In my upcoming novel “The Rice Queen Spy” I pay homage to a British Caucasian homosexual who spent his entire life having sexual encounters only with Asian men. In essence, “No Caucasian Needs to Apply” was his motto. A rice queen is a Caucasian or black gay man who is fully or partially devoted to Asian men. It is somewhat of a slang term, as is the term potato queen, which means an Asian male fond of white males.

I’ve even heard Asian men who had a soft spot for black men called sweet potato queens or yam queens. Do not blame me. This is all part of the jargon of gay life. Gay terminology and slang has always been a living and rapidly evolving feature of the gay subculture.

Until the mid-1980s, before there was a national crackdown, the rice queens went to the Philippines in large numbers. For quite a few decades, Thailand has been the favorite place of the rice queens. Sex tours to Thailand have been organized not only for gay men, but also for a large number of straight men seeking female sexual partners. Sexual partners are often too young. Many gay Caucasians have moved permanently to Thailand due to the availability of sexual encounters with Thais.

After World War II, Japan was a paradise for rice queens. Later, when the economy improved markedly, there was a decrease in the availability of Japanese men for the rice queens. Also in those early post-war years there was still a great reverence for the elderly; that’s why so many older western gays felt at home there. The compassionate attitude of young people towards older people has become something of a victim of youth culture, westernization and now globalization.

That leads to a conclusion. Many gay men became or were labeled rice queens because they went to Asian countries where economies and poverty forced some of the men into the sex trade. Caucasian homosexuals went to these poor Asian countries because sexual partners were available and abundant. Not all Asian-Caucasian gay sex is financial, but a fair amount of it is.

But for a rice queen, why an Asian man? Numerous reasons are given: Asian men are less hairy, have smoother, silkier skin; many are smaller and less intimidating and threatening than white men; they are better lovers, more accommodating; they are often willing to play a less than dominant role, to be more subservient to their Caucasian partners; ascetically they are more attractive; if they ask for money, it is often to buy food and to support their families because they are in dire need of financial assistance; gay Asian men often appear much younger than they really are; there are fewer bs with asian men, and so on.

Some of this may be rationalization. Sex and sexual motivation is often a maze and a labyrinth of contradictions and obfuscations. It often boils down to a simple “I feel good.”

In my most recent novel, “The Daemon in Our Dreams,” I treated the rice queen phenomenon, but in a somewhat tangential way, and in my first novel, the terrorist thriller “Nine Lives Too Many,” I treated it without. absolutely. However, in “The Rice Queen Spy” it is, in many ways, the central theme of the book. It is what makes the hero tick, the motivating force of his life. If you read the book, you will see the truth of the statement: Philip Croft (the hero) would not exist were it not for his personality as a rice queen. (For a full discussion of my novels, visit my website at http://www.senneffhouse.com).

The thoroughbred rice queen makes no apologies for being a rice queen; on the contrary, he is proud of it and boasts about it. Lifelong love relationships have been formed between Caucasian and Asian gay men.

Often, what the queen of rice finds in Asia is the young man who passes himself off as gay for economic reasons. A gay strip club in Bangkok had over thirty straight men who were entertaining and dating gay customers. Their jobs involved a great deal of acting and role-playing. There is even an informal school for scammers to learn what to say and how to act and act. One thing they learn to do is turn their belly in what some people think is a provocative way.

The rice queen may often want to separate the scammers from those men who are genuinely gay. The percentage or proportion of homosexuals in the populations of Western and Asian countries is probably about the same.

Starting in the 1980s, in some of the Asian countries where there was a lot of sex work and mixing of Westerners with the indigenous population, there has been a serious HIV/AIDS epidemic. The spread of the disease has been acute among gay scammers and their families. This consequence of sexual activity was completely unexpected and devastating.

Since the first rice queen saw her first love object, this syndrome has been growing and attracting strangers with questions about the meaning of everything. The explanation is really simple. It is the desire and need of a human being to find the love, compassion, friendship, kinship, and sexual gratification of another human being. Love makes the world go round and in the end love will conquer all. The true queen of rice is a mistress, plain and simple.