A message from him. I fumble with my cellphone and a thousand thoughts that refuse to fit inside my head. I manage to dial his number. He answers. He is here. I leave the door ajar and wait. The minutes feel like millennia but finally I hear footsteps and suddenly he really is there.

Walking into the room. He starts to say something but all I want to do is kiss him. So I do. Reach up on my toes and find his mouth kissing me back. I try not to fall. Try hard to keep my feet on the ground but I can’t. So I fall. Into his arms. Into his eyes. Onto the bed.

Struggle to unbutton his shirt. Struggle to breathe. Struggle to stop my head from exploding. Put my hand on his chest. Feel his heart racing within. Feel it in the palm of my hand. How much I want this man. Want to climb inside him. My desire is raging like riptide and it pulls me under. Drowns me in his deep blue sea. Here I am born. From his lips. Warm. Lovely. Breathing life into me. But then the sound of his voice breaks my reverie.

“Where are you from?”

Always a tricky question. The coitus-interruptus kind. But he is hot as hell. And I want him with every fibre of my being. And I want him to want me reciprocally. So I hope against hope that his interests are geographical.

“Cape Town,” I say as matter-of-factly as I can muster.

“I mean your ethnicity,” he explains.

And there it is. The potential deal-breaker. Caught in the Catch-22 of a man being attracted to me because of my race or despite it. This moment is one I have played out more times with more potential lovers than I care to remember. So I throw the question back at him and ask, “What would you like me to be?”

Black and white is the most conspicuous combination of interracial relationships in the gay community. But what about the shades in between? I am neither white nor black. So where does that leave me? A child growing up wants to belong. Wants to be a part of the group. Nobody likes to be an outsider. And yet my eastern name, my eastern face, my eastern customs, my eastern holy days and holidays mark me as “different”.

Though born and bred in Cape Town, there is no escape for me from these eastern markers. Despite the cocktail of nationalities that flow throw my veins; my blood is forever bound by the eastern origins of one ancestor with a strong genetic blueprint. Three of my grandparents came from England, the Middle East and the Netherlands. But the features I inherited from the fourth – my paternal Javanese grandfather – profile me ethnographically.

Though merely “Coloured” to the untrained eye, for connoisseurs of everything oriental, to all intents and purposes I appear to be of South-Asian origin. And hence I have often found myself fodder for prowling Rice Queens — white men, usually of the older variety, who prefer younger East — and/or Southeast-Asian boys.

Rice Queens usually “curry cruise” which in international gay slang terms means they almost exclusively search out for sexual and romantic pleasure those of Indian or similar descent to satisfy their “brown fever”. I admit this is a generalisation but we all know there is a kernel of truth in most stereotypes.

The documentary entitled “Rice and Potatoes” by John Biasatti and Todd Wilson details the frightening and often funny relationships between Asian and Caucasian men. The couples profiled in the film come from all walks of life and the stories they share illuminate how, who we are and where we come from as gay men, combine and refract through the anxious process of cruising for and choosing significant others to create the relationships we find ourselves in.

And some of us find ourselves in more curious relationships than others more often than most. Now, there are Rice Queens and there are Rice Queens. Some just want to be with a different piece of eastern ass every night. Others form part of a breed known as Sweet Rice Queens: Sugar Daddies who seek out Asian boys for conquest in much the same way that the West has been historically fixated with colonising the East.

But there are instances where the relationships between a gaysian boy-toys and great white Western males have in fact turned out to be based on mutual respect, true friendship and self-actualisation. Shakespeare’s Hamlet hit the nail on the head when he admonished Horatio about there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy.

I could never be flattered by a guy who was attracted to me simply because of my cultural origins. Similarly I could never be a fan of any man that settled for being with me despite my ethnicity. I want to be loved for me dammit! Because I am desirable and beautiful and talented and absolutely worthy of unconditional love. We all do. Don’t we? Somehow some old white guy wanting me because of my cinnamon skin and his fantasies of patchouli seems to invalidate all that.

But what of my own fascination with foreskin? And my sheepish lover’s adoration of the six-pack which I so masochistically maintain by gymming myself into a coma on a daily basis? Who knows what drives us in our quest for the perfect partner? If we could really choose who we were sexually attracted to, would there even be a gay community?

Given that physical attraction is and always will be an essential part of sexual chemistry there is not really a hell of a lot we can do about who we desire or why. That stuff is all just smoke and mirrors anyway. After all, to quote the song by Eden Ahbez, “The greatest thing you will ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return.”