Publishers Weekly
07/25/2022
Ocampo (The Latinos of Asia) documents the challenges of growing up gay for second-generation urban Latinos and Filipinos in this insightful blend of ethnography and memoir. Homophobic attitudes pervaded and oppressed the lives of Ocampo’s interviewees from early childhood. Manny Roldan recalls his grandmother reprimanding his “gay” laugh, while Joaquin Marquez confronted his family’s prejudiced priest during Sunday Spanish Mass (“You’re not God!”). Excelling in academics was one way to “counteract the stigma of being seen as gay,” but racism remained omnipresent. Upon entering an LGBTQ club at Georgetown University, for example, Armando Garza’s impression was of unwelcoming “rich White kids.” In contrast, community and empowerment were found at clubs and chat rooms specifically organized by and for queer people of color. Ocampo catalogs how various experiences of “coming out” or “being outed” illuminate how quests for love, loyalty, and belonging manifest, including how some “may have been victimized by masculinity to maintain rapport and support from family, they were willing to denigrate other gay men.” The author’s own relationship with his parents after coming out improved only after his parents met and connected with his partner. Ocampo creates a collective voice out of the many people he interviewed while simultaneously honoring each experience. The result is a daring and provocative portrait of a uniquely diverse generation. (Sept.)
The Gay & Lesbian Review - Vernon Rosario
"Ocampo analyzes with great empathy the struggles of his informants as gay children of immigrants, often with non-English-speaking families, conservative values, and Roman Catholic mores. Thoughtfully evoked and beautifully narrated."
author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Com Roberto G. Gonzales
"Anthony Ocampo has written a book for our time. Brown and Gay in LA has got it all. This elegantly written and sociologically sophisticated book skillfully explores what it means to live at the intersection of immigration, race, and LGBTQ identity. Drawing on richly developed life histories of gay Latino and Filipino men in Los Angeles, Ocampo brings to light the untold stories of young men at the margins of multiple communities who experience the blunt force of racism and homophobia while also carving out spaces of community and belonging. Timely, relevant, and original, this could well be the most important book this year."
author of South to America: A Journey Below th Imani Perry
"A brilliant and soulful ethnography that merges probing critical analysis, social history, and cultural inquiry, with emotional clarity and dignity. Ocampo uses his own experience as a queer Filipino person as a form of intellectual insight and wisdom, thereby demonstrating how the role of the imperial, distant scholar, in contrast, leaves so many stones unturned, and how care matters in rigorous scholarship. I highly recommend this beautifully written work."
author of Heavy: An American Memoir and Long D Kiese Laymon
"Anthony Christian Ocampo shows us page after page that superb research deserves the artful rendering of a dedicated artist offering up the resonances of that research to hungry, wide-eyed readers. In order to actually experience, not simply explore, and definitely not exploit, the lives of Brown and Gay men in LA, Ocampo summons the artistry of our finest writers, moving us from watcher to reader to witness to this once in a generation offering."
CHOICE - A. J. Ramirez
"The book takes a very personal stance, allowing readers to relate to these individuals and their lives. The well-written preface provides helpful context, explaining the author's use of certain phrases and labels. Ocampo does a very good job of presenting qualitative research on a much-needed subject."
co-author of The Company We Keep: Interracial Grace Kao
"In this beautifully written book, Ocampo vividly tells the coming-of-age stories of over 60 young Filipino and Latino gay men in Los Angeles. Their experiences navigating the perilous landscapes shaped by racism and homophobia along with the fraught expectations of masculinity are heartbreaking."
author of Modern Families: Stories of Extraord Joshua Gamson
"Brown gay sons of immigrants have been largely invisible in nearly all their lifeworlds — often overtly or implicitly hostile to some part of their identity — as well as in the academic worlds that would do well to learn from them. Animated by his own voice and those of his many interviewees, Anthony Ocampo fills the void with a book that is richly storied, sociologically nuanced, affectingly written, effortlessly intersectional, and painfully hopeful."
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
"Brown and Gay in LA is a beautifully written representation that many queer people of color did not have previously. Ocampo is not only a skilled sociologist, but also an excellent storyteller. His approachable writing style, coupled with sharp sociological analyses, would benefit a wide range of audience, from undergraduate students to interested public audience alike... Ocampo tells an “I see you” story of visibility and recognition, acknowledging whole humanities of these gay sons of immigrants as well as other queer racial minorities whose identities and lives are often forcibly compartmentalized and fragmented."
Albert Samaha
"Through on-the-ground research and sensitive insights, Anthony Ocampo illuminates a generation escaping the pressures to assimilate by finding liberation among one another. Brown and Gay in LA presents a vivid, rigorous, and heartfelt examination of how community can serve as a radical bulwark against colonial legacies, religious intolerance, and racial exclusion."
Los Angeles Times - Jireh Deng
"A nuanced perspective on this particular kind of coming-of-age: coming out, perhaps leaving home for college, finding new families in public and private spaces. Ocampo writes lovingly of gatherings that have provided gay men of color an escape not just from the judgment of traditional families but also from the cultural dominance of white West Hollywood."
the author of The Color of Success: Asian Amer Ellen Wu
"Anthony Ocampo has crafted a gorgeous love letter to a distinctive generation of immigrant sons. In a series of tender portraits, he invites us into the heady world of Brown and Gay Los Angeles at a time of momentous change. Ocampo gracefully fuses his dual roles as storyteller and sociologist to distill the particulars and the universals of this cohort. The result is a transformative meditation on the meanings and substance of ambition in American life."
Vulture - Jason Frank
"At the heart of Brown and Gay in LA is a central interior tension people whose surroundings constantly show them the many ways in which they do not belong. A professor of sociology, Anthony Christian Ocampo weaves the stories of his interlocutors with personal narrative writing and workmanlike, scholarly prose to suggest a tenderness that comes from personal history. Rather than write strictly for academics, or write a memoir that is concerned only with the self, Ocampo splits the difference."
Jonathan Rosa
"Brown and Gay in LA is at once an incisive sociological analysis of immigration from the perspectives of race, sexuality, and geography, and an emotive account of lives forged from multiple margins. Through Anthony Ocampo’s refusal to obey generic conventions, he joins his research participants in challenging dominant narratives that make legitimate movement across borders contingent on the capacity to inhabit societal norms. The result is an urgent book that not only asserts the existence of racialized queer experiences in particular times and places, but also invites reconsideration of the possibilities created through survivance of diverse itineraries of exclusion."
Library Journal
08/01/2022
To be a second-generation immigrant to the U.S., LGBTQIA+, and Brown often compounds to getting harangued, not solely within the societal system but also one's own family microcosm. Ocampo (sociology, California State Polytechnic Univ.; The Latinos of Asia) writes of the arduous journey through trial identities Brown people have to embark upon before being able to fully integrate into society and into their own households as their true LGBTQIA+ selves. The "otherness" experienced as part of a minority group is further exacerbated by being part of a queer minority within the minority. Through Ocampo's interviews, the reader learns about how religious beliefs, a distorted sense of masculinity, and generational expectations directed at their offspring by first-generation parents may all contribute to creating further alienation. VERDICT The intersections of race, immigration, and queerness are as much at the core of Ocampo's book as bigger-picture analyses of masculinity. This book is the best platform to dive into the matter and reemerge feeling inspired and motivated to just be and become one's unique self, the person one was always meant to be.—Alessandro Cimino
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-07-26
A professor of sociology explores details of his life as a queer Filipino American and the long-overlooked stories of gay immigrant men like him.
Told through stories that redefine what it means to be a gay person of color at the intersection of homophobia, sexism, and racism, Ocampo’s text “chronicles the life experiences of young adult men who have roots in the Philippines, Mexico, and Latin America. All of the men I interviewed are cisgender, meaning they identify with the sex they were assigned at birth: male. They are sons of immigrants. Most were born and all were raised primarily in the United States, which means they are ‘second generation’ Americans.” Following in the tradition of scholars of intersectionality and performative gender and sexual identity, these coming-of-age narratives reveal how pathways of education and socio-economic status are influenced by "the need for independence from the heteronormative family and friend circles [these men] felt trapped by.” He also shows “how gay people of color can grow exhausted of the identities they have meticulously curated. Ocampo effectively explores the "value systems of the gay community and the immigrant family and its community" in the context of belonging and incompatibility with the dreams that many immigrant parents have for their American-born children. Cultural expectations can lead to volatile relationships between parents and their gay children, leaving children with limited options. Some experience homelessness or commit suicide. Organized into chapters with titles such as "Lessons in Manhood and Morality," "Escaping to College," "Not That Gay," the text smoothly combines personal anecdotes with thorough sociological research, spotlighting those who feel they don't fit the archetype of the ideal gay man within predominantly White queer spaces, both virtual and in-person. Ocampo should be commended for presenting the lives of queer people of color in a humane, compassionate, and informative way.
An important book that showcases different models for gay men of color.
