Book Review: Coming Out of My Skin

Coming Out of My Skin by Jean-Baptiste Phou, translated by Edward Gauvin.

“But I can’t be racist, I’m gay!” A blissfully ignorant and obviously absurd claim, yet misguided retorts like these are all too familiar to writer and multidisciplinary artist Jean-Baptiste Phou, whose memoir, Coming Out of My Skin, recounts a lifelong journey of learning to find joy while gay and Asian. Translated by Edward Gauvin from the original French, La Peau hors du placard : Asiatique et gay, une vie de lutte (Le Seuil 2024), Phou’s brutally honest memoir offers a refreshing and important voice within diasporic Asian literary and cultural production, particularly with regard to conversations about race and sexuality in France, where universalist ideals have made the very concept of race a taboo topic.

I was already incredibly moved by Phou’s memoir from the first few pages when I read the original French. What struck me about Gauvin’s translation, though, was the retained emphasis on “skin” in the titles: Coming Out of My Skin and Skin Out of the Closet (my translation). This retention of “skin” across the two versions gets at a central issue of the memoir: how to live comfortably—or even feel good—in one’s own skin. The choice of “coming out” as a present participle in the English translation, too, is apt: “coming out” suggests an ongoing unsettledness, a continuous or reiterative process of coming out. Skin is inescapable, but, as the undertaking of writing and coming out with this memoir reveals, the closet isn’t so easy to escape either. Unsurprisingly, race/skin and sex go hand-in-hand. As Phou puts it: “you can’t keep your skin in the closet the way you hang up latex accessories.”

With a long list of artistic credits under his name since 2008, Jean-Baptiste Phou has built a following and reputation for his public takes on Asian representation in France and contributions to the Cambodian art scene, but, as he relates in the memoir, has historically shied away from discussing his homosexuality. If discussions of race and racism are so hushed up in France, then racism against Asians, an already invisibilized minority relative to Black and North African groups, certainly have gone generally unnoticed—let alone racism and homophobia toward gay Asians. However, sex, love, and desire, but specifically their intersections with race, take center stage here. Emboldened by the uptake of the #MeToo movement in France, in particular #MeTooGay, Phou realized, in writing his memoir, “perhaps it was my turn to speak? Perhaps it was time no longer to be held back by fear and shame, to rid myself of these at last, once and for all. There was so much to tell. Perhaps I still had things to say?” Across its three parts, Coming Out of My Skin guides us through the author’s curiosities and vulnerabilities in queer millennial young adulthood, his fraught relationships with desire and his own desirability, a tortured sexual liberation coupled with exploitation, and a continuous search for home in unexpected places.

Author Jean-Baptiste Phou. Photo by Sovan Philong.

Early in the memoir, Jean-Baptiste Phou recounts often finding himself “alone in a corner, unable to find [his] place” within traditional gender roles and expectations of endogamy while growing up in his Teochew/Chinese-Cambodian family in France. When he finally is able to seek community and explore his sexuality, though, the gay centers of Paris are not exactly welcoming either. Met with either rejection or fetishization, the adolescent Phou quickly concedes, “I had to live in a world that didn’t want me. A hetero world that didn’t want me. A gay scene that didn’t want me.” Phou reflects on these experiences of isolation throughout the memoir with a certain lucidity while drawing from a wide range of sources across genres, media, and fields to expand the significance of his lived experience beyond himself. With each anecdote, Phou invites reflection both on how his own story resonates with experiences of sexual and racial marginalization broadly, and what these connections may reveal about France and society at large.

It should be no surprise, then, that Coming Out of My Skin is part of the Quilombola! series, edited by acclaimed Cameroonian author Léonora Miano with the Kolkata-based world literature press, Seagull Books—a series that the publisher describes as “a space from which resonate insubordinate, inventive, provocative, and unexpected voices.” Phou’s voice and insights are precisely that. Unexpected because Asians typically fall under the radar in Western racial discourses, even as significant increases in Anti-Asian violence since the COVID-19 pandemic have drawn greater attention to racial discrimination against Asians.. In France, responses to COVID’s racial aftermath builds upon the mobilization efforts of Asian activist groups since the murders of Zhang Chaolin in 2016 by youths in the Parisian suburb Aubervilliers and Liu Shaoyo in 2017 in his own apartment by a police officer. Phou’s provocative and incisive account, though, initiates a necessary conversation in the wake of this growing awareness in France and beyond.

Whether he is rebuking matters of “personal taste” in gay dating and hook-up culture as bad covers for racism or defending marginalized groups in France from politicized accusations of communitarianism, the indignance with which Phou critiques hypocrisies in France and the LGBTQ+ community may offer generative dialogue with indignant pieces by other diasporic Asian writers. Immediately coming to mind are the late Cambodian American author Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties, Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, and anything by the late, notoriously opaque French Vietnamese writer Linda Lê. With superbly accessible prose, Phou raises a call to action for solidarity across minoritized racial and sexual identities so that we do not end up “alone in our corners.” In Phou’s own words, “Beauty is found everywhere, in all of us. It’s up to us to bring it to light. Through our own eyes, on our own terms.”

Coming Out of My Skin
by Jean-Baptiste Phou
translated by Edward Gauvin
Seagull Books


Alan Yeh is a Ph.D. candidate in French at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in refugitude aesthetics, memory, and food in 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature, especially of the Vietnamese diaspora. He previously received his BA at Hamilton College and taught high school English in the Occitanie region of France. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation, and published in L’Esprit Créateur. Born and raised in the Seattle area, he loves steaming hot noodle soups and coffee (in the rain, of course).

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