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Nov. 27th, 2019 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pearwaldorfGodfrey Gao died after a sudden heart attack today. It's awful in general--he was 35 (the same age as my cousin) and it happened after working a 17 hour day on some reality TV show in China; but it also smarts in the way that he was one of "ours".
I'm not going to claim I was any sort of die-hard fan of his. He fell into that category of "social media pretty", where you're happy to see some pictures of him because he was fucking gorgeous, and then move on with the rest of your day. But he was beautiful, and an object of desire in a Western-centric media space that doesn't always see Asian men as such, or they try to de-emphasize their Asian heritage (like Keanu Reeves).
(Which is not to say that a person's "value" in any sort of media space should determine whether or how they're mourned, but it was some small comfort to realize there's a crack in the door for people who look like us, and we can wedge it a little wider.)
(This is not an intersectional analysis. I'm just bummed and I wanted to talk about it a little.)
I'm not going to claim I was any sort of die-hard fan of his. He fell into that category of "social media pretty", where you're happy to see some pictures of him because he was fucking gorgeous, and then move on with the rest of your day. But he was beautiful, and an object of desire in a Western-centric media space that doesn't always see Asian men as such, or they try to de-emphasize their Asian heritage (like Keanu Reeves).
(Which is not to say that a person's "value" in any sort of media space should determine whether or how they're mourned, but it was some small comfort to realize there's a crack in the door for people who look like us, and we can wedge it a little wider.)
(This is not an intersectional analysis. I'm just bummed and I wanted to talk about it a little.)
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Date: 2019-11-27 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-28 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-11-30 11:29 pm (UTC)