Openly stating, "No fats, femmes, or Asians" ("no FFA" for short, and sometimes the more expansively exclusionary "No Asians, no Blacks") was not so long ago no big deal—prevalent enough on dating apps to make it the primary example cited by Zach Stafford, former chief content officer at Grindr, of the kind of "discriminatory language" that was officially banned from the app as of September 19, 2018. The phrase was justified as a statement of the dater's preference rather than his racism, fatphobia, and misogyny. "It reconstructs the Asian identity as a 'type,' allowing this 'preference' to be interchangeable with one's racial and ethnic identity," theorized one author in Sparks Magazine.
Yet beyond the individuals who said it, perhaps more deplorable is the community that accepted it. "Why is white the primary color of gay male beauty?" asked Jimmy Nguyen in the Advocate in 2011. Noting that the bars, parties, and gyms of elite gay culture are predominantly white, Nguyen describes the unique irony of being a racial minority within a historically oppressed minority community that nevertheless upholds white supremacy.
"In part, that's because racial minority groups still are not fully integrated into the queer sphere. It's also because power in America (gay or straight) has historically been concentrated in white hands. But mostly, it's because the men considered most attractive, by the most people in our country, are 'all-American' white," he writes, admitting, "The irony f.
