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.

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.

The post Transgender Equality: a profile of Pauline Park (6.19.00) appeared first on Pauline Park.