Nguyen Tan Hoang

Nguyen Tan Hoang is a gay Vietnamese American video artist and academic. Nguyen's research interests include Asian American masculinity in gay male video porn and Hollywood and international cinemas.

Nguyen was born in Saigon, Vietnam. His family left Vietnam in the late 1970s as part of the "boat people" exodus. After spending a year and a half in refugee camps in Malaysia, the family arrived in the United States in 1980. Nguyen grew up in San Jose, California. He received his B.A. in art and art history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, an M.F.A. in studio art at the University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently an assistant professor of English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College.

Nguyen Tan Hoang's creative work has been widely featured in festivals around the world. Nguyen's artistic agenda is a political one: to create a popular culture for gay Asian Americans. Nguyen often uses appropriated film footage, combining pastiche, kitsch film and music references to speak of his queer positionality.

Nguyen's writings have appeared in Porn Studies (Duke University Press, 2004), Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (http://vectors.usc.edu), and GLQ (2007).

Partial filmography

• A Horse, A Filipino, Two Women, A Soldier, and Two Officers (2005)
• K.I.P. (2001)

Experimental video featuring images of the maker inserted into classic 70s gay porn footage of Kip Noll

• The Calling (2000)

Catholicism, homosexuality and “cinematic men of the cloth”

• Cover Girl: A Gift from God (2000)

The strange tale of Dalena, "a blond-haired, blue-eyed, all-American white woman who is also a Vietnamese American pop star...A gift from God, she possesses the uncanny ability to sing in perfect Vietnamese."

• Crimson (2000)

A video collage/memoir about two buddies who drift apart, a bit, when one changes gender.

• PIRATED! (2000)

Trauma and erotica conflate in the revisionist memories of a Vietnamese filmmaker who encountered Thai pirates as a young refugee

• Forever Bottom! (1999)

Defiantly (and hilariously) celebrates bottomhood while simultaneously challenging dominant myths about gay Asian sexuality

• Maybe Never (But I'm Counting the Days) (1996)

This innovative short uses pop music to interrogate queer life and love in contemporary society; skillfully examines anxieties, restrictions, and prohibitions in gay life in the age of AIDS.

• Love letters 1 & 2 (For Julian Love, Hoang) (1996)
• Forever Linda (1996)

Details a young Asian American teenager's obsession with Supermodel Linda Evangelista

• 7 steps to sticky heaven (1995)

A documentary of interviews with a group of young gay Asian men in San Francisco on a range of subjects; a musing on the politicization process of becoming "sticky rice", a gay Asian male (GAM) who dates other GAM’s

• Forever Jimmy! (1995)

As a reaction to the lack of sexy Asian men in U.S. media, the film inserts Asian male pop stars into films in a barrage of seductive, fast edits and pornographic intertitles.

• All of his videos are distributed by Video Out Distribution (http://www.videoout.ca/)

References

• Williams, Linda (2004). Porn Studies. Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3312-0. 
  • Nguyen Tan Hoang, contributor: "The Resurrection of Brandon Lee: The Making of a Gay Asian American Porn Star

By comparing porn star Brandon Lee to martial arts actor Bruce Lee (as well as his son Brandon Lee, who died during the filming of The Crow and from whom the porn star took his name) Hoang examines recent changes in the images of Asian men in porn and cinema generally. Hoang compares Bruce Lee's tasting his own blood in Enter the Dragon with Brandon Lee tasting his own cum in Asian Persuasion 2 and understands both images as a series of complicated messages about the acceptance and voiding of Asian male identity.

External links

• Faculty bio — Bryn Mawr College
• Nguyen Tan Hoang at the Internet Movie Database

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