Tomi Kita: Saga of an Asian Badboy

Tomi Kita was hard enough, rich enough and pretty enough to style himself the Male Madonna, the Asian Prince, the New Pig on the Block. by Tom Kagy

Tomi Kita pads barefoot through the Mondrian’s black marble lobby, nodding and smiling at long-haired loungers, as though they were guests in his own living room. In a sense they are. Kita has made the West Hollywood hotel his home since selling his Las Vegas mansion four months earlier. Walking discreetly behind Kita is a pretty blue-eyed blonde whom he introduces in his surprisingly gentle, slightly hoarse voice, as his, ahem, secretary. Her name is Summer which strikes me as poetically correct given the late-September heat wave that has turned the LA basin into a shimmering cocktail of toxic gases.

It is lunch hour and we move into the hotel’s cafe with its climax view of West Hollywood and the Mid-Wilshire district. As we seat ourselves at a window table, I am still wondering if there might be some connection between Tomi Kita and the unrolled fluorescent orange condom I saw under the urinal in the men’s room during a pre-meeting pitstop. My thinking goes like this: (1) Kita is a long-haired rock musician who writes, sings, plays and arranges songs with titles like “Desire” and “Masturbation”; (2) he posed buck naked for his CD cover; (3) he likes being called the Asian Prince, the Male Madonna and, in the words of rock producer/promoter Kim Fowley, the New Pig on the Block; (4) Kita is the only guest walking around the lobby barefoot; (5) he has ready access to a blonde who is obviously not his secretary. I’ll grant it isn’t an airtight case.

Before I get around to asking Kita about the orange rubber, he adds fuel to my conjectural flames by admitting that his life and music are centered around sex. Summer calls Kita a clinically certifiable sex addict, giving me a martyred look that dispels any doubt I may have entertained about the true nature of their relationship. She adds, in that guileless way only American blondes can get away with, that Kita’s demands for sex seven or more times a day is getting to be a nuisance, a real threat to her health.

“It can be a pain in the butt sometimes,” she says, laughing. She probably didn’t intend the double-entendre, what with her being so young and being from Modesto. She has been in LA only a few months. Kita is her first boyfriend, she says.

“With him it’s anywhere, anytime,” she complains, confirming my suspicion about the orange rubber in the men’s room. “I’m only in my early 20s,” she says by way of explaining her trouble keeping up with Kita. “I haven’t reached my sexual peak yet.”

Kita sits looking detached, maybe a little proud, about the addiction Summer has just made public.

“At parties he just goes up to girls and asks if they want to have sex,” Summer reports. She met him when she accompanied a friend she was staying with, a well-known porn star named Rusty Rose, to Kita’s place. Kita and Rusty had known each other for some time. Summer speculates the two may have met at a porn convention which Kita sometimes attends. I ask whether Kita has ever considered acting in a porn film. Laughing, Summer offers that he would make a great porn actor. But can he act? She nods, her face screwing comically to suggest the weirdness of their sexual secrets.

“Sometimes he plays a country boy,” says Summer, giggling uncontrollably.

“Or a keymaster,” says Kita, putting himself back in the conversation. His voice is as cool and detached as when he orders an iced coffee. “I like to act out when we have sex,” he adds laconically. “S&M, bondage, like where she’s the slave and I’m the master.” Kita says he has had an offer to star in a porn film but turned it down.

“Because it’s not real,” he says. “I don’t know if I’m too good or too bad for pornos. I may be into sex, but I’m not a dog. Dogs do it with anyone, but I’m picky about who I do it with.” There was a time, though, when he just “wanted to get inside every woman he saw.” He estimates he has had sex with 360 women. He claims among his girlfriends some recognizable names, including Miss Universe 1982, Angie Bowie and several international models and actresses.

His admitted sex mania was triggered, Kita believes, by an experience he had while living in Guam, a tiny, tropical U.S.-controlled island that lies halfway between Japan and New Guinea.

“I was a sex maniac but I was afraid of going up to girls at that time,” recalls Kita. “I masturbated a lot. My first sexual experience was when I was 13 1/2, with my neighbor. She was 29. Her husband was in the military but they must have been going through a divorce or something. He was always away. I was mowing her lawn and caught her masturbating. When I saw that vibrator going inside her, I was shaken.”

Kita worked up the nerve to ring the doorbell and ask for a drink of water. As he sat in the living room nursing a glass of water, his neighbor, an American brunette raised in Japan, talked about the wonderful time she had had with her 18-year-old boyfriends before her marriage.

“You could tell she was really horny,” recalls Kita. “I was getting really hard.” Aroused beyond the limits of his self-control but at a loss as to how to seduce a 29-year-old married woman, Kita excused himself and went into the bathroom for manual relief. Before he could finish, the woman pushed open the door, catching him stark naked.

“She walked in and grabbed my butt and started touching me and licking my back and neck. My body started to shake. I was thinking ‘I don’t know what this is, but it’s wonderful!’ She grabbed me and started kissing me. I didn’t know how to kiss. She took me to her bedroom and turned on classical music, Bach, and then she started licking me all over from head to toe. She started taking her clothes off. I didn’t know how to put it in so she slid on top of me and started moving up and down.

“I just wanted to eat her, man, devour her,” recalls Kita, “not, you know, her box, but her whole being. We had sex for about forty minutes. That was when I first saw that sex had a spiritual side, there was more to it than just sticking it inside. Before that I had even had sex with a dog.” Of the canine variety, when Kita was 13.

Kita began seeing the woman every day, often three times a day. “I would wake up early in the morning and go over to her house. I was very attracted to her and she was attracted to me. She was like my goddess.” The experience of having a mature woman appreciating his body and sexuality filled him with immense sexual confidence. “Sexual energy is very important,” he says.

“Kita’s sexual appetite and directness about satisfying it might concern some women. Not Summer. She finds his honesty a cause for reassurance. “He’ll tell you what he really feels,” she says. “Most people you can’t trust at all.”

Kita’s directness is refreshing. What makes him even more unusual is a total lack of pretension about what he hopes to achieve. Ask most artists about their goals and you get talk about artistic integrity, the purity of their motivations. Ask Tomi Kita and he talks about the need to keep breaking patterns and changing images in order to stay fresh and hold the media’s attention. “I’m not going to have long hair forever,” he says, putting his finger on a key element of his current image. “I believe in change.”