Even if you pass as white in most ways, or have a particularly complex heritage, stereotypes have a habit of catching up with you. In my own past, people have suggested that—in the vein of Ming the Merciless—I’m “impassive” or “cool”, and they’ve extended those traits to my writing, describing it as unemotional and delicate as a fine silk print. When they do, it feels like a shadow has fallen across me. Or, worse, that the shadow was always there. I’d just been ignoring it.

In a 1991 interview, Keanu said of himself: “I’m a meathead. I can’t help it, man. You’ve got smart people and you’ve got dumb people. You just happen to be spending some time with a dumb person.”⁶⁶

Has Keanu internalized racial thinking here, playing the part of the stereotypical Pacific Islander? Or would he simply prefer not to answer the interviewer’s questions?

In 1995, rumors spread that Keanu had married the record executive David Geffen in a secret ceremony in Paris or on a beach in Mexico. “If sexual ambiguity was as easy to grow as tomatoes, he would be the biggest gardener in Hollywood!”⁶⁷ declared the French magazine Voici. In Vanity Fair, Michael Shnayerson suggested that it would be “useful to shoot the rumors down cold,” asking directly whether or not Keanu was gay. “To deny it is to make a judgment,” he replied, at which point Shnayerson changed the topic.⁶⁸

The feminist is someone who “stops the smooth flow of communication,”⁶⁹ writes Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life. In refusing to play by the rules of what Adrienne Rich called the “bias of compulsory heterosexuality,”⁷⁰ Keanu’s evasions—intentionally or not—show how it might be possible to resist the fixed boundaries of masculine and racial identities.

In another interview—this time with Premiere magazine in 1994—Keanu was asked whether he had “consciously” tried to set himself apart from other male actors of his generation. “I mean, I’ve always played the kind of male equivalent of the female ingénue,”⁷¹ he said.

Back at school, I saw Keanu as having the better, more acceptable version of my face—neither pig-eyed nor mongoloid—but maybe I was drawn to another of his qualities: his ability to slip all boundaries. In pitching himself as a “female ingénue”—refusing to comply with the rules of heteromasculinity—he reclaimed the space that racialization takes away. Calling yourself a “female ingénue,” after all, belies ingenuousness; it suggests a kind of aesthetic self-consciousness. It also makes me think—which is another quality Keanu has cultivated—of the inconnu: the figure of someone unknown to others and so free to define themselves.