Front Cover & gay Asian identity: a love story of a very different kind
by Pauline Park

“Front Cover” is a love story of a very different kind. Depictions of complex LGBT or Asian characters in film is unusual and depictions of LGBT/queer Asians and Asian Americans is rare; even rarer is the depiction of a romantic relationship between two Asian men who are fully realized complex characters. Ray Yeung’s new film represents a real breakthrough, the most complex and compelling gay Asian love story that I’ve seen on the screen since Stephen Frears portrayed a torrid romance between a white working class Londoner and the son of Pakistani immigrants in “My Beautiful Laundrette.” Rather like the 1985 Frears film, “Front Cover” looks at the complexities of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation; but unlike “Laundrette,” which brings a white working class British bloke into the world of a prosperous Pakistani immigrant family, Yeung’s film depicts a romantic entanglement between two gay Asian men. Jake Choi is Ryan Fu, an out-and-proud gay Chinese American New Yorker who is deeply ashamed of his Chinese heritage; and James Chen plays Qi Xiao Ning, a closet queen from Beijing who is intensely proud of being Chinese; both actors effectively bring these complex characters vividly to life. Ryan is assigned to ‘style’ the famous Chinese actor for an important photo shoot by his neurotic, high-strung and culturally insensitive Italian boss, Francesca, played with aplomb by the Italian actress Sonia Villani. After an explosive confrontation between Ryan and Ning, they agree to try to work together on the photo shoot, in the course of which a blow-up with the racially insensitive photographer and his assistant bring Ning and Ryan together for the first time. Young then introduces Ryan’s immigrant Chinese parents: Elizabeth Sung as Ryan’s mother Yen gives the stand-out performance among the secondary characters; she and Ming Lee as Ba (Ryan’s father) are both the comic relief in “Front Cover” and the source of some of the most poignant moments in it. A sizzling sex scene follows the trip to see Ryan’s grandmother on Staten Island, succeeded by tender romantic moments that are the calm before the next storm, when Ning discovers that a Chinese magazine has published photos of Ryan and Ning together that could destroy his acting career in China unless Ryan publicly denies the very true report that the two are romantically involved. In less skilled hands, this scenario could easily have gone off the rails, but Ray Yeung’s superb script, plotting and direction lead to a realistic and credible resolution to the conflict which is as much an internal one for Ryan as an external one with Ning.

While “Front Cover” dramatizes what theorists might call ‘multiple oppressions’ through what is effectively an intersectional lens, the film is anything but a dry treatise on intersectionality or an exercise in preachy moralizing about racism or homophobia, as Ray Yeung brings this story alive, animating richly complex characters and conflicts with a nuance and subtlety rare in treatments of gay Asian lives. Part of the reason for the success of this film is that it is informed by Ray Yeung’s lived experience as an openly gay Chinese man from Hong Kong. To that extent, “Front Cover” stands in stark contrast with stereotypical depictions of Asian and Asian American men as buck-toothed coolies and subservient laundrymen or their latter-day successor, the dorky sexless Asian computer nerd who never gets the girl, much less the boy. In the course of the film, the proudly Chinese closet queen and the potato queen running away from his Chinese heritage both learn from each other what neither on his own had been able to figure out about himself or the world before their explosive encounter.

The Reel Affirmations film festival will screen “Front Cover” at tat the HRC Equality Center (1640 Rhode Island Ave. NW) in Washington, D.C. at 7 and 9 p.m. on August 19. For more info. about the film, go to FrontCoverthemovie.com.

This review was published by the Washington Blade as “Unlikely gaysian romance” (8.19.16).

The post Front Cover & gay Asian identity: a love story of a very different kind appeared first on Pauline Park.

Korea 2015: return to the motherland
by Pauline Park

In June 2015, I returned to Korea for the first time since I left at the age of seven and-a-half months old; it was a momentous trip. 나는 한국에서 입양되었다 These are some photos from the month I spent in the Land of the Morning Calm. #입양 #입양인 #한국 #조선 #대한민국 #남한 #남조선 #한국말 #입양홍보

Sunday, June 14

On the eve of my flight to Korea, I visited my friend Mohammad in Brooklyn.

Mohammad made a splendid Palestinian dinner for me and for our mutual friend Ang and I played a little piano for them on the grand piano in Mohammad’s house.

Monday, June 15

I flew out of La Guardia the next morning to Dallas/Fort Worth.

I spent the night in a mini hotel at DFW — my first experience of a Japanese-style mini hotel; it was clean and comfortable and it was convenient, as I didn’t have to go out of the security perimeter of the airport; in the morning, I was ready for my flight to Korea.

Tuesday, June 16

An ill omen for the country — though fortunately not for my flight or my trip — was Donald Trump’s announcement of his presidential candidacy, which I watched on CNN while waiting for my flight to Incheon. But a good omen was something S-shaped that I will leave to the imagination of readers that I produced on the morning of my flight to Korea.

I flew out of DFW to Incheon, Korea’s largest airport; it was impossible for me to get more than just a few restless hours of sleep on the 13-hour flight, cramped as I was in coach; the saving grace was that — though I was up against the emergency exit — I didn’t have anyone in front of me on the flight.

At least I got a decent dinner on the AA flight from DFW; we were given a choice of an American-style dinner and a Korean one and I opted for the Korean.

Wednesday, June 17

Incheon’s new-ish airport impressed me with its cleanliness and efficiency.

I arrived at Incheon international airport, only to be confronted with bilingual posters in English and Korean warning of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) ‘epidemic,’ which turned out to be a hyped non-epidemic.

My first view of the city of my birth upon my return after 54 years from the patio outside Seoul Station. 서울

I took the AREX train into Seoul, arriving at Seoul Station around dusk.

I took a taxicab to the Ramada Hotel Namdaemun.

Thursday, June 18

I awoke the next morning to a spectacular panorama of Seoul as seen through the window of my room at the Ramada Hotel Namdaemun, with Seoul Station on the left.

The breakfast room at the hotel was large and airy and very woodsy.

I met two other participants in the Mosaic 2015 adult tour organized by Me & Korea which ran from June 17-28; we went out to lunch at Seoul Station and on the way back passed Namdaemun, the Great South Gate.

Namdaemun 남대문 has always held a special place in my heart: it is the only landmark in Seoul or Korea that I can distinctly remember from reading about the country of my birth in encyclopedias we had at home.

I was delighted to see Namdaemun for the first time.

I was delighted to meet Marie Frenette, a Canadian from Nova Scotia who had seen my post on Facebook about coming to Korea and was interested to meet me; after living in Korea for 9 years, she had become fluent in Korean — quite a feat for any North American with no familial connection with Korea. I remarked on the irony that I spoke the language of Marie’s ancestors (French) while she spoke that of mine…

Friday, June 19

I visited Soedaemun Prison Museum with my friend Kris; Korean nationalists were held here during the Japanese occupation and tortured and murdered. But the postwar Korean dictatorship continued to use Soedaemun to detain, torture and murder political dissidents for decades after the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945.

Saturday, June 20

Me & Korea’s Mosaic Tour began in earnest on Saturday.

After breakfast, we piled into a bus and drove to Gwanghwamun 광화문, the huge square in the center of Seoul that is where countless protests and demonstrations have taken place; there, we were greeted by an enormous statue of Sejong the Great 세종 대왕, the king who commissioned the creation of hangul 한글, the alphabet still in use today that is considered by many linguists to be among the most ingenious alphabets ever created.

I got to pretend that I was president of the Republic of Korea 대한민국 at the Cheongwadae Sarangchae 청와대사랑채 museum in Seoul 서울 한국 조선

I visited Gyeongbokgung 경복궁 — the largest of the five royal palaces in Seoul 서울 — at the beginning of my month in Korea.

It was raining so hard, the royal guard took cover under the great gate of Gwanghwamun 광화문 한국 조선 대한민국 남한 남조선

Gyeongbokgung houses a good part of the collection of the National Museum of Korea and I saw this magnificent dragon in the palace.

I saw many other fascinating works of art in the museum; perhaps the most unusual was a car once used by the royal family.

Sunday, June 21

On Sunday morning, Mosaic tour participants gathered in the lobby of the Ramadan Namdaemun.

We attended a service at the Jesus’ Love Church, featuring a rather extraordinary sermon by the Elder Pastor Kim, who told us that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as Korean adoptees but rather as warriors for Christ whose mission is to take over the United States so that it can convert the entire world to Christianity. I seriously doubt anyone in the group took the Elder Pastor Kim’s nonsense seriously either, but since the church was one of the co-sponsors of the tour, we all listened politely to his sermon. One of the two interpreters on the tour — a young progressive feminist who grew up in Korea but was by this point studying in the United States — was seriously offended by the sermon. But as for me, having been raised in a Christian fundamentalist household, I was in effect ‘inoculated’ against such nonsense and the sermon did not bother me; fortunately, the Elder Pastor Kim did not get into homophobic or transphobic discourse.

And thankfully,  the sermon was only half an hour long (even if it seemed much longer), and after the service, some of us were paired with ‘host families,’ others with ‘host buddies.’ I met my two host buddies, the wonderful Tae-kyung and Sinhae, and we saw much of Seoul together, including Changyecheon stream, one of the most delightful places in the city. The original plan for the members of the tour was to stay overnight with a host family from the church, but apparently after some internal discussion, the organizers quite prudently decided that pairing me with host buddies not associated with the fundamentalist Jesus Love church would make sense for the only openly transgendered or queer member of the motherland tour group.

Tae-kyung and Sinhae introduced me to the delights of Cheonggyecheon #청계천; the stream flows once again through the heart of Seoul as it did before being covered in concrete for 45 years; it’s a rare bit of nature in Korea’s capital 서울

We also visited Deoksugung Palace 덕수궁, one of the five royal palaces in Seoul 서울. I had been there the day before, but it was pouring rain on Saturday; on Sunday, it was gloriously sunny and the light brought out the wonderful yellow color on the side of the throne room building.

I was enchanted by the Joseon dynasty era architecture of the palace.

And it was sweet of Taekyung and Sinhae to be so patient with my touristy curiosity, Taekyung taking a number of shots of me in front of one of the pavilions.

Deoksugung 덕수궁 is the second largest of the five royal palaces but isn’t so much a single building as with most European palaces but rather a series of pavilions, this one being one of the largest and most prominent.

 

 

Monday, June 22

In the morning, I went with two other adoptees from the Mosaic tour and one of the interpreters to meet with staff at Social Welfare Services. Afterwards, we went out for lunch and I really loved the bibimbap that I had along with many other dishes I shared.

In the evening, participants in the Mosaic tour took a cruise on the Han River.

One part of a bridge on the river was spouting water from colored lights, which looked like the colors of the rainbow flag. It was a hot and humid evening, but the breeze on the river was wonderfully cooling.

And the nighttime views of Seoul were dazzling.

Tuesday, June 23

Around midday, Mosaic tour participants served lunch to elderly Koreans at a soup kitchen near Seoul station, which is the area where many of the city’s homeless congregate.

천 사 가 되 어 주 서ㅣ 요

Afterwards, we took a bus down to Gyeongju (Kyongju) in the southeast.

Cheomseongdae Observatory 첨성대 (瞻星臺) is one of the oldest surviving structures in Korea. Built in 647 during the reign of Queen Seondeok of the Silla kingdom, Cheomseongdae  was used as an astronomical observatory.

Gyeongju (Kyongju)경주 was the capital of the ancient Silla kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period and it was fascinating to visit.

Mosaic participants took a group shot at Cheomseongdae Observatory.

Dongung Palace 동궁과 & Anapji Pond 안압지.

Hanhwa Resort in Gyeongju was a nice place to stay overnight, but surprisingly lacked wi-fi in the rooms and non-Korean TV stations.

Wednesday, June 24

National Museum

The Mosaic tour wended its way to Pohang 포항 in North Gyeongsang 경상북도 where we dipped our feet into the waters of the East Sea (Dong Hae) — Koreans don’t call it the ‘Sea of Japan’~!

The waters off Pohang are so clear you can see the sea floor and all of the flora and fauna in the ocean.

I dipped my feet in the Donhae.

The pier at Pohang

Jukdo market in Pohang was huge and fascinating.

Jukdo market in Pohang had live octopus and fish of every kind.

Live octopus on display in Judo market made for a visual feast.

Thursday, June 25

In the morning, Mosaic tour participants visited the Gyeongju National Museum, which has an enormous collection of Korean art and artifacts.

The most impressive artifact was a crown from the Silla kingdom.

We then lunched at Choi’s Bobsang before visiting the Gyochon Traditional Village (경주 교촌마을) on the southern edge of Gyeongju.

Three ‘ajumma’ taught us traditional Korean tea service

The biggest challenge was actually sitting on the floor cross legged.

Mosaic tour participants were instructed in traditional tea service and taught how to sing “Arirang,” the most famous of all Korean folk songs — though I had already learned the song before going to Korea.

We had Korean archery lessons as well.

On the way back to Seoul, we stopped at a rest stop for dinner and I had ttangcho ramyeon, a wonderfully hot and spicy noodle dish.

Friday, June 26

On the morning of the last full day of the Mosaic tour, participants scaled Naksan fortress wall.

In the afternoon, I took the Seoul subway with Sina Lee and Jacob Bowman to Insadong, a popular shopping area that is known for offering more traditional items than Myeongdong.

Insadong is a popular shopping district in Seoul.

Mosaic tour dinner

Sunday, June 28

I had a small but perfectly serviceable room at the Itaewon Inn for 10 days and nights.

The Queer Korea Festival drew a crowd estimated at 35,000, making it the largest event in the history of the LGBT community of Korea.

Christian fundamentalists tried to block the event from going forward and then tried to drown it out with loud noise but abjectly failed in that goal.

This was the first Queer Korea festival in Seoul City Hall Plaza  in the heart of the city.

At the festival, a young man confronted a Christian fundamentalist — though they were speaking in Korean, so I couldn’t understand what they were saying; but I guessed that the young man was gay and was challenging the minister’s homophobia.

Christian fundamentalists had tried to stop the Queer Korea Festival, but organizers were successful in challenging them in court.

I was surprised and delighted to see a big banner declaring “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid — Free Palestine.” 

I was invited to keynote the Queer Korea Festival (퀴어문화축제 & 퍼레이드).

Chogakbo is a new transgender advocacy project and had a float in the Seoul Pride Parade.

Seoul Pride 2015 was the most exciting pride parade I’ve ever been in; there were no pandering politicians and no corporate sponsorship, just ordinary LGBT people marching for their rights.

The mayor of Seoul put 3,000 police officers on the ground to guard participants in the Queer Korea Festival and Seoul Pride Parade.

Seoul Pride drew thousands of LGBT Koreans and allies to march for LGBT rights.

Monday, June 29

On Monday, June 29, Larry Tung and I met with Bong Youngshik and Kim Jiyoon at the Asan Institute to discuss their report, “Over the Rainbow: Public Attitude Toward LGBT in South Korea,” on LGBT rights and discrimination in Korea. In the afternoon, we met with a Korean transgender activist.

I saw Pororo the Little Penguin 뽀롱뽀롱 뽀로로 & his friends in the Seoul 서울 subway; my favorite is Eddy 에디 the fox 여우

Tuesday, June 30

Larry Tung and I explored the popular shopping district of Myeongdong on June 30 and I commented on how very ‘metrosexual’ young Korean men were, especially in the promotional posters in Myeongdong, in which the young men are very boyish, some even quite girlish to an American eye.

Larry and I were amused by the cute products on the shelves in stores in  Myeongdong.

Myeongdong cut-outs of a Korean boy band with a K-Pop look, which seems to be a dominant influence among young Koreans in Seoul.

At Daeksugong palace, Larry and I watched the changing of the guard; I was absolutely enchanted by the bright yellow garb of some of the guardsmen, with the feathers on their Joseon (Choson) dynasty era style hats and their traditional Korean flute playing.

In the evening, we passed by Gwanghwamun, the great entrance gate to Gyeongbokkung, the main royal palace and the largest of the five royal palaces in Seoul.

King Sejong commissioned the creation of the Korean alphabet and is the most revered of all Korea’s kings.

July 1

I was invited to speak at a press conference at the Turkish consulate in Seoul protesting the Istanbul police violence against participants in the Istanbul Pride Parade.

July 3

In the morning, Larry Tung and I went to the Social Welfare Services office to film in front of the rock outside the SWS office. 입양인 입양인의 입양인이 입양정보 입양기록 입양기록을

In the afternoon, I went with Minyoung Kim to a local police precinct to register as an adoptee; though nothing came of it, I appreciated her going out of her way to make me accessible to any birth family who could be searching for me.

I had some noodles before my speaking engagement in the evening.

In the evening, I was invited to speak at a meeting of  Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights of Korea (Haeng Seong In) (행동하는성소수자인권연대) about my LGBT activism.

I talked about what might be helpful for queer activists in Korea as they advocate for equality for LGBT Koreans. I was delighted to speak to a full room of community members and I was told that a turnout of more than 50 people was a large turnout for the 행동하는성소수자인권연대는.

The organization had created a poster to announce my speaking engagement:

July 4

I spent the Fourth of July in the land of my birth, traveling from the city of my birth to Busan, the second largest city in Korea, with Larry Tung 부산

On the way, we passed through Namdaemun, the Great South Gate, which has always been for me the iconic image of the city of my birth.

In the arch of the great gate there’s a wonderful dragon painted on the wood frame of the inside of the arch (7.4.15) 남대문

Larry and I bought tickets for Busan at Seoul Station.

We visited Daegaksa 대각사 Temple (Nampo-dong) near Busan Tower.

The reclining Buddha was striking.

Larry and I went up Busan Tower and took in the spectacular view of the harbor and the city.

Afterwards, we went to Lotte Mall, where we saw everything on sale from pianos to Japanese-style toilet seats.

July 5

We visited the Haedong Yonggungsa Temple 해동 용궁사 outside of Busan 부산, one of the most famous Buddhist temples in Korea.

I found some lucky pigs on the grounds of the temple.

I love pigs and the fact that they are considered symbols of good fortune in traditional Korean mythology.

After touring the temple site, Larry and I visited Haeundae 해운대해수욕장 

Haeundae 해운대해수욕장 outside of Busan 부산, one of South Korea’s most famous beaches One of South Korea’s most famous beaches

After getting back into Busan, we visited Shinsegae, which claims to be the largest department store in the world.

Zooraji is a children’s playground on the top floor complete with a carousel and dinosaurs.

July 6

I joined friends in strolling through Naru Park in Songpa-gu 송파구 in Seoul 서울 on a hot and humid day.

And we

I walked through the neighborhood of Mapo-gu, parts of which looked like what Seoul was before Park Chung-hee’s crash industrialization.

July 7

I gave a presentation on the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine (Jan. 2012) at a meeting of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대

After which they wrote:

오늘 폴린 박 토크 굉장했습니다. 팔레스타인연대운동과 성소수자 운동의 접점을 찾은 이 기분…! 앞으로 만들어나갈 연대가 기대됩니다. 오늘 후기와 녹화 영상도 곧 공유하겠습니다. 온오프로 함께 해 주신 분들 정말 고맙습니다! (7.6.15)The

The

The

The

July 7

I had breakfast with Sina in Itaewon.

It was wonderful to see Sina and to reflect on the Mosaic Tour that we’d participated in together.

July 8

I was delighted to have Marie’s companionship as we took the train to the end of the #1 line where we crossed a busy intersection in downtown Uijeongbu 의정부시 to get to the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시 — like the rest of Gyeonggi Province 경기도 — is now part of the Seoul metropolitan area.

Uijeongbu 의정부시: the 신 altar in the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시: inside the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시: Marie and me outside the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시

Uijeongbu 의정부시

July 9

I I had lunch with Hyong-Jin, Myunghwa & 나 양 in Itaewon #이태원 #서울

July 10

I visited Changdeokgung 창덕궁 with my friend Kris.

One of the five royal palaces in Seoul, Changdeokgung is a UNESCO World Heritage site and famous for its celebrated Biwon 비원 — the ‘Secret Garden’ that was intended for sole use of the king and the royal family.

Seoul: a small gate in the Piwon — the Secret Garden of the Changdeokgung (7.10.15)

July 11

Korean celadon 청자 in the National Museum of Korea 한국 조선 in Seoul 서울.

I came across this boddhisattva.

July 5

July 6

I met up with two Korean friends in Seoul and we strolled around Seokchon Lake Park 석촌호수공원 coming across a World Wildlife Fund promo with plastic pandas.

Strolling around Seokchon Lake Park 석촌호수공원 we came across this Korean flag made out of chrysanthemum flowers.

In the evening, I went to Mapo-gu Café for a meeting of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대 where I gave a presentation on my participation in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in Jan. 2012 to members of the group.

Afterwards, I went out to dinner with members of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대.

The poster for my presentation to members of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대 on my participation in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine at their July 7 meeting (7.9.15)

July 8

I met up with Hyong-jin, Myunghwa & Kim Na-young in Itaewon for lunch.

I had had haemul pajeon (seafood scallion pancake) for dinner in Seoul.

I was amused by the fact that the Seoul Metro calls its subway currency ‘T money.’

I took 6,686 photos during 30 days in Korea — 2,658 with my iPad & 4,028 with my digital camera —  including 625 on the first memory card, 2,430 on the second card & 973 on the third. That compares with 1,996 photos that I took in 7 days in Paris in May, which averaged 287 photos per day, vs. 222.9 photos per day on average in Korea. So the Paris trip exceeded Korea for the most photos taken per day on average in any given trip, but the Korea trip topped the charts for the total number of photos taken on any trip until my five weeks in Europe in 2017, during which I took over 30,000 photos.

I arrived safely home after an uneventful three-hour flight from Dallas, following a more than 12-hour flight from Incheon, less than 12 hours short of 30 full days since leaving home on the biggest trip of my life (so far, at least). My month in Korea was the longest, most exhausting but most productive & most fun trip of my life and the most important since the trip that brought me to the land of my youth from the land of my birth so many years ago.

바울인 박
박 바울인

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ISSUES OF TRANSGENDERED ASIAN AMERICANS AND PACIFIC ISLANDERS
By Pauline Park, co-founder, New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy and John Manzon-Santos, Executive Director, Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center

Testimony submitted to the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders

Transgendered and gender-variant people are among the most invisible and marginalized of all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and it is important that our issues be addressed in any attempt to discuss the needs and concerns of the larger lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) Asian Pacific Islander community.

What we today would call ‘homosexuality’ and ‘transgender’ have existed throughout human history, present in some form in every pre-modern society, though they have been socially constructed in very different ways across different cultures and time periods. Most often, the two phenomena have been conflated and have been constituted through notions of a ‘third sex’ or ‘third gender’ role. In fact, in pre-modern Asian and Pacific Islander cultures, individuals whom today we would identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersexual, might have identified themselves as bakla (in Tagalog), shamakhami (in Bengali), waria (in Javanese), paksu mudang (in Korean), or mahu (in Hawaiian).

Mythological narratives involving sexual transformation appear throughout the oral storytelling tradition and written literature of Asian and Pacific Islander cultures, as for example, with the Chinese story of the male deity Kuan-yin, who changed sex to become the goddess of mercy. There are many popular tales of Kuan-yin’s adventures, and traditionally, she is the most popular deity in the Taoist pantheon. It is fitting that mercy should be the province of transgendered people, because the power of the transformation teaches compassion to the transformed.

Unfortunately, European colonialism had a deleterious effect on many traditions of transgender in Asia and the Pacific. For example, the Hijra of India, male temple priestesses of the mother goddess Bahuchara Mata, were turned into social pariahs during the British occupation. And the Babain culture of transgendered priests and priestesses that was revered in traditional Filipino society was destroyed by Catholic missionaries in the nineteenth century.

In Korea, there are three distinct transgenderal traditions. Under the Silla dynasty, which unified the peninsula in the 7th century, the Hwarang warrior elite included many boys who dressed as women, wearing long gowns and make-up when they were not practicing archery or preparing for battle. In addition to the Flower Boys of Silla, there were the boy actors who played women’s roles in the Namsadang theatrical troupes that toured the villages of Korea until the end of the 19th century, often taken as lovers by the older males who played the men’s roles in those same companies. Finally, there was the tradition of the mudang, always a woman, but not always female. The paksu mudang was a male shaman who performed sacred rituals as a woman (and may have lived as a woman as well), and who was not only respected but also revered. However, the mudang culture has slowly died out, under the impact of Communism in the North (where the paksu mudang were particularly popular before World War II) and capitalism and conservative Christianity in the South. Ironically enough, the mudang tradition is in fact rooted in the Altaic origins of Korean culture having its origins in the Siberian homeland from which the Korean people migrated, and it long predates the introduction of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism to the peninsula under Chinese influence after the unification of Korea under the Silla.

The term ‘transgender’ is of relatively recent origin, having come into general use only in the last ten years or so; it is an ‘umbrella’ term used to identify a diverse community of individuals who are similar only in transgressing conventional gender norms. The term is usually meant to include everyone from casual crossdressers and transvestites to post-operative transsexuals, as well as many individuals who are not consciously transgender-identified. There has been no comprehensive study of the transgender community, and so an estimate of the population is speculative at best. While Kinsey estimated the lesbian and gay proportion of the general population to be approximately ten percent, the percentage of Americans – and by extension, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders – who are transgendered in some sense depends to a large extent on how one defines that population.

The smallest proportion of the transgender population may well be those who are transsexual-identified – both male-to-female (MTF) and female-to-male (FTM) – ‘transsexual’ traditionally being used to describe someone seeking or having undergone sex reassignment surgery (SRS). But in addition to pre-operative and post-operative transsexuals, a growing number of individuals identify as non-operative transsexuals, those who do not seek SRS; some ‘non-op’ transsexuals may undergo hormone therapy, while others do not.

A much larger category, in which would be included transsexuals, would be those whom we could term ‘transgendered,’ whether they use that term as a self-descriptor or not. This category includes transvestites and crossdressers, the former term now considered by many to be somewhat old-fashioned or overly clinical and giving way to the latter term as a self-identifier. In that category, one could also include those who identify as or who are labeled by others as drag queens and drag kings, stone butches, etc. Non-transsexual transgendered people are those who choose to spend a significant portion of their lives in the gender opposite their sex assigned at birth without SRS.

A still larger category would be the gender-variant: individuals who transgress conventional gender norms but who do not (for the most part) ‘crossdress’; this category would include feminine men (some gay, others bisexual or heterosexual-identified) and masculine women (some lesbians, others bisexual or heterosexual-identified), as well as transgendered and transsexual people. In contrast to the gender-variant are the conventionally gendered – masculine males and feminine females who at most times and in most places conform to societal standards of gender. One important point must be made here: the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) population and the transgender population are not mutually exclusive, nor are they coterminous. At some point in their lives, many transgendered people identify as LGB: e.g., an individual may ‘come out first as a gay male and then later come to identify as a transgendered woman; or a heterosexual-identified male may, as a post-operative transsexual woman, identify as a transsexual lesbian.

It is widely assumed that there are only two sexes – male and female – and that these form the basis of masculinity and femininity; this is what social theorists call the ‘sex/gender binary.’ Even many of those who recognize gender as being ‘socially constructed’ – i.e., in a very profound sense, ‘invented’ by human beings, just as we invent different styles of clothing – do not fully realize the extent to which sex is also socially constructed. Pioneering work by Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a leading biologist, is leading to a re-evaluation of our notions of sex as well as of gender. The phenomenon of intersexuality represents one of the most significant challenges to the sex/gender binary. Intersexuals (traditionally known as ‘hermaphrodites’) are those whose genitalia are neither entirely male nor female. Because of the ‘ambiguity’ of their genitals at birth, intersexed people are subject to intersex genital mutilation (IGM), usually performed between birth and age six, in which their genitals are surgically altered to conform to socially sanctioned notions of maleness or femaleness. Many intersexuals suffer lifelong sexual dysfunction and physiological problems as a result of the brutal physical mutilation to which they are subjected, almost always in infancy or childhood, when they have neither the legal standing nor the cognitive maturity to give informed consent, much less to object, to IGM.

Intersexed people have existed in all societies and epochs, and were thought in many Asian and Pacific Islander cultures to have special spiritual powers. Therefore, a renewed respect for intersexuals would represent a rearticulation of traditional Asian and Pacific Islander cultural values as well as empowering those intersexed Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who suffer so much shame and stigmatization. We therefore urge the Commission to make a public statement in support of an amendment to the recently passed federal law banning female genital mutilation (FGM) that would explicitly include intersex genital mutilation in its provisions. It is striking the extent to which Americans, outraged by the practice of FGM in the Middle East and Africa, are largely unaware of the equally disfiguring practice of IGM that the medical establishment condones here in the United States.

Ironically enough, while transsexuals often lack the means to obtain sex reassignment surgery, intersexuals have their sex involuntarily reassigned in a way that deprives them of autonomy in sexuality and gender expression. Sex reassignment surgery (SRS) can cost anywhere from $5,000-150,000, depending on whether the individual is MTF or FTM and the skill and reputation of the surgeon. Added to the cost of SRS itself is the cost of hormones (a lifetime expense, from the start of hormone replacement therapy), of psychotherapy, and related expenses. But the price that transsexuals pay for sex reassignment goes well beyond the costs of SRS and hormones: included in that price is lifelong stigmatization.

In order to obtain SRS, a transsexual woman or man must first undergo psychotherapy and obtain a diagnosis of ‘gender identity disorder’ (GID), a mental illness listed in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), compiled by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The process of transsexual transition – including psychotherapy, hormone replacement therapy (HRT), and SRS is ostensibly governed by the Standards of Care (SOC) published by the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA). Together, the GID and the SOC constitute a regime for the regulation of gender, and one constructed and maintained largely by white, upper middle class, US-born, heterosexual-identified, and conventionally gendered men. One of the aims of the GID regime is to help transgendered women ¾ whom many such mental health professionals assume incorrectly to be mostly attracted to men ¾ become conventionally gendered heterosexual women, just the expectations are that transgendered men (who are incorrectly assumed to be mostly attracted to women) will become conventionally gendered heterosexual men. The fear of ‘transhomosexuality’ among such practitioners is high: they do not want to ‘create’ homosexuals (i.e., transsexual lesbians and transsexual gay men), but rather to ‘cure’ those they perceive to be homosexuals of their homosexuality.

The practical consequence of a diagnosis of ‘gender dysphoria’ or GID is that the transsexual man or woman so diagnosed is labeled mentally ill, even in those cases where he or she is perfectly mentally healthy. While there certainly are a number of transsexuals who have real mental illnesses (such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc.), most are no more mentally ill than non-transsexuals are. But the struggle to find or keep a job becomes a daunting one when, in order to obtain SRS, the otherwise mentally healthy transsexual has to accept a diagnosis of mental illness that could prompt discrimination based on prejudice against the mentally ill in addition to that against the transgendered. The logical solution is for the APA to remove GID entirely from the DSM. What further complicates the situation, however, is that SRS is still considered an ‘experimental’ practice (despite surgery for MTF transsexuals having been brought to a high level of sophistication), and so the diagnosis of GID is used to enable psychiatrists to ‘prescribe’ SRS as the ‘cure’ for a ‘mental illness’ that simply does not exist. It is important to realize that GID affects not only those who seek SRS: its presence in the DSM pathologizes not only transsexuals, but all transgendered people more and even more generally, all who are gender-variant. In fact, GID is diagnosed most often in gender-variant children and youth whose parents – once again, conflating homosexuality and transgender – are concerned that their children may grow up to be gay. Ironically, three quarters of the children and youth who are diagnosed with GID do in fact come to identify as LGB as adults, while only a quarter come to identify as transsexual or transgendered.

There is a growing consensus within the transgender community in favor of a ‘reform’ of GID to eliminate the designation of transsexuality as a mental illness but to retain some reference in the DSM to transsexuality as medical condition justifying HRT and SRS. We therefore call on the Commission to make a strong statement in favor of the GID reform to eliminate the designation of transsexuality as a mental illness.

The American Psychological Association has already taken a stand in favor of GID reform, stating quite clearly its belief that transgender is simply a naturally occurring variance in gender identity and expression. Just as the removal of homosexuality from the DSM 25 years ago helped significantly alter society’s view of lesbian and gay people as well as giving renewed impetus to their struggle for civil rights, so too, the removal of GID from the DSM will help remove the stigma of mental illness from transgender.

Given the profound transgenderphobia – reinforced by the GID diagnosis – it is not surprising that transgendered people constitute one of the most marginalized populations in American society, facing pervasive discrimination, harassment, abuse, and violence. The violence that is so commonplace in the lives of the transgendered was no more dramatically illustrated than in the case of Brandon Teena, a young female-bodied transman who was brutally raped and murdered in Nebraska several years ago, and whose story was told in the 1999 Academy Award-winning film, “Boys Don’t Cry.” Transgendered men and women face discrimination and violence not only in the United States, but in countries throughout the world, as documented by the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) based in San Francisco and by the Amnesty International OutFront Program based in New York. Unfortunately, many such human rights abuses take place in Asian countries.

In the face of such pervasive discrimination and violence, transgendered people, are beginning to organize its own civil rights movement, both here and abroad. Much of that political work is being done in alliance with LGB people. Hence, while there are distinct differences between homosexuality and transgender, the overlap in LGB and transgender populations and the common cause that these diverse communities have made justify the term ‘LGBT’ to describe a political community and movement.

In the last few years, the concerns of transgender communities have increasingly become integral to the lesbian, gay, and bisexual movement. Similarly, AAPI initiatives that include sexual orientation should also include the language of gender identity and expression. For example, the fear of persecution based on sexual orientation is now recognized as cause for political asylum; however, the term ‘sexual orientation’ does not necessarily include transgendered or gender-variant people. A statement from the Commission in favor of the addition of “gender identity or expression” to political asylum law would therefore help address the problem of pervasive discrimination and violence that our transgendered brothers and sisters face in many Asian and Pacific Islander countries.

It is a cruel irony indeed that transgendered people – who helped lead the Stonewall uprising that catalyzed the modern lesbian and gay movement – were marginalized in that movement after June 1969. Only in the last five years has a real transgender political movement emerged in the United States. In the 1990s, transgender political organizations formed at the local, state, and national level to press for transgender-inclusive and transgender-specific anti-discrimination and hate crimes legislation. Anti-discrimination laws that include transgender-specific language (such as gender identity and expression) have been adopted in 30 jurisdictions across the country, including one state (Minnesota), three counties, and 26 municipalities. Those cities range from the large and cosmopolitan (San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Atlanta) to the small and unexpected (Ypsilanti, Michigan; York, Pennsylvania).

A campaign is now underway in New York City to amend that city’s human rights ordinance which, if successful, would make New York City the largest jurisdiction in the country to protect transgendered people from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. The campaign is being led by a transgendered Asian woman and has elicited the support of leading Asian American organizations, such as the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF) and the Filipino Civil Rights Advocates (FilCRA). There is also a campaign to get the California state legislature to adopt similar legislation, and one of the key organizations involved in that campaign (California Alliance for Pride & Equality – CAPE) includes a number of LGB Asian Americans in its leadership. If successful, that campaign would make California – the largest state by population and one that includes a huge API community – a leader in transgender anti-discrimination law.

Little specific information exists on transgendered communities as a whole. To date there has been no community assessment of Asian American and Pacific Islander transgendered population in the U.S. From a behavioral health perspective, transgendered people are often subsumed under the larger category of gay, bisexual, and other Men who have Sex with Men (MSM). Few tracking systems allow for gender identification beyond male and female. One watershed effort was mounted in 1997 by the San Francisco Department of Public Health. The Transgender Community Health Project (TCHP) became the first study (qualitative focus groups and quantitative surveys) designed to assess HIV risk among male-to-female (MTF) and female-to-male (FTM) transgendered individuals. 505 anonymous surveys and HIV tests were administered, and risk behaviors inclusive of and beyond HIV were reported. Forty-nine, or 13%, were completed by AAPI participants.

Although TCHP data is limited in that its cohort resides in the City and County of San Francisco and its purpose was to assess HIV risk specifically, transgendered AAPIs are everywhere, often building visible communities in metropolitan areas across the U.S. More comprehensive studies on a national scope are urgently needed for transgendered people across races, including AAPIs. To the extent that findings from the TCHP study can be extrapolated as one example of an urban area where transgendered AAPIs live, work, and socialize, consider the alarming statistics below. Of the total sample of transgendered respondents (MTF% / FTM %):

52% / 41% had no health insurance
53% / 21% had unstable housing
65% / 29% had a history of incarceration
23% / 20% had been hospitalized for mental health
32% / 32% have attempted suicide
53% / 31% had been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease
35% / 2% tested HIV-positive
80% / 31% had a history of sex work
59% / 59% had a history of forced sex
91% / 57% use hormones
65% / 54% inject hormones
34% / 18% inject street drugs
63% / 91% report sharing syringes
According to the Comprehensive HIV Prevention Plan for San Francisco, transgendered respondents persons are at increased risk for HIV infection due to a combination of biological, economic, psychological, behavioral, social/situational and access-related cofactors. Primary among these are a much higher incidence of commercial sex work, substance abuse, poverty, lack of access to HIV/AIDS and medical services, and discrimination by AIDS service organizations as well as employers. In particular, commercial sex work, largely a result of employment discrimination and poverty is closely associated with: increased rates of injection drug use as well as substance abuse, increased STD rates, increased rates of rape and coerced unprotected sex, increased trauma to tissues during sex, history of child sexual abuse and abusive relationships, as well as dramatically increased numbers of sexual encounters and numbers of sexual partners of higher risk.

The Plan also suggests that a transgendered sex worker’s risk for HIV infection may be different from other groups. One study reports that transgendered sex workers are more likely to have receptive anal sex with their paying partners than their primary partners, a behavior with direct consequences for HIV and STD infection if protection is foregone. Preoperative transgendered sex workers who are trying to earn money for gender confirmation surgery or sexual reassignment may perceive a monetary incentive for unprotected sex as beneficial in the moment, despite the associated health risks. Feminization through hormone therapy, hair removal, plastic surgery, breast implants, and sexual reassignment surgery, although costly, is often a transgendered individual’s first priority.

Sharing unsterilized needles and syringes during injection drug use or hormone use is also common within the MTF transgendered community. Injection drug use, and in particular injected speed or crystal methamphetamine use in combination with commercial sex work is a common practice. Injection hormone therapy is seen as a positive component of the gender confirmation process, and therefore safe, though it poses many of the same HIV transmission risks as injection drug use.

Rejection and isolation are integral aspects of a transgendered sex worker’s life. Transgendered individuals are often marginalized from the mainstream gay and lesbian communities and many are ostracized by their families of origin. As a result, they have low self-esteem, neglect their own health, and are fatalistic about the future. Discrimination creates significant barriers for transgendered persons who want to maintain or seek regular employment. Eliminating discrimination during access to services is particularly important for disenfranchised groups such as transgendered individuals and sex workers. The provider of services is seen initially as a representative of a larger social system which is perceived as antagonistic to their well being. Based upon direct experience, many transgendered people distrust service providers, feel misunderstood by them, and believe that providers regard them as expendable, which further prevents access of services.

From the TCHP study, some AAPI-specific data can be gleaned. Consistent with a high HIV-seroprevalence among transgendered AAPI participants (27%), they reported high levels of HIV risk behavior, including unprotected anal intercourse and other sexual activities, as well as other co-factors such as sharing needles for the injection of hormones and street drugs. Among transgendered AAPI sex workers, the drugs of choice are injected and non-injected speed, such as crystal methamphetamine, which helps them to work late into the night. These individuals are often isolated from traditional support networks available in AAPI families and communities while language and cultural differences often limit access to health and human services. Finally, transgendered AAPIs engage in high-risk behavior but their perception of susceptibility is low, a reality consistent with gay, bisexual, and other MSM AAPIs. The transgendered AAPI population in San Francisco is estimated to number 2,500, or 40% of the local transgender population, and tend to be immigrants and refugees from Asian countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and China where transgendered individuals have a distinct social role.

Some nonprofit organizations report anecdotal evidence that confirm the TCHP findings. Specifically, highest among the needs of transgendered AAPIs are immigrant and refugee-competent, multi-lingual programs that broker housing, employment, and health care.

Given the complex factors which place transgendered AAPIs at high risk of disease and discrimination, targeted programs and interventions should address the following barriers:

Linguistic and cultural barriers: Asian immigrants and refugees face linguistic and cultural barriers to accessing services. Since most outreach is conducted in English, limited English individuals are not reached through mainstream channels of outreach and promotion. In addition, when health services are located, limited English proficient individuals often are unable to describe their health problems to primarily English-speaking service providers. Furthermore, providers are often unaware and even insensitive to the nuances of AAPI cultures and the needs of these individuals. For example, AAPI cultures discourage the open discussion of life-threatening illnesses for fear of inviting the disease into one’s life; thus, the superstition and fatalism attached to disease undercuts the value AAPI peoples place on prevention. The fear of stigmatization is particularly important in AAPI communities. There is fear “that any disclosure will result in community-wide disclosure of a person’s most intimate, personal life. Hence many AAPIs will not disclose outwardly nor acknowledge internally behaviors that put them at risk. Out of denial, many high-risk individuals will neither acknowledge that they are at risk nor identify with a service which targets risk behavior; consequently utilization of education prevention services is low and perpetuation of risk behavior remains high.”

Lack of health providers trained in cross-cultural delivery of services: Health care systems lack culturally responsive and linguistically appropriate services. Given the diversity of AAPIs, the health service system is simply unable to reach out to many populations, especially as AAPI populations continue to grow exponentially. In addition, effective partnerships between mainstream health organizations and community-based agencies working with limited English proficient individuals are lacking. Few AAPI language interpreters are competent in sensitive issues related to work in the sex industry, gender identity among transgendered individuals, and HIV/STD services. Many lack self-advocacy skills to effectively access health services on their own.

Socioeconomic conditions which impede access to health care system: Transgendered AAPIs who engage in sex work and exchange sex for money or drugs face immediate needs which are prioritized over seeking health services. Many sex workers are immigrants and are fearful of arrest and prostitution convictions, which could hurt their chances for naturalization. Many of the transgendered MTF AAPI sex workers, being born male, often send money home to provide for their parents in fulfillment of their filial duties.

The pervasive discrimination, harassment, abuse, and violence that transgendered people face has led to the marginalization of transgendered people, and have led transgendered AAPIs in particular into sex work and other dangerous occupations.

A strong statement from the Commission on the need to accept and appreciate the fullness of the diversity of AAPI communities would do much to help ameliorate the marginalization and the stigmatization of transgendered and gender-variant AAPIs. We would also appreciate a strong statement in favor of fully inclusive hate crimes and anti-discrimination laws at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as a statement in favor of the reform of GID. And we would view as a special priority a statement from the Commission in favor of the addition of the phrase ‘gender identity or expression’ to federal asylum law and administrative guidelines.

Transgendered, intersexual, and gender-variant people were respected and even revered in many Asian and Pacific Island cultures, from the hijra in India to the paksu mudang in Korea to the mahu in Hawai’i. Contemporary AAPIs of transgender experience have much to contribute to their AAPI communities of origin, if given the chance.

By Pauline Park & John Manzon-Santos, October 2000

Additional References / Sources
Clements, Kristen, et al; HIV Prevention & Health Service Needs of the Transgender Community in San Francisco: Results from Eleven Focus Groups; San Francisco Department of Public Health; 1997.
Clements, Kristen, et al; The Transgender Community Health Project: Descriptive Results; San Francisco Department of Public Health; 1999.
Consensus Report; San Francisco Department of Public Health; 1997.

http://www.apiwellness.org/article_tg_issues.html

The post Pauline Park testimony on transgendered APIs appeared first on Pauline Park.

Breaking the Silence: LGBT Identities & Multiple Oppressions
Pauline Park, Ph.D.
Chair
New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)
and
President of the board of directors and acting executive director
Queens Pride House

Day of Silence
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
11 April 2014

I would like to thank Infusions for inviting me to speak at the Day of Silence event today and I would especially like to thank Danny Wenan Zheng, the president of Infusions, who was instrumental in bringing me here. It’s hard to believe that it’s now 20 years since I finished my Ph.D. here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) way back in 1994, and I’m grateful for every opportunity to come back to C-U to visit the old alma mater, and I’m absolutely delighted to be here and to have the opportunity to talk about LGBT identities, multiple oppressions, intersectionality and community empowerment with you today. And in fact, I’ve entitled my talk “Breaking the Silence: LGBT Identities & Multiple Oppressions” because it seems to me that those are three of the crucial elements in our task.

My perspective is informed by work in the academy both in faculty and staff positions and of course as a student as well as work in the community, most intensively with Queens Pride House, which I co-founded in 1997, and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), which I co-founded in 1998. Queens Pride House is the only LGBT community center in the borough of Queens, and we offer support groups — including a transgender support group, which I serve as co-coordinator — free mental health counseling for members of the community, and other services; we are just completing our first funded advocacy program which focused on advocating for members of the community — especially transgendered women of color — who are victims of police harassment and brutality.

NYAGRA is a co-founding member of the coalition seeking enactment of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), the transgender rights bill currently pending in the New York state legislature, and I represent NYAGRA in that coalition, as I did in the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) in 2011. The Dignity Act came into effect this July and prohibits discrimination and bias-based harassment in public schools throughout the state of New York. I mention safe schools legislation in the context of this discussion because the New York State Dignity legislation includes a comprehensive list of ‘protected categories,’ including race, religion, ethnicity, and disability as well as sexual orientation and gender, defined to include gender identity and gender expression. Safe schools legislation such as DASA can help move us out of a purely ‘identitarian’ conceptual framework, which can be limiting.

For example, with both the New York State Dignity for All Students Act and the New York City Dignity in All Schools Act (NYC DASA) enacted in 2004, the diversity of the coalition itself was a major source of strength. LGBT organizations certainly constituted a core component of both coalitions, but both coalitions also included substantial participation by organizations of color; in the case of the NYC DASA Coalition, it was Asian American groups that played an especially significant role. The Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF), the Coalition for Asian American Children & Families (CACF) and the Sikh Coalition, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), were key members of the coalition, along with LGBT organizations such as NYAGRA and the Empire State Pride Agenda.

As I like to point out, when it comes to legislative work, the active participation of people and organizations of color is crucial in the success of such work; and the two DASA coalitions in which I participated demonstrate that LGBT organizations that actively engage non-LGBT-specific organizations of color can find such engagement and participation in safe schools coalitions to be fertile opportunities for collaboration and relationship-building.

It should be obvious — but may not be to everyone — that the work of breaking the silence has focused substantially on the problem of bullying and bias-based harassment in elementary and secondary schools, since so many LGBT students drop out of school because of such bullying and never make it to college; and that is as it should be, since our ability to break the silence must include our ability to make schools throughout this country safe for every student, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, national origin, disability and every other difference that is used against students by their peers, by faculty or by non-teaching staff in our schools.

But while the origin of the Day of Silence begin with anti-bullying work, I would argue that our work in breaking the silence cannot end there; it must encompass everything that is currently diminishing the ability of both LGBT and non-LGBT people to participate fully in this society. So, for example, it must include access to health care, both in schools and on college campuses and elsewhere.

In 2009, NYAGRA published the first directory of transgender-sensitive health care providers in the New York metropolitican area; and while directories of this kind have been posted on-line for cities such as Los Angeles, Boston, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, the NYAGRA directory was the first such directory in the United States ever published in a print edition; we are updating it continuously as we identify more transgender-sensitive providers in the area and it is now available on-line as well.

In addition to the work I do on behalf of NYAGRA in the legislative arena, one other important component of my work is transgender sensitivity training; I’ve conducted sessions for a wide range of social service providers and community-based organizations, ranging from one-hour workshops to full-day trainings. A small part of my training work has been with academic institutions, focused on issues related to transgender inclusion — including, for example, gender-neutral housing, which has become a major issue on many campuses.

One of the biggest issues for transgendered people both on campus and off is access to health care, which is why I co-founded the Transgender Health Initiative of New York back in 2004. THINY (as we call it) and its members have worked tirelessly to try to open up health care to members of our community in New York, who face significant impediments to accessing quality health care, just as they do throughout the country.

In 2006, I co-facilitated a series of trainings for St. Vincent’s Hospital, which was one of the largest hospitals in New York City, and a hospital with one of the largest transgender patient populations. Sadly enough, St. Vincent’s went bankrupt last year and closed after failing to resolve a situation in which the hospital had accumulated over a billion dollars in debt. Sad, too, because these were the first transgender sensitivity trainings for any major hospital in the city and they were as much of an eye opener for us as they were for the nurses, techs, and other health care professionals we trained. Participants ranged from hostile to indifferent to open-minded to genuinely supportive  in short, a microcosm of society and its attitudes towards the transgendered. Only a few of the nurses were openly hostile and even (in at least two cases) somewhat disruptive. But most of the nurses and other providers we did trainings for at the very least listened politely.

The real problem was the lack of both knowledge of the challenges facing transgendered people as they try to access health care as well as the lack of sensitivity on the part of some of these providers. In that regard, I am delighted to hear that UIUC will make its student health insurance fully transgender-inclusive starting in the fall semester 2014, covering hormone replacement therapy (HRT) 100% and providing 80% coverage for sex reassignment surgery (SRS) (which some call gender confirmation surgery); this is a significant advance and I congratulate all those who made this happen.

But one of the big problems facing our community is that among those who think about transgender access to health care —and there are far too few who think about this issue at all — most imagine that the main challenge we face is accessing hormones and surgery. In fact, the biggest challenge for transgendered people really is accessing healthcare for all of those medical issues unrelated to gender transition. And it is poor people, immigrants and people of color who are most likely to be under-insured or entirely uninsured. Which leads me to an important theme of my talk today, the need to address multiple oppressions through the lens of intersectionality in order to break the silence. Let me suggest that to do so effectively, we must avoid the erasure of multiple identities that so often accompanies the dominance of white-dominant organizations in the LGBT community.

And what precisely is the silence that we must break? First, we need to address racism and ethnocentrism in the LGBT community; second, we must also address homophobia and transgenderphobia in the LGBT community; and last but not least, we need to embrace an ethic of ethic of accountability and responsibility that enables us to empower all our communities. These are the three distinct but interrelated principles that I would like to articulate here.

Racism &  Ethnocentrism in the LGBT Community

Let me begin with a story that seems to me to illustrate the compelling need to address racism and ethnocentrism in the LGBT community. In October 1998, the Audre Lorde Project (ALP) and the Gender Identity Project of what was then the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center worked together to organize TransWorld I, the first conference specifically by and for transgendered people of color.

The Center GIP had held three previous conferences known as ‘Transgender/Transsexual Health Empowerment Conferences.’ While providing useful information about hormone replacement therapy (HRT), sex reassignment surgery (SRS), and other procedures to those pursuing a medical transition, these conferences had featured a roster of speakers who were almost all non-transgendered white men – mostly endocrinologists, surgeons, psychiatrists and others in the ‘gender industry.’

Those of us who were members of the organizing committee for TransWorld I decided that we would invite only people of color to play formal roles in speaking at the conference, in an effort to make TransWorld truly a ‘speak-out’ for transgendered people of color. I decided to call up Riki Anne Wilchins, the executive director of GenderPAC, to invite her to attend TransWorld. Riki had been, after all, instrumental in helping set up the GIP with Barbara Warren several years before as well as organizing the first Transgender/Transsexual Health Empowerment Conference. And I had taken Riki’s bona fides as an ‘anti-racist’ seriously when she had asked me to talk to participants in GenderPAC’s annual lobby day in Washington, D.C. in May 1998 on the subject of how to address issues of discrimination based on gender identity and expression when speaking with members of Congress and their staff members who were people of color.

I was all the more shocked by Riki’s response to my invitation, then, when she denounced TransWorld as a ‘racist’ conference for ‘excluding white people.’ I pointed out to Riki that everyone was invited to attend and even to speak from the floor during plenary sessions and workshops, but that we had made a point of inviting only those who identified as people of color to speak as presenters in order to make the conference truly a conversation among transgendered and gender-variant people of color.

It seemed to me that Riki’s characterization of TransWorld as a ‘racist’ event was based on a failure to understand the difference between the historic exclusion of people of color – not to mention women and LGBT people – from positions of power and privilege and the creation of ‘safe spaces’ for members of disadvantaged and oppressed communities.

There is a fundamental difference between the exclusion of people of color as well as women and LGBT people from all-white and all-male private clubs and the construction of spaces for discussion and support for such people. The difference lies in the asymmetry of power between conventionally gendered heterosexual white men and all those deemed ‘other’ in this society based on their race, ethnicity, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity, or other characteristic. There have been organizations for LGBT/queer Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs) for at least 20 years, but there are still people – mainly gay white men – who still label such groups as ‘racist’ if and when they insist on limiting some of their events (usually discussion groups) to queer APIs.

This is not to suggest, of course, that there are not at the very least boundary issues – for example, what constitutes ‘Asian/Pacific Islander’ for API groups or what qualifies one as a ‘person of color’ for POC organizations or who counts as a ‘woman’ in ‘women-only’ spaces. In truth, all identities and identity formations are social constructs. But those social constructions that take into account relations of power – and crucially those asymmetries of power that exist in this society as in every society – would seem to me to be the most useful.

It is when members of our community sorely uninformed on issues or race and ethnicity bring their prejudices into the public arena in campaigns for LGBT rights legislation that those prejudices can have potentially still greater consequence, as another story will illustrate. In February 2000, NYAGRA – working in partnership with the Empire State Pride Agenda, the largest lesbian and gay political organization in the state – launched the public phase of our campaign for Int. No. 24 – the transgender rights bill enacted by the New York City Council four years later. Standing on the steps of New York City Hall between two African American members of the City Council – one straight, one gay – and next to a Latina Lesbian member of the Council, I was struck by the important symbolism of having a transgendered woman of color lead the campaign for that legislation, in a city that is two-thirds people of color. Following my speech, a white transsexual activist named Melissa Sklarz spoke, loudly declaring, “When I transitioned, I lost my white skin and my white skin privilege.” Truth be told, she still looked pretty white to me. I was mortified that Melissa would make such a statement – standing on the steps of City Hall with two African American Council Members, a Latina Council Member, the executive director of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund, and a representative of the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund – and that her statement would be quoted in the news story on our press conference in Lesbian & Gay New York, the leading LGBT weekly in the city.

The working group coordinating the campaign had decided on a strategy of securing the support of people of color in the City Council and Melissa’s statement could only put into question the credibility of our commitment to forefronting the discrimination faced by transgendered people of color in the five boroughs. Fortunately, the African American who was the lead sponsor of the bill did not make an issue of Melissa’s comment.

But I am dismayed to see activists of the prominence of Riki Anne Wilchins and Melissa Sklarz make comments that clearly show a failure to understand fundamental differences between and among different forms of exclusion and oppression, and such comments and the attitudes that are made manifest by them demonstrate the need to address issues of racism and ethnocentrism within the white-dominant LGBT community.

Homophobia & Transgenderphobia in Communities of Color

At the same time, I am dismayed by the apparent lack of enthusiasm on the part of at least some LGBT people of color for addressing the homophobia and transgenderphobia that is prevalent in our communities of color.  I recall one occasion when I raised the issue of homophobia and transgenderphobia in API communities at a public forum on organizing in queer API communities.  At this event at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan in September 2001, my comment elicited a response from Joo-Hyun Kang, then executive director of the Audre Lorde Project, a center for LGBTST people of color based in Brooklyn. “Are you saying that people of color are more homophobic than white people?,”Joo-Hyun asked. It seemed to me a somewhat rhetorical question, to which the response was simply, “no.” I was making no comparison, but rather simply asking if we as queer APIs thought it as important to address homophobia and transgenderphobia that is prevalent in our communities of color as it is to address racism and ethnocentrism in the white-dominant LGBT community. And I would answer my own question with a definitive ‘yes.’ Indeed, to fail to do so is to abdicate our responsibility as LGBT people of color. To fail to do so would also concede our right to live openly as LGBT people in our communities of origin.

I am struck by the defensive tone of some LGBT people of color when I raise the issue of homophobia and transgenderphobia in our communities of color and the accusation implicit in their defensive response, “Are you saying that people of color are more homophobic than white people?,” that we are somehow “letting down the side” even to be admitting to the presence let alone the prevalence of homophobia and transgenderphobia in our communities of color. Such an implicit accusation is based on a binary opposition of ‘good/bad’ that suggests that we are somehow condemning our communities altogether by raising the question of anti-LGBT sentiment in those communities. But it seems to me that if we care about our communities of origin, we have both a right and an obligation to challenge homophobia and transgenderphobia in them; after all, if we don’t, who will?

I think the real question is whether or not LGBT/queer people of color are actively involved in the examination of homophobia and transgenderphobia in communities of color rather than a situation all too prevalent in which white leaders and white-led organizations engage in such a critique without being informed by any critical race consciousness. The current debates over how to respond to countries such as Uganda and Nigeria which earlier this year enacted explicitly homophobic legislation effectively criminalizing not only same-sex sexual relations but LGBT people themselves are a case in point; I would argue that we as LGBT people of color owe it to our brothers and sisters in Uganda, Nigeria, Jamaica, Malaysia and elsewhere to be actively involved in that examination; we need LGBT people of color with critical race consciousness to ensure that such discussions do not fall into the trap of a binary opposition of white LGBT ‘saviors’ and oppressed LGBT people of color as mere victims without agency or voice.

Back in November 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage throughout the state after thousands of same-sex couples had already received marriage licenses from San Francisco to San Diego. I participated in a massive demonstration in New York that passed by the Mormon temple on Broadway and 66th St. on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I remember some very good placards, including some which were very clever in taking on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and its role in the Prop 8 campaign. But I also remember some signs that I found problematic, including one held aloft by a gay white man declaring that “gay is the new black.” Now, those of us who are people of color know from personal experience that there are significant differences between discrimination based on race or ethnicity and that based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression, and it is problematic to conflate or elide them.

Let me also mention an important element in racial and quasi-racial discourse that has become very nearly the dominant discourse in the United States since 9/11, and that is Islamophobia. Granted that Islam is a religion and not a race, but ‘Muslim’ and ‘Arab’ are often conflated by Americans, such as the elderly white woman who asked Sen. John McCain at a campaign event in 2008 if Barack Obama was an ‘Arab.’ I’m quite sure that woman was completely unaware of the fact that the largest Muslim-majority nation on earth is not an Arab country at all (viz., Indonesia). But given the conflation of Islam and Arabs, the rising tide of Islamophobia has had a powerful effect on communities of color in this country as well as in Europe.

After September 2001, many people of color were assaulted on the street, unfairly linked in the minds of some white Americans to the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. I live in Jackson Heights in western Queens, a neighborhood with a large South Asian population; just around the corner from me is a two-block stretch of 74th St. popularly referred to as ‘Little India’ in which Sikh men with large turbans are ever-present. I vividly remember Sikh men wearing saffron-colored turbans standing on street corners and outside of subway stations handing out brochures explaining that Sikhs are neither Arab nor Muslim; of course, no one should have been harassed or assaulted because of their actual or perceived race, religion or national origin in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; but it was heart-rending to read of the attacks on Sikhs and South Asians as well as those of Arab origin and descent and anyone perceived to be Muslim in the  immediate aftermath of the fall of the Two Towers. Under no circumstances should Sikhs have to explain either their religion and headdress nor their differences with others perceived (incorrectly) to be a threat to American security. I have friends — including South Asians — who have been interrogated and even harassed by Transportation Security Agency (TSA) agents at airports because of this widespread misperception of security threats. I have a friend of Libyan descent who was born and raised in the United Kingdom who was interrogated by the TSA at the airport because he has an Arab name; ironically enough, he is estranged from his family after they rejected him when his sister ‘outed’ him to the rest of the family as gay.

Another area in which Islamophobia has reared its ugly head is in discussions of Israel/Palestine, where the fact that the majority of Palestinians are at least nominally Muslim has been used in a campaign of ‘pinkwashing’ — an attempt to justify the continued illegal occupation of Palestine by the Israeli military on the pretext that Palestinian society and neighboring Arab societies are monolithically and profoundly homophobic, in contrast with a liberal Israel ostensibly better on gay rights. In fact, the actual situation is far more complex than that; but the attempts to justify the illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip is based on an entirely false premise, namely, that Israel is a haven for LGBT Palestinians; in fact, queer Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not permitted to enter Israel without special permission (which is rarely granted in practice) and Israeli law does not recognize economic or political refugees who are non-Jewish — a fact that I often find myself compelled to mention in the context of my Palestine solidarity work through New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA).

All of that being said, while we must recognize and address the racism and ethnocentrism — including the Islamophobia where it rears its ugly head — in much discourse on homophobia and transgenderphobia when discussing communities of color as well as countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, we must also challenge  homophobes and others who deny the legitimate points of comparison between discrimination and violence based on homophobia and transgenderphobia on the one hand and that based on racism and ethnocentrism on the other, and I see significant parallels as well as quite a few significant differences. Above all, it seems to me that the failure or even outright refusal by some of our organizations to address homophobia and transgenderphobia in communities of color and in our countries and continents of origin is tantamount to an abdication of responsibility, and the consequences of that abdication of responsibility can be very real indeed for those who suffer such oppression, including the state-sanctioned oppression of LGBT people by the murderous regimes of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, not to mention Vladimir Putin in Russia.

Racism, Institutional Power and the Noble Savage Revisited

The need for LGBT people of color to speak out in situations such as those involving the effective criminalization of LGBT people in countries such as Jamaica, Uganda, Nigeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among others,  speaks to another issue of signal importance, which is that of the construction of racism and a discourse of anti-racism in this country.

Let us begin by acknowledging that the problem of race and racism goes back to the founding of the republic and even before. Slavery was recognized in the Constitution of 1787 and so deeply embedded in the constitutional order of the regime that it took a civil war to resolve the question and then another hundred years of struggle to end state-sanctioned segregation. Anyone who has seen “Twelve Years a Slave” — a film based on the live of Solomon Northrup that won a well-deserved Academy Award in February — will understand how profoundly the institution of slavery has shaped the history of this country.

But we would make a mistake if we regarded the issue of race as a regional problem. It would not surprise anyone to learn that a Southern city (Charleston, South Carolina) had the largest slave population before the Civil War. But do you know which city had the second largest slave population? It was New York. After Brown vs. Board of Education prompted the formal desegregation of public school systems in the South, many in the North remained segregated due to informal systems of control, often under the guise of ‘neighborhood schools.’ Growing up on the south side of Milwaukee, my brother and I were the only non-white children in our elementary school and Milwaukee, in fact, had one of the most thoroughly segregated public school systems in the country before court-ordered desegregation in 1977.

One of the difficulties in discussing racism is the way in which it is differently construed in different communities. To many white people, ‘racism’ is an individual-level issue and the charge of ‘racism’ is often read as an accusation of personal prejudice. Most people of color, on the other hand, recognize that racism involves institutional power as well as individual bigotry. And there are some who insist that people of color cannot be ‘racist’ because they do not exercise institutional power or control institutional resources; but a simple review of the facts will demonstrate that this is not in fact the case.

As we all know, the United States elected its first African American president in 2008, and given the history of slavery and segregation in this country, Barack Obama’s election was certainly an enormous symbolic victory; but was it in fact a practical advance for people of color, including LGBT people of color? I would simply point to the fact that since his election, Obama has killed twice as many people of color in Afghanistan and Pakistan with drone strikes than George W. Bush and deported more than four times as many undocumented immigrants than Bush; how many of the victims of drone strikes or the deported immigrants were LGBT we cannot know, but some almost certainly must have been. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have pointed out that Obama’s drone strikes are illegal under international law and may well constitute war crimes under the clear meaning of the term. And La Raza has called Obama the ‘Deporter-in-Chief.’

Obama’s defenders no doubt will point to his decision to abandon the defense of the indefensible Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by Bill Clinton and his appointment of two justices — one of them a Latina — who voted to strike down key provisions of the federal DOMA. But the key question I have posed here is whether people of color do in fact exercise institutional power in this country — the crucial point, in the view of critical race theory, as to whether people of color can be racists. And here I would point out that there are now so many African American mayors that they have formed a National Conference of Black Mayors, which counts nearly 50 mayors of cities with a population over 50,000; that’s not to mention African Americans as governor of large states, such as New York (the former governor, David Paterson) and Massachusetts (Deval Patrick) and members of the US Senate (most recently, Cory Booker, who was elected to represent New Jersey last November. We have also had two African American U.S. Secretary of States – though I doubt that most people would describe either Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice as progressive in their policy-making when they served in the Bush administration.

Latinos and Asian Americans are also coming into political prominence, though here, too, there are to be found both progressive and exceedingly unprogressive figures. To the latter category we must surely assign Alberto Gonzalez, the attorney general of the United States in the Bush administration; the record of Obama’s African American attorney general, Eric Holder, is distinctly mixed, to say the least. I might also mention John Yoo, who served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General (in the Office of Legal Counsel) and Diet Vinh, who served as Assistant Attorney General under Gonzalez in George W. Bush’s first term. Along with Robert J. Delahunty, John Yoo (now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law) co-authored “Legal Arguments for Avoiding the Jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions,” the notorious 42-page memo that effectively authorized the use of indefinite detention without trial as well as the use of torture by US forces in Guantanamo and elsewhere (Neil A. Lewis, “Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights,” New York Times, 21 May 2004).

And Diet Vinh was the central figure in drafting the USA Patriot Act (Eric Lichtblau, “At Home in War on Terror: Viet Dinh Has Gone from Academe to a Key Behind-the-Scenes Role”, Los Angeles Times, 18 September 2002), which surely must be accounted the most Orwellian legislation ever enacted by the US Congress, a frontal assault on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that sadly many leading Democrats such as Hillary Clinton voted for and continue to support.

It would be all too easy – and simply wrong – to dismiss figures such as Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo and Diet Vinh as mere ‘tokens.’ They are not tokens; in fact, they are much worse: they are people of color who exercise or have exercised real institutional power at the highest levels of government. And they have used that power largely to the detriment of people of color, both here in the United States and abroad.

As a direct result of the legal work that John Yoo did for Alberto Gonzalez, the Bush administration overturned the principle of habeas corpus, a central principle in the tradition of English common law that goes back to the signing of Magna Carta by King John in 1215. John Yoo’s work gave pseudo-legal cover for the Bush administration’s indefinite detention without charge of thousands of people in Guantanamo and in secret ‘black prisons’ in Eastern Europe. When the full record of this gross violation of human rights is finally written, it may well show that most of those detained without trial and even without legal counsel were completely innocent of the accusation of involvement with terrorism – one cannot say ‘charges’ of terrorism because most of these unfortunate individuals were never charged. Significantly, most of these individuals were and are people of color – mainly of Middle Eastern origin.

And so I would argue that the evidence shows that people of color at the highest levels of the Bush administration and the US government have participated in a concerted use of institutional power in a way that can only be described as ‘racist.’ It would seem to me that the attempt to deny our ability and capacity as people of color to commit acts of racism is to deny the reality of the complicity of at least some of us in the most unspeakable violations of human rights in decades. It hardly exonerates the likes of Rice, Gonzalez, Yoo, and Dinh that they served as the happy black, brown and yellow faces of a white administration.

I would argue that we owe it to the victims of Guantanamo to hold those responsible for such abuses accountable regardless of whether they are white or people of color. And I would also argue that we must reclaim our full humanity as people of color only by conceding the possibility of our doing evil as well as good. Only by acknowledging the bad that some people of color do in this world can we hope to have the good that some of us do as people of color fully appreciated.

And of course, Barack Obama himself is the ultimate example of the achievement of political power in this country. I know that there are a few who would argue that Obama, like any president, is a captive of the system; but if that is true, then no individual holds real power and no individual can be held accountable for his or her actions, a conclusion that I find absurd, however constricted the powers of even the president of the United States might be.

There are those in our communities of color who would exempt their fellow people of color from the capacity for racism and for evil more generally; in doing so, they pay unwitting homage to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s celebration of the Noble Savage, incapable of evil as he is incapable of good. Writing in 1755 in A Discourse on Inequality Among Men, the French Enlightenment philosopher declared,

“Men in a state of nature do not know good and evil, but their independence, along with ‘the peacefulness of their passions, and their ignorance of vice,’ keep them from doing ill.”

It seems to me that there is behind the notion that people of color are incapable of racism the very white idea of the Noble Savage. So I see a rather enormous irony here, because those who follow Rousseau in exempting their fellow people of color from the capacity to commit this particular form of evil – namely, racism – I am certain would be among the loudest in criticizing colleges and universities for requiring the reading of the canonical texts of dead white men. And so those who limit the capacity for institutional racism only to white people unwittingly echo the words of Rousseau, among the deadest and whitest of dead white men.

I am sure that some would object that people of color do not exercise the same degree of institutional power in the United States as white people, even if they are willing to acknowledge access to institutional power by people of color at all. And I would agree. But the people of color who are being deported, who are suffering in indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, and are being targeted (accurately or inaccurately) for drone strikes most likely will not find it a comforting thought that they are denied legal redress as the result of by the actions of prominent people of color in the Obama administration as in the Bush administration.

I would urge us therefore to avoid falling into the trap of revisiting the discourse of the Noble Savage, which would deny us as people of color our capacity for good as surely as it would deny us our capacity for evil. Rather than denying the evident reality that we as people of color are beginning to come into real institutional power in this country, I would urge us to escape the limitations of an overly narrow identity politics that would have us identify with either LGBT people and/or people of color simply because they are one or the other or both; instead, we need to focus on the actions of people in power and people with power and the impact of their actions on real people, whether LGBT people and/or people of color.

I would also urge us to embrace the possibility of attaining even greater institutional power. I would urge us to embrace the possibility of using that power responsibly on behalf of our communities, in order to further empower LGBT people, people of color, and especially LGBT people of color. Rather than retreat into a discourse that would deny us our full humanity, I would urge us to embrace that full humanity. And rather than focusing exclusively or primarily on racism and ethnocentrism in the white-dominant LGBT community, I would urge us to address both racism and ethnocentrism in the LGBT community and homophobia and transgenderphobia in communities of color.

And that means approaching politics and policy from an intersectional perspective, understanding the multiple oppressions under which LGBT people of color labor as well as the opportunities for the achievement of power and therefore the need for an ethic of accountability and responsibility.

Just as those of us who are LGBT people of color cannot leave behind our racial or ethnic identities or skin color when we participate in the LGBT community, we also should not have to leave behind our LGBT identities when we participate in the life of communities of color. We owe it to our communities and we owe it to ourselves to pursue the broadest possible conception of social change and the most rigorous and inclusive as well as historically informed agenda of social justice.

And so it seems to me that we must insist on an ethic of accountability and responsibility and an analysis of politics and policy informed by critical race theory in order to understand our world and to make change in it, engaging in a process of social change that produces genuine justice and social transformation. As the Mahatma Gandhi would say, we must be the change that we seek to make in the world.

Thank you.

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in New York, which she co-founded in June 1998, and president of the board of directors and acting executive director of Queens Pride House, the LGBT community center in the borough of Queens, which she co-founded in 1997. Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council (Int. No. 24, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002). She served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute.  Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), a safe schools bill currently pending in the New York state legislature, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation introduced in that body.  She also serves on the steering committee of the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act by the New York City Council in September 2004. In 2005, Park became the first openly transgendered person chosen to be grand marshal of the New York City LGBT Pride March, the country’s oldest and largest pride parade. She has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of social service providers and community-based organizations. Park has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The post Breaking the Silence: LGBT Identities & Multiple Oppressions (UIUC, 4.11.14) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Contact:
Pauline Park
paulinepark@earthlink.net
(718) 662-8893
or
Jen Richards
Co-Director, The Trans 100
jen@thetrans100.com

Pauline Park named to the first-ever ‘TRANS 100’ list

We Happy Trans, This is H.O.W., Chicago House and GLAAD Announce Inaugural List Focused on Positive Work Being Accomplished by Trans People Nationwide

April 9, 2013 – Today, Pauline Park was named to the inaugural Trans 100 list, an overview of the breadth and diversity of work being done in, by, and for the transgender community across the United States. The 2013 Trans 100 list, created by We Happy Trans, a website that celebrates the positive experiences of transgender people, and This is H.O.W., a Phoenix based nonprofit organization dedicated to the betterment of the lives of trans people, was presented at an event sponsored by Chicago House, GLAAD, the Pierce Family Foundation, Orbitz.com, and KOKUMOMEDIA. The first effort of its kind, the list intends to shift the coverage of trans issues by focusing on the positive work being accomplished, and providing visibility to those typically underrepresented.

Pauline Park (paulinepark.com) is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) (nyagra.com), which she co-founded in 1998, and president of the board of directors as well as acting executive director of Queens Pride House (queenspridehouse.org), which she co-founded in 1997. A resident of Jackson Heights in western Queens, Park also co-founded Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in 1997 and served as its coordinator from 1997 to 1999.

“I’m honored to be named to the inaugural Trans 100 list and delighted at the enhanced visibility that my presence on this list will bring to Queens Pride House and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) as well as the other groups, organizations and projects that I’m involved with,” said Park, who led the campaign for passage of the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. She served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines — adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 — for implementation of the new statute. Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), a safe schools law enacted by the New York state legislature in 2010, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation enacted by that body.

The list began as an idea by This Is H.O.W. Executive Director Toni D’Orsay, and was then developed in partnership with Jen Richards of We Happy Trans. The project received over 500 nominations in December 2012, with over 360 individuals recommended for inclusion.

A launch event for the Trans 100 list took place at Mayne Stage in Chicago on International Transgender Day of Visibility, a day which aims to bring attention to the accomplishments of transgender people around the world.

“The only sustainable self-interest is that which extends the sense of self to include the whole,” said Jen Richards at the Trans 100 launch event. “Look around: women, men, people of color, genderqueer kids, crossdressers, showgirls, sex workers, academics, activists, artists, and allies. We are all one community.”

“The value of the work that is represented by the 100 people on this list is immeasurable,” said Executive Director of This Is H.O.W., Antonia D’orsay, about the Trans 100. “These people demonstrate the diversity, the determination, and the incredible triumph of spirit that informs all trans people, no matter where they are. This is just a glimpse of what trans people can accomplish.”

“The Trans 100 will bring much-needed visibility to the critical, grassroots work that trans people have been doing in communities across the country for years,” said GLAAD’s Wilson Cruz. “While media coverage so often misses the mark on accurate portrayals of trans people, the Trans 100 is changing the game by sharing the inspiring and diverse stories behind trans advocacy.”

KOKUMO, an artist, activist, and African American transgender woman, hosted the event. Two accomplished transgender musicians – folk-rock songwriter Namoli Brennet, and singer Joe Stevens of the West Coast-based Folk/Roots group Coyote Grace – gave live performances.

Jen Richards partnered with Chicago House and KOKUMOMEDIA to produce Chicago’s Trans 100 launch event. GLAAD served as Inaugural Sponsor, with additional support from the Pierce Family Foundation, Orbitz.com, Progress Printing, and Dr. Graphx. Both Chicago House’s TransLife Project and This is H.O.W. provide direct services to transgender people experiencing homelessness, unemployment, violence, health disparities, and HIV infection. KOKUMOMEDIA uses film, music, and literature to provide to create and generate realistic depictions of transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex (TGI) people of color.

For a full list of the 2013 Trans 100 visit www.WeHappyTrans.com, or www.facebook.com/Trans100.

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About We Happy Trans: WeHappyTrans.com was launched in early in 2012 in response to the lack of positive depictions of trans people in the media, and the absence of an online space that focused on the positive aspects of the trans experience. For more information, please visit www.wehappytrans.com or connect with We Happy Trans on Facebook.

About This is H.O.W.: This Is H.O.W. Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the betterment of the lives of Trans (transsexual, transgender, and gender variant) persons experiencing crisis situations such as homelessness, substance abuse, familial abuse, and transition related difficulties. For more information, please visit www.thisishow.org or connect with This is H.O.W. on Facebook and Twitter.

The post Pauline Park named to the inaugural Trans 100 list (4.9.13) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Transgender Identities & Spiritual Traditions
in Asia & the Pacific: Lessons for LGBT/Queer APIs
by Pauline Park
presentation at the Pacific School of Religion Chapel
Berkeley
2 April 2013

 I’d like to begin by thanking Jess Delegencia of the API Roundtable for inviting me to speak here at the Pacific School of Religion; I am honored by the invitation and delighted to have the opportunity to speak at such a distinguished institution. And this chapel seems an especially appropriate setting to be discussing about the relationship between transgender identity and spirituality. I would like to focus specifically on the question of the relationship between transgender identity and religious and spiritual traditions in pre-modern Asian and Pacific Islander societies.

There is a very wide misconception that ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender’ (LGBT) constitutes a purely modern phenomenon created by late nineteenth and early twentieth century sexologists and activists. In fact, every pre-modern Asian and Pacific Islander society had what could be termed ‘proto-transgenderal’ and homoerotic traditions which anticipate these contemporary LGBT identities, even if there are significant differences between the pre-modern and the contemporary identity formations.

I would like to suggest that it is important for us as LGBT/queer APIs to address the biggest misconception in API communities — namely, that we are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered because we’ve been hanging around white people too much. The implicit assumption behind that misconception is one of a viral model of gender identity and sexual orientation. The slogan of Queer Nation was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” When it comes to homosexuality and transgender, the truth is that we have been here — in every Asian or Pacific Island society — since time immemorial.

And third, I would like to address the misconception that transgender identity is at odds with religion and spirituality and that gender variance is and can only be an expression of the profane.

To begin with, while it is true that contemporary LGBT identities are of recent vintage, it is equally true that there were people in every pre-modern Asian or Pacific Islander society who were like us in important respects and whom we would call lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered. The last are what I would call ‘proto-transgenderal’ — a term I coined to describe those whom we might consider transgendered in centuries long before the term ‘transgender’ came into common usage.

China has homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions going back centuries. The ‘passion of the cut sleeve‘ (duànxiù 断袖) — the love of the Han dynasty Emperor Ai (27 BC-1 AD) — for his male favorite, Dong Xian — is the source of the Chinese euphemism for homosexuality (‘cut sleeve’). The other popular Chinese euphemism for homosexuality – the ‘half-eaten peach‘ (yútáo 余桃) – goes back even further, to the Zhou dynasty Duke Ling of Wei (衛靈公) (534-403 BC) and his male lover, Mixi Zia(彌子瑕). Ever since Mizi Xia and Dong Xian (董賢), the half-eaten peach and the cut sleeve — yútáo duànxiù (余桃断袖) — have been euphemisms for male homosexuality in China. As in many societies, homosexuality and transgender were not always distinct and were often conflated, so that examining the one requires examining the other, and vice-versa. Relations between males in ancient China and other pre-modern Asian and Pacific Islander societies were often highly gendered, with the younger partner often the more feminine in gender expression, even if he did not necessarily ‘present’ as a woman.

But in theater, women’s roles were in fact usually played by the younger male actors in the company. So, for example, there is the tradition of the Beijing opera dan, as dramatized in “Farewell My Concubine,” the 1993 film by Chen Kaige starring Leslie Cheung as the male actor and singer who plays women’s roles on stage.  And of course there is the Japanese tradition of kabuki, though the onnagata — the male who plays women’s roles in the kabuki theater — at least in contemporary Japan is not necessarily gay or transgendered.

There is also an interesting connection between religious and spiritual traditions and lesbianism and bisexuality in traditional China. For example, the Golden Orchid Association was a Chinese women’s organization that celebrated ‘passionate friendships’ and embraced same-sex intimacy. The origins of the Jin Lan Qi (Jinglanhui) have been traced as far back as the Qing dynasty. Members of the group participated in ceremonies of same-sex unions, complete with wedding feasts and exchange of ritual gifts (see Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol & Spirit, 1997, p. 161). Women of the Golden Orchid Association engaged in sexual practices described as ‘grinding tofu.’

The ‘Rubbing Mirror Society’ was founded in Guandong province in the seventeenth century by a Buddhist nun and its members participated in same-sex unions (see Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol & Spirit, 1997, p. 237). Originally known as the ‘Ten Sisters’ by the nineteenth century, the society was called the Mojing Dang. The interesting question — for which one finds little if any documentation — is whether such female relationships were as highly gendered as male homoerotic relationships so often were in ancient China, with one member of the pair playing the ‘butch’ role and the other the ‘fem.’

In the mid-nineteenth century, the philosophy of Chai T’ang (Jaitang) became popular (see Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol & Spirit, 1997, p. 108). Emerging out of a syncretic Taoist/Buddhist milieu, the philosophy of Chai T’ang found expressing in communal living in ‘vegetarian halls’ or ‘spinsters’ houses’ which emphasized gender equality among members who revered Guanyin (Kwan Yin), a Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion.

Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion

Called the ‘goddess of mercy,’ Guanyin — “She who hears the cries of the world” — is sometimes portrayed as Avalokiteshvara, the male Buddha of the Pure Land who transforms into a female one (Vern L. Bullough, cited in Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol & Spirit, 1997).

Guanyin statue in a Chinese temple in Thailand

Revered by Chinese Buddhists and Daoists alike, Guanyin has a special place in the hearts of transgendered Chinese and Asians who know of the transgenderal version of the story of the deity of compassion.

In Tibet, the Gelug (or ‘Gelugpa’ – ’Yellow Hat’) strain of Buddhism has long been associated with same-sex relations between monks in its monasteries, especially in the Gelug monastery at Sera (see Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol & Spirit, 1997, p. 10).

There is a long tradition of homosexuality in Japan, prominently featuring Buddhist monks (see Gary Leupp, ”Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan,” University of California, 1997). “The Great Mirror of Male Love” (Nanshoku Okagami), is a collection of 40 homoerotic stories from 1687 by Ihara Saikaku (1642-93) that depicts the nanshoku tradition of male love in all its variety, including some involving monks in Buddhist monasteries.

A samurai kisses a kabuki actor in a shunga hand scroll
(Miyagawa Issho, c. 1750).

Korea has at least four distinct traditions that anticipate contemporary LGBT identities. First, there is the hwarang warrior elite — sometimes referred to as the ‘flower boys of Silla’ (the dynasty that united the Korean peninsula in the seventh century) — an elite corps of archers who dressed in long flowing gowns and wore make-up. Second, there are the namsadang, the troupes of actors who went from village to village. Among the namsadang, the youths played women’s roles, as in Elizabethan theater. It is said that the youths were often lovers of the older men in the corps. Third, there is the tradition of ‘boy-wives,’ in which youths would wed older men and be recognizes as wives of the men.

And finally, there is the the paksu mudang — the male shaman who performed what was a woman’s role in the ancient shamanic spiritual tradition that Koreans brought into the Korean peninsula from eastern Siberia in pre-historic times.

Korean mudang

The mudang was the priest-like figure in Altaic shamanism. In that culture — the oldest level of Korean society, which predates the introduction of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism into the peninula by the Chinese — the mudang was always a woman, but not necessarily female. A significant number of mudang were male, and some of these paksu mudang (male mudang) may have lived as women as well as performing the sacred rites and rituals of the mudang spiritual tradition, though there is not enough documentary evidence to come to any definite conclusions as to whether many or most them lived as women and were recognized as such outside the context of the sacred rites and rituals tnat they performed.

Korean mudang

In South Asia and Southeast Asia, there are many examples of homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions, including that of the hijra of India, the eunuchs who undergo ritual castration in order to serve as temple priestesses in a tradition that has survived in India to the present day. The lives of the hijra are documented in “Harsh Beauty,” a 2005 film by Alessandra Zeka. The hijra undergo ritual castration and devote themselves to the hindu goddess Bahucharamata, living in group houses known as jemadh, as described in Serena Nanda’s classic work, “Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India” (1990).

a hijra in the film “Harsh Beauty”

Vietnam also has a shamanic tradition, known as dao mau, also presided over by shamans, many of whom are transgendered. The filmmaker Nguyen Trinh documented this tradition in “Love Man Love Woman,” his 2007 documentary about Master Luu Ngoc Duc, one of the most prominent spirit mediums in Hanoi. In the dao mau tradition, it is usually feminine males (referred to as ‘dong co’) such as Master Luu Ngoc Duc who preside over the country’s popular mother goddess religion.

Master Luu Ngoc Doc

Master Luu Ngoc Duc is but one of many examples of proto-transgenderal shamanic traditions that have survived into the twenty-first century. Another such tradition is that of the bissu, documented in the 2005 film, “The Last Bissu: Sacred Transvestites of South Sulawesi, Indonesia” by Rhoda Grauer.

Sulawesi bissu

The Long Island University professor’s documentary focuses on Puang Matoa Saidi, a contemporary bissu priest who is attempting to keep the bissu tradition alive.

In Thailand, there are the kathooey (often translated as ‘ladyboys’) of Thailand (see, for example, Michael G. Peletz, ”Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times,” in Current Anthropology, Volume 47, Number 2, April 2006,) though I have not come across any evidence that they traditionally played a shamanic role in Thai Buddhism or any other spiritual tradition indigenous to Thai culture.

The Pacific Islands have many homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions, including those of themahu in Hawai’i, the fa’afafine in Samoa (see “The Transgender Taboo“), the fakaleiti in Tonga, thevaka sa lewa lewa in Fiji, the rae rae in Tahiti, the fafafine in Niue, and the akava’ine in the Cook Islands (New Zealand AIDS Foundation, cited in “To Be Who I Am: Kia noho au ki toku ano ao,” a report by the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, 2007, p. 25), and . The Maori of New Zealand have several different terms for those whose gender identity is different from their sex assigned at birth, includingwhakawahine, whakaaehinekiri, tangata ira wahine, hinehi, and hineua (for transgendered women) andtangata ira tane (for trans men) (op cit.).

transman (tangata ira tane) & transwoman (hineua)
(Rebecca Swan photos for the New Zealand Human Rights Commission report on transgender discrimination, “To Be Who I Am”)

There is evidence that some of these proto-transgenderal figures in Pacific Islander societies played shamanic roles in their cultures’ spiritual traditions.

In examining the entire history of homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions in pre-modern Asian and Pacific Islander societies, we must not make the mistake of romanticizing such traditions or failing to recognize the significant differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’ — meaning contemporary queer LGBT/queer APIs, especially those of us in the diaspora. Those ancient traditions are embedded in societies which were not characterized by equality of age, gender or class relations, and many of the forms that homoeroticism and transgenderal identity took would offend our egalitarian sensibilities.

The important point is that we as LGBT/queer APIs must known the history of our predecessors in order to counter the narrative of LGBT and queer as foreign, white, Western, and even specifically North American; only in doing so can we reinsert ourselves in the governing narratives of our countries, cultures and communities of origin. That is an imporant lesson for queer APIs; as I say, it is not that we should necessarily identify with the paksu mudang or the bissu or the hijra; rather, that examining such figures, we as queer APIs can re-envision ourselves in the light of such figures as both API and LGBT/queer. In other words, examining such proto-transgenderal shamanic figures from pre-modern Asian and Pacific Islander cultures can help those of us who are queer APIs to engage in identity formation in a way that avoids the binary opposition of LGBT = white/API = non-LGBT; it enables us to re-envision ourselves as queer and API by pointing to predecessors in our cultures of origin.

But the implications are not merely for individual identity formation but also for community construction; pointing to proto-transgenderal figures and images can enhance the sense of community among contemporary queer APIs and especially transgendered APIs; examination of such figures and images can even have implications for political action by challenging and disarming the false discourse of reactionary elements in the Asia/Pacific region today and in API immigrant communities that attempt to label LGBT identities as false and foreign, the fabrication of white, Western and even specifically American influence.

The Taliban represent an extreme example of a profoundly homophobic and transgenderphobic as well as misogynistic phenomenon that attempts to link homosexuality and transgender (which they invariably conflate) with Western influence and counterpose LGBT identities with adherence to religious faith, but there are examples to be found throughout the Asia/Pacific region of reactionary religious and political forces that reify this binary opposition and use it to oppress LGBT people. Images of proto-transgenderal figures can be deployed strategically to counter this false narrative by pointing to the important and in some cases even central role that these shamanic figures played in the spiritual traditions of pre-modern Asian and Pacific Islander societies.

Finally, and not least of all, examination of these proto-transgenderal figures can help queer APIs of all faith traditions to connect with a deeper level of spirituality by integrating their sexual orientation and/or gender identity and expression with their religious faith and/or spirituality. The binary opposition of the sacred and the profane which runs as a theme throughout the histories of many cultures has set up a false dichotomy that many LGBT people, including queer APIs, have deeply internalized. In examining the shamanic roles played by these proto-transgenderal figures, we as contemporary queer APIs can understand ourselves and our sexuality and gender identity and expression as something not intrinsically opposed to the religious or the spiritual, but instead as a very expression of the divine within; that can be true regardless of our religious affiliation or spiritual tradition, whether that be Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, pagan, animist, or other.

The important truth is that the queer self can be the sacred self just as sacred texts can be queer and queered; so let us reclaim the sacred space which is our birthright as queer APIs; let the goddess within come out~!

Pauline Park is chair of NYAGRA, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (nyagra.com), a statewide transgender advocacy organization that she co-founded in 1998. She also co-founded Queens Pride House (the LGBT community center of Queens) in 1997 and currently serves as president of the board of directors and acting executive director. Park co-founded Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in 1997 and served as its coordinator from 1997 to 1999. Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. In 2005, she became the first openly transgendered grand marshal of the New York City Pride March. She did her B.A. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Park has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of organizations. She was the subject of “Envisioning Justice: The Journey of a Transgendered Woman,” a 32-minute documentary that premiered in 2008.

  한국

The post Transgender Identities & Spiritual Traditions in Asia & the Pacific: Lessons for LGBT/Queer APIs (Pacific School of Religion, 4.2.13) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Pauline Park
Vassar College
18 April 2012

I feel honored to be speaking here at Vassar College again only a year after my last appearance here.

I’d like to begin by thanking the Vassar College Feminist Alliance and TransMission for inviting me to speak today.  I’d especially like to thank Faren Tang and Rachel Ritter, the co-presidents of the Feminist Alliance, and Tristan Feldman, president of TransMission, for arranging my appearance here.

Given that it was the Feminist Alliance and TransMission, I would like to engage in a feminist analysis of the politics of identity from my perspective as a transgendered woman of color who was born in Korea and raised here in the United States. I would like to focus on the claim made in a speech in 2000 that the transgender community needs to move beyond identity politics to a ‘post-identity’ politics model of organizing.

Introduction: GenderPAC’s Organizational History and Background

Riki Anne Wilchins was the executive director of GenderPAC for the entire 14 years of its organizational life, from 1995 until 2009; in that capacity, she called for the creation of “a post-identity politics national gender rights movement for all Americans.” By way of a critique of that call, I will argue here that the discourse of a post-identity politics movement – far from providing a unifying philosophy and political strategy – is intellectually incoherent and politically counterproductive. It is my aim here to articulate what I see as the racial politics implicit in the discourse and to offer an alternative conception of identity formation and transgender movement politics based on notions of community.

GenderPAC was founded in November 1996 to be the national voice of the transgender community. A number of different individuals and organizations came together to establish the organization in order to educate society on transgender issues and to advance a legislative agenda in Congress. Wilchins, a white post-operative male-to-female transsexual woman, took the organization in a very different direction. By the end of 1999, Wilchins shifted GenderPAC from the original vision of its founders to a very different organization with a very different mission. With Gina Reiss as managing director, Wilchins then went public with her intention to reject the original conception of a transgender advocacy organization in favor of a vague, rather inchoate concept of a ‘gender rights’ organization.

Wilchins’ rejection of GenderPAC’s original mission as a national voice for the transgender movement is symptomatic of the inherent problems of attempting to create a movement while denying the existence of a community upon which it is based. I would argue that community is a necessary component of any movement politics. Organizational accountability to the community is not only the analogue, but also the concomitant, to – individual accountability to a board of directors. Any refusal to acknowledge community as the basis of movement politics ultimately represents an attempt to evade responsibility to a larger collective. Wilchins’ decision to reject the notion of transgender community organizing had profound implications for the community and the movement that GenderPAC once claimed to represent. In 2000, Wilchins gave a speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving National Donor Conference entitled “A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights” in which she asserted that she was:

“…building a post-modern argument that is so downright insubordinate and hopelessly perverse that it undermines the paradigm that created the issue of transinclusion and made my presence there to address it necessary in the first place… And so it’s not so much a question of including transgender, as of recognizing that gender has always been a part of a gay agenda and always will be… GenderPAC is a ‘post-identity’ organization, meaning we are committed to building a broad-based, national movement for gender rights that includes all of us…  In a post-identity movement, who we are is not a pre-condition for working together – our identification as gender activists comes out of the work we do.  And so identity becomes not a cause of our politics, but an effect — not a wall to be defended and debated but something mobile, personal, and flexible that changes and grows with us as our understanding of ourselves changes and grows.  And all these confusing, even threatening new identities are not barbarians at the gate but a doorway out. Their messiness is not the problem, it’s the solution — a tactic, even an essential political goal… We need movements that demand that we build bridges to one another instead of burn them, that we stress our commonalities instead of our differences… A transgender struggle is an important thing, but it is not my fight. In fact I personally have no interest in being transexual or transgender… What I am interested in is the original cultural gesture to regulate what your body and mine can mean, or say, or do…”  (Riki Anne Wilchins, “A New Kind of Politics: A Movement for Gender Civil Rights,” a speech to the Gill Foundation OutGiving 2000 National Donor Conference).

The Gill speech was perhaps the clearest articulation of the discourse of the ‘post-identity politics’ gender rights movement that Wilchins ever gave, a discourse that I will simply call ‘the post-identity politics paradigm’ (or ‘PPP’ for short). But even the most cursory glance at that speech will reveal a number of significant problems of the ‘new paradigm’ that Wilchins ostensibly articulated in it. First, there is the problem of the conflation of sexual orientation with gender identity and expression. Second, there is the problem of the practical application of Wilchins’ notions in the legislative arena. Third, there is the problem raised by Wilchins’ conception of identity formation, as it might be applied to race. Fourth, there is the parallel problem as applied to gender. And fifth, there is the problem of the apparent contradiction of ‘post-modernism’ and liberal rights discourse in Wilchins’ thinking.  I will take each of these in turn.

The Conflation of Homosexuality and Transgender

At its heart, the discourse of a post-identity politics movement is based on a misconception about the nature of individual identity and the relationship of sexual orientation to gender identity and expression. Wilchins’ analysis of the sex/gender binary is reductive, attempting to reduce one form of oppression to the other, rather than recognizing them as mutually reinforcing discourses of oppression.  One cannot fully understand homophobia or genderphobia unless one maintains the conceptual distinction between homophobia and genderphobia.  Hence, in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins makes it impossible to successfully explain either.  In her Gill speech (quoted above), Wilchins declared,

“And here I mean gender in its widest sense – including sexual orientation, because I take it as self-evident that the mainspring of homophobia is gender: the notion that gay men are insufficiently masculine or lesbian women somehow necessarily inadequately feminine.  And I include sex, because I take it as prima facie that what animates misogyny and sexism is our society’s astonishing fear and loathing around issues of vulnerability or femininity.”

In fact, it is not at all self-evident that “the mainspring of homophobia is gender.”  Not all gay people are gender-variant, with the ‘butch’ gay man and the ‘lipstick lesbian’ exemplifying the gender-conventional; the oppression they face could not therefore be attributed to their outward gender expression.  There are many cases of conventionally gendered lesbians and gay men facing discrimination and violence because of their sexual orientation alone. Relatively ‘butch’ gay men, for example, have been attacked leaving gay bars despite— and one is almost tempted to hypothesize because of – their gender conventionality.  In fact, the very assertion of a self-conscious masculinity on the part of gay men in the 1970s may have provoked even more intense hostility on the part of some homophobic men who may have perceived those masculine gay men to be all the more threatening because of their relative masculinity; in other words, in the logic of a homophobe, if a relatively manly man can be gay, a manly man like me could be gay.

A more conceptually sophisticated analysis would recognize homophobia and (trans)genderphobia as mutually reinforcing discourses of oppression, one in which neither is fully reducible to the other, though interrelated.  One could draw an analogy with explanations of racism based in class prejudice. Clearly, race cannot be reduced to class, because racial discrimination cannot be fully explained as class discrimination.  Similarly, discrimination and oppression based on sexual orientation cannot be fully reduced to oppression based on gender expression, especially in cases involving conventionally gendered LGBs.   But in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins implicitly dismisses the distinct forms of oppression faced by conventionally gendered LGBs.

Clearly, gender variance is relative; but it is equally clear that the kind of oppression faced by relatively more gender-variant LGBs is likely to be more intense than that faced by more conventionally gendered LGBs; they are, in any case, different and distinct.  Collapsing homophobia into genderphobia provides Wilchins with a rationale for jettisoning the concept of ‘transgender,’ which she finds hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-date.  But in reducing homophobia to genderphobia, Wilchins is left without a conceptual framework for distinguishing between gender-based and non-gender-based homophobia. Hence, Wilchins’ conceptual framework does not allow her to recognize the greater potential for discrimination and violence faced by gender-variant LGBs. Ironically enough, then, Wilchins’ desire to focus on what she sees to be the gender-based roots of homophobia leads her inadvertently to minimize or trivialize the oppression that gender-variant LGBs face specifically because of their gender variance, as opposed to their sexual orientation alone.

While the conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity leads to conceptual confusion, it also provides an opportunity for Wilchins to try to bridge what she perceives to be a gap between traditional ‘gay’ politics and the newer politics of transgender.  Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that GenderPAC’s philosophy and strategy were premised on a conflation of sexual orientation and gender, and that conflation allowed Wilchins to position herself as the leader of a ‘post-transgender’ organization, one which was guided by an ostensibly sophisticated conception of gender that was ‘hip,’ ‘cool,’ and ‘post-identity politics.’

Wilchins thus cast herself as the avatar of a new age in which GenderPAC would lead a gender rights movement that would supercede both the old gay and lesbian rights movement and the newer transgender rights movement.  What this all-inclusive ‘national gender rights movement’ ended up looking like, in practice, was an organization whose primary constituency would appear to be non-transsexual transgendered youth who were uncomfortable with any fixed gender identity and who reject the classic transsexual transition narrative. GenderPAC’s membership was especially heavy with college students, mostly of female birth sex, who were intrigued by Wilchins’ use of Butlerian terms such as ‘gender performativity’ and notions of gender fluidity that seemed to apply so well to their own personal experiences at that stage of their lives.  Since many of these individuals identified as lesbians at some point but seemed dissatisfied with the inability of that term to adequately describe or encompass the gender-transgressive component of their identities, they were especially attracted to the way in which Wilchins seemed to be able to bring the issues of sexual orientation and gender identity together.

Praxis Makes Perfect: Applying the Paradigm in the ‘Real World’

The faults of Wilchins’ approach can be observed by applying it to a current political battle engaged by the movement.  The focus of national efforts for many years has been passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), the federal LGBT rights bill still pending in Congress many years after its introduction.

In Wilchins’ view, the gay movement does not understand that gender oppression is at the root of homophobia and therefore seeks to exclude transgendered people in a futile attempt to appropriate heteronormativity; but the transgender movement too narrowly circumscribes the concept of gender because it is rooted in the medical model of transsexuality and therefore excludes non-surgical ‘gender queers.’

The equivalent of Wilchins’ desiradatum – ‘a national gender civil rights movement for all Americans’ – would be a ‘national sexual freedom civil rights movement for all Americans’ that would remove ‘identity politics’ labels such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay.’  It is unlikely that LGBT organizations would remove ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ from their mission statements and their literature and jettison the use of the term ‘sexual orientation’ in favor of some broader but vaguer notion of ‘sexual freedom for all,’ and if that scenario seems extremely far-fetched, it is because such a move would represent a rejection of the fundamental principles around which lesbian and gay groups have been organized heretofore.

But Wilchins stakes out a much bigger territory than even a movement that covers both the transgender movement and the lesbian and gay movement. One can probably best understand Wilchins’ call for a ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement’ as part of a marketing strategy under which GenderPAC was marketed as being ‘more’ than just a transgender organization, because it (ostensibly) had a broader conception of gender; broader than any lesbian and gay rights organization because it included a focus on gender issues; and broader than any women’s organization because it included transgendered and gender-variant people who were not part of the traditional mission of organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW).

But for all that she claimed to be engaged in a critique of binary thinking, Wilchins ironically constructed her own binary opposition, implicitly pitting a ‘transgender’ movement against a broader and more inclusive ‘gender’ movement. This is a false dichotomy.  Wilchins offered no evidence that a self-styled transgender movement cannot include both non-transgendered gender-variant individuals as well as issues faced by such individuals.  Clearly, there is no ‘either/or’ here.  There is no reason to jettison the concept of transgender simply because it is not all-inclusive; nor is there any reason to believe that a transgender movement cannot be based on a conception of gender oppression that recognizes all forms of oppression based on gender identity or gender expression.

Race, Gender, Identity Formation and the Politics of Community

The third difficulty with Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm lies in the way in which Wilchins misconstrues the nature of gender identity formation and political movements rooted in communities organized around such identities. Underlying the discourse of a post-identity politics gender rights movement as Wilchins articulated it in her Gill speech is the assumption that any exclusion is bad – both illegitimate and politically problematic – coupled with the assumption that any exclusion is equivalent to any other kind of exclusion.

The rationale implicit in this discourse would seem to be something like this: gender-variant people (transgendered people, genderqueers, etc.) have been excluded from the lesbian and gay movement, and that is a bad thing. Transgendered people (including male-to-female transsexuals) have been excluded from the women’s movement, and that is a bad thing.  The underlying assumption would seem to be that any movement that excludes anyone is morally suspect and politically questionable.  But the fundamental error is the failure to take account of the asymmetry of power between privileged and marginalized groups in American society.

A case in point is Wilchins’ reaction to an invitation to attend TransWorld in October 1998. Co-sponsored by the Gender Identity Project (GIP) of the New York City Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center (now the LGBT Community Center) and the Audre Lorde Project, TransWorld I (which took place at ALP in Brooklyn) was the first conference specifically by and for transgendered people of color (TGPOCs). The organizing committee for TransWorld I made the decision to invite only people of color to speak as formal presenters, though the conference was open to everyone whether white or of color, transgendered or not. As one of the members of the planning committee, I voted for that decision because I felt that it was necessary to ensure that the conference provide an opportunity for TGPOCs to speak for themselves. Previous conferences in the series sponsored by the Center’s GIP (of which TransWorld I was the fourth) had featured largely conventionally gendered white men literally and figuratively talking down to transgendered people from the dais. This conference would be different: it would feature transgendered and gender-variant people of color speaking from personal experience of oppression and marginalization as well as from expertise in health care, social services, and advocacy.

Wilchins’ reaction to the decision to invite only people of color to speak as formal presenters was to denounce the conference as ‘racist’ because it ‘excluded’ white people.  Her response to the invitation to attend TransWorld was not merely an expression of her personal pique at not having been invited to speak at the conference.  The rejection of TransWorld I and limited-membership formations – based on the assumption of a symmetry of ‘exclusion’ – demonstrates a failure to understand the difference between the power of a white elite vs. the power of marginalized communities, as well as a failure to understand the nature of institutionalized racism in this society.

The ‘exclusion’ of whites from the dais at TransWorld I cannot be equated with the historic exclusion of transgendered people of color from positions of power in society, because those white service providers – whether physicians (such as surgeons and endocrinologists), psychiatrists and psychologists, social workers, or other ‘gender professionals’ – are in positions of power relative to the transgendered people of color who are their clients (or ‘patients’ or ‘consumers,’ however one may wish to describe them). Such white gender professionals – most of whom are not themselves transgender-identified – exercise power over their clients as ‘gatekeepers’ in terms of affording (or denying) access to hormones, sex reassignment surgery, psychological evaluation, legal change of sex, and other crucial aspects of transsexual transition. Those professionals have access to resources – financial, legal, and organizational –that their clients largely lack, and the institutional power that they command therefore belies any ‘moral equivalency’ between their ‘exclusion’ from the dais at this one event and the exclusion of transgendered people of color from positions of power in a white-dominant society brought about by pervasive discrimination based on race and/or gender identity that TGPOCs face.

The decision of the TransWorld I organizing committee to limit panels to people of color only was understood by committee members as an attempt to provide transgendered people of color themselves with a forum in which they could speak unhindered by service providers who had dominated the previous three ‘health empowerment’ conferences sponsored by the GIP.  That decision was informed by a recognition of the multiple oppressions – oppressions based on race, ethnicity, language, national origin, and citizenship status (among others) as well as gender identity and expression – faced by transgendered people of color.

It is important to understand, however, that such oppressions are not merely additive in nature; in other words, it is not simply that a transgendered African American faces transgenderphobia in one context and racism in another; rather, these oppressions are interactive and mutually reinforcing.    For example, a transgendered African American woman may find no support as a person of color at a white-dominated center for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities; but she may also find no support as a transgendered person at a community center or social service provider in her community of origin.

Related to oppressions based on race and ethnicity are those based on nationality and citizenship status. Many TGPOCs are immigrants and face the same challenges as their non-transgendered compatriots, but without access to social services in their communities, because many immigrant service providers will not serve openly transgendered people. Even in those instances where social service agencies may welcome them, transgendered people may be reluctant to come forward for fear of discrimination. While LGBT community centers are springing up across the country, very few have any means of ensuring linguistic access for those who are not native speakers of English or cultural competency for those who are immigrants and/or people of color.

Those TGPOCs who are not US citizens do not have even the minimal legal rights that transgendered citizens enjoy; if they are undocumented, they are easily deportable; and while they live here in the United States, undocumented transpeople face exploitation because of their lack of legal status.  Hence GenderPAC’s call for a ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement for all Americans’ begged the question as to just who constitutes an ‘American.’ To define the category of ‘all Americans’ by way of citizenship would leave out the undocumented, who are the most vulnerable to exploitation.  But to include the undocumented would raise the question of whether or not GenderPAC is serious about working on behalf of this population.

While transgendered people of color certainly need legal protections from discrimination and violence, they do not have the luxury to regard legal rights as the sum total of the movement’s goals.  Juridical rights are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the liberation of transgendered people of color. A movement that limits its focus to legal rights will not be able to satisfy the need for social justice that transgendered people feel deeply.  That movement, in order to serve transgendered people of color, must also address issues of race, ethnicity, language, national origin, and citizenship status, as well as class, (dis)ability, environment, and every other form of oppression suffered by TGPOCs.  Hence, a broad social justice movement is desperately needed, and an organization that embodies those values is a necessary component of that movement.

The complexity of the transgender community and the variability of gender oppression across different transgender populations and different transgendered and gender-variant people provides the rationale for the use of ‘transgender’ by an organization or a movement.  Deployed strategically and with intellectual and political sophistication, ‘transgender’ becomes a useful organizing principle for a community under construction that is attempting to create a political movement.

As I have already argued, it was GenderPAC’s failure to connect to community that led to its failure as an organization. Indeed, the discourse of a ‘post-identity politics’ movement as articulated by Wilchins in her Gill speech would seem to have no role for communities of any kind. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm is all about ‘doing your own thing,’ as the phrase popular in the 1960s and 1970s would have it; and that may account for GenderPAC’s appeal to genderqueer youth, especially female-bodied youth who do not relate to terms such as ‘transsexual or even ‘transgender.’  Wilchins apparently believes that gender is primarily or perhaps even solely a matter of self-expression; what she does not understand is that gender identities are constructed by individuals in the context of larger communities, including the broad national community that we call ‘society.’ Public fora and conferences such as TransWorld that have a circumscribed focus are necessary precisely because transgendered and gender-variant people do not exist solely as atomized individuals; they live in communities – even if some are profoundly alienated from communities, including communities of origin and communities of color.

At root, the discourse of a post-identity politics movement is premised on an atomized individualism that does not recognize the social context in which gender identities are formed. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm reduces the problem of gender oppression to a simple society-wide oppression of genderqueers attempting to express their individual gender identities. But the lack of conceptual sophistication regarding the variegation of gender oppression across different cultures and communities is not the only conceptual flaw in the discourse of a ‘national gender civil rights movement for all Americans.’ A reading of American history will show that the very notion of a ‘post-identity politics’ is fundamentally ahistorical, as it fails to acknowledge the identity politics of Jeffersonian liberalism, which was premised on an identity politics that excluded some from power because of their identity.  Identity politics did not begin in the 1960s; rather, the women’s movement, the lesbian and gay rights movement, and the African American civil rights movement were simply a different form of identity politics. Wilchins’ post-identity politics paradigm is rooted in an individual rights discourse of Enlightenment provenance that ironically enough – and fatally for its intellectual coherence – is at odds with Wilchins’ ostensible ‘post-modernism.’

Wilchins’ rather superficial critique of ‘post-identity politics’ really speaks only to the excesses of an exclusionary version of identity politics and does not acknowledge the origin of identity politics, much less address the issues raised by white skin privilege. GenderPAC’s call for a post-identity gender politics is analogous to Ward Connerly’s call for a color-blind society. The discourse of a color-blind society – promoted by conservatives who aim to eliminate affirmative action – fails to recognize the specificity of racial and ethnic oppression and therefore renders impossible any effort to address it. In a certain profound sense, the call for a post-identity gender rights movement represented a ‘whitewashing’ of gender and transgender politics. Implicit in Wilchins’ critique of identity politics was an assumption that identities are somehow fixed and exclusive. In her Gill speech, Wilchins implies that identifying as ‘gay’ somehow precludes identifying as ‘transgendered’ or that identifying as ‘transgendered’ somehow precludes one from identifying as ‘genderqueer.’ But identities need not be mutually exclusive; rather, they are more like Venn diagrams – overlapping and not always strictly definable.

‘Transgender’ is an identity formation that offers the same kind of advantages by bringing together a loose collection of individuals – crossdressers, transsexuals, drag queens, and other gender-variant individuals – who may have many differences but who can achieve greater political agency through coalition-building, which is precisely what the construction of a ‘transgender community’ represents when brought to bear on the creation of a transgender political movement. Transgender offers the additional advantage of moving beyond the pathologizing medical model of transsexuality. The fact that ‘transgender’ does not include everyone who might be identified as gender-variant, much less the total human population does not invalidate it as a construct.

The term ‘transgender’ can be deployed strategically in order to bring legal rights to individuals who face pervasive discrimination, as the example of the successful campaign for the New York City transgender rights law shows (Int. No. 24, introduced in 2000, was enacted by the City Council in 2002). Similarly, terms such as ‘gender-variant’ or (if you prefer) ‘genderqueer’ can be deployed as well.  These are all clearly social constructions, and the one to be used in any given context depends on the particulars of that context.

Because of personal experiences of being excluded, transgendered and gender-variant people have become sensitive to the notion of exclusion of any kind. Perhaps some of this sentiment is behind Wilchins’ insistence that a gender rights movement, to be legitimate, must include everyone.But if the African American rights movement does not include everyone, does that invalidate it in some way? Certainly, white people (including many Jewish Americans) have played an important role in the movement, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, when liberal whites in the South and from the North participated in Freedom Summer and other civil rights campaigns. But the focus was clearly on dismantling Jim Crow, which directly affected African Americans in the South, even if it had an indirect impact on whites, especially those who supported the black aspiration for civil rights.  Was the African American civil rights movement ‘exclusionary’ because it did not specifically seek to include Latinos or Native Americans? Or was it rather more effective because it chose to focus on the specificity of oppression faced by African Americans, which was distinct from that of other people of color?

Wilchins simply fails to understand the variegation of gender oppression by race and ethnicity. And to suggest that it is illegitimate to organize around identity formations is to suggest that those identities are illegitimate. Indeed, such a suggestion represents nothing less than an attempt to invalidate efforts to address racial and ethnic oppression itself.

All that being said, we must also acknowledge that an ‘identity politics’ model can be limiting, and nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of electoral politics. There is considerable pressure within the LGBT community — just as there is in communities of color — when the prospect opens up for electing the first openly gay person or the first person of color to an office at the local, state or national level, the most spectacular case in point being the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in 2008. There were also many women — Gloria Steinem most prominent among them — who championed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2008 because she would have been the first woman elected president, had her candidacy succeeded.

David Paterson became New York’s first African American governor upon the abrupt resignation of his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, in 2008. Hiram Monserrate became the first Latino elected to office in Queens County when he was elected to the New York City Council in 2001, and John Liu became the first Asian American elected to office in the state in same year when he was elected to the City Council. Paterson decided not to run for re-election as governor in 2010 after a series of scandals tainted his administration, and Liu — now City Comptroller — is facing possible criminal indictment in a campaign finance scandal. Monserrate was actually convicted of misdemeanor assault in 2009. All of which to say that the crudest model of identity politics — that we have to support ‘one of our own’ just because that person shares our identity category or categories — is just as absurd as rejecting identity politics altogether. When it comes to elected officials, at the very least, there is an obligation to hold members of one’s community or communities accountable even when there are compelling reasons to support them. Identity politics is rather like nationalism in having a more positive face of community empowerment and a negative valence that can at its most extreme even lead to genocide.

From my personal experience working in the legislative arena, the best example that comes to mind of work that moves beyond the limitations of identity politics is the campaign for the Dignity for All Students Act (NYS DASA), an anti-bullying law enacted by the New York state legislature in 2011. This safe schools law protects students in public schools across the state from bias-based harassment based on a comprehensive list of characteristics — including sexual orientation and gender defined to include gender identity and expression — as well as race, religion, ethnicity, and disability.

Importantly, while the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity bill — in which I represented the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) — included a number of LGBT-specific organizations, it also included many non-LGBT organizations. The coalition that advanced enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act (NYC DASA) by the New York City Council in 2004 was perhaps an even better example of a legislative coalition based in identifiable communities but able to work in a way that moved that work beyond the limitations of identity politics. Asian American organizations played a particularly important role in the NYC DASA Coalition, including the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund (AALDEF), the Sikh Coalition and the Coalition for Asian American Children & Families (CACF).

My experience as an activist leads me to conclude that we need to work within recognizable communities because of the continued oppression that members of those communities experience, while at the same time moving beyond those communities to work together across identity categories to pursue a common goal of social justice and social change; it is not an ‘either/or,’ but rather, a ‘both.’

‘Paradigm-Shattering’ and the Disjuncture of the Liberal and the Post-Modern

Pretensions to the contrary, Wilchins’ argument is not consistently or rigorously ‘post-modern,’ and it is not so much ‘insubordinate’ as simply incoherent. There is in fact a fundamental disjuncture at the heart of Wilchins’ thought, between the rights discourse of a ‘national gender rights movement’ and the self-consciously ‘post-modern’ thinking of post-structuralist theory that is superficially applied to the problem of gender-based oppression. Liberal rights discourse is premised on the very unicity of the unified subject as well as the specific identity of that subject (in demographic and (sub)national terms) that Derridean deconstruction would render impossible. Rights appertain to individuals, and individuals with individual identities, not to gender expression itself – to acts, to gestures, or to performances. And rights presuppose at the very least the possibility of an objective moral order. One need only cite a few passages from her Gill speech to demonstrate how little Wilchins understands the conceptual problems posed by this disjuncture. Post-structuralist thought renders problematic if not impossible the ground of rights discourse that enables the articulation of positive assertions of normative right of the sort that Wilchins would like to make. To many post-structuralist theorists, there is no such thing as objective moral obligation; given the inherently arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, there cannot be. For at root, ‘post-modernism’ represents a challenge to the fixity of meaning. For post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida, the relationship between ‘signifier’ (e.g., word) and ‘signified’ (thing or concept) is inherently unstable and arbitrary.  If this is the case, there can be no conceptual ‘fundament’ to liberal rights discourse, because the meaning of the term ‘right’ itself cannot be fixed, any more than ‘individual’ can be:

“If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totalization.  This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions…” (Jacques Derrida, “Writing and Difference,” trans. Alan Bass, 1978, p. 289).

Liberal rights philosophy is precisely the kind of ‘totalizing’ discourse of which Jacques Derrida speaks in this passage. Traditional philosophy – including the normative political philosophy of Locke and the liberal Enlightenment – is undermined by a deconstruction of the relationship between word (logos) and concept. For the post-modernist, a normative project such as the construction of a ‘national gender civil rights movement’ is not only hopelessly old-fashioned, it is an impossibility, because the deconstruction of the unified subject and the relationship between word and concept makes it so. Wilchins does not seem to understand that the central core of post-structuralism is the disjuncture between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified.’ But if one were to take Derrida (by way of Judith Butler) seriously, then there can be no unified subject ‘I’ and therefore no unambiguous collective ‘we’ or ‘us.’ Unfortunately, Wilchins herself has never given any indication of how, from the post-modern ethos she would embrace, she would find a middle ground between the Enlightenment concept of the self and the deconstructive reduction of identity to textual device, or how she would create a conceptual foundation for positive moral statements such as the ones that she makes in her Gill speech.

In short, the notion of a post-modern ‘post-identity politics national gender rights movement’ is inherently contradictory and intellectually incoherent. Poststructuralist theory of the Derridean sort that informs the work of Judith Butler – which Wilchins in turn takes as the conceptual fundament for her own thought – challenges not only identity formations of the sort that Wilchins labels ‘identity politics,’ but also undermines the very possibility of affirmative statements about individual and collective human needs and human rights that were at the heart of the GenderPAC strategy and philosophy that she labeled her ‘post-identity politics paradigm.’ That Wilchins does not recognize this problem, let acknowledge it, demonstrates the superficiality of her use of terms such as ‘post-modern’ and the bankruptcy of her notion of a ‘post-identity politics.’

Conclusion

It is no accident that GenderPAC failed to spearhead a new ‘national gender rights movement’ just as it failed to connect to the transgender community out of which it initially emerged. Wilchins reconfigured GenderPAC as a ‘post-transgender’ organization that would create and lead a ‘post-identity politics’ movement. GenderPAC’s rejection of a clear link with the transgender community left the organization unmoored from its tethering, and it is emblematic of GenderPAC’s failure that hardly anyone even noticed when Wilchins shut down the organization in 2009, by which point GenderPAC had become a bloated irrelevance.

Failing to take account of (let alone effectively address) the multiple oppressions of transgendered and gender-variant people of color, Wilchins’ GenderPAC instead offered slogans such as ‘gender, racial and affectional equality.’ Nor did her call for “a national gender rights movement for all Americans” address issues of race, ethnicity, national origin, or citizenship status in any meaningful way. An organization or a movement that purports to include everyone includes no one, because it does not speak to the specificity of particular forms of oppression, which must be named in order to be addressed.

Wilchins’ discourse is not truly liberational, because it fails to take into account the totality of individual human experience. A crucial part of our humanity is the experience of community – admittedly ambivalent and complex for many transgendered and gender-variant people – but a sine qua non for human existence as well as a necessary element of any successful political movement.

What the ‘post-identity politics paradigm’ does not recognize is how identity formations – such as ‘transgender’ as well as ‘Asian Pacific American’ or ‘people of color’ – can be strategically deployed to form community, which is the basis of any successful social or political movement.

Finally, Wilchins fails to recognize – let alone address – the inherent contradiction of a rights movement that is ostensibly ‘post-modern.’ Any attempt to try to construct a ‘post-identity politics paradigm’ that is rigorously poststructuralist is bound to failure, because of the fundamental disjuncture between a liberal rights discourse that depends on the unified subject as its fundament and a theoretical framework that denies the very possibility of a unified subject who is the ostensible bearer of those rights. If the hallmark of the ‘post-modern’ is a rejection of ‘logos’ and the very notion of a stable and unambiguous relationship between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified,’ then no truly ‘post-modern’ political movement is possible, because post-modernism rejects the possibility of affirmative normative statements that are the requisite for an objective moral philosophy upon which ‘rights’ movements must of necessity be based.

In the end, for all of Wilchins’ ability to market herself and her organization to funders and members, GenderPAC shut down operations in 2009, with Wilchins continuing some of its work through a new organization, True Child, ostensibly focusing on “programs and policies that address reproductive health, partner violence and gender-based bullying, and educational achievement integrate a strong, specific focus on gender norms.” Wilchins’ role as executive director of True Child suggests that it is a reformulation of the same marketing strategy that she used to build GenderPAC, but with a focus on youth. Why Wilchins closed GenderPAC’s doors remains a bit of a mystery, as she never explained the decision to shutter GenderPAC, despite having built a very impressive financial base for the organization. Allow me to speculate and suggest that Wilchins shut down GenderPAC because it became clear to her that it was not and would never be the vanguard of a ‘new gender movement.’ GenderPAC was a useful platform for Riki Wilchins herself, but because she rejected the very concept of a community, and because other organizations — most prominently, the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) — took up the work that GenderPAC was originally created to do, GenderPAC lacked a foundation in any recognizable community. Hence Wilchins’ quixotic attempt to cast herself as the Martin Luther King of her own movement failed because she failed to understand that a movement must have a connection to a recognizable community or communities in order to succeed in advancing a real agenda of social justice and social change.

This speech is based on an essay entitled “GenderPAC, the Transgender Rights Movement and the Perils of a Post-Identity Politics Paradigm” that was published in “Crossing Boundaries, Redefining Gender: A New Front on Equality?,” a compendium of presentations  given at the 5^th Annual Georgetown Symposium on Gender & Sexuality (27 February 2002).

Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in New York (www.nyagra.com), which she co-founded in June 1998. She also serves as vice-president of the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF). Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council (Int. No. 24, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002). She served on the working group that helped to draft guidelines – adopted by the Commission on Human Rights in December 2004 – for implementation of the new statute.

Park negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA), a safe schools bill currently pending in the New York state legislature, and the first fully transgender-inclusive legislation introduced in that body. She also serves on the steering committee of the coalition that secured enactment of the Dignity in All Schools Act by the New York City Council in September 2004. Park has written widely on LGBT issues and has conducted transgender sensitivity training sessions for a wide range of social service providers and community-based organizations. She has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The post Asian American Communities, People of Color, the Transgender Rights Movement and the Perils of a Post-Identity Politics Paradigm (Vassar, 4.18.12) appeared first on Pauline Park.

On 5 March 2011, LGBT supporters of Palestinian human rights protested the LGBT Community Center’s cancellation of an Israeli Apartheid Week event scheduled for that evening.

The Israeli/Palestinian Conflict Breaks Out at the NYC  LGBT Community Center

Among the issues that Americans lump under the rubric of ‘foreign affairs,’ perhaps the most divisive and the most intractable is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Since the administration of Harry S. Truman recognized the new State of Israel in 1948, the United States has been caught up in the competing claims of the Jewish state and the Palestinian Arabs who lived in the land they call Palestine for centuries before Zionists began settling there in significant numbers in the 20th century.

Within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, the slogan “we are everywhere” is not only wonderfully true but painfully true as well, as LGBT people are found both among the Jewish Israeli and Palestinian and Arab populations living within the borders of the State of Israel. And LGBT people in the United States are found on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian divide, scattered on a continuum from those who see Israel as the only legitimate claimant to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean to those who believe that all of that land is the home of the Palestinian people alone. Many queer Americans, of course, are somewhere in between, recognizing as legitimate both the State of Israel and the aspirations of the Palestinian people. Perhaps a majority in the LGBT community in the United States is either frustrated to the point of giving up or apathetic after years of war and conflict.

Given the intense and even violent passions that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict can provoke, it is difficult to imagine any LGBT community center wanting to become entangled in it, but that is exactly what has happened to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center of New York City.

And the story of how the Center became drawn into the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, despite the desire of its board and staff to avoid such entanglement — or perhaps because of it — is a cautionary tale for LGBT community centers and LGBT organizations and queer politics more generally — both in New York and beyond.

So how did this ‘controversy’ begin? It began with that most controversial of characters in the ensuing drama, Michael Lucas, a right-wing pornography mogul. Lucas was furious to discover that the Center had rented a room to the Siege Busters Working Group, which is calling for an end to the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.  The group had contracted with the Center to rent space for ‘a party to end Israeli apartheid,’ a term that raised the hackles of the porn king. Lucas then threatened the Center with a boycott of donors if it did not cancel the Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) fundraiser scheduled for March 5. That set of facts is the full extent of what all parties agree to; from that point onwards, there is no agreement even on the facts of the matter, let alone the interpretation of them.

“Lucas Entertainment founder and president Michael Lucas was born in Moscow, Russia, on March 10, 1972,” the website of Lucas Entertainment states. “He was raised in Moscow and attended college there, graduating with a degree in law. In 1995, Michael Lucas moved to Germany, then to France, where he began modeling and appearing on several European television programs and covers of many European magazines. In 1998, Lucas opened his own production company, Lucas Entertainment, in New York City,” the site adds. The biography on LucasEntertainment.com also notes that he was naturalized as a United States citizen in 2004 and even goes on to describe him as 6 feet tall and weighing 180 pounds.

Does the devil make him do it…?

“Michael Lucas is the most mainstreamed, provocative, and controversial figure in gay adult entertainment,” declares the right-wing porn king on his blog site. “With his unparalleled character, activism, and distinction, Michael Lucas is at the forefront of his industry and beyond,” he modestly asserts. Among the adjectives that Lucas describes himself, ‘provocative’ and ‘controversial’ are the only two that his critics as well as his supporters are likely to agree with.

‘The zionist porn star impresario,’ as the Huffington Post described him, “intimidated New York’s LGBT Center into canceling its hosting of another group’s Israeli Apartheid Week event scheduled for next month,” declared HuffPo on February 27. “And it took him only a few hours of emails and phone calls, plus a little more than $1,000, to do so,” added the popular website, linking to the full-length news story in the Village Voice.

The self-described ‘top’ with a (self-reported) penis size of ten inches (a claim for which I could find no independent verification) plunged into the world of public policy and queer politics with a letter to the Center that threatened a boycott of major donors if the Center did not expel the Siege Busters Working Group; sadly, the Center capitulated to the blackmail, and in doing so, betrayed its mission to be an open and safe space for all members of the LGBT community .

It is precisely because of the sensitivity of  the issue that I feel compelled to make clear that this analysis and any opinions expressed here are solely mine, speaking in an individual capacity, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organizations with which I am or have been associated, including those that I serve as chair or president or vice-president of the board of directors. I have not in fact consulted with any of those boards with regard to the Israeli/Palestinian issue, let alone with regard to this statement in particular, and I say that because my one overriding concern in deciding whether to speak or write about this issue — and the current controversy embroiling the Center — is because I do not want any of my organizations to suffer recriminations or retaliation as a result of any statements that I might make.

That all being said, of course, in speaking and writing about this issue, I draw on over 17 years of experience in activism and advocacy work across a wide variety of organizations, including those I currently serve: the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) (as chair), Queens Pride House (as president of the board of directors, the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) (as vice-president of the board of directors). I also draw on my experience with the Out People of Color Political Action Club (OutPOCPAC) (which I served as co-president), the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY) (which I served as a member of the steering committee), Iban/Queer Koreans of New York (which I served as coordinator from 1997-99), Q-Wave (the organization for LBT API women, of which I am currently a member, though not in a leadership position), the National Queer Asian/Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) (of which I am a founding member but which I have not served in any leadership capacity), Gay Asians & Pacific Islanders of Chicago (GAPIC) (of which I was the founding chair), and the Guillermo Vasquez Independent Democratic Club of Queens (GVIDCQ) (which I served as vice-president).

While GAPIC, GVIDCQ and Iban/QKNY are now, sadly, defunct, and OutPOCPAC can most generously be described as dormant, all of the other organizations are active and all but NQAPIA are based in New York City. I mention this long list of organizations simply because one point that the Center has insisted on is that the process which led to the decision in question involved ‘wide consultation’ with many different organizations and constituencies; and yet, none of the above mentioned organizations was consulted in any way before, during, or after the decision that was made; of that I have certain knowledge.

In any case, the Center’s executive director, Glennda Testone, rebuffed attempts by Siege Busters members to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement before the controversy widened. As Brad Taylor told Steven Thrasher of the Village Voice, Testone was evasive and controlling in responding to questions from Siege Busters members in a meeting following the Center’s cancellation of their March 5 fundraiser, telling them “that our event had generated too much controversy from both sides, and it wasn’t ‘queer enough'” (“‘Party to End Israeli Apartheid!’ Still On at Gay Center, Activists Vow, But With Picketing, Not Dancing,” Steven Thrasher, Village Voice, 4 March 2011).

Ironically enough, in cancelling the March 5 event, Testone and the Center leadership brought far more attention to the Siege Busters and their cause than simply allowing the event to go forward (as the Center was contractually obligated to) ever would have. And the outrage over the Center’s decision to embrace censorship as well as to implicitly endorse the illegal Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories was hardly limited to a small number of queer activists in New York: over 1,600 individuals signed the petition on iPetitions.com, which declared:

“We, the undersigned, are LGBT people and allies who condemn the stifling of free speech at New York’s LGBT Center due to pressure from wealthy supporters of Israel’s anti-Palestinian policies. A slanderous press release followed by a threatening call-in campaign led to the cancellation of an Israeli Apartheid Week event scheduled for March 5, 2011, and the right of peaceful pro-Palestine activists in the Siegebusters group to meet at the Center.

“New York’s LGBT Community Center has a 28-year history of accommodating the needs of oppressed and marginalized groups and allowing controversial opinions to be aired. It is a sanctuary for those seeking a democratic organizing space. The recent press release by Michael Lucas, a wealthy gay porn entrepreneur, threatened a boycott and defunding campaign if the Center didn’t cancel the event, which it tragically agreed to do.

“If activists allow this decision to stand, the Center will go from being a liberated space of democracy and free speech to yet another occupied, homogenized venue where wealthy and powerful voices can squelch all the rest.

“Lucas’s accusation that the March 5 event and groups organizing to build it are “anti-Semitic” is not simply an odious lie, it is an attempt to manipulate hatred of anti-Semitism to draw attention away from the ongoing Israeli crimes of dispossession, systematic racism, collective punishment and wholesale warfare on a population guilty of nothing other than their own existence. An international campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel has global support, including diverse voices from queer theory icon Judith Butler and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Auschwitz survivor and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network spokesman Hajo Mayer.

“The LGBT Center must return to its mission as a space for the oppressed and marginalized and reverse its decision on the March 5 event and reinstate the right of Siegebusters activists to meet there.

“Please email or call the Executive Director of the Center, Glennda Testone at glennda@gaycenter.org or 212-620-7310

“In solidarity and struggle,

Siegebusters Working Group,
Existence is Resistance,

Sherry Wolf, author, Sexuality and Socialism; International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
Cleve Jones, AIDS and LGBT rights activist
Judith Butler, author, Gender Trouble; Professor, University of California-Berkeley
Sarah Schulman, Writer. Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, City University of New York.

The petition was entitled, “Save New York’s LGBT Center! Don’t Let Wealthy Bigots Shut Down Free Speech,” and I found myself entirely in agreement with the text and the sentiment of the petition, but I had to weigh my organizational responsibilities against my own deeply felt commitment as an individual to speak truth to power, and I waited until April 5 to sign the petition; when I did, I posted this comment:

“I have been attending events & meetings at the Center ever since I moved to New York City in 1995 and have always supported the organization, but I find I cannot continue to support the Center in good conscience after it has engaged in censorship and — by banning Siege Busters and canceling the March 5 event — implicitly endorsed the illegal Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories. The Center must acknowledge the violation of its own process as well as the betrayal of the LGBT community that this decision constitutes, and it must reverse the decision itself; and the Center’s leadership must show that it is the LGBT community as a whole and not merely a few privileged gay white millionaires who determine policy at the Center.”

Mine was the 1,646th signature. Many of the signatories left thoughtful comments, such as Eric Mills, who posted his on March 13:

“If Pride Toronto could (after some struggle) uphold its dignity and independence by welcoming Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) to its parade last year, surely New York’s LGBT Center could at least host a meeting to oppose racist oppression in Palestine. What happened to the Stonewall spirit?”

William Lee, signing the petition on February 23, wrote,

“It is outrageous that the Center should buckle under to pressure like this, particularly in this case where the denial of rights to a people living under a harsh military occupation for more than 40 years was to have been highlighted. Shame on the Center for caving in to spurious charges and big-money pressure.”

Signing the petition on April 2, Ray Sutton put it even more succinctly:

“I strongly disagree with your caving in to monied Islamophobes.”

Bob Lederer, self-described ‘queer producer, WBAI Radio’ and ‘former ACT UP organizer,’ wrote on March 23,

“Thank you for standing up against censorship and affirming the right to keep the LGBT Center as a space for the entire community.”

A prominent activist, Lederer was by no means the only Jewish member of the community to sign the petition. On February 23, Otto Coca wrote,

“As a Jew and an American, I know the sensitivity of this issue, but the priority is freedom and the right to free speech. Allowing an unpopular group to meet is a decision of tolerance and acceptance of diverging views: capitulating to the will of a wealthy group intent on stifling discussion is COWARDICE. THE LGBT community fought too hard to be co-opted by Porn Star activists hiding behind two flags. Michael Lucas is NOT a voice of the LGBT community.”

On February 23, Gary Lapon wrote,

“Support for the Palestinian people is NOT the same as anti-Semitism. Not only are Lucas’s claims a smear against a legitimate liberation struggle, they are particularly offensive to Jews such as myself who object to false claims of discrimination against us being used to justify the oppression of others. Rarely have I felt more comfortable than among my brothers and sisters in the Palestinian solidarity movement.”

On February 23, Ellen Davidson wrote,

“As a Jew, I am offended by the equation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. This serves to stifle dissent and shut down any reasoned discussion of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.”

Writing on February 23, Hannah Mermelstein addressed her comments directly to the Center management:

“You claim that the Center should be a safe space for LGBTQ people. It is no longer a safe space for me, based on my political views, and it is no longer a safe space for my queer Arab and Muslim friends, due to their ethnic and religious identities. Please reconsider your decision.”

Not only did many Jewish Americans sign the petition, but even Israelis signed on, Daphne Tier writing on February 23,

“I am an Israeli anti-Zionist, anti-Zionism is NOT antisemitism ! When you expel hundreds of thousands of people, massacre them, put the rest in camps, steal their lands, and deny their history, you are doing something wrong. When you blockade access to roads, demolish homes, destroy water wells, build walls down the middle of orchards and villages and kill hundreds of unarmed civilians every year, you are doing something wrong. Regardless of your religion. People have the right to oppose U.S imperialism, and Israel is a colony propped up by U.S imperialist interests!”

Former members of the Center staff also weighed in on the controversy. On February 23, Sabelo Narasimhan signed the petition, writing,

“As a former employee and always a visitor at the center — I plead for you to keep it a space for ALL KINDS of oppressed and marginalized people locally and globally.”

Organizations of color also sent letters to the Center. The Audre Lorde Project, FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project issued a joint statement on March 4:

“Open Letter to the NYC LGBT Community Center from The Audre Lorde Project, FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice and Sylvia Rivera Law Project:

“The Audre Lorde Project (ALP), FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project write to express our extreme disappointment and concern with the NYC LGBT Center’s decision to cancel the Israeli Apartheid Week’s event and to disallow Siege Busters from continuing to meet at the Center.

“Our four organizations recently hosted an event as part of the Palestinian Queer Activist Tour on February 18th. Co-sponsored by the South Asian Lesbian Gay Association (SALGA), Q-Wave, and the Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), the event featured alQwas for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society and ASWAT Palestinian Gay Women. Reflective of the history of ALP’s dialogue with Palestinian queer activists over the last decade, the panel drew over a hundred LGBTQ folks of color and allies and resulted in a rich, fruitful discussion about the intersections of sexuality, culture, race, class, nationalism, and colonial occupation. This event made clear to us that our constituencies are eagerly interested in and in need of community spaces where they can be educated about the relevant issues and debates regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and where community members can openly discuss the ways in which these issues have impacted them on a personal level.

“We are aware that you have received many statements and letters detailing the many ways that the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is a LGBTSTGNCQ issue. As organizations also working in service of NYC’s LGBTSTGNCQ community and movements, we believe that the LGBT Center should be a space where all experiences of oppression and struggles for liberation are valued.

“Since its establishment, the Center has been a space that our communities and movements have sought to access for support against isolation, safety from homophobia and transphobia, and access to resources that we need to survive. By canceling the IAW event, you risk alienating many members who frequent your Center by sending a strong message to our communities and allies that the issues with which we struggle such as racial justice, anti-imperialism, immigration, economic justice, disability justice and militarization are not genuinely welcome to be discussed at the NYC LGBT Community Center.

“We hope you will reconsider your decision in light of the polarization that it creates amongst our diverse community. We invite you to be in conversation with our organizations as you think through this issue. Furthermore, we hope you will engage your funders who oppose the IAW event with courage and accountability in support of the concerns voiced by the very individuals and communities who use the Center.”

SALGA, Q-Wave and GAPIMNY — the three queer API organizations in New York City — also sent an ‘open letter’ to the Center:

“We, the undersigned Queer Asian Pacific Islander groups, are very concerned with the LGBT Community Center’s decision on canceling the scheduled March 5th “Party to End Apartheid” event. The Center has a long history in providing a space, for many LGBTQ and other vulnerable groups, to hold dialogue and give voices to explore conflicts, issues and resolutions. The Siegebusters Working Group, while not identified a LGBTQ group, it is a minority voice seeking to address oppression and deserves a safe space.

“In cancelling this event and disallowing Siegebusters Working Group from meeting at the Center, the center comes across as supporting censorship. The LGBTQ movement has always had many voices, and suppressing these voices does not serve to make the center a “safe haven for LGBT groups and individuals.” Social justice and open dialogue has always been a central part of LGBTQ organizing. Many of us in the QAPI Community believe that queer rights are human rights, and therefor human rights issues in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict are inexorably linked to our struggle for queer rights.

“We are pleased to know that there will be an open forum to help clarify and possibly amend this decision, and we believe that the outcome will be supported with full consideration of justice. LGBTQ minorities have always found a safe space at the center, and we hope that this space continues to exist for us. Thank you very much.”

The Center’s response to the furor was to host a community forum on March 13, which was billed as ‘a chance to talk, listen and be heard.’ “Recent events have led us to build on our process for providing space at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center,” declared the Center’s leadership on the Center’s website. “As we do, we invite members of the LGBT community to join us for an open forum to share their perspectives and provide us with feedback,” the announcement on gaycenter.org added.

The air was tense when I arrived at the Center on March 13, and the big hall on the third floor was packed, with every chair taken and even standing room filling up. Oddly enough, for a room that can hold 250-300 people and that was filled to capacity, Gay City News reporter Duncan Osborne reported a crowd of only 100 people.

Of 23 members of the Center’s board of directors, only two actually attended the forum — Mario Palumbo, Jr., the board president, and Tom Kirdahy, the at-large member of the board’s executive committee. Of the few senior staff, only the Center’s executive director Glennda Testone spoke for the Center. (Robert Woodworth, the long-serving director of meeting & conference services & capital projects, was present for the entire meeting and did respond to one informational question from Testone.) Neither of the two board co-chairs (H. Gwen Marcus and Paul Gruber) were in attendance. Nor did I see Richard Winger — the immediate past board president and (reportedly) the partner of Michael Lucas — at the forum.

The fact that only two members of a 19-member board of directors were present for a meeting of such signal importance was taken by many in the audience as an indication of a lack of interest on the part of the board in the event and as yet one more indication that the Center was not serious about dialogue with Siegebusters or with other critics of the Center’s decision to cancel that group’s IAW event.

Of the board members, I know only three: Tom Kirdahy, Ana Oliveira, Stephanie Battaglino; I have also known Glendda Testone for many years — back from when she was on staff at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) — and I like all four of them and respect the work they have done for the community over the years. By way of full disclosure, I should mention that Stephanie Battaglino has just joined the board of directors of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF), one whose board I serve as vice-president (I was in fact the first and original member of that board). Of these four individuals, my only conversation about the current controversy was a very brief one with Stephanie following a TLDEF board meeting as we descended in an elevator at the end of that meeting; other than that minute-long conversation on the day that the story broke in Gay City News, I had no interaction with the board or staff of the Center about this controversy before the March 13 forum.

That forum drew many prominent activists, including Jon Winkleman, Melissa Sklarz, Bill Dobbs, Andy Humm, Urvashi Vaid, Sarah Schulman, Lisa Duggan, Jasbir Puar, Terry Boggis, and Geleni Fontaine, as well as the union leader Stuart Applebaum and Michael Lucas himself. One transman, Tom Léger, did live blogging at the March 13 forum, in order to provide a detailed account of it to those who could not attend. Glennda Testone asked Ann Northrop to facilitate the discussion, and she moderated the frequently heated debate as well and as even handedly as one possibly could in the difficult circumstances.

On a table at the door, I found a pink sheet signed by Bill Dobbs, Brad Taylor, Emmaia Gelman, Naomi Brussel, Sammer Aboelela, Sarena Melcher that was addressed ‘to participants at the LGBT Community Center public forum – March 13, 2011’:

“Greetings to All,

“We don’t know how this meeting will go. We are (separately) members of Siegebusters, members of groups who wrote to the Center to object to the treatment of Siegebusters and queer political activists in general, organizers of the last week’s protest against the Center’s censorship, Palestinian and Jewish queers, and active participants in queer community. The Center hasn’t included any of us as “stakeholders” in planning this meeting. However, we’d like to offset some of the chaos by offering a few starting ideas.

“Some bottom-line issues:

1. The Center dealt badly with Siegebusters. An apology is due, and the Center should immediately restore Siegebusters’ access to meeting space until it can provide a transparent process for deciding otherwise. The reasons given by Center staff for cancelling the March 5 event and Siegebusters ongoing meetings in scattered e-mails and announcements (that Siegebusters is somehow not queer enough, or that queer activism on Palestine makes queer space “unsafe”) have been broadly refuted in public comment from many corners of the queer community.

2. This controversy reveals a much bigger problem at the Center – lack of transparent decision-making. Center Executive Director Glennda Testone and the Center’s Board of Directors have made major decisions about our space and community with no real community engagement.

“No one from Siegebusters was consulted before the cancellation.

“No organizers of the ensuing protest against the Center were contacted before the Center decided to hire private goons to police our community center against us.

“No public response has been made to the queers – particularly queers of color and Palestinian queers – who told the Center that this decision has marginalized them and made them unsafe.

“The forum today has been organized without input from affected groups.

“The Center must have a transparent process for making (and that allows for challenges of) decisions about who can use the Center. The Center also must open its board meetings to the public and take public comment. The board should be accountable, and it isn’t. Its operations aren’t public, its members don’t represent our communities, and it doesn’t provide the Center’s constituency with any lines of communication – although it’s clearly making decisions about us.

“What this meeting shouldn’t be about:

“The Center shouldn’t be blessing or disapproving queer political work, nor should this meeting.

“The Center shouldn’t be making political calls about the Middle East, nor should this meeting.

“It’s not a “neutral position” to shut down queer organizing or anti-occupation work because it’s “too controversial.” But having gotten itself into this mess, the Center now has the responsibility to transparently and neutrally bring folks back to the table. This meeting doesn’t satisfy that responsibility.

“Here’s hoping for a productive discussion.”

In Steven Thrasher’s March 15 news report for the Village Voice, he called the controversy ‘the Gay Battle of Zion‘ and  he wrote that

“At the heart of the debate was the right to free speech for anyone renting space in the Center versus the right of donors to have their say about who gets to use the space. That argument is far from settled…”

Thrasher paraphrased the comments I made at the forum, writing, “As transgender activist Pauline Park pointed out, the Center’s decision to cancel Siege Busters’ event was already a way of choosing sides.”

In a response to the March 13 forum, Lisa Duggan wrote a letter to Glennda Testone on March 16:

“Here is a link to VV coverage of the Center foum, if you haven’t seen it yet:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/03/more_sniping_in.php#more

I was very disturbed by a number of things said by the (only 2!) Center board members present at the forum.  Mario made it quite clear, repeatedly, that there is a ban on the word “apartheid” as applied to Israel at the Center–he called it quite simply “offensive.”  When questioned, he was clear that even an “LGBT focused” group would not be permitted to use that term for events, etc.  Though he said this was “just” his opinion, he also made it clear that it was the basis for his vote on this matter.  This is an effective ban based on point of view.  Tom voiced the belief that organizing critical of the state of Israel creates an “unsafe” environment for vulnerable people at the Center.  But the feeling of “safety” is also based on point of view.  The feelings of “safety” of queers of color, and not only anti-Zionist queer groups, are not included as important in assessing the overall sense of “safety” in this context (I use scare quotes here because I don’t think “safety” is an appropriate goal with regard to political disputes).  The result is the exodus of queer of color groups from the Center, as was noted by 2 speakers from ALP.  And, Bill Dobbs noted, using “controversy” as a rationale for excluding groups and events echoes the rationale used by the National Portrait Gallery for censoring the David Wojnarowicz video on exhibit there.

“The range of rationales provided by you and Center board members at the meeting were largely contradictory and clearly ad hoc.  I think the underlying forces at work have been shaped by the recent successes of the Palestinian BDS movement on campuses and in the LGBT communities across the U.S.  There has been a backlash mobilization, featuring efforts to frame critiques of Israeli policy as anti-Semitic, and responsible for creating a “hostile environment” for Jewish students/Center users, etc.  Since the Israeli government has quite deliberately created a “branding” campaign designed to whitewash apartheid policies by focusing on progressive policies with regard to LGBT populations, it is no surprise that this contest is being played out within the LGBT community.  The recent highly successful US tour of Palestinian queer activists, with two events in NYC (standing room only at both), has (I believe) specifically motivated the timing for this ruckus at the NYC gay community center.

“Here is an article on how this is playing out on college campuses:

http://chronicle.com/article/Education-Dept-Investigates/126742/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

It doesn’t seem to me that Center staff and board are aware of the wider context for this conflict.  Both the wider conflict over Middle Eastern politics that has been focused on LGBT populations, or the widening split among LGBT groups over the definition of what is a “gay” issue.  You and your board repeatedly stated that the Siege Busters are not an LGBT focused group, as if that were just a fact.  But the reframing of queer politics as properly and centrally concerned with the forces that oppress and constrain queer people all over the world–lack of health care, the violence of occupations–has been going on for nearly a decade now.  There is no agreement about what is properly a “gay” issue, and it is primarily prosperous white gay men who see “gay specific/only” as the right frame.  Many activists, especially lesbians, queers of color, and social justice activists generally, now use an intersectional frame for their queer activism, and do not isolate sexual identity in the way that seems “natural” to many monied white gay men.  So the Center is taking a political position on this question, without seeming to understand that this position is precisely the point that has been debated for years, and that now frames an increasingly wide gulf within LGBT communities, splitting Pride events worldwide in the past couple of years (google Pride Toronto or Pride Berlin Civil Courage Award 2010, or Pride East London 2011).

“It’s quite true as you eventually acknowledged that the decision the Center made reflected a very flawed process.  And the process from here on out will be an anti-democratic, corporate style decision–with the board of trustees making final decisions that are neither transparent nor accountable.  And as you no doubt know, boards of directors are all about funding.  There is no structural mechanism to give community “feedback,” as you call it, any teeth.  The board will do what it wants, when it wants, for whatever reasons it wants.  There are two steps that might be taken immediately to democratize the Center:  Establish clear guidelines (not the current power to ban any group at any time for any reason) with an appeals/complaint process included, and open the board meetings to the public, or at least to Center members.  A clear timetable for this series of decisions also seems necessary as a sign of minimal responsiveness to community “feedback.

“You might have noted the wide gap at the forum between the activists/orgs that opposed your decision–mostly (but not only) lesbian leaders, and queer of color organizations, and the mostly (certainly not entirely) white gay men who support the decision.  I think the split is over class and race, as well as right/left perspectives, and not primarily about gender.  Nonetheless it was striking.  That room was full of the heaviest hitters in NYC lesbian and social justice activism:  Urvashi Vaid, Leslie Cagan, Sarah Schulman, Alisa Solomon, Jasbir Puar, and many more….  All on the same “side” of this debate.  And then so many more who called or wrote:  Sue Hyde, Kate Clinton, Judith Butler.   I’m not sure you realize the weight of this consensus among so many lesbian leaders? (If you don’t know who these folks are, you should google them.)  Plus Andy Humm, Bill Dobbs, Brad Taylor, transgender activist Pauline Parks and others present, of course, as well.  And I’m not meaning to invoke celebrity here, but rather the decades of experience in LGBT organizing in New York City.  So much collected in that room at the forum it was kind of mind boggling.  In that context, the relative ignorance of the Center representatives and their supporters (as well as the absence of most board members, and the presence of that clown Michael Lucas) was quite stark.

“I’m sorry you all seemed to be digging in around your decision, even if willing to consider some process and guidelines changes.  As the weeks roll by, the LGBT Community Center is going to become whiter, richer, more male and more politically conservative–as the progressives and queers of color leave for more welcoming pastures at the ALP, QEJ building and elsewhere.  You might consider renaming it the LGBT Clubhouse, to reflect the private governance and restricted viewpoints permitted there.”

Lisa DugganProfessor, American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

On March 21, Bill Dobbs e-mailed Glennda Testone, Tom Kirdahy, and Mario Palumbo a message from 11 activists (including Dobbs himself) who were present at the event — the others being Naomi Brussel, Brad Taylor, Leslie Cagan, Pauline Park, Emmaia Gelman, Lisa Duggan, Steve Ault, Jasbir Puar, Andy Humm, and Ann Northrop:

“Dear Glennda, Mario and Tom, We’re writing to stay in touch about the issues raised in the community forum and to get an update. There were several issues on the table when we ended the forum–particularly the questions of whether the Center would invite Siegebusters to resume meeting there, and whether the Center Board of Directors would open its own meetings to the community. We are members of an ad hoc group meeting tonight to talk about all this and we would appreciate knowing whether the Center has made any decisions about any of the above. Thank you,

Bill Dobbs
Ann Northrop
Naomi Brussel
Brad Taylor
Leslie Cagan
Pauline Park
Emmaia Gelman
Lisa Duggan
Steve Ault
Jasbir Puar
Andy Humm

Later on March 21, Glennda Testone responded,

“Hi Bill and everyone, Thank you for checking in with us.  We are continuing to carefully review the community feedback from the forum and the input coming in through the online suggestion box.  This issue is a priority for us and we will keep you apprised.  One of the things we heard loud and clear at the forum was that people wanted more avenues to communicate input and concerns to the Center, so in addition to the initial community forum and the online suggestion box, we have decided to offer other community forums as well.  We also plan to share the details of our process for analyzing and revising our room rental policies in a public memo as soon as possible. Thanks again, Glennda”

Meanwhile, between the March 13 and March 24, when a monthly meeting of the Gay & Lesbian Yeshiva Day School Alumni Association (GLYDSDA) was scheduled, a controversy arose over the group’s invitation to Michael Lucas to speak at that March 24 event, which was advertised to members thusly:

“Monthly GLYDSA meeting with special guest Michael Lucas [boldface GLYDSA’s]. We will be discussing the recent events of the past few weeks that have pitted anti-Israel organizers against the Center, as well as other topics of interest to our community, followed by socializing. Michael Lucas is a well-known columnist, activist, film maker and strong supporter of gay rights and Israel. Please join us, on time, at the Center 208 W.13 St, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.

“As a follow up to the open community meeting that was poorly attended by the pro-Israel side, The Center is receiving a lot of pressure to re-allow Siegebusters and other anti-Israel groups to rejoin the center.  The Center wants to do the right thing but needs our support. Please take a moment to go to the below link and send in your thoughts — this comment box was created just for thoughts about space rental…”

After Bill Dobbs alerted Sarah Schulman and other activists about the GLYDSA event and the promotional message sent to members highlighting Lucas, Schulman then wrote to Glennda Testone on March 15,

“Dear Glennda, Clearly the elements of the pro-Seige of Gaza gay community who favor censorship, and we who favor open debate both have the same perception of your actions – namely that the Center is now officially partisan on the question of The Occupation. What are you going to do about this?”

Testone responded later that day by e-mail,

“Hi Sarah, We did not know about this and are looking into it as we process everything that was shared and conveyed at the community forum. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.”

Scott Long, a visiting fellow in the human rights program at Harvard Law School and one-time LGBT research director at Human Rights Watch, e-mailed NYU’s Gender & Sexuality Studies list this response:

“Earlier this month, as most of us know, the New York LGBT Community Center decided to draw a line around what it considered its community by banning a an event for “Israeli Apartheid Week” from its premises.  In doing so, it acceded to the demands of Michael Lucas, an adult entertainment star whose loathing for Muslims is notorious. And it acceded as well to Lucas’s contention that criticism of Israeli policy is prima facie anti-Semitism.

“At a community meeting last weekend–which I couldn’t attend because I’m working in the Balkans this week–one board member of the Center reportedly stated that the word “apartheid” would be banned at the Center if applied to Israel; he called it “offensive.” (Presumably Jimmy Carter will not be speaking at the Center anytime soon.)  Another board member reportedly said that organizing critical of the state of Israel creates an “unsafe” environment.  (I owe this information to Lisa Duggan.)  According to a New York newspaper (sometimes, I have to note, inaccurate in its coverage of the gay community) the Center’s Director, Glennda Testone told the meeting that the Center could not afford to host “an incredibly controversial and contentious event.”

“I am therefore especially shocked to find that the Center is hosting Michael Lucas himself to speak on March 24 from 8:00 – 10:00 PM… One can only conclude the Center doesn’t find *him* controversial.

“There’s no secret about Lucas’ racism.  Last year, he informed a waiting world that ” I hate Muslims, absolutely. It’s a horrible, horrible religion. It’s a plague … they’re stuck in a horrible lie, brainwashed from birth to death. And now they have been stuck in time since the 7th century. They have not contributed to civilization in any way, in any field — political thought, science, music, architecture, nothing for century after century. What do they produce? Carpets. That’s how they should travel because that’s the only way they travel without killing people.” (http://www.queerty.com/michael-lucas-muslims-have-not-contributed-to-civilization-in-any-way-for-centuries-20100714/#ixzz1GxTNbfWz)

“I don’t support banning Lucas. Let him talk; let the rest of us, who believe in the Center’s professed values of acceptance and inclusion, respond–preferably loudly.  But the inconsistency in the Center’s policy, and its increasingly explicit decision to align itself with Lucas’s overt racism, is not just an assault on tolerance–it’s intolerable. Insult has been piled on injury. I don’t know whether protests against Lucas and the Center’s cowardice are planned that night–I’m still in Serbia–but if so, please let me know. If not, we need one.”

On March 24, the date on which the GLYDSA meeting was scheduled, Steven Thrasher reported that “at the last minute, the Orthodox Jewish gays decided to call off their own meeting at the center and hold it at another location.” (”Gay Center’s Feud Over Middle Eastern Politics Flares Up Again,” Village Voice, 24 March 2011). “The group decided not to do it at the Center. The reason is simple. The Gay Center told the Jewish group that they had received threats and at the same time cannot guarantee the safety of the members of GLYDSA who attend. So the group decided to meet at a different location and I am still speaking,” said Lucas, ‘the gay-porn impresario and ardent Zionist’ (as Thrasher described him). But GLYDSA flatly contradicted Lucas’s assertion. “We are a small private group with no interest in publicity,” a group spokesman told the Voice. “We received no threats, nor did the Center ask us to ‘un-invite’ Michael Lucas.”

But Lucas charged Testone with lying about the GLYDSA event. “From this email it is very clear that the Center is lying when saying that they did not interfere by pressing GLYDSA to disinvite me,” Lucas e-mailed Gay City News (“Michael Lucas Says LGBT Center Pressed Jewish Group to Move Meeting,” Gay City News, 31 March 2011). “Yes, we were pressured to cancel Mr. Lucas,” a GLYDSA spokesperson was quoted by GCN reporter Duncan Osborne as saying.

Once again, the credibility of the claim made by the Center’s executive director that the Center had nothing to do with GLYDSA’s withdrawal of its invitation to Lucas to speak and its decision to move its monthly meeting out of the Center — just like Testone’s assertion that the Center’s decision to cancel the Siege Busters’ March 5 fundraiser — was undermined by key actors in the drama, leaving no one satisfied. Having alienated not only Siege Busters but fair-minded members of the LGBT community as well, the Center’s leadership then ham-handedly managed to alienate Michael Lucas, the figure who was instrumental in pressuring the Center to cancel the Siege Busters event that was the original flashpoint in the controversy. By this point, even those sympathetic to the Center were beginning to question Testone’s competence as well as her honesty.

The fact that Testone had come to the Center from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) — supposedly the most media savvy of all the national LGBT organizations — made her apparent inability to handle media relations seem all the more ironic.  Having done corporate public relations in my first career, I was intimately familiar with the requirements of crisis management and damage control in such situations, and in that context, I was struck by the astonishing incompetence of the Center’s executive director and its board of directors. Even setting aside the merits of the Siege Busters event as well as the underlying issue of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories, the Center’s handling of the controversy purely in terms of its own institutional self-interest was bumbling at best, dishonest and disastrous at worst. “The decision [to cancel the Siege Busters March 5 event] was made in good faith and it as not made in response to any one individual,” Testone told Gay City News (“Michael Lucas Says LGBT Center Pressed Jewish Group to Move Meeting,” Gay City News, 31 March 2011). But neither Michael Lucas and those who supported that decision nor the Siege Busters and those who were critical of it believed the party line coming out of the Center’s executive suite. By insisting on pushing a story line that no one believed, Testone and the Center’s board undermined their own credibility as well as their ability to speak as leaders of the city’s large and diverse LGBT community.

Meanwhile, on March 21, the ad hoc group of activists critical of the Center’s decision to cancel the Siege Busters fundraiser, gathered at the Audre Lorde Project in Manhattan and decided to call themselves ‘Queers for an Open LGBT Center.’ (I did not attend, as I was chairing a meeting of the board of directors of Queens Pride House that evening.) The new group followed up with a second meeting at ALP on March 31.

The controversy spread from New York to Israel itself, as Gil Shefler of the Jerusalem Post reported on the upcoming March 13 forum on March 8 (”NY activists to debate scrubbed gay center event”). Ben Weinthal’s March 27 news story for the Post (”Gay opposition rises against Israel Apartheid Week”) characterized Michael Lucas as ‘the game changer’ in the center’s decision to cancel the Siege Busters event, writing that “Lucas’s efforts garnered a rare victory in a battle arena where anti-Israel forces have gained traction over the years.”

Weinthal went on to quote Phyllis Chesler, a professor emerita of psychology and women’s studies at the City University of New York (CUNY) — whom Weinthal characterized as ‘a leading expert on contemporary anti-Semitism’ — saying that “over the years, the gay liberation movement, world-wide, has become increasingly Stalinized and ‘Palestinianized” and that “to retain their place in the larger Left, feminist and gay movement, they have identified Palestinians as the most victimized of all, and to retain their own value as outcasts and victims, they, too, especially lesbian feminists and lesbian Jewish feminists, must toe this politically correct party line.”

Chesler had the opportunity to peddle her bizarre ‘analysis’ in a rabid opinion piece (”Out for Israel: A New Answer to the Hate Speech of Queers for Palestine“) in Right Side News (’The Right News for America’) on March 26, in which she wrote of Siege Busters that “the Center trembles when they demand something.” Well, the Center did not seem to tremble much when they cancelled the Siege Busters fundraising event and banned Siege Busters from the site. And characterizing Siege Busters members as ‘Palestinianized lesbians’ not only ignores the non-lesbian members of the group (including quite a few gay men), it also raises the question as to what precisely a ‘Palestinianized lesbian’ might be — a lesbian who actually recognizes the common humanity that she shares with Palestinian people, perhaps?

Chesler concludes that “the Gay and Lesbian Center of NYC [sic] has joined [the] ranks… [of the] angry hecklers, silencers of anything that is pro-Israel or anti-Islam, intimidators, shriekers, haters, Nazi brownshirts (who view themselves as ligerationists and progressives and view the ‘other side’ as Islamophobic demons…” In one regard, Chesler has much in common with the ‘Nazi brownshirts’ she references — she seems drawn to telling the Big Lie in order to disparage those with whom she disagrees. It was not, after all, Michael Lucas who was banned by the Center, but rather the Siege Busters. But neither Chesler nor Lucas — whom she describes as ‘a heroic gay Jewish man’ — have much interest in the facts of the matter or in anything that might be described as ‘the truth’ in any sense of the word.

The truth, rather, seems to be that the leading institution in the LGBT community of New York City caved into a threat of blackmail by a right-wing Islamophobic bigot because of the fear of losing a few wealthy donors, and the Center’s executive director and board of directors then engaged in damage control that was not based on any version of truth that any of the parties — whether Michael Lucas or the Siege Busters — would recognize. Rather, the Center’s leadership insisted that Michael Lucas — the one person almost universally acknowledged by supporters and critics alike as having been instrumental in bringing about the initial decision to ban the Siege Busters — had absolutely nothing to do with that decision. In insisting again and again on an explanation that beggars credulity, the Center’s leadership has diminished if not completely undermined its own credibility within the LGBT community.

It is important to recognize that the issues involved in the controversy that the Center provoked by instituting its moratoriium went well beyond any tempest in a teacup involving an outrageously bigoted gay porn mogul; they touched on the most fundamental issues of process and accountability, community and justice:

1) Process. It seems to me that the Center’s own admission of a faulty process in coming to the decision to ban the Siege Busters and cancel their event falls far short of any genuine acknowledgement of the full extent of that failure. A decision of signal importance was made by a craven and incompetent cabal who did not even bother to consult with the full board of directors. Even so, not even all the members of the executive committee of the Center’s board bothered to attend the Center’s ‘community forum’ on March 13, suggesting that the issue of the Center’s relationship with the community it ostensibly serves was really of little interest to the executive committee, let alone the full board. The Center leadership has not provided a shred of evidence that it ever bothered even to consider the ethical obligations of running a community center.

2) Accountability and community. By its actions, the Center has made clear that it sees its primary — perhaps exclusive — responsibility as being to its wealthy donors, with little or no sense of being part of, let alone accountable to, a larger LGBT community. The ‘extensive process of consultation’ that Glennda Testone engaged in seems to have consisted in a hurried conversation with one Siege Busters member which Testone apparently used simply to issue an ultimatum and then inaccurately reported to the participants in the March 13 community forum. By caving into a threat of blackmail from a right-wing bigot, the Center made clear that for its management team, the ‘bottom line’ was indeed the bottom line.

3) Censorship and freedom of assembly. Among the most shocking aspects of the affair has been the Center’s endorsement of censorship — its willingness (eagerness, one is tempted to say) to silence discussion of an issue of signal importance to the LGBT community, locally, nationally, and globally. The insistence that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is patently absurd: there are LGBT/queer-identified people in both Israel proper and in the Palestinian territories; and more to the point, the illegal and immoral Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories has had and continues to have a significant and deleterious impact on the lives of LGBT/queer Palestinians.

4) The underlying issue. At the March 13 forum, the executive director made a point of insisting that the Center wanted to avoid taking a position on the underlying issue of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. One could argue that a community center committed to a vision of justice had an obligation to support those — including the Siege Busters — who were working to make that vision a reality. But if the Center were serious and sincere in wishing to remain neutral on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict itself, the decision should have been to issue a statement that the Center would allow the Siege Busters event to take place, but that the Center itself took no position on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and did not endorse the Siege Busters event, the group’s views, or their use of the term ‘apartheid.’ By canceling the March 5 event and banning the Siege Busters group, the Center did in fact endorse the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories, though the Center’s leadership has not been honest enough to acknowledge that fact…

By the end of March, the ad hoc group of activists critical of the Center’s decision to ban the Siege Busters adopted the name ‘Queers for An Open LGBT Center,’ and on April 5, they e-mailed Mario Palumbo, Jr., the Center board’s president:

Dear Mario–

It’s good to hear from Glennda Testone that the Center Board and Administration are engaged in a serious process of examining the Center’s room rental policies and community access to Board meetings.

As part of that process, we would appreciate the opportunity to meet with the full Board to provide some information and discuss these important issues. It was good to see you and Tom Kirdahy in attendance at the March 13 Community Forum but there’s an ongoing need for a conversation between us, as longtime users and supporters of the Center, and the full Board. Please email Steve Ault (you may recognize his name as a founding board member)…  and Ann Northrop…  to arrange a mutually agreeable meeting time.

We would like to hear back from you by Monday afternoon, April 11. Please share this memo with board members whose email addresses we don’t have. Thank you.

Bill Dobbs
Lisa Duggan
Leslie Cagan
Steve Ault
Pauline Park
John Francis Mulligan
Shawn Jain
Emmaia Gelman
Andy Humm
Bob Lederer
Ann Northrop
Scott Long
On behalf of Queers for An Open LGBT Center

On April 11, Palumbo responded with a message to the signatories, writing,

Dear Bill,

Thank you for your email.  We appreciate your recognition of the extensive amount of time and energy Center staff and board have invested in this process, including continuing to meet with community groups and members on this issue each day since the forum.  We look forward to sharing our process and timeline for the review of our space-use guidelines once completed.

As Executive Director, Glennda represents the organization in meeting with groups on the issue of our space guidelines.  Glennda and relevant staff members would be happy to meet with your group.  We would love to hear your input.  While the board has been kept apprised of Glennda’s and the staff’s activities and meetings, the board has not held meetings with individual groups. We are designing a process that will provide ample opportunity for community input into the revised policies, which the board will ultimately approve.  The board will not meet with individual groups outside this process.  Such a meeting could be seen as unfair by other stakeholders who may have different points of view and who will also want individual audiences with the board.

In addition to the avenues already in place for the community to provide feedback to the Center, we are exploring additional vehicles which will provide community members a regular opportunity to communicate concerns and meet with representatives of the Center in the future. We are taking this issue and process very seriously while at the same time maintaining our focus on serving the daily needs of the Center’s users.  We very much want to hear from you and all community members who care deeply about the Center and this issue. We look forward to doing so as part of this process and sooner, if you choose, in a meeting with Glennda and her staff. She is copied on this email. Please feel free to contact her to schedule a mutually convenient time. Thank you,

Mario

In the meanwhile, as president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House, I welcomed the Siege Busters to the only LGBT community center in the borough of Queens on May 7 for a screening of the moving documentary, “Arna’s Children,” about the work of Juliano Mer-Khamis, a social justice activist and actor murdered in March 2011. Following the screening, attendees engaged in a discussion of the issues raised in the film, including the ways in which the continued Israeli military occupation of the West Bank have produced the very conditions for armed struggle and resistance that the Israeli government and its supporters deplore.

The film screening at Queens Pride House was the very first time that an LGBT community center in New York City had hosted an event sponsored by the Siege Busters since their expulsion from the Center in Manhattan in early March. While the decision to invite the Siege Busters to Pride House prompted some discussion among members of QPH groups, no members left Pride House because of it and the organization lost no donors.

What the May 7 event demonstrated quite clearly was that an LGBT community center could host a Siege Busters event without incident, without safety or security issues, and without any fall-off of support for the organization. Above all, I and my Queens Pride House colleagues felt it was important to underscore the principle of inclusion and the need for every LGBT community center to be a safe space for discussion of issues of importance to the community — serving, as queer theorists would have it, as a ‘site of contestation’ for debate over precisely those issues that are most controversial within the community.

More than a month after the April 11 letter to the Center from Dobbs et al, there was still no word from Testone or anyone at the Center about any follow-up meeting and there was absolutely no indication that the Center had any intention of lifting the ban on the Siege Busters. Hence, the formation of Queers for an Open LGBT Center (QFOLC) as well as Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA).

QFOLC was the formalization of the ad hoc group that formed to protest the ban on the Siege Busters, and QAIA was a new group formed out of the memberships of both QFOLC and Siege Busters to mount an LGBT-specific challenge to Israeli apartheid.

QFOLC members agreed that continuing media coverage of the Center/Siege Busters controversy was necessary to keep up the pressure on the  Center, but momentum seemed to be slowing after the initial flurry of activity, and the Center’s administration seemed determined to ‘stonewall’ QFOLC on the issue of opening up the Center and ensuring inclusion there. In mid-May, an opportunity afforded itself when Steven Thrasher, a blogger for the Village Voice, contacted me, requesting an interview in order to update Voice readers on the status of the controversy.

My initial impression was that Thrasher would be interviewing me in order to extract a few quotes for a blog post on the controversy, but Thrasher decided to post a blog post consisting almost entirely of the interview itself (edited down for length), prefaced by a brief introduction which cited the Center’s declaration that it would no longer talk about the controversy; the (unnamed) Center spokesperson told Thrasher that “At this time, we are not doing any further interviews on the topic.” I actually did not know about that statement when I did the interview, but my comments were not only unusually blunt but deemed newsworthy enough that the transcript of the interview itself became the blog post, entitled, “Pauline Park Q&A: LGBT Center ‘Gives the Community the Finger’ in ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ Dispute” (VillageVoice.com, 5.12.11).

Thrasher referred to me as ‘veteran transgender activist Pauline Park — responsible for addiing the ‘T’ to Manhattan’s LGBT Center,’ and quoted me as president of the board of directors of Queens Pride House as saying that

“We [at Queens Pride House] believe that community centers, and LGBT community centers above all, should be places for those excluded by society… Controversy, far from being the reason for banning groups, should be viewed as an opportunity to engage the LGBT community around debate. Centers should be open to discussion and debate of the important issues of the day…”

Perhaps most controversial were my criticisms of the Center’s action in banning the Siege Busters. Thrasher quoted me as labeling the Center’s rationale for the ban — the allegation that the Siege Busters March 5 event was ‘controversial’ as ‘baloney’:

“They cave and they capitulated to blackmail. As the president of Queens Pride House, I would never capitulate to blackmail…”

The interview with Steven Thrasher was the only occasion on which anyone publicly pointed out the fact that Michael Lucas was the boyfriend or partner of Richard Winger, the immediate past president of the Center’s board but that neither Lucas himself nor the Center board openly acknowledged that relationship, despite the fact that it gave Lucas access to Center board members and major donors that ordinary Center users or ‘consumers’ simply would not have.

In an indication of the intensity of opinion on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Village Voice blog post prompted 58 comments, including many attacking the Siege Busters and inaccurately labeling the group as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘anti-Israel’ as well as a collaborator in terrorist activities undertaken by Hamas. But Sammer, a Palestinian member of Siege Busters, responded to those comments by writing,

“It is wonderful to see so many comments on this piece, especially the desperately pro-Israel ones.  Anyone whose mind has yet to be made up will surely notice that just about all of the pro-Israel posts rely on islamophobia and/or anti-Arab racism to make their point while the pro-Palestinian posts make no comparable racist attacks on the Jewish population.  It’s hard to blame zionists for using these tactics as they have worked for decades, but change is in the air and everyone concerned with the occupation knows it. Anyone with a memory of this issue spanning more than a few years understands how much the ground has shifted and why stories such as this one are important.  Israel’s brutality has been on open display thanks, in part, to the proliferation of independent media.  The racist language that has for so long worked to sway Americans in support of the occupation, now only underlines the brutal inhumanity with which the state treats it’s Palestinian citizens, prisoners, and occupied populations.  The comments to this story are a remarkably typical soup of racial and religious hatred, character assassination, and false accusations.  What I find exciting is that this is what every racist regime and mindset looks like in it’s waning moments… a totem of bigotry teetering on it’s own rotting foundation.  Justice for Palestine is on the way… it’s in the air and even zionists know it .”

Brad Taylor, another member of Siege Busters, wrote,

“The Center has been represented by its “leader”ship in this embroglio as a non-transparent, anti-liberationist shell of its prior embodiment as a progressive community stronghold.  If this is “dynamic and effective”, the direction of the dynamism must be the complete undermining of the credibility of the Center.  The community leadership on display here equates taking a “neutral” position on Palestine/Israel with censoring the discussion and banning the queer/allied organization that brings it up.  Unless they bring it up from the right side.  Center leadership has shown either indefensible bias or complete non-familiarity with the issues at play.  And no respect for dialogue whatsoever.  I don’t think it benefits Glennda to compare her to the authentic and politically knowledgeable Pauline Park.”

Taylor, along with John Francis Mulligan, Emmaia Gelman, and several other activists, formed Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) in May in order to bring to the LGBT community in New York City the issue of Israeli apartheid. QAIA began its activism by submitting a request for space rental at the Center, which had justified its exclusion of Siege Busters in part because Siege Busters was not an LGBT-specific group, even though a majority of Siege Busters members were in fact openly LGBT-identified.

Ordinarily, such space rental requests are answered in two-t0-three days, and the only consideration in most cases is whether there is a room available on the date requested. In this case, however, the Center staff interrogated QAIA about the rental request in detail, posing questions that would have been asked of no other group submitting a space rental request, and the decision on that request ultimately went up to the executive director and the board of directors — not surprising, given the political sensitivity of the issue.

In the face of obfuscation on the part of the Center, QAIA and QFOLC members were gearing up for an action on May 26, the day that QAIA members had requested a room. Just the day before, on May 25, the Center released a public statement on its decision:

STATEMENT ON DECISION TO ALLOW SPACE USE BY OUTSIDE QUEER IDENTIFIED GROUP
MAY 25, 2011

“The Center recently received a request for space rental by a group called “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” for the purposes of holding recurring meetings to plan for local Pride events. This afternoon we informed the group that the Center would allow access for these meetings.

“The decision is consistent with our current guidelines. Under the guidelines we provide space to community groups for a fee on a case-by-case basis, asking that they abide by the Center’s Space Use Agreement, Payment Terms, Code of Conduct and Good Neighbor Policy. Earlier this year we denied space to a group with a similar profile because among other reasons, it was not LGBT focused. In addition, the Center has a longstanding practice of allowing non-LGBT groups to meet so long as it doesn’t distract us from our primary purpose of serving the LGBT community; the circumstances surrounding the group in question diverted us from our core mission and we therefore asked it to move an event and all future meetings.

“LGBT New Yorkers are facing urgent issues including: youth homelessness, violence, bullying, substance abuse, health disparities and the other myriad of challenges our community members encounter each and every day. The Center is here to help address these issues 365 days a year. Six thousand people pass through our doors every week. We have a responsibility to meet the vast and diverse needs of this community, and our number one priority is delivering critical services to the people we directly serve.

“The Center also provides space for a variety of LGBT voices in our community to engage in conversations on a range of topics. The Center does not have a position on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, nor does it endorse the viewpoints of this group or any others that use rooms here. This is a complex issue, and there is a tremendous diversity of viewpoints within the LGBT community.

“We are currently undergoing a review of our space-use guidelines to ensure we have the most robust standards moving forward. As an interim step we are asking all new and existing groups to sign a Space Use Pledge of Non-Discrimination as part of their rental agreements. The group we approved today has signed this pledge.

“Most recently we have also engaged the firm Ritchie Tye Consulting, Inc. to help facilitate a thorough review of the Center’s current standards and procedures for determining space use by outside groups, with the ultimate goal of strengthening our guidelines. Ritchie Tye Consulting, Inc. is a New York-based organizational development consulting firm with a long tenure of work with the LGBT and HIV/AIDS communities.

“The firm has already been working closely with Center leadership on a process that includes opportunities for input from a diverse cross-section of Center and community stakeholders through interviews and small groups, and will deliver recommendations to the full Board of Directors later this year. At the conclusion of this process, we will apply the newly adopted guidelines to all existing, recurring and new space-for-fee requests.

“The Center continues to welcome community input and feedback on this topic through our online suggestion box.”

Extraordinarily, the Center did not send the statement to members of QAIA and QFOLC, merely e-mailing QAIA a document confirming the approval of the room rental request. On that Thursday, QAIA and QFOLC members held a joint meeting in Room 412 (the room rented to QAIA for the meeting), and then split into the two groups to consider matters pertinent to each.

On May 25, in response to the Center’s statement, Michael Lucas posted a message leveling a new threat against the organization:

“Dear friends, I have a very unfortunate update. The group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid was just granted the ability to have their meetings in the LGBT Center. As I always believed, the LGBT Center of NY is an anti-Israeli nest and we did not put enough pressure on them to stop their efforts to harm the Jewish state. But we have the power to stop them. The LGBT Center receives city, federal, foundation, and private funding. We have to work on reaching the government officials and ask them to cut that funding unless the Center changes its decision. We should also reach out to different organizations and individuals and collect money to take a full page ad in the New York Times Magazine. I know this is not cheap and I myself will generously contribute. I also believe that their support of political activity may jeopardize their ability to maintain tax-free status. I would appreciate hearing your thoughts, input, and suggestions. I do need your help.”

The hyperbolic language and the hysterical tone were typical of Lucas’s communication style, but despite making some absurd claims, the threat was based on a concrete reality: the Center has become dependent on funding from the City of New York, which has become an increasingly large part of the Center’s budget since Council Speaker Peter Vallone, Sr. gave the Center its first multi-million-dollar grant in 2001 as part of his campaign for the Democratic mayoral nomination.

It may nonetheless be useful to point out the absurdity of three distinct claims that Lucas made in this message to his supporters:

1) The claim that “the LGBT Center of NY is an anti-Israeli nest” is an extraordinary one, since Jewish groups — including the Gay & Lesbian Yeshiva Day School Alumni (GLYDSA) — meet regularly at the Center, while the Siege Busters remain banned from the Center; if that’s an ‘anti-Israeli nest,’ it’s a rather strangely ineffective one.

2) The claim that the Center is engaged in ‘efforts to harm the Jewish state’ is also an extraordinary and absurd one; all the Center did on May 25 was to concede the right of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) to meet at the Center; and QAIA, in turn, simply used that meeting space to begin planning for marching in pride parades in Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan; so there have been no ‘efforts to harm the Jewish state’ on anyone’s part going on at the Center.

3) The claim that the Center’s “support of political activity may jeopardize their ability to maintain tax-free status” is perhaps the most absurd of all. There are no implications for the Center’s federal tax status for simply renting rooms to a political organization. The Center regularly rents space to the Stonewall Democrats of New York City (SDNYC), a political club explicitly focused on party politics and electioneering, and has done so for years; no one has ever claimed that renting space to SDNYC and other political clubs has any consequences for the Center’s 501(c)(3) status; in such cases, the Center is simply renting space to a political organization, and is not in any way implicated in its activities.

QFOLC, in turn, responded to Michael Lucas’s statement, declaring:

“…Terrifyingly, it proposes that the Center is not allowed to host any political group meetings, and that the Center is itself an ‘anti-Israel nest.’ (What does a pro-Israel nest look like, then?!) If ever there were a time to shore up the Center’s principles of openness and commitment to queers’ long history of political organizing, it’s now.” (QFOLC, “Michael Lucas kicks up again,” openthecenter.blogspot.com, 5.26.11).

And that scourge of progressive inclusion, Phyllis Chesler, again reared her ugly head, screeching hysterically in a blog post misleadingly entitled, “NYC Queers for Jihad,”

“The LGBT ‘queers’ [sic] had threatened to storm or ‘surge’ into the Center if they did not receive official approval for their group meeting. ‘Surging’ and ‘storming,’ Arab street mob behavior, is a vision and a tactic that… reminds me of Nazi Brownshirt behavior. Think Kristallnacht. Civilians and men in uniform breaking Jewish shop windows, breaking Jewish bones, burning Jewish books, eventually burning millions of living Jews…” (“NYC Queers for Jihad,” Front Page Mag, 5.30.11).

Aside from ignoring the fact that a majority of members of Siege Busters and QAIA are in fact Jewish, Chesler’s bizarre rant mischaracterizes the action that was planned: had QAIA been denied the space to meet, QAIA and QFOLC members were planning simply to find an empty room at the Center, and if none were available, to hold the meeting in the lobby of the Center  — to do a ‘sit-in,’ as it were, and nothing like ‘surging’ or ‘storming.’

And of course, the larger point is that neither QAIA nor Siege Busters nor QFOLC are in any sense anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic; rather, QAIA is committed to challenging the apartheid regime that governs and controls the lives of Palestinians under the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories, the Siege Busters are working to break the cruel and illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip, and QFOLC is committed to ensuring an open and inclusive LGBT Community Center.

But the outrageous falsehoods and the hysterical tone of both Chesler and Lucas may be taken as indicating the effectiveness of all three groups in challenging the Center’s illegitimate ban of the Siege Busters and the Center leadership’s betrayal of the values and principles upon which the Center was founded.

It is also worth noting that the Center, through its actions, has put itself in an untenable position. The Center maintains a ban on the Siege Busters, because they used the phrase ‘Israeli apartheid in the name of the event that they planned for March 5; yet on March 25, the  Center leadership issued a statement explicitly recognizing the right of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to meet at the Center even though QAIA includes the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid’ in its very name — one of the reasons cited by Mario Palumbo, Jr. (the Center board’s president) for banning Siege Busters in the first place. Given the May 25 policy statement, the only conceivable rationale for maintaining the ban on Siege Busters could be that the group is non-LGBT specific; but since many non-LGBT specific groups continue to meet at the Center (including a host of 12-step groups), that ‘policy’ clearly is not being enforced by the Center administration.

Perhaps the rationale for maintaining the ban is that Siege Busters is both a non-LGBT-specific group and once used the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ in the name of an event it was planning; but if so, the Center has not said so. And so the Center leadership seem to have painted themselves into a corner, defending a non-policy that is not only indefensible but that is not even coherent.

The inability of the Center’s leadership to respond coherently to the challenge from QFOLC and QAIA was made all the more evident in the news story on the QAIA meeting and the change of Center policy filed by Duncan Osborne for Gay City News on June 1 (“LGBT Center ‘Apartheid,’ Access Controversies Reignited“). Rather than a comment from the executive director or the board president, the Center provided the reporter only with an e-mail message from Cindi Creager, the director of communications and marketing who at one time was a colleague of Glennda Testone’s at GLAAD:

“We held a community forum on March 13th,” Creager wrote to Osborne in response to his request for an interview. “Ann Northrop moderated and board members were present. And our board meetings are not open to the public, but input from the community is welcome and encouraged,” Creager added, neatly evading the most pertinent questions and avoiding any comment at all on the renewed threat of a boycott from Michael Lucas. But Lucas himself had no hesitation in commenting for the record. “This group has had their first and last meeting in the Center,” Lucas e-mailed Osborne in response to a query from the GCN reporter. “If someone fucks with Israel, I fuck them back. And I usually win,” Lucas added in typically crude and adversarial language.

The Jerusalem Post, ever a sentinel of right-wing opinion in Israel, reported on the latest developments in the controversy as well (Benjamin Weinthal, “NY LGBT Center slammed as center of anti-Israel activity,” Jerusalem Post, 6.1.11).

On June 2, in response to the renewed threat of a boycott by Michael Lucas — this time, ominously focusing on pressuring elected officials to cut funding to the Center from the City of New York — the Center again capitulated to blackmail, reversing course yet again and issuing a statement banning Queers Against Israeli Apartheid just as it had banned the Siege Busters three months previously:

Significantly, the Center did not send this statement directly to either QAIA or QFOLC or the Siege Busters Working Group, and even more significantly, the Center’s media contact (Cindi Creager) refused to answer any questions about the new ‘policy’ when asked by Duncan Osborne. The Gay City News reporter told me that Creager merely referred him to her press release, as if the release itself would answer any question he might have about the apparent inconsistencies and contradictions in the statement itself.

To my mind, one of the most important questions in examining the reasons for the reversal of the May 25 policy statement by the Center on June 2 was whether calls from elected officials to the Center prompted that abrupt reversal. In his June 2 report for Gay City News, Duncan Osborne asked that question of Cindi Creager (the Center’s director of communications and marketing), Stuart Applebaum, and Michael Lucas (“Swift, Stinging Criticism of LGBT Center ‘Moratorium’,” Duncan Osborne, Gay City News, 6.3.11). I was struck by the fact that the three of them gave three different answers to that crucial question. Osborne quoted Lucas as saying, “I don’t know, you should ask them.” Speaking on behalf of the Center, Creager e-mailed Osborne to tell her that the Center had not been contacted by any ‘elected officials.’ But Applebaum “said he had spoken with many people, including elected officials or their staff,” Osborne reported. “I’m aware of offices of elected officials reaching out to try to save the Center from itself,” Applebaum was quoted by Osborne as saying. “I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what calls were made, but people at every level said they were going to call to find out what was going on,” Applebaum told Osborne, directly contradicting the official party line coming out of the Center, as voiced by Creager.

The question as to whether elected officials pressured the Center to reverse its May 25 policy statement and expel QAIA just as the organization’s leadership had the Siege Busters in early March is far from a purely academic one: rather, the lack of transparency on the part of the Center board and staff here was replicated by a lack of transparency on the part of elected officials who — Applebaum clearly indicated — were involved in working behind the scenes to get the Center to abruptly reverse course and ban QAIA as well as the Siege Busters.

Indeed, it is quite possible that it was the city’s highest-ranking openly LGBT elected official — New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn — who was behind the abrupt reversal of policy. The Council Speaker is universally recognized as the second most powerful person in New York City government, and Quinn is an undeclared but active candidate for the Democratic nomination for mayor in 2013. If Applebaum, as president of the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union — one of the largest in the city — used that position to pressure the Council Speaker to pressure the Center, there would be not only the problematic misuse of power by the Center’s board and executive director, but by a major labor union and by a leading (openly lesbian) elected official as well.

New York State Senator Thomas K. Duane (D-Manhattan), in whose Senate district the LGBT Community Center is located, was asked at the Queens Pride Parade on June 5 what his response was to the participation of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid in that event as well as the controversy surrounding the Center’s expulsion of QAIA and Siege Busters. “I know about the difficult discussions around the Center’s policies for meetings, and we have spoken with both sides,” Duane told Gay City News (Winnie McCroy, “The World, Again, Comes to Queens,” Gay City News, 6.8.11).  “It’s a very, very tough issue, and one that I think will eventually be resolved… But, they are a group that is in solidarity, that share a point of view represented by a tremendous number of peopled,” added Duane, the first openly gay person elected to the New York State Senate. “But with all of that said, there are people who simply disagree with them. It’s unfortunate, yet appropriate that it be played out with the Center being in the middle of it.”

Another elected official who was equally evasive and non-committal when asked directly about the Center’s ban on QAIA and Siege Busters was Daniel Dromm, who in November 2009 was elected to represent the 25th district in the New York City Council. “I don’t know exactly what their stand is,” Dromm said of QAIA,” although I have heard some of the press around it,” he told Gay City News  (Winnie McCroy, “The World, Again, Comes to Queens,” Gay City News, 6.8.11). “I know that the [Queens] Pride Committee, when they discussed the participation of that group here, felt that, look, they’re gay, they should be allowed to march and to express their viewpoint. We all agreed on that,” added Dromm, who along with Jimmy Van Bramer became the first openly gay person elected to public office in Queens (Van Bramer was elected to represent the 26th Council district in November 2009). Significantly, Dromm did not respond to the Gay City News reporter’s question about the Center’s newly announced policy banning QAIA and the Siege Busters as well as discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The fact that Dromm, Van Bramer, and especially Duane are all personal friends and political allies of Speaker Quinn — who has made a very public show of her continued support for the Center while at the same time refusing to comment on the Center’s ban on QAIA and Siege Busters — suggests that the openly gay and lesbian elected officials in New York are unwilling to take any stand on the issue that could potentially alienate voters and/or donors to their own campaigns.

In any case, the refusal of the Center’s board president and executive director to speak directly — or even honestly — even to LGBT media outlets such as Gay City News underlined the rejection of any concept of accountability to the LGBT community which the LGBT Community Center ostensibly serves.

As Duncan Osborne quoted me for his Gay City News report, “The Center was intended to be a location for the open and free discussion of controversial issues; it was never intended to be solely a social services provider. This was a cowardly act of betrayl of the Center’s mission by its executive director and its board of directors… They are no longer a community center.”

Significantly, Michael Lucas was widely perceived by those who supported the Center’s decision to ban QAIA — just like the decision to ban the Siege Busters — as having been instrumental in prompting that decision. “According to observers of the dispute, Lucas played a crucial role in waging the campaign against the center furnishing anti-Israel groups, including Siege Busters and QAIA, with space to organize activities, Benjamin Weinthal wrote in his report for the right-wing Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal, “New York LGBT Center ejects Queers Against Israel Apartheid,” Jerusalem Post, 6.5.11); and this, despite the Center’s own refusal to recognize Lucas’s role in the reversal of its May 25 decision to allow QAIA to meet at the Center. Typically, the Jerusalem Post reporter did not even bother to seek comment from QAIA members, contenting himself with quoting Michael Lucas and Stuart Applebaum as the only sources that he contacted for comment; Weinthal simply and lazily took a comment from the QFOLC website as well as two excerpts from the Center’s press release and dropped them into a ‘report’ obviously designed to defend the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories at all cost.

On June 7, Naomi Brussel and Brad Taylor of Out-FM — the LGBT program on WBAI Radio in New York City — interviewed three organizational representatives, who discussed the ongoing controversy. Sherry Wolf represented the Siege Busters Working Group, John Francis Mulligan represented Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, and I represented Queers for an Open LGBT Community Center. (A podcast of the Out-FM interview is available on Out-FM.org.)

In response to the Center’s ban on QAIA, members decided to hold a meeting in the lobby of the Center on the very date that their second meeting was scheduled to be held there; and so at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, June 8, members of QAIA, supported by QFOLC, the Siege Busters Working Group and LGBT community members, gathered in the lobby of the Center to hold the meeting that the Center had a contractual obligation to host. More than 50 individuals — at times approaching 60 people — crowded into the Center’s lobby to plan for the upcoming Brooklyn Pride Parade and New York City Pride March as well as to consider a possible action at the Center Garden Party on June 20. Duncan Osborne reported on the action for Gay City News (“Critics of Israeli Occupation Occupy Center Lobby,” Gay City News, 6.8.11).

The next step in the campaign for an open center was the QFOLC action at the Center Garden Party on June 20, the Center’s biggest fundraising event of the year. The Garden Party began in the Center’s tiny garden years ago but then moved to a playground/ basketball court a few blocks down the street; in that location, community organizations staffed tables with literature about their activities. But the Center eventually moved the Garden Party to the Chelsea Piers, where it has since become a corporate food fest, with restaurants providing food a different booths to the thousand or so attendees who now pay $100 or more for tickets.

I attended the Center Garden Party in June 2010, and while a pleasant experience with good food and an opportunity to catch up with friends and acquaintances. A few elected officials made brief references to the need for legal and political equality, while the speech by Glennda Testone simply thanked attendees for their support and reminded them of the need for more money to keep the Center running. Most of the attendees were middle class to upper middle class gay and lesbian white professionals. Other than the drag queens who were the ‘talent,’ there were only a handful of transgendered people, including Stephanie Battaglino, who had at that point recently joined the Center board. Most of the attendees were not activists, which was perhaps not surprising, given how nearly entirely denuded of political content the event had become.

And the 2011 Garden Party would have been just as denuded of political content had it not been for Queers for an Open LGBT Center and our vocal and colorful protest. Dozens of us positioned ourselves on the long corridor along the West Side Highway leading to the entrance to the pier on which the Garden Party was being held. We handed out more than 500 leaflets informing Garden Party-goers of the issues at hand; our leaflet reiterated our demand that  the Center:

1) lift the ban on the Siege Busters and Queers Against Anti-Israeli Apartheid,
2) hold open board meetings, and
3) reinstate free speech at the Center.

The full QFOLC statement, which was drafted by Steve  Ault — a co-founder and member of the original Center board — and other members of QFOLC, was printed on the back fo the flyer, and read as follows:

“New York’s LGBT Community Center has served as an indispensable resource since its founding in 1983. But now, something has gone very, very wrong at the Center. Its Board has turned the simple matter of renting space to queer groups for organizing into a giant mess. Groups have been told they can meet and then are banned. Suddenly there’s a cloud of censorship on 13th Street. Claiming it “has been forced to divert significant resources from its primary purpose of providing programming and services to instead navigating between opposing positions involving the Middle East conflict,” the Center announced “a moratorium, effective immediately, on renting space to groups that organize around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Summarily canceled were scheduled meetings of the group, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA), which the Center had approved only eight days earlier. One such meeting took place without incident. Previously, the Center banned the group, Siege Busters, from further meetings because of its organizing around Israeli Apartheid Week. Center Executive Director, Glennda Testone, stated that Siege Busters was expelled because it was both non-LGBT and controversial, with neither factor alone being grounds for refusing meeting space. Obviously, QAIA met this announced criteria. Also obvious ― now ― is that the banning of Siege Busters and the criteria were a smokescreen for something else. By banning queer political organizing groups in response to “controversy,” the Center is moving into a dangerous world of policing the queer community on behalf of outside forces ― forces that are openly trying to silence anyone with a position different from their own. Making matters worse, by banning discussion of the Middle East conflict, the Center is, indeed, taking a side: implicitly endorsing Israel’s policy on Palestine as well as the dangerous idea that anyone who objects to this policy is “anti-Semitic.” Only groups opposing that occupation had been meeting there, so the ban affects them only. Despite the extreme controversy surrounding this issue, these groups have affirmed the right of those supporting the opposite position to meet at the Center as well.

“The Center’s “primary purpose” as described in its release is historically inaccurate. The Center was founded in 1983 to provide meeting and office space to community groups for the purposes of organizing, developing programs and rendering services. That the Center now itself performs some of these functions is great, but this role should never be used as an excuse to negate its founding purpose by limiting access to community groups. Contrary to the Center’s claim, there is nothing around which to “navigate.” Republicans, Democrats, socialists and anarchists have met at the Center; so have Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and atheists. Before this latest statement from the Center leadership, no one―including the Center itself ― had ever suggested that the provision of rental space implied an endorsement of the groups renting rooms or of their political perspectives. Siege Busters was banned under pressure from anti-free speech, Islamophobe Michael Lucas who threatened to organize a donor boycott of the Center. When QAIA was briefly allowed to meet,  he threatened to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times against the Center, calling it an “anti-Israeli nest.” Thugs like Lucas are the last people the Center should be listening to when developing policy. Clearly, secret conversations are taking place behind the closed doors of the Center’s boardroom.  But if the word “Community” in the Center’s name has any meaning, we all have every right to know what’s going on. Instead of responding positively to requests from community activists to meet on this matter, the Center board hired a consulting firm to formulate a space utilization policy at exorbitant cost that is a complete waste of community resources. Calls for open board meetings have been heard before. Now, with the latest flip-flop and ever lengthening trail of obfuscation, the need for the Center to heed this call is more urgent than ever.”

In a rare moment of contact with the Center board of directors, Andy Humm and a few other QFOLC members confronted Mario J. Palumbo, Jr. about the board’s refusal to meet with QFOLC. When asked directly by Humm if Palumbo would raise the QFOLC request for a meeting with the Center’s board, the board president initially seemed to indicate that he would raise it; but when Humm asked Palumbo if he would advocate for such a meeting, he said that he would not. Palumbo then started to say something about ‘our Center,’ but Humm reminded him that the Center belonged to the entire community. At that point, Palumbo stormed off, leaving QFOLC members present with yet one more confirmation of the current Center leadership’s disdain for the LGBT community and refusal to be accountable to it.

I reported on the confrontation with Mario Palumbo at the second meeting/sit-in of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid at the Center, which took place on July 5.

As on June 8, the Center management did nothing to try to expel QAIA members who occupied the Center’s lobby from 6-8 p.m. on July 5. “The Center, which declined to comment on this latest QAIA move, took no action against the two unapproved QAIA meetings and appeared to be content to let the group meet,” Duncan Osborne reported for Gay City News (Duncan Osborne, “Queer Critics of Israel to Test LGBT Center Ban,” Gay City News, 7 July 2011).

Comic relief came in the form of a gay man who held up a banner proudly declaring himself one of the “American Friends of Likud,” complete with the Star of David superimposed on the American flag; attached to his Likud-friend banner was a string of three Israeli flags, which he anchored to the lubricant container of the Center’s front desk. Precisely what the man thought he was accomplishing was unclear, but QAIA members found his presence a source of considerable amusement.

Michael Lucas blasted the Center for refusing to bodily expel QAIA members. “It is up to the Center how they want to approach intruders and hooligans that are trying to illegally occupy its premises,” Lucas told the Jerusalem Post (Benjamin Weinthal, “Support for gays, Hamas at NY’s LGBT Center sparks fury,” Jerusalem Post, 7.10.11).  “I think the center, by allowing this, is setting a bad precedent,” Lucas added. Despite the Center’s previous declaration that it would not comment any further on the Siege Busters/QAIA controversy, its communications and marketing director did in fact respond to a request from the Jerusalem Post for a comment. “The QAIA had a sit-in at the center this past week in violation of center policy,” Cindi Creager told the Post’s Weinthal. “It was very small. We are not permitting them to meet and the moratirum remains in place,” added Creager.

But the Jerusalem Post story on the July 5 QAIA sit-in could hardly be called reporting in any meaningful sense; Weinthal did not contact QAIA (or Siege Busters, or QFOLC, for that matter) for comment, instead relying only on one quote from Emmaia Gelman that he extracted from Duncan Osborne’s report for Gay City News. And the false impression created by the headline and the story that QAIA supported Hamas was unsubstantiated by the reporter; indeed, since QAIA does not support Hamas, Weinthal’s decision not to contact QAIA for comment must have been deliberate, as any QAIA member would have told him that QAIA had no connection with Hamas. But such is the climate of fear and intimidation created by the bullying behavior of ultra-Zionist pro-Israel propagandists that the Jerusalem Post story would be regarded in certain circles as objective journalism.

In the meanwhile, Michael Lucas and his partner, Richard Winger, continued to be active in the community, participating in a Lambda Legal fundraiser on Fire Island on July 9. The listing of Lucas as a sponsor of the July 9 Pines event prompted QFOLC to write to Kevin Cathcart, Lambda Legal’s executive director:

Dear Kevin,

Lambda Legal is one of the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) organizations in the country, and it is because of our recognition of the prominence and importance of your organization that we are writing to you to express our concern about the inclusion of Michael Lucas in the list of sponsors of your 33rd annual Fire Island event on July 9.

We fully recognize the need for any 501(c)(3) organization to raise funds to support its work, especially in an economic downturn such as we are now experiencing. However, we feel compelled to bring to your attention the involvement of Mr. Lucas in the operations of the LGBT Community Center — in particular, his pernicious influence in persuading the Center to expel and ban the Siege Busters Working Group in March of this year and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA) in May.

It was the ban on the Siege Busters and the silencing of free speech at the Center that prompted us to form Queers for an Open LGBT Center (QFOLC). Unfortunately, the ban on both of those organizations remains in effect to this day, and represents an unprecedented as well as entirely unjustified exclusion of individuals and groups working on behalf of the liberation of the Palestinian people — including LGBT Palestinians — who currently struggle to survive under an illegal and oppressive Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Michael Lucas has consciously and deliberately mischaracterized both groups as being ‘anti-Israel hate groups’ and its members as anti-Semitic — despite the fact that many members of both groups are Jewish — while he himself has made outrageously bigoted statements about Arabs and Muslims.  Lucas has been quoted as saying, “I hate Muslims, absolutely. It’s a horrible, horrible religion. It’s a plague.” Lucas has also said of Muslims, “They have not contributed to civilization in any way, in any field — political thought, science, music, architecture, nothing for century after century. What do they produce? Carpets. That’s how they should travel because that’s the only way they travel without killing people.” And Lucas has slandered the proposed Islamic cultural center on Park Place in Manhattan as a “monument to Muslim terrorism.”

We have to assume that Lambda Legal as an organization does not endorse Michael Lucas’s virulently Islamophobic and anti-Arab/anti-Palestinian bigotry or his efforts to exclude QAIA and the Siege Busters from the Center and repress queer political speech — in particular, his campaign to marginalize Arab and Muslim LGBT people and to silence community members who speak out against racism and bigotry. However, we would have to ask whether Lambda Legal would want to be seen as legitimizing the position as an LGBT community leader that Lucas so obviously wants to claim for himself.

Sincerely,

Naomi Brussel

Leslie Cagan

Bill Dobbs

Emmaia Gelman

Andy Humm

John Francis Mulligan

Pauline Park

Brad Taylor

for

Queers for an Open LGBT Center (QFOLC)

On July 11, Cathcart responded,

Dear Pauline, and all –

Thanks for your letter regarding Lambda Legal and sponsors of our Fire Island event.   You are right in assuming that Lambda Legal does not endorse any donor’s political views; we have tens of thousands of donors every year and they cover a wide spectrum of opinions on LGBT issues and beyond.  In some cases, I think that all they share in common is a desire to support Lambda Legal’s work.  Any listings we have show names of people who support Lambda Legal; not the reverse. It would be impossible for us to police the views of all of these donors, and any attempt to do so would take time and energy away from the work we exist to do and would, I believe, not serve the interests of our community.

Lambda Legal has been successful for nearly four decades by sticking to our mission statement and working to achieve full recognition of the civil rights of LGBT people and those with HIV through impact litigation, education, and public policy work, and I think that our work, accomplishments, and positions are clear to all who follow LGBT and HIV-related civil rights. I appreciate your taking the time to write with your concerns.

Kevin

At the same time that QFOLC was writing to Lambda Legal to express concern about Lucas’ prominent role in the Lambda event in the Pines, Lucas himself was writing an angry letter to the Center denouncing the executive director and the board president for allowing QAIA to continue to meet there despite the official ‘moratorium’:

Glennda and Mario-

This is an open letter to you and I am copying it to others. It came to my attention that you, yet again, allowed a group of anti-Semites to meet on your premises, in the lobby of your Center.

http://www.chelseanow.com/articles/2011/07/07/gay_city_news/news/doc4e15ce498112c075992096.txt

This time, the size of the group was larger and consisted of several anti-Israeli groups. As I said before, the Center has become a magnet for anti-Semitism. The difference between previous meetings and the meetings that took place on June 8th and July 5th is that these times the meetings were more visible, instead of meetings and anti-Israeli fundraising campaigns behind closed doors. Meetings have now moved into a public space in the Center’s lobby for everyone to see.

Again, you have publicly lied by saying that you would put a moratorium on these meetings, since the keep happening on larger scales.

I, as others have, made up my mind long ago that you are vigorously anti-Semitic. Let me state that nobody cares if you have Jews on board, if there are self-loathing Jews taking part in anti-Semitic meetings that you host, or if there are self-hating Jews supporting you. If you think that you bought insurance by having a handful of Jews on your side, then you are mistaken. Don’t think you are fooling anyone.

The American Jewish body overwhelmingly opposes your actions and is disgusted by them.

As you know, there is a new meeting scheduled in your lobby for August 10th. If this meeting goes on, then I do hope that you will be forced to resign, since the Center deserves better leadership.

I am including your contact information for anyone who would like to contact you.

Glennda Testone

Executive Director of the LGBT Center

212-620-7310

glennda@gaycenter.org

Mario Palumbo

President of the Center board

212-875-4900

mpalumbo@millenniumptrs.com

Michael Lucas

What response, if any, the Center gave to Lucas, was not made public.

On 22 November 2011, Steve Ault provided an update on the Center controversy regarding his own personal attempt to meet with the  Center’s executive director:

So, given my unique position as both a former board member of the Center and now an activist with QAIA and QFOLC, I decided to take the initiative of contacting former Center board members of a like persuasion on the issue of the ban to see if there may be something of substance we could accomplish given our relationship to the Center.

First, I contacted Chris Collins, also a founding board member, who then told me he was opposed to the ban. Next, I contacted Michael Seltzer, a former board president, who had written to Gay City News in opposition to the ban and against those pressuring the Center with threats of withholding funding. We both agreed that a meeting with Center leadership, including board members, was the correct way to proceed, with Michael making the contacts and coordinating arrangements. Further, he suggested contacting Janet Weinberg, also a former board president.

Michael reported that Executive Director Glennda Testone and Board President Mario Palumbo agreed to meet with the four of us. Initial contact was made in July but a mutually convenient date for the meeting couldn’t be found until early October.

As the meeting date was approaching, Michael suggested that I write a memo on strategy so that we would all be on the same page. As I was putting the finishing touches on the memo Michael called to inform me that as a consequence of my participation in the meetings/sit-ins in the Center lobby, all involved were requesting that I withdraw from the meeting.

Of course, I protested in no uncertain terms and said among other things that my participation in these meetings was hardly a secret. In closing I said the request was completely unacceptable. Michael promised to get back to me again before the meeting. He never did. Soon after our conversation I called Chris Collins who said he was in a meeting and would get back to me soon. He never did. I left a message with Janet Weinberg. She returned my call some days later but at the time I was at the edge of cell phone reception and in a few seconds the call dropped. Upon returning home I left another message with her. She never called back.

It appears that Michael had a number of conversations with Glennda prior to the scheduled meeting, and I believe she managed to talk him into supporting the ban. He maintained to me that the Center’s continuing ability to provide services to those in need is essential and is, in essence, a “class issue.” I believe Michael then masterminded my exclusions with numerous conversations to which I was not privy.

I learned a number of things along the way that were never revealed to me as confidential information, but I assume there was an implicit understanding that they were so. However, given current circumstances, the hell with it.

* The Center has been viciously attacked, put under pressure, and threatened by the Zionist side. Two people particularly named (one assumes there are more) are Stuart Appelbaum (no surprise) and Jerrold Nadler. Some of these attacks/threats have been personal in nature (but not necessarily made by the aforementioned).

* The Center lost a considerable amount of government funding (was it $300,000?) for reasons that are not clear

* Glennda was particularly interested in the circumstances around the banning of NAMBLA.

* The Center is completely freaked out by this entire matter and has developed a bunker mentality.

* Michael Lucas is essentially a gadfly and has not been influential in determining policy.

By March 2012, a full year had gone by, and the Center had failed to fulfill its promise to produce a room rental policy, nor had it acted to lift the ban on Siege Busters and QAIA, and so QAIA members decided to mount a teach-in/demonstration on March 3.

QAIA issued a media advisory announcing its teach-in/demonstration on March 3:

Occupy the Center!

Protest censorship by New York’s LGBT Community Center

WHO: Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and other groups (list below)

WHEN: Saturday, March 3, 2012 from 4-6 PM

WHERE: LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13^th St. between 7^th and 8^th Avenues

WHY: One year ago, amidst great controversy, the LGBT Center banned groups opposing Israeli apartheid. Protesters will confront the Center’s censorship policy and its secret closed-door board of directors meetings.

It’s been a year since NY’s LGBT Community Center banned Siegebusters, the anti-occupation organizers, from using space at the Center. Since that time NYC Queers Against Israeli Apartheid has also been banned from the Center—and a “moratorium” has been imposed on ANY discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (meaning “discussion” of support for Palestinian rights). The Center’s board promised, but never delivered, a policy revision clarifying their rental/access/programming guidelines.

On Saturday, March 3, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week, protesters will enact an end to the ban on Palestinian-related organizing at the Center, and re-institute the Center’s original access policy of full inclusion for all queers who organize for liberation. The “moratorium” is over!

The wealthy and powerful 1% should not be allowed to silence the voices of the 99%. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid will defy the ban on March 3 — Occupy the Center!

DEMANDS:

1. End the ban on Palestine solidarity organizing at the Center

2. Open the Center to all who respect its stated mission.

The post Israeli/Palestinian conflict breaks out at the NYC LGBT Community Center appeared first on Pauline Park.

Invisible No More
By John Caldwell
The Advocate
15 March 2005

It’s been a year since an offensive feature in Details inspired unprecedented activism and visibility among gay and lesbian Asians. So how much has really changed?

While Andy Wong has gotten over what he calls “the biggest mistake of my life”—joining the Mormon Church in high school—he still struggles with being gay in his traditional Chinese immigrant family. Now living in San Francisco, the 24-year-old activist grew up in a conservative neighborhood in San Diego. When he came out at 18, he says, his mother at first accepted his homosexuality, then backed away. “She desperately wants me to have children and has mentioned more than a few times that she wished I would turn temporarily straight so that I could conceive a grandchild for her,” he says.
Filmmaker Quentin Lee, who grew up in Hong Kong before immigrating to Montreal, has faced his own demons. “Long Duk Dong traumatized my entire generation of Asian males,” says the 34-year-old, referring to Gedde Watanabe’s extreme Asian stereotype in the 1984 John Hughes comedy Sixteen Candles. Twenty years later, young gay Asians looking for people like themselves still have few choices, Lee notes: “Asian men are often left out of popular culture, and gay Asian men are nonexistent.”

That invisibility is one reason both gay and straight Asians were outraged by Details magazine’s “Gay or Asian?” stab at humor. When Wong first saw that April 2004 feature he was offended but not surprised by the sarcastically captioned photograph of a young, spiky-haired Asian man dressed in metallic shoes and a V-neck T-shirt. Portrayals of Asian men as sexually ambiguous or purely feminine are still quite common, he says: “This is an issue that the gay Asian community has faced time and time again. There’s so much ignorance.”

Nearing the one-year anniversary of the Details article, Wong says little has changed for gay Asian people. Yes, studies have been done and pro-Asian programs implemented, “but there’s still a lot of work to be done. We need to really speak out on our own invisibility.”

Glenn Magpantay, cochair of Gay Asian and Pacific Islander Men of New York and a staff attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, agrees. He helped organize a high-profile protest outside the Details office in Manhattan that resulted in a full-page apology from the magazine. “[But] we are still finding homophobic articles in the Asian-language press and anti-Asian caricatures in the gay media,” he says.

The Details controversy did shed light on the pervasive stereotypes and general lack of positive representation that Asian men continue to face. Despite the success of gay Asian stars like Alec Mapa and B.D. Wong, “gay Asian men are still not perceived to be popular,” says Lee, who has featured young gay Asian characters in his independent films Drift and Ethan Mao.

Gay Asians are still perceived as passive or exotic, says Alain Dang, 28, a gay Asian activist in Manhattan and a member of the New York API group. “The Details article really perpetuated the ‘rice queen’ phenomenon,” he says, referring to gay men who pursue Asian lovers on the assumption they’ll be passive or submissive. “It’s a real part of my existence and my friends’ existence. It’s been hard.”

That particular assumption crosses gender lines, says Pauline Park, a transgender Asian activist in New York. “I actually have had men say, ‘I really like Asian women because white women can be too independent,’” Park says. “One of the big challenges for transgender Asian women, just like gay Asian men, is dealing with our exotification by men of all races. The assumption is that you’re going to be submissive. I’m not. It’s annoying and dispiriting to have to constantly correct assumptions.”

This battle against expectations is also something many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Asian people face within their ethnic groups. “There’s racism in the gay community,” Park says. “But there’s a bigger problem of homophobia in the Asian–Pacific Islander community.” Cultural traditions of marriage and child rearing often make it difficult for gay Asian men to come out, says Dang, who was born and raised in Cupertino, Calif., amid a large and traditional Asian family. “All my parents want are grandchildren,” he says. “At every family event I’m accosted by relatives asking me if I have a girlfriend.”

Dang, who works as a policy analyst for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, isn’t out to any of them. “It’s something I struggle with because I’m completely out socially and professionally,” he says. “Deep down I know that they love me regardless and nothing could break that bond; I’m just dreading the actual conversation.”

Hoping to help people like his family members understand, Wong, who is director of development at Community United Against Violence, a gay advocacy group in San Francisco, started a first-of-its-kind national organization dedicated to raising awareness about gay issues in the larger Asian population. When over 7,000 Asian-Americans rallied against same-sex marriage in San Francisco last April, Wong was inspired to form the gay rights group Asian Equality, which he now heads. He organized his own San Francisco rally in August and in February helped put together the first marriage equality float for the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade. “Over 3 million Chinese-Americans saw it,” Wong says. “This was a unique opportunity to present a powerful message and to have loving same-sex Asian couples standing side by side.”

Patrick Mangto, who was executive director of Asian Pacific Islanders for Human Rights in Los Angeles until March 1, says in the past year his group has been making inroads through efforts to publish pro-gay ads in Asian community newspapers. Many initially resisted, fearing readers’ reactions, but the ads are now reaching more and more Asian-Americans. “Most of our ads are run in native languages so that it’s not an outside thing,” Mangto says.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has also been working with the media to ensure that there are positive depictions of gay Asians, notes Andy Marra, Asian–Pacific Islander media fellow for the group [see page 10], while the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in February released an unprecedented study coauthored by Dang that looks at the challenges gay Asian families face.

But support from such mainstream gay rights groups is still limited, Wong says. A recent unity statement from 22 gay rights groups didn’t include a single signature from a gay Asian organization. “Asian-Americans are chief plaintiffs in lawsuits to win same-sex marriage, yet we weren’t even asked to sign on to this statement,” Wong notes. “This was an opportunity for them to reach out to us.”

It’s true that gay Asian groups and activists have been left out in the past, Marra says, but she’s optimistic. “It’s amazing that our issues are even being discussed and being brought to the table,” she says. “We are seeing an emerging movement.”

This article originally appeared in the 15 March 2005 of The Advocate magazine, which is now defunct.

The post Invisible No More (queer APIs) (Advocate, 3.15.05) appeared first on Pauline Park.

An Interview with Pauline Park
Chapter 8 in Embodying Asian/American Sexualities, edited by Gina Masequesmay & Sean Metzger

Based on interviews conducted August 22, 2004 and January 3, 2005

1.      What does transgender mean? Can you distinguish between transgender and gay/lesbian/bisexual for the reader?

‘Transgender’ is an umbrella term that refers to a diverse population.  The transgender community includes a number of different subgroups, such as transsexuals, crossdressers, and genderqueers (gender-variant individuals who may not identify with either gender).  Some (including many but not all transsexuals) will seek sex reassignment surgery while others will not; some will present fully in the gender opposite their birth sex at least part of the time (transgendered people) while others will not; but in its most general sense, ‘transgender’ refers to those individuals who ‘transgress’ gender boundaries in some sense and to some degree.  The most important point is that gender identity and sexual orientation are two entirely different phenomena; the common misconception that all transgendered people are gay is belied by the fact that many (perhaps most) transgendered people are heterosexual, though many are lesbian, gay, or bisexual as well.  Gender identity has to do with how one feels about one’s gender (whether one feels oneself to be a boy or girl, man or woman), while sexual orientation has to do with whom one is attracted to.

1a.     Given that this anthology addresses issues of “embodiments,” could you comment on what “embodiments” means for you as a transgender person?

Like every other human being, I am ’embodied’ in that I occupy a physical body.  Many transgendered people are uncomfortable in their bodies or even alienated from them.  Some who identify as transsexual seek to alter their body through hormones and surgery.  Unlike some other transgendered women, I am comfortable occupying a male body, and I see no contradiction between being male-bodied and identifying as a woman.  For me, sex and gender are two very different things.

2.      Please narrate your “coming out” as a transgender person? Did religion impact your coming out process? If so, how?

I was born in Korean and adopted by American parents of European descent who were Christian fundamentalists and who had homophobic attitudes and very conservative views on gender roles.  Transgender issues were never discussed.  To that extent, my coming out as gay (at the age of 17) coincided with my rebellion against my mother’s religious and political views (my father died when I was 12 going on 13).  I had my second coming out at the age of 36 and have been living as an openly transgendered woman since then.  But while my public coming out as a gay boy preceded that as a transgendered woman by nearly 20 years, in fact, I realized I was transgendered at the age of four, long before I began to identify as gay, and I always knew that the gay male identity that I adopted was a tentative and incomplete one that did not fully address my gender identity.  I first began to ‘cross-dress’ regularly in public at the age of 21, but I went back in the ‘tranny closet’ two years later and so my gender transition was far less linear and far more complicated than my gay ‘coming out’ narrative.

2a.     Could you elaborate on what a “tranny closet” is? How is it different from the “gay closet”?  Were there differences being in the “tranny closet” within gay versus straight communities? For example, what were the reasons for staying in the closet among those different groups?

The ‘tranny closet’ is somewhat different from the ‘gay closet’ insofar as transgender identity generally has more implications for one’s public presentation.  After all, a gay man is probably going to still present as a man, and a lesbian as a woman, even though they may be somewhat gender-variant.  But a transgendered man or woman may significantly or even profoundly alter his/her gender presentation.  So to that extent, ‘tranny closet’ may literally involve what is in one’s clothes closet.  But in a less literal and a deeper sense, the alteration of identity may be more profound and life-altering for many transgendered people than for non-transgendered LGB people.  Because of this, the process of ‘coming out’ of that ‘closet’ may be more complex for the transgendered.  In my case, for example, my coming out as a gay male was much simpler and more linear than my coming out as a transgendered woman.  There are some differences between coming out in the LGB community vs. coming out in straight society; while there is still some prejudice within the LGB people, the transgenderphobia in straight society is much more pervasive and much more intense.  It was partly for those reasons that I remained in the ‘tranny closet’ as long as I did.  I was particularly concerned about the potentially deleterious impact on my professional career.

2b. Could you elaborate on the different issues of “coming out” versus “passing”? How are such issues different for a transsexual person versus a gay/lesbian person versus a queergender person versus a crossdresser?

The term ‘passing’ originates in the experience of light-skinned African Americans who could ‘pass’ for white and would live as if they were born white, concealing their black racial and cultural origins.  ‘Passing’ for a transgendered person refers to the experience of being perceived as gender-normative.  In other words, a transgendered woman ‘passes’ when everyone around her regards her as a female-born woman without realizing that she is transgendered (i.e., was born male).

‘Coming out’ and ‘passing’ are very different experiences, and in some circumstances, may even be opposed to each other.  For example, there is a certain proportion of post-op transsexuals who live ‘stealth,’ concealing their transgender identity and living in their chosen gender as if they were born into that sex.  In other words, a post-op MTF may pretend that she was born female and conceal from neighbors, co-workers, and others the fact that she was really born male; or an FTM transsexual may live as a man without revealing to others that he was actually born female.

For me, ‘coming out’ means living as an openly transgendered woman, not in any way attempting to conceal my male birth and anatomy.  That does not mean, of course, that I always alert strangers to my transgender identity; on the street, I do not wear a button saying, “I’m really male,” or anything of that sort.  Safety is important to me, as it is to everyone; but as long as my personal security is not at risk, I am very open about my being transgendered.

For part-time crossdressers, by definition, it is not a question of living as transgendered women.  But there is still an issue of disclosure, as spouses, family members, friends and colleagues usually would not know unless told.  Many if not most crossdressers are closeted, and some are completely closeted (i.e., they only crossdress alone, in the privacy of their own homes).

‘Passing’ for lesbians and gay men would mean passing as ‘straight.’  Some lesbians are sufficiently feminine, and some gay men sufficiently masculine, so that they can pass relatively easily; others may be sufficiently gender-variant that it would be difficult for them to pass, and others may assume that they are gay based on their gender variance.

3.      What led you to create the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy and what is its function?

NYAGRA is the first statewide transgender advocacy organization in New York.  We founded NYAGRA in June 1998, because at the time, there was no such organization and none that was involved in the legislative arena at the state or local level.  NYAGRA’s mission is to advocate for freedom of gender identity and expression for all; we do so through public education and public policy advocacy.  Our public education efforts include public forums on transgender and intersex issues and transgender sensitivity training for social service providers, AIDS agencies, government agencies, and community-based organizations.  But we are best known for our legislative work, in particular, for having led the successful campaign for Int. No. 24 (Local Law 3 of 2002), the transgender rights bill that passed the New York City Council in April 2002. NYAGRA was also instrumental in negotiating inclusion of gender identity and expression in the text of the Dignity for All Students Act, a safe schools bill currently pending in the New York state legislature that would prohibit discrimination and harassment in public schools throughout the state.  In 2004, NYAGRA partnered with other LGBT organizations in mounting a series of public forums on discrimination and harassment in schools based on gender identity and expression, held in cities throughout the state (Nyack, Albany, Syracuse, Ithaca, Poughkeepsie).  NYAGRA was a founding member of the New York State DASA Coalition as well as the coalition supporting the Dignity in All Schools Act, a safe schools bill passed by the New York City Council in June 2004 and enacted when the Council overrode Mayor Bloomberg’s veto of the bill in September 2004.  The NYC law prohibits harassment in public and (non-religious) private schools in the five boroughs, and features a definition of gender that includes gender identity and expression.

3a.     California passed Assembly Bill (AB) 537, the California Student Safety and Violence Act, in 2000. One of the continuing struggles for the coalition that worked to pass and now to enforce this legislation is the inclusion of transgender issues. Please elaborate on NYAGRA’s work with the DASA coalition. What, if anything, did you learn from other local LGBT activist organizations around the country such as Seattle’s Safe Schools Coalition (which started in the late-80s) and the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Project 10, which started in the mid-80s, who have dealt with similar struggles? How did national efforts such as the Human Rights Watch “Hatred in the Hallways” study or the work of GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network) inform activist activities in New York?

We in NYAGRA try to keep abreast of developments in other states, including California, but the only thing that I can recall influencing our thinking working on the New York state DASA bill was our recognition that the California state legislature was able to include gender identity and expression in their safe schools legislation without mentioning that language explicitly simply by referencing protected categories already included in California state law through its state hate crimes statute; we were not able to consider that possibility in New York because the New York State Hate Crimes Bill Coalition was not willing to hold up that hate crimes bill to include gender identity and expression in that legislation.  GLSEN is one of the member organizations in the NYS DASA Coalition, and NYAGRA has worked in partnership with GLSEN on our series of public forums on the issue of gender identity and expression in the NYS DASA Bill.  But GLSEN’s support for the safe schools bill introduced in Congress in late 2004 by U.S. Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois (R-19th) has raised questions within the LGBT community about GLSEN’s commitment to full transgender inclusion in safe schools legislation at the state and federal levels.

Regarding the NYS DASA bill, it was NYAGRA that negotiated inclusion of gender identity and expression in that legislation so that it became the first fully transgender-inclusive bill ever introduced into the New York state legislature when it was reintroduced in 2000.  Persuading the NYS DASA Coalition to support a transgender-inclusive bill was not easy.  Both the Empire State Pride Agenda and GLSEN (which co-coordinated the coalition through 2004) initially resisted inclusion of the definition of gender in the bill.  But we were eventually able to persuade the Pride Agenda and then GLSEN and through the Pride Agenda, we were able to persuade the prime sponsor of the bill in the Assembly, Assembly Member Steve Sanders, chair of the Assembly education committee.  Ever since then, the coalition has stood by full transgender inclusion, though in the spring of 2004, there was some interest on the part of ESPA and
GLSEN in exploring compromise language similar to that in the Florida DASA bill, which we in NYAGRA do not regard as being sufficiently transgender inclusive.  That bill puts the phrase ‘identity or expression of’ before the list of protected categories (including gender) but does not include a definition of gender or any other transgender-explicit language.

3b. Do you foresee joining forces with other transgender groups to form a national organization for transgender people?

There already is a national organization: the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE).  While we don’t have a formal coalitional relationship with NCTE (NCTE is not a coalition or a national organization with state chapters), NYAGRA has co-sponsored events with NCTE, including a forum in New York City in December 2002 (co-sponsored by NGLTF).

3c. Do you work with gay/lesbian organizations in NY? What about national gay/lesbian organizations like HRC (Human Rights Campaign) or NGLTF (National Gay and Lesbian Task Force)? In other words, where do you see your organization fit into other queer movements and efforts?  Is the trend toward a merging of queer movements to fight for freedom on gender and sexual expressions? Or, do trans and gay/lesbian have such different issues that they will remain separate organizations?

We work with a wide range of lesbian/gay and LGBT organizations in New York City and state.  Our primary partner to date has been the Empire State Pride Agenda and (on education issues, including safe schools legislation) GLSEN.  We have also had some limited opportunities to work with both HRC and NGLTF, both of which supported our campaign for Int. No. 24 (the transgender rights bill passed by the NYC Council in April
2002, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002).  But we also signed onto a letter from the Task Force in December 2004 that was highly critical of HRC for suggesting that it might support Social Security privatization in exchange for support from the Bush administration and Republican majorities in Congress for movement on LGBT rights legislation.

We in NYAGRA see ourselves as part of a larger LGBT community, and we have played a significant role in the shift toward greater transgender inclusion here in New York.  For example, NYAGRA is a key part of the Coalition for Unity & Inclusion, which successfully lobbied the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center to change its name to LGBT Community Center (aided significantly by the internal work on transgender inclusion by Center staff).  NYAGRA & CUI also successfully persuaded Heritage of
Pride to change the name of the NYC Lesbian & Gay Pride March to ‘LGBT Pride March.’  And we were successful in persuading the NewFest to change the name of the New York Gay & Lesbian Film Festival to ‘LGBT Film Festival.’  Beyond nomenclature, since its founding in 1998, NYAGRA has contributed significantly to the shift in consciousness in New York City and state toward transgender inclusion.  When we were founded in June 1998, few lesbian & gay organizations in New York City included the ‘T’ in their names, much less included transgender in their mission statements, their programming, or their thinking more generally; now, most do in name as well as in practice.

But we in NYAGRA also see ourselves as part of a larger progressive movement for social justice and social change; not all LGBT organizations share that philosophy.

4.      What are the particular challenges facing transgender Asian/ Americans and Pacific Islander/ Americans?

Transgendered Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs), like many other transgendered people of color, face multiple oppressions based on race, ethnicity, citizenship status, and language.  Many transgendered APIs are recent immigrants and have limited English-language proficiency and cultural competence.  Some are undocumented and face problems related to their immigration status.  Others would like to marry U.S. citizens of the same sex as their birth sex but cannot because of laws and state constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage.  Others face problems changing their legal sex designation on documents issued either by U.S. government agencies or by government agencies in their country of birth (such as birth certificates issued by their municipalities of origin).  Some transgendered API women — especially those who are undocumented — are forced into sex work and face heightened risk of HIV infection and other sexually transmitted diseases.  Many transgendered  APIs lack health insurance and/or full access to quality health care.  Many transgendered APIs are reluctant to approach social service providers in their ethnic communities for fear of discrimination or being ‘outed,’ but those with limited English-language proficiency and cultural competence may find it difficult to access services through LGBT community centers and other LGBT social service providers.  Given the centrality of the family in API communities, one of the biggest challenges for transgender APIs is gaining acceptance from their families of origin.  Religious institutions also figure prominently in many API communities, but few are transgender-affirming.  Christian churches in the Korean American community tend to be socially conservative and are often homophobic and transgenderphobic.  The Roman Catholic Church is also a central institution in the Filipino community, with implications for transgendered Filipinos.  For transgendered immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia), the increasing influence of Islamic fundamentalism has further complicated their lives, already difficult because of the sex segregation and gender oppression of their immigrant communities and cultures of origin.

4a.     The API transgender issues are diverse.  Is there a common issue that the majority of API transgenders share that distinguishes them from non-API transgenders?  We see, in Los Angeles for example, gay/lesbian groups splintering into smaller racial , gender and ethnic groups.  Is the trend similar in the transgender communities (between FTMs and MTFs; TS who identify as straight versus gay/lesbian or bi; etc.)?

I think this question raises the larger issue of what is often referred to as ‘identity politics.’  There is certainly a trend throughout the LGBT community toward narrower and narrower focus in organization-building based on identity formations.  The right wing is enamored of the term ‘Balkanization.’  I think the use of this term shows an ignorance of the need of marginalized groups to address the specificity of their oppression.  Clearly, transgendered APIs have in common both being transgendered and being API; but transgendered API women in particular also have the commonality of being ‘fetishized’ as ‘exotic’ objects of sexual interest by straight ‘tranny chasers’; they also share the other multiple oppressions of queer APIs that relate to race, ethnicity, and citizenship status; and they share heightened risk for HIV/AIDS and other STDs.  And yet, of course, transgendered APIs are individuals who are very different in other respects as well.

4b. How do you feel about the disidentification that many Pacific Islanders feel with the term API? Such divisions are reflected, in fact, in our own final decision to use Asian/ American and Pacific Islander/ American in this book. In what ways are such divisions either useful or not?

‘API’ and ‘APA’ are obviously social constructs, but then again, so are ‘Asian American’ and all identity formations, to a greater or lesser extent.  Clearly, the attempt to include Pacific Islanders within the API/APA construct reflects a concern over inclusion, but it can be disingenuous or even tokenizing if not accompanied by a real effort to include Pacific Islanders in organizations that are ostensibly ‘API.’  But the parallel here with ‘LGBT’ is striking: if it is simply a question of adding the ‘T’ for purposes of inclusive nomenclature, then adding the ‘PI’ is insufficient; it is important to make the ‘P’ or ‘PI’ in ‘APA’ or ‘API’ meaningful through meaningful inclusion of Pacific Islanders in whichever organizations and initiatives use one of those designations.

5.      What resources are available for transgender Asian/ Americans and Pacific Islander/ Americans?

The resources available for transgendered APIs (as distinct from resources available to the transgender community as a whole) are virtually all housed in AIDS agencies serving API communities, including:

Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center (San Francisco)
http://www.apiwellness.org/

Asian Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS (APICHA, New York)
http://www.apicha.org/

Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT, Los Angeles)
http://www.apaitonline.org/

AIDS Services in Asian Communities (ASIAC, Philadelphia)
http://www.asiac.org/

Asian Pacific Islanders for Human Rights (APIHR, Los Angeles)
http://www.apihr.org/

APIHR is the first non-AIDS organization for LGBT/queer APIs to receive significant funding and also has a TG program.

5a. Which texts (books, films, etc.) do you find particularly useful for educational purposes?

There are all too few resources on transgender and queer API issues currently available.  Among the few that I find useful are:

David L. Eng and Alice Hom, eds., Q&A: Queer in Asian America
(Philadelphia, 1998: Temple University Press).
Kevin K. Kumashiro, ed., Restoried Selves: Autobiographies of Queer
Asian/Pacific American Activists (New York, London, Oxford, 2003:
Harrington Park Press).
Franklin Odo, ed., The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian
American Experience (New York, 2002: Columbia University Press).

Ann Thomson Cook, Made in God’s Image: A Resource for Dialogue about
the Church and Gender Differences (Washington, D.C., 2003: Dumbarton
United Methodist Church).
“Georgie Girl” (P.O.V. documentary about the life of Georgina Beyer)
“Boys Don’t Cry” (feature film)

Embodying Asian/American Sexualities, edited by Gina Masequesmay & Sean Metzger, was published by Lexington Books (a division of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.) in 2009. “An Interview with Pauline Park” (pp. 105-114) is chapter 8 out of 13 chapters, and was based on interviews conducted by Sean Metzger on August 22, 2004 and January 3, 2005.

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As coordinator of a legislative work group that includes city council members, transgender-supportive allies, and other members of  the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, Pauline Park is one of the key players in the initiative to amend New York City’s Human Rights Law to include transgendered and gender variant people. (In February 2000, city council members announced their co-sponsorship of a trans-protective bill; it has not yet passed.) Park’s participation in transgender activism began with GenderPAC’s annual national gender lobby days in Washington, D.C., in May 1997 and 1998.  She and other New York-based trans activists decided to focus their efforts at the state and local levels, and in June, 1998, they  founded the  New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the first statewide transgender political organization in New York.

Park, who has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois, found working on this project in the highly-charged political environment of New York City to be a real education in lobbying.  Her first piece of advice: “While the support of legislative staff is important, it’s crucial to get at least a few of the members themselves actively engaged in the process. We’ve been very fortunate to have the direct and active participation of two legislators of color — Margarita Lopez, an openly lesbian Latina city council member; and Bill Perkins, a GLBT-supportive African American city council member.” The legislative work group meets in person or via a conference call every two or three weeks.

“It’s also vital to have the support of the lesbian, gay, and bisexual community. We’ve formed a working partnership with Tim Sweeney and Ralph Wilson at the Empire State Pride Agenda, and we’ve been able to build on the credibility with legislators that they already enjoy,” Park said.

Park also emphasizes the importance of forming a broad coalition of allies in support of the bill. “In a city as diverse as New York, it’s important to counter the perception that transgender-based discrimination is only a white queer lower Manhattan issue.”  Park said. “With Pride Agenda staff and the six council members in our legislative work group, we’ve produced what looks to be a winning strategy, forging a broad-based coalition that includes communities of color and people in the outer boroughs.”  Members of the legislative work group have reached out to a range organizations for their support, including the Audre Lorde Project, the National Organization for Women-New York City Chapter, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund, District Council 37 (the largest union in the city),  the GLB political clubs, and people of faith.

Park has been involved with organizing in GLBT communities since 1994, when she launched Gay Asians & Pacific Islanders of Chicago, an organization for gay, bisexual, and transgendered Asian and Pacific Islanders. Since then, she has continued to be involved in Asian and Pacific Islander communities, working with the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York and co-founding Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in February 1997. The initial spark for Iban/QKNY was the Korean LGBT Forum organized by the Korean Gay Organization/ Chingusai and hosted by the Korean American Association of Greater New York on November 2, 1996.  Park was one of the four speakers in that panel discussion, the first forum on GLBT issues ever sponsored by a non-queer Korean American organization. For Park, ensuring that people of color have an equal voice in the transgender political movement is critical. “As a transgendered woman of color, I do not have the luxury of completely separating what are ostensibly ‘transgender’ issues from issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, and citizenship status.”

Transgender Equality: A Handbook for Activists & Policymakers, by Paisley Currah & Shannon Minter, was published on 19 June 2000 by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

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Transgendered People of Color Take Center Stage
by Pauline Park
The Missive of the Audre Lorde Project (ALP)
winter 1998
(the following are excerpts from a longer article that appeared in LGNY’s November 19th issue)

The first conference specifically by and for transgendered people of color ever held in New York City, and to my knowledged, anywhere, was a historic moment in the life of the TG POC community. Sponsored by The Audre Lorde Project and the Gender Identity Project (GIP) of the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center, Transworld — the Fourth Annual Transgender/Transsexual Health Empowerment Conference — took place at ALP in Brooklyn on October 24. Only a week before, ALP’s Arms Akimbo, the first confeence for lesiban, bisexual, two-spirit and transgendered women of color, featured the first workshop specifically devoted to transgendered women of color, facilitated by Carmen Vazquez and me.

Transworld was the fourth in a series of conferences that are the biggest annual event of their kind on the transgender calendar in New York City. As in past years, the conference was well attended, with over 200 people from throughout the metropolitan area and beyond in attendance. Some came from upstate locales such as Ithaca, others from as far away as Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

In addition to a focus on TG POCs, what made TransWorld distinct was the decentering of service provider as all-knowing authority figure — for the first time in the history of the annual TG/TS health empowerment conference, health professionals did not dominate the proceedings.

The all-day conference began with an opening plenary on transgender history and culture moderated by Javid Syed. I spoke on the role of the transgendered Korean shaman — the paksu mudang; Arlene Hoffman reviewed African American history; Christian O’Neill offered insights from the perspective of a transsexual black man; and Carmen Vazquez talked about her identity as a buth Puerto Rican lesbian of transgender identity. The early afternoon featured a series of workshops on transgenderphobic violence, facilitated by Victoria Cruz and Alex Gilliam; substance abuse, by Leona Williams and Caprice Carthans; transgendered youth, by Pagen and Reyana Quinones; government entitlements and immigration, by Isiris Isaac; and medical issues.

Perhaps the most innovative feature of the conference was the speak-out sensitively and expertly facilitated by Maura Bairley of Project Reach, who elicited personal experiences of discrimination and violence as well as suggestions for addressing the multiple oppressions that transgendered people of color face in this society…

Also noteworthy was the fact that medical issues of transsexual transition (especially access to hormones and SRS), the focus of one workshop, were not central to the conference, as is often the case at transgender conferences. It may be a mark of the growing maturity of the transgender community that these issues, while important, did not dominate the proceedings. Instead, the question of how to organizaed TG POC’s politically closed the conference’s formal discussion.

One would think that a conference whose aim — the health and empowerment of TG POCs — would win the embrace of all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people. Remarkably, some white queers stayed away based on the misconception that the conference ‘excluded’ white people. (In fact, the conference was open to all and about a quarter of the attendees were white.) The conference even prompted one nationally prominent transgender activist to denounce it as ‘racist’ for having limited the roster of presenters to people of color, despite the fact that POC-only spaces have become increasingly commonplace in LGB communities. Perhaps it is a measure of the need of the transgender community to address issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, and citizenship status more forthrightly that a conference featuring only people of color as presenters would create any controversy at all.

Pauline Park is coordinator of Iban/Queer Koreans of New York, policy coordinator of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy; she also served on the Transworld organizing committee.  The views expressed here are not necessarily those of these organizations.

This article originally appeared in the winter 1998 issue of The Missive (Vol. 2, Issue 4) of the Audre Lorde Project (ALP), and before that, in the 19 November 1998 issue of Lesbian & Gay New York (LGNY).

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