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HWANG: Such a fundamental component of the relationship is the fantasy, without that, it is no longer the same relationship. Gallimard is in love with a butterfly, he's not in love with this Asian man.
DIGAETANI: Do you mean that fantasy is necessary for all love? That strict realism will destroy love?
HWANG: Gosh, am I saying that?1
Onstage are two people: one man, one woman, covered head to toe in leather. The setting is an S&M parlor, and the client and sex worker spend the evening playing through sexual fantasies steeped in racial and ethnic difference. Nothing to raise eyebrows at a contemporary theatre festival, but watching bondage in a strictly realistic setting is not quite what you would expect at a community theatre in Lubbock, Texas. Then again, the theatre was only providing the space for a midnight show put on by Texas Tech University students. This particular performance was not widely advertised, word of mouth and an insert in that evening's program for a production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie being the only publicity. There was an unsurprisingly surreptitious air to this production in such a religiously and politically conservative West Texas city, but the fact that such a play could be staged is an indication of how the play (David Henry Hwang's S&M love play, Bondage) intersects with right wing political spaces.2 The problematic fantasy of the "Other" as exotic sexualized being would most likely be present in the minds of local audience members living in this Bible belt region. At the same time, my sense of an implied audience for this Lubbock production would be a liberal audience ready to subscribe quickly to democratic ideals of liberal pluralism and unreconstructed multiculturalism. As a witness to this event, as a spectator on the border between inside and out, I saw the extent to which Hwang is negotiating through language possible positions for contemporary Asian American masculinity. The very locale of this production helped to reimagine the play as an attempt at a corrective to debates in the Asian American scholarly community about the intersections of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in his better-known work M. Butterfly. And yet, in its very political slipperiness, the play reaffirms a certain level of ambivalence...