Growing up Korean American in a pearly white city at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, I often wanted out of my own skin.

“No, where were you born though?” my classmates would demand. “Where are you from from?”

“Idaho,” I’d insist through gritted teeth.

It was at times like these I wanted a second skin that I could swap with my own.

Like other queer people of color, I started confronting the twin burdens of queerphobia and racism early in life. In junior high school, I wondered: What does love even look like for someone like me, surely the only gay Asian guy in town?

In seventh grade, after another stretch of sleepless nights, I thought I’d be better off dead. Wiping away tears, I looked skyward and prayed: “Make me straight or make me white. Pick one.”

I yearned to have the privileges of being either heterosexual or white because I wasn’t just gay and Asian; I was kinky too. Foreign desires stirred in me that felt icky, perverse and unmentionable, far beyond the pale of the better-known indecencies that were condemned from the pulpits of my Colorado hometown.

That’s why I begged a God I had long stopped believing in for help. If I were heterosexual or white, I could come out of the kinky closet — a “second” closet — and find a way. I would be “acceptable” in one of the crucial ways of being acceptable in America. But my status as a triple minority felt like a sick joke, a death sentence.

After all, on gay dating apps, East Asians routinely face dehumanization that reduces us to nothing more than featureless clones in the eyes of others. We either get the racist “no Asians” or “no rice” cold shoulder, or we get fawning treatment that can feel worse — yellow fever, the dreaded Asian fetish.

“Fetish” is a weird word. We use it to refer to the benign passion people have for leather or lingerie, feet or earlobes, a love for certain inanimate objects or body parts. But we also use it in the context of racial fetishism, that empty flattery that casts people of color as curiosities and turns us into trophies, making it tough for us to trust anyone’s affection.

Case in point: “I love Chinese food,” whispered a beautiful white man after we had made out at a Manhattan gay bar. I pulled away and fled home, too tired to explain why.

“I’ve never had an Asian,” said another as he pulled me toward him. I flushed in anger as I pictured him posting a photo of us with a sushi emoji next to my username, as I had once seen a white man do to a hapless Asian guy on Twitter.

Others were more subtle. I chatted with a sharp conversationalist who seemed a good match, also white, before I happened upon his Instagram and found nothing but shirtless selfies with East Asian men plastered across his profile. Duped again.

In Elaine Hsieh Chou’s novel “Disorientation,” the Taiwanese American protagonist begins to wonder if her white fiancé truly loves her after discovering his exes were all East Asian.

“The sad thing is, Ingrid,” says her Korean American friend, “you’ll never know for sure.”

I was lucky that the sexuality gods, in minting a kinky Asian queer, anointed me with a fetish fun enough to give me an escape from the cruelty of this racist reality. Latex fetishism is a predilection for form-fitting rubber clothing that’s shiny, slippery, slithery, sultry. Coming in every imaginable color, latex has captured the imagination of celebrity fashion and cyberpunk film. But most of the uninitiated have trouble understanding why we would willingly wear something that doesn’t breathe — at all.

It’s hard to articulate the electrifying sensation of a finger skating across the taut surface of latex, or the warm squeeze of a rubber-clad hand on your back. Many “rubberists,” as we call ourselves, prefer the all-encompassing stimulus of full-body compression, sometimes with attached hoods and gloves, trading porous, pockmarked skin for skin that’s pristine and pretend.

But latex’s allure also comes from the naughty nirvana of consensual dehumanization: the desire to become featureless and faceless, to vanish into the bliss of latex’s skintight embrace. It offers a chance to become, for a moment, someone different — something different. A second skin.

There were times in my 20s, as I ventured into the sordid depths of the gay kink world, when I wished I could disappear into that second skin forever.

“You can’t call yourself American,” said a white man to me in a Berlin fetish club, grabbing my shoulders and pushing me so hard he knocked the wind out of me. “You have to call yourself China or Japan.” I didn’t realize then that some still saw me as so less than human that I didn’t even deserve to be called “Chinese” or “Japanese.”

“You can’t be in this elevator with us,” said a drunk white man in a cheap harness at one of America’s largest gay kink events, shoving me to the floor. I didn’t realize then that this is what they call a hate crime.

“I just wanted to see if the stereotype was true,” said an older white man at a New England leather bar after reaching down to fondle my rubber-covered groin. I didn’t realize then that this is what they call sexual assault.

Over time, whether the indignities happened in a schoolyard, gay bar or fetish club, they blended together in a toxic stew, and it wasn’t long before I shied away from dating altogether, like so many queer people of color do to avoid racial fetishism or hatred. I started seeking out men I already knew in my social circles. I’m not sure if it’s because of my experiences with racism or despite them that I can only feel physical attraction to someone after I sense an emotional connection.

My first boyfriend and I were close friends before we started flirting, then dating. He wasn’t into latex. I stayed with him because he never asked me where I was from from. And I never asked him, a biracial Black man, anything like that either. I like to think it’s why he stayed with me too.

My second boyfriend, a fellow rubberist, was the kind of lover who would comb his hands through my hair and adjust my latex to make sure I looked my best before going out. The only photo of us, long lost, depicts us in contrasting rubber (he in a white surf suit; I in a dark-blue-and-green bodysuit) with our arms draped over each other’s shoulders. I stayed with him because he never asked me those questions either.

But I worried constantly about being enough as his partner — which really meant enough as his Asian partner. I began to think in circles: Does he, a Latino man, actually find me attractive, or is this just a ruse to try out an Asian for size? Has he never asked about my ethnicity because he’s hiding his yellow fever? Would people think I was just a sympathy case? Would they think I was paying him?

At some point, my paranoia didn’t just unwind our relationship; it overwhelmed my own love for latex to the point that I didn’t wear it for an entire year. During our last online chat, I told him I was taking more from him than I could give, that I was irreparably broken. All because I was Asian.

“I’ve never seen you that way,” he wrote. “I don’t care that you’re Asian. I love you for who you are, and nothing else.”

Soon after, we broke up. I can’t blame him. I had wrapped my own worth in the scorn others had for my skin, and I was letting it suffocate me. While I couldn’t fix society, I could get out of my own way. With help, I healed the lesions on my sense of self. I sought out art and media I could see myself in and began to create my own. I forged community with other queer and kinky people of color. I practiced seeing my skin as worthy, visible and perfect. I reclaimed my sexuality and my sexiness.

After my year of shunning latex, I now shine in it nearly every day once again, but only for me — not as a substitute skin but as a gleaming continuation of my skin, something I am able to celebrate and love. I no longer want to encase myself in a second skin of rubber to shroud my original skin. I take pride in both — biodegradable, sexy and essential to who I am.

Which is the best gift of all, apart from another brilliantly colored latex catsuit, of course. Even though I have my favorites, I’m trying a new color. This time, I’m picking yellow.

Preston Gyuwon So, a writer in New York City, is working on a memoir about the experiences of queer and kinky East Asian Americans.

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