I grew up in a small town in Central Canada. There were very few Asian families so I was mainly growing up amongst people of European heritage. I didn’t spend very long there and spent most of my formative years in Toronto.
I was outed when I was close to my last year of high school. I don’t have any heartbreaking stories that people have that try to come out to their families and are rejected or heartwarming stories where people are completely accepted. It’s never really been discussed within my family; it was kind of, “Well, this is how it is and you’ll try to live your life as best as possible.”
In the 1990s I was living in the Church-Wellesley area amongst the gay community there. As an Asian man I would feel the stereotypes of the standard white majority where Asian men are classified as “bottom feminine submissive,” and these are stereotypes that are applied to Asian men before they even have the chance to experiment and decide what roles truly fit them and what their preferences are.
I managed a smaller store in a record chain for almost 11 years and then moved into personal training. I was doing a lot of streetwear campaigns and my tattoos got heavier so the photographers that came toward me looked at me a little differently. I was taking off my shirt or posing in shorts or underwear. And then I got involved in the BDSM scene, which opened a whole new set of photographers looking into erotic work and nude work and fetish work. I didn’t start working in the adult industry until I was almost 40. My first film was in 2009 and Buck Angel mentioned they were looking for performers and I just said, “Oh, I’ll do it.” I was hanging out with Ricky Sinz and we went to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco together and I got called up on the stage at the Raging Stallion party and introduced as one of their new models, Damian Dragon. In the late 1990s to early 2000s there were a lot of stigmas against porn. There were a lot of stereotypes against Asians and I fought for what I wanted to do and hoped that I was inspiring.
I had tried to do work with big porn studios and I was unsuccessful; I was rejected or I was being stereotyped into a feminine and submissive role, which I didn’t want to portray at that point in time. So I went after smaller studios that would cast me as a top. From Toronto I moved to Vancouver, San Francisco, L.A., New York, and now I’m in Bangkok. There was a point where I got turned down so many times and my platform became my own website. I could support and show the beauty of other Asian men, other men of color.
In New York I met this man who had very talented fingers and showed me what the prostate was and was able to give me hands-free orgasms. In 2021 or 2022 I started introducing bottoming and submissive roles. Now I’m top and bottom and submissive and dom within certain scenes.
COVID was a great lesson because most people were filming week to week and a lot of people got caught where they didn’t have content. But that was the moment where I learned to keep at least 3 to 6 months of content ahead in the queue. Every time I’ve gone into the hospital for abdominal surgery and had to recover I’ve always had that content to be able to carry me through.
Within the general public I receive a lot of letters from Asian men, mostly from Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, saying that it’s great to see another man that looks like them doing what I’m doing. With other Asian content creators we act as a support system for each other within the industry. Other Asian men around the world can see those little interview clips to see that we’re just like them.
