Flattering Pictures : Stereotypes: New calendar portrays Asian men as sexy, virile types, not computer nerds or villains. Its creator hopes to raise eyebrows, too.

While teaching a course on Asian-American history at San Francisco State University last fall, Antonio De Castro was troubled by Asian women in his class who said they were not sexually attracted to Asian men--and, in fact, preferred to date and marry whites.

Part of the reason, De Castro surmised after talking with students, was a dearth of positive media images of Asian men. In Hollywood and in real life, Asian men have been stereotyped as menacing villains, computer nerds, obedient sidekicks or a mix-and-match combination of caricatures.

After asking his class to write a paper on the topic, De Castro, a Filipino American, decided to do something himself: He gathered a group of six Asian-American men, oiled them down, and photographed each--in black and white--flexing muscle and posing in a loincloth or swimming trunks.

And voila : the Asian Pacific Islander Men 1991 Calendar, a first-of-its-kind publication that aims to break stereotypes as it raises eyebrows.

“The calendar is making a very directed statement that the Asian male does have a physical aspect, a sexual aspect and does have virility,” said De Castro, 38, who is also a commercial photographer.

To distinguish his product from any other “beefcake” calendar, De Castro photographed the men fully as well as scantily clothed, and included short profiles of each alongside their pictures. Some people warned that the calendar might be too modest that way.

“But that’s a real important part of the calendar. It’s a whole person I’m portraying,” De Castro said.

Indeed, media images of Asian men (and other minority groups) have fallen far short of portraying real people.

In the late 1920s, there was the sinister, green-eyed Dr. Fu Manchu. There also was Charlie Chan, the fortune cookie proverb-spouting detective, and even such recent characters as Long Duk Dong, a sex-starved, drunken Chinese exchange student in the 1984 movie “Sixteen Candles.”

Frank Kwan, executive producer of KNBC-TV Channel 4’s “News Conference”--a weekly political affairs show--has been openly critical of the media’s portrayal of Asians.

“Charlie Chan never was portrayed by an Asian. It was always a Caucasian in ‘yellow face.’ All the Chan movies were like that,” said Kwan, who accuses Hollywood of stripping Asian men of their sexuality and dignity--in essence, their acceptance as normal, mainstream Americans.

Times are changing: Producers now are looking for an Asian actor to play the Chinese detective.

“We’ve taken two steps forward and 1 1/2 steps backward,” said Dennis Dun, a Chinese-American actor who plays a radio talk show engineer named Billy Po on the NBC television series “Midnight Caller.” Currently, Dun is the only Asian male regular on prime-time television.

Dun said his character is “witty, intelligent, American and hip”--qualities that persuaded him to audition for the part. But several years ago, while rehearsing on the set of his first major motion picture, “Year of the Dragon,” Dun said he noticed that the lines for his character--an undercover cop--were injected with blatant stereotypes.

“I looked at the script and thought, ‘Oh my God.’ They had the character speaking horrible pidgin English,” Dun said. “I thought if he was talking this way how could he be a cop? I started rewriting my part. . . . I corrected the grammar so he spoke proper English. And I got away with it.”

Unfortunately, such negative stereotypes are a reflection of how Asian men are viewed in the real world as well.

“Society sends a negative message to Asian-American men taking on . . . non-traditional roles, specifically if the roles call upon the person to be articulate, assertive, verbal,” said Diane Yen-Mei Wong, executive director of the Asian American Journalists Assn.--and wife of one of the calendar men, Dale Minami, a prominent San Francisco attorney who pressed for reparations for Japanese Americans interned during World War II.

Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo, the city’s first Asian-American council member, agreed. “The people who are making the decisions think Asian males are not attractive, not appealing,” he said.

Although Woo said that being Asian and male were never an impediment to his getting elected in 1985, constituents, Asian and non-Asian, have told him that at times he comes across as inscrutable, cerebral and unemotional--in other words, “too Asian.”

“People told me they wish I would act more like Jesse Jackson,” Woo said. “However, I resist the idea of remaking myself to satisfy someone else’s idea of what a politician should be.”

The image of the Asian-American man is a touchy subject, especially in the wake of an article in the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday magazine, Image. The Dec. 2 article, “Asian Women, Caucasian Men: The New Demographics of Love,” drew criticism from some Asian Americans who said the piece portrayed Asian males as sexist, unattractive and hung up on “losing” Asian women to white men.

“(The) article made it look like it is Asian men’s fault that many Asian women are now dating and marrying Caucasians . . . because Asian men placed them in a submissive role,” wrote Los Molinos resident George Wang in a letter printed in a Jan. 6 issue.

Another upset reader was UC Berkeley student Dave Nakamura, one of the men quoted in the story. He said he regretted participating in the interviews. “I am not the militant, sexist, hard-up and inflexible Berkeley Asian male portrayed,” he wrote.

Bill Wong, an associate editor and columnist for the Oakland Tribune, said the piece, which quotes a white sorority member saying white women don’t date Asians, implies it is impossible for white women and Asian men to become romantically involved. Wong said he was offended by the article, especially because he is married to a white.

Certainly, a collection of snapshots of bare-chested Asian men cannot be expected to work miracles. But by forcing discussion of the issues it addresses, the calendar is starting to have an impact.

Dojoon Bahk, 30, a Korean American who appears in the calendar as Mr. January and Mr. February, said a female co-worker never thought of him as attractive until she saw his photograph on television news program. “That made me think what the media can do to a person,” said Bahk, a social worker, who is training to be a firefighter.

De Castro didn’t have to go far to find well-built subject matter. Five of the six live in the Bay Area; one resides in Southern California. None of them are professional models. Besides Minami and Bahk, there is Rene DeGuzman, a Filipino-American sculptor; Siake Lealaimatafao, a Samoan-American graduate student in physiology and anatomy; Cuong Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American medical student, and T.C. Chang, a Chinese-American college student majoring in theater.

The calendar hit the market in December and did surprisingly well, De Castro said, despite an explosion in the number and variety of specialized calendars offered this year. He said he has sold about two-thirds of the 3,000 printed.

Although the calendar wasn’t intended to appeal to a specific ethnic group or gender--it’s available in non-Asian communities--most of the buyers in Los Angeles have been Asian females, said Gary Sumida, manager of Amerasia Bookstore in Little Tokyo.

On a recent afternoon, Janet Cromwell, 32, stood at the store’s display table and flipped through the calendar as her fiance, Gary Oba, looked on in amusement. Then, the two walked up to the front desk and paid the cashier $12.95 for it.

“It’s for her apartment,” said Oba, 39, who is Japanese American.

“I feel uncomfortable about pin-up calendars,” said Cromwell, who is white. “But this concept has taken a twist on that whole image. It definitely is more socially responsible.”

Not all agree that a calendar is the best way to break stereotypes.

“I think that before we get to the cheesecake stage, it’s more important to get to the realistic stage--trying to deal with portraying Asian males as who we are,” said Kwan, of KNBC-TV.

Said Wong, of the Oakland Tribune: “It’s a sad thing there has to be something like this to reinforce what should be accepted in general culture--that Asian men are like all others.”