Most people of color in America have had the painfully uncomfortable experience of being mistaken for another person of color who looks nothing like them. Still, I don’t think anything can top the cringe factor of what happened to Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang this week.
An article published in Out magazine criticized The Hollywood Reporter for mixing up the two Asian comedians. Unfortunately, the Out writer also got them mixed up in their own piece. That’s right: While trying to point out an injustice toward two queer Asians being mistaken for each other, they did the exact same thing. Witnessing it all play out online was like opening a Russian nesting doll of microaggressions that wouldn’t stop revealing themselves.
In the piece, posted Dec. 6, Out magazine attributed a quote from Yang to Booster. As the flustered cherry on top of all this, the writer also said that “Booster and Kim continue to be two of the funniest comedians working today.” (Again, “Booster” and “Kim” are the same person.) Both errors have since been corrected, and the Out article now includes a correction note and apology for the misattribution, saying it “deeply regrets” its mistake.
By the way, we’re not going to call out the writer by name because we’re not interested in being petty to another presumably queer person. And at media outlets, there are usually multiple eyes on a story before it’s published. So when non-Asian writers do shit like this while writing about Asian people, it’s often a team folly.
Still, as a queer Asian person, it was especially exasperating to witness a writer getting these comedians’ names wrong, especially when Yang and Booster are so beloved by our community — and the Out piece was supposed to be in their defense. Booster rightfully roasted the piece on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The deep irony of this post is Out ALSO misidentifying us,” he wrote. “What is happening. This feels like a social experiment.”
Bowen and…
Read the full article here
