My name is Karlo ishibashi. I grew up in East L.A., and I lived with my mom and my godmother for a majority of my life and they were my maternal support and my paternal support. It wasn’t until I went to public school that I started to learn and appreciate my culture in East L.A., specifically my Latino culture. Being somebody who is both Japanese American and Mexican American, you start to learn the dichotomy and the beauty of it, which is “I’m not Asian enough but I’m also not Mexican enough.” And that’s kind of been an identity crisis a little bit, but in the long run because I am a gay man, I’ve already been an outcast from the get-go, so it just leaves me more room to create at that point.
At the age of nine first I came out as bisexual, and I didn’t know I was officially gay until I was 13 years old. I was wondering to myself, Well, who am I? And as a gay person, who do I want to be as a gay person? And when I got to high school, the whole, “Oh, you’re Japanese, you’re Mexican, you’re gay, what do you do?” There were a lot of scenarios like what language I spoke, what food I ate, everything that I had not really thought about before. But I wanted to learn about everything, and the Latino side and the gay side were a lot easier and accessible because of my community. But I also thought, what about the Asian gay side of me? And I felt like a lot of that was neglected because no one really talks about that in the Asian community. I didn’t see a lot of a gay Asian males or even lesbian Asians or bi Asians.
And then as I got older I started understanding another side of me, which was my kink and leather side. In college one of the things that I started to notice was I liked the feeling of being kinky and sort of being a sexual outcast a little bit. It was like almost like a fifth coming out and I didn’t learn about it officially until I was at least 25, through my ex who was part of the leather community and taught me how to flog, how to dress, how to act in the community. And even then I didn’t see a lot of queer Asian people in that community so that made it a little bit intimidating for me. I met Asian people who I knew who were in the pup community and I started to feel more comfortable about that.
I was learning about how there is a big kink history within Asian culture, in particular with my Japanese background. There’s shibari, there are other forms of S&M play that have been around. And I started to feel a little bit more comfortable as an Asian man having to talk about this with other Asian individuals.
All types of people ask me about the kink community and the leather community and they’re like, “What do I do if I don’t feel included?” And I tell them, “It’s going to be hard. You’re going to find that people are not as inclusive as you think. However, you do have people who understand. It’s going to be hard to find them, but you have people like that, like myself.” We’re not a token staple in this community. We’re very vibrant, very active in this community and we’re here. I felt like that was one of my main callings with teaching in the community as well. I want them to have that experience of, You can be in this community and you don’t have to limit yourself. You can show your own identity.
