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.

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.

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.

]]> http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2010/07/transgender-equality-a-profile-of-pauline-park-6-19-00/feed/ 0 http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2010/07/transgendered-people-of-color-take-center-stage-alp-missive-winter-1998/ http://www.paulinepark.com/index.php/2010/07/transgendered-people-of-color-take-center-stage-alp-missive-winter-1998/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:47:24 +0000 Pauline http://www.paulinepark.com/?p=1723

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).

TransWorld Conference 1998
by Pauline Park
The Missive
fall 1998

The Audre Lorde Project (ALP) will be hosting TransWorld: New York’s first conference specifically for People of Color of Transgender experience. On Saturday, October 24, this full-day conference will feature a variety of panels and workshops. Speakers will address a range of issues, spanning from Survival Skills to Non-Western Concepts of ‘Transgender.’ Break-out sessions will help attendees grapple with concerns such as employment, violence, homelessness, medical issues of transsexual transition and health care for transgendered individuals.

BransWorld is the fourth annual Transgender and Transsexual Health Empowerment conference sponsored by the Gender Identity Project (GIP) of the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in Manhattan, and the first conference in that series with ALP as a primary co-sponsor. The event’s other co-sponsors include: the NYC Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, the Asian & Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Gay Asian and Pacific Islander Men of New York, Harlem United Community AIDS Center, Iban/Queer Koreans of New York, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy, PRoject Reach, and Queens Pride House.

Contact Nguru Karugu from ALP at 718-596-0342, ext. 11 or GIP at 212-620-7310 for registration and other information. This promises to be an exciting event!

This article originally appeared in fall 1998 issue of The Missive (Vol. 2, Issue 3) of the Audre Lorde Project (ALP ).

Spotlight on Incubator Projects
Iban/QKNY: Building Queer Korean Community
by Pauline Park
The Missive:
News from the board, staff & volunteers of the Audre Lorde Project
spring 1999

Iban/Queer Koreans of New York is a social, discussion, and support group and political advocacy organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Koreans, Korean Americans, and Korean adoptees. The group emerged in the wake of the November 2, 1996 Korean LGBT Forum co-sponsored by the Korean Gay Organization/Chinkusai, the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence and The Audre Lorde Project and hosted by the Korean American Association fo Greater New York. Iban/QKNY, which began as a small group of friends, is actively engaged in the process of constructing a queer Korean community here in New York City.

Since its founding, the organization has sent a contingent of seven members to KASCON, a national Korean American student conference held at Yale in March 1998; produced a 12-page bilingual newsletter in June 1998; and held a Pride Month reception, which attracted over 120 people, including some non-Koreans. In November, the organization co-hosted a party with Chingusai-NY, a group of Korean speaking gay men. Iban/QKNY is also a co-sponsor of the new and popular Asian women’s gatherings organizaed by Persimmon Space. As a participant in ALP’s Incubator program, Iban/QKNY held a strategic planning retreat at ALP at the end of January, facilitated by Veronica Flores.

This article first appeared in the spring 1999 issue of The Missive (the newsletter of the Audre Lorde Project).

Reclaiming Our Spiritual Legacy as Transgendered People
By Pauline Park
18 June 2000

I was asked to speak on spirituality and the transgender community. It seems to me that the connection is an intimate one, far closer than we may realize.

For we as transgendered and gender-variant people lie at the interstices not only of the binary of sex and gender, but also of the binary of the sacred and the profane. In contemporary North American society, we are viewed by some as being — of all people — perhaps the farthest removed from God — at least the God of the Christian fundamentalists. And yet, on this continent a mere three hundred years ago, our forebears, far from being a despised minority, were regarded as intermediaries between heaven and earth, uniquely constituted by their transgendered nature to serve as interlocutors between the human and the divine.

In a cruel irony, the European conquest made transgendered people special targets of prosecution because they were viewed as particularly offensive to Christian strictures — at least as interpreted by conquistadores of the 17th century and other colonizers who followed them. I can well imagine — here on the island that the Algonquin called Manahatta — transgendered shamans exercising a role of spiritual leadership, not only respected but revered by their compatriots. And yet, on this terrain that was to them sacred ground, we now find ourselves cast down from the realm of the sacred to that of the profane.

One of the greatest challenges facing us as we construct a transgender community and catalyze a transgender political movement is to recapture and revivify the sacred in our own nature and then to communicate our most deeply felt spirituality to our contemporaries. We cannot afford to cede the territory of ‘faith and family’ to those who would seek to erase us from the history of this continent. We would make a fatal error, I would suggest, in all too readily falling into a civil libertarian discourse of the ’separation of church and state,’ conceding religion and spirituality to the most conservative and regressive elements in our society.

Regardless of whether we are People of the Book (Christian, Jewish or Muslim) or profess a non-Western faith — or whether we embrace pre-Christian pagan spiritual traditions — we must work to gain recognition of the validity and integrity of our spiritual lives.  And we must reinscribe ourselves in the narrative histories of our peoples and reclaim our legacy as spiritual beings.

shaman’s drum

It was an honor for me to address the congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York (MCC-NY) on Stonewall Sunday 2000 as we commemorated the birth of the modern movement for the liberation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people. This is the text of my address to the congregation, which was published in the November/December 2001 issue of PersuAsian (Issue 10, “Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Spirituality“), the news magazine of the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY).

Finding the Authentic Self: Coming Out as a Transgendered Korean Adoptee
By Pauline Park

Being a transgendered Korean adoptee has meant a life-long process of coming to terms with identity issues related to gender identity and sexuality as well as to racial, ethnic and national identity. Just as I have always known that I was an adoptee, I have always known that I was transgendered; but precisely what that meant to me and to the larger world would take me decades to understand and articulate.

While there are obvious differences between the experiences of those lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people who grow up in Korean American families and my adoptive family – my Norwegian American father and my German American mother and grandmother, all devout Lutherans – the patriarchal heteronormativity of Korean and Korean American families finds a striking parallel in that of the German American culture of Milwaukee in the 1960s.

The regular church attendance as well as the piano and violin lessons and practice that are expected of so many Korean American children were dominant elements in my childhood and adolescence as well. And my parents were not merely ‘Sunday Christians’; they were as devout and committed Christian fundamentalists as are to be found in most any Korean American church in Koreantown in Los Angeles or in Flushing or Skokie.

Around the time of my confirmation, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod was taken over by its fundamentalist wing, coinciding with a change in minister at our home church. The likeable and theologically moderate pastor I had grown up with and who had confirmed me left us to lead an LCMS congregation in Iowa and was replaced by a fundamentalist minister who preached fire-and-brimstone homophobic sermons from the pulpit just as I was trying to come to terms with same-sex attractions that began with puberty. These developments hastened my exit from the mother church when I moved away to go to college.

I came out as gay in my first semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but I understood even then that my first coming out was incomplete one, as it addressed my sexuality but not my gender identity. I spent my fourth year at the UW in a study abroad program in London and stayed for a second year to do my master’s degree at the London School of Economics. In that second year in London, I began going out regularly in public dressed as a woman for the first time, and it was one of the most liberating experiences of my life. But when I returned to the United States after my two years abroad, I also went into a period of denial about my gender identity. However, my mother did come to accept my sexuality just before her death only a few months after my return from London, though she never knew about my transgender identity. (My father died just before I turned 13, and so he and I never had the opportunity to discuss – or argue about – sexuality and gender issues.)

After a career in public relations and another one in academia, I came out as an openly transgendered woman when I moved to Queens in 1997. And while my first coming out was a huge step for me, my second coming out was bigger still in its implications for my life and work. It is not an exaggeration to say that I came out as transgendered through my activism and advocacy work, co-founding a number of organizations, including Queens Pride House (a center for the LGBT communities of Queens) and Iban/Queer Koreans of New York (Iban/QKNY) in 1997 and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) in 1998.

I also came to see a parallel between my identity as a transgendered woman and my identity as a Korean adoptee: just as I came to realize that the sex/gender binary constructed an artificial and ultimately false dichotomy between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ (heteronormatively defined), I came to understand that I had a set of experiences and a life history as a Korean adoptee that was distinct from that of Koreans or Korean Americans just as it was different from European Americans, despite my having grown up in a white household and in an all-white neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee. What had impeded the resolution of both identity complexes had been a false discourse of authenticity; the authentic identity was to be found only through an articulation of the true self and its ultimate expression through advocacy on behalf of those communities of which I was a member.

It was on 29 February 2000 that I found myself suddenly transformed into a public figure as we launched the campaign for the transgender rights law ultimately enacted by the New York City Council in April 2002. Leading that legislative campaign was the honor of a lifetime, and since its successful culmination, I have found countless opportunities to speak out on behalf of queer Koreans and other Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs) and the LGBT community at the local, state, and national levels. As the Mahatma Gandhi so rightly put it, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” And so I have.

This essay was published in June 2010 in “Resist & Exist,” a ‘zine edited by Sam Jung & Sarah Shim.

“What’s At Stake In The Elections For LGBT Asians?” Immigrantion rights for gays? Same-sex marriage for Asians? Civil liberties and civil rights? Where do the candidates and political parties stand? Speakers include Rocky Chin, Working Families Party; Pauline Park, Guillermo Vasquez Democratic Club of Queens; Glenn D. Magpantay, attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense andEducation Fund and the Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York. 8 p.m. at The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St. Free. Contact 212-802-RICE or gapimny@gapimny.org for more information.

This originally appeared as a calendar item in the ‘7 Days & 7 Nights’ section of the 9 September 2004 issue of Gay City News.

Articulating Identity, Organizing Community
Re-Launching the Queer API Movement in the United States

Pauline Park

keynote speech

Launch
The 3rd Annual Queer & Asian Conference
University of California at Berkeley
1 May 2010

I would like to begin by thanking Cal Q&A and the committee members who organizers of the 3rd annual Queer & Asian conference for inviting me to speak here. I’d especially like to thank Charles Tsai for all of his work in helping to bring me here. I’m honored to be asked to keynote this conference and I’m delighted to have the opportunity to speak to you on the theme of ‘Launch,’ which I have made the theme of my speech.

QACON08’s theme was “Story-ing The Silence: Filling the Pages,” and QACON09’s theme was “Articulation: Animating Our Collective Autobiography.” QACON10’s mission statement declares:

“…It’s time now, to use the tools we have, our history, our storytelling, our wills and hearts to look forward and move together in solidarity. Continuing the conference tradition of strength through shared stories and experiences, the question now becomes how we can unify those stories into action. How can we build and unify a community to address the issues we face as a whole? How do we advance our trajectory with the networks we have built? How do we take concrete actions to make our presence as a community seen, heard, and felt?…”

What I would like to do is to attempt to answer those questions by linking the themes of identity and activism, talking about how an articulation of identity can provide the basis for effective activism and advocacy. I would like to begin with a brief look at the homoerotic traditions and proto-transgenderal identities and practices in pre-modern Asian and Pacific Islander (API) societies and their relevance for contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity construction in the United States. I will then look at the emergence of an LGBT/queer API movement through the development of queer API organizations in this country over the course of recent decades. Drawing from my own experience with several of those organizations, I will outline what I see as the major challenges facing queer API organizations and how we as a community can move forward to build a queer API movement that effectively advances our liberation as individuals and members of that community.

We’re Here, We’re Queer: Homoerotic Traditions & Proto-Transgenderal Traditions in Pre-Modern Asian & Pacific Island Societies

What could history — some of it genuinely ancient — possibly have to do with contemporary issues facing the queer API community, from marriage equality to transgender rights? Quite a lot, I would argue. Why? Because possibly the biggest misconception in API communities is 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 implications for the struggle for LGBT rights are profound.

Here in California, of course, the debate over same-sex marriage has intensified over the last few years, culminating in the passage of Proposition 8 in November 2008. There has been a great deal of controversy over the apparently greater margin of victory for Prop 8 in communities of color, and some white queers have engaged in a very counterproductive discourse, waving placards with slogans such as ‘Gay is the new black.’ I was dismayed to see such signs held aloft in the enormous crowd that gathered in New York City on November 13 of that year to protest the passage of Proposition 8.

The role of the religious right in the passage of Proposition 8 was crucial, as both pro-8 and anti-8 forces would agree, and the ability of Mormons, evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, and other elements of the religious right to reach communities of color in particular played a pivotal role in the success of the campaign for Prop 8. And that brings us back to those homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions, identities and practices. Why? Because the discourse which the religious right successfully articulated in communities of color — including in API communities — was one which makes us foreign to our own cultures and communities of origin.

Ironically enough, as I have said, queer is in fact traditional in Asian and Pacific Islander cultures in a very meaningful sense. 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.

China has homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions going back centuries. The ‘passion of the cut sleeve‘ (duan xiu) — 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 (namely, ‘cut sleeve’). The other popular Chinese euphemism for homosexuality – the ‘half-eaten peach‘ — goes back even further, to the Zhou dynasty Duke Ling of Wei (534-403 BC) and his male lover, Mixi Zia. And there is that most gender-transgressive of Taoist deities, Guanyin, who is said by some to have changed from man to woman and who has become an iconic image for the gender-variant throughout East Asia.

In pre-modern Korea, the was a  tradition of teenage ‘boy-wives’ whose marriages to adult men were recognized in the villages in which they lived. There were also the hwarang — youth in the Silla period who were members of squads of elite archers wore make-up and dressed in long, flowing women’s gowns. And of course, in the all-male namsadang theatrical troupes that toured villages throughout Korea until the early 20th century, the teenage boys played women’s roles — just as Elizabethan theater in England — and were said very often to be lovers of adult men in the same companies. Finally, there is the mudang — the shamanic figure in the original Altaic culture which Koreans brought down into the Korean peninsula with them from eastern Siberia. This pre-Sinitic mudang culture pre-dates the introduction of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism into the peninsula. In the mudang culture, the shaman is always a woman, but not necessarily female: a significant number of mudang were male — paksu mudang — and evidence suggests that they may have lived as women as well as performing the sacred rites and rituals of the mudang.

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 binary opposition of LGBT people as secular atheists opposed to the God-fearing conservative Catholic Filipinos, fundamentalist Protestant Koreans, and ultra-traditional Hindu South Asians who are a significant part of the Asian diaspora in the United States is a false dichotomy, reinforced by the mainstream media who pit an invariably white queer activist calling for a complete separation of church and state against a minister or priest or lay person — often a person of color — in a false ‘debate’ over same-sex marriage.

Of course, the dangers of the propagation of this false dichotomy are apparent not only with regard to same-sex marriage, but every issue related to sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression in our society. So when we join the Chinese lunar new year parades — as we did in New York City’s Chinatown for the first time on Feb. 21 as the first LGBT contingent in that parade – we are simply reclaiming our rightful place in our communities of origin and reinscribing ourselves in the dominant narratives of Asian and Asian American cultures. What we must tell non-LGBT APIs who are shocked or confused by our participation in such events is this: we are you and you are us. We have been queer, we have been here (all along), and you have been used to it, you just forgot.

Acknowledging our queer Asian and Pacific Islander forbears, actually, is very much in the Asian and Pacific Islander tradition of honoring one’s ancestors. But at the same time that we recognize those forbears — so often erased from Asian and Pacific Island history writing — we must also recognize that there are significant differences between members of our contemporary queer API communities and those queer API forbears who anticipate our twenty-first century LGBT identities; that means resisting the temptation to appropriate such identities wholesale and without a full recognition of the differences that may separate us from the Indian hijra and the Sulawesi bissu transgendered shamans as well as the passage of centuries that may separate us from the Korean hwarang of the Silla dynasty.

We must also acknowledge the class, generational, and gendered aspects to those homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions that separate us from our queer forbears; and so we must resist the temptation of falling into an easy and naive romanticization of pre-modern traditions which will not and cannot meet contemporary feminist-informed progressive political standards. Let us rather invoke these icons as inspiration in the full realization of their imperfection and imperfect applicability to the identity constructions and issues of today.

Queering Asian, Asianing Queer: Movement in Emergence

The point of such an invocation must be not an end point in itself, but rather, the strategic deployment of such images in the reconfiguration of identity, which in turn may provide the basis for action. In other words, let us insist on the integrity of our identities as queer APIs who have no need to choose between the LGBT/queer and the Asian or Pacific Islander components of those identities.

The task for us as queer APIs must therefore be twofold: to ‘queer’ the notion of ‘Asian’ and ‘Asian American’ as well as to ‘Asian’ the notion of ‘queer.’ How do we do that? By establishing an API presence in the LGBT movement as well as a queer presence throughout API communities in the United States as well as back in our homelands of origin in the Asia/Pacific region. Here in the United States, just as back in Asian countries, there have been significant developments in that regard. In this country, the greatest progress has been made at the local level.

I am currently a member of both Q-Wave — the queer API women’s organization in New York City — and the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY) and I served on the GAPIMNY steering committee in 1999 and 2000. I am also a member of the advisory committee of the Dari Project, which is in the process of developing materials to explain LGBT issues to Korean-speaking family members of queer Koreans. Here in the San Francisco Bay area, there is the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA), Asian and Pacific Islander Family Pride, the Asian Pacific Islander Queer Women & Transgender Community, South Bay Queer & Asian (SBQA), and a host of student organizations at colleges and universities in the area, including Cal Q&A here at Berkeley, who have organized this conference. These local and student organizations are a crucial part of the infrastructure of queer API communities.

Until recently, however, we have had little presence or organizational infrastructure at the national level. The National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) is the first national queer API organization in the United States, emerging out of a series of meetings held between 2002 to 2005. I participated in a number of those meetings as well as in workshops at the NQAPIA conference in Seattle last August, and I am very hopeful that NQAPIA will help us establish a firm foundation for a queer API presence nationally that we have not had until its founding.

But there are challenges facing queer API organizations, whether student, local or national, not the least being the struggle to fund their activities. Most local groups are entirely volunteer-run, and most are not even incorporated under state law, let alone tax-exempt 501(c)(3)s under federal law. Three distinct challenges that every queer API organization faces are these: the challenges of gender, ethnicity, and purpose.

First challenge: gender. Most local groups have until recently been either gay men’s organizations or lesbian organizations. To some extent, the binary gendering of our organizations may reflect our highly gendered cultures of origin in Asia and the Pacific region; such gendering may also reflect the legitimate concern of API women to have safe spaces, and spaces not dominated by our gay menfolk. When we founded GAPIC — Gay Asians & Pacific Islanders of Chicago — in 1994-95, I was still gay male-identified, and all seven of the founding members were gay men, even if the name of the organization itself was gender-neutral. But having subsequently transitioned and come out as a transgendered woman, I find such gendering offers both a challenge to define my place in such organizations. If there are no co-gendered or multi-gender groups in town, do I join the local men’s group or the local women’s group? But the flip side of the challenge is an opportunity to participate in differently gendered spaces. GAPIMNY was the first group of any kind that I joined when I moved to New York in 1995, but I have since also joined Q-Wave as well. When I was on the GAPIMNY steering committee, I proposed that the group amend its bylaws and mission statement to include transgendered men and women as well as gay, bisexual and questioning men, and the steering committee adopted that proposal. Q-Wave has been open to transgendered men and women as well as lesbians and bisexual and questioning women from the beginning, and I have facilitated or co-facilitated workshops on transgender issues for both GAPIMNY and Q-Wave. Clearly, at the national level, an organization such as NQAPIA has to be multi-gendered to be effective in representing the full diversity of our community simply in gender terms, but those questions of gendered space will not go away simply because of a stated intent to do so.

Second challenge: ethnicity. When we co-founded Iban/Queer Koreans of New York in 1997, it was out of an express desire to provide a Korean-specific space, though that group was multi-gendered from the beginning. Iban/QKNY was also in a curious sense multicultural, in that it attracted ethnic Koreans from Korea — primarily Korean-speaking first-generation immigrants and international students — as well as English-speaking Korean Americans and Korean adoptees. The very diversity of the group posed a challenge even for the conduct of our meetings. Even despite a commitment to completely bilingual meetings, conducting meetings with simultaneous interpretation from Korean to English and vice-versa meant that in practice, they veered from being primarily Korean-language to English-language and back again. Even beyond language, the needs and interests of the Koreans were in general quite different from those of the Korean Americans and Korean adoptees. Then, too, Iban/QKNY’s relationship to GAPIMNY also posed questions for both organizations (Q-Wave had not yet been founded in this period, 1997-99). Were GAPIMNY and Iban/QKNY brother or sister organizations or competitors? Questions such as these may also face LGBT/queer South Asian groups in their relations with pan-API groups.

Third challenge: mission, purpose and scope. Every queer API group has to answer this question: is its primary mission social? support? or political? or a combination of the three? Every group I’ve been a member of — including GAPIC, GAPIMNY, Q-Wave, and Iban/QKNY — has faced the challenge of responding to that question, and each has answered it slightly differently. The core activity of local queer APIs such as these is what is usually called the GM — the general meeting. The format is usually ‘educational’ in some sense, a workshop on coming out, on safer sex practices, or possibly on transgender identity or political activism. I recently participated with three others in facilitating discussion at a Q-Wave general meeting on religion and spirituality in the queer API community.

The challenge for queer queer API groups such as these is to serve those who are just coming out or not yet come out and at the same time retain the interest of those who are far more established in their queer identity and possibly more politically inclined. Social or political? Local queer API groups struggle to balance monthly potlucks or brunches that appeal to the socially-minded with activism and advocacy work that at least a few members seek to make a significant focus of those organizations. Being an activist, I would of course like to see queer API groups everywhere devote at least some of their energies to participation in what we may call the queer API movement. But my experience with every queer API organization from GAPIC onwards makes me cognizant of the importance of building group cohesion through social and support activities. The year that we spent in preparing for GAPIC’s first public event — a public forum on queer API identity and activism — was productive, but our organizing was incomplete, as we failed to consider the need to build a foundation for the organization through membership-building activities, which must of necessity include a strong social component.

So launching — or re-launching — a queer API movement cannot successfully be premised on a false and artificial distinction between the social and the political; the two must instead be conceived of as being mutually supporting, even if there is inevitably tension between them. Along with sufficient funding, the social cohesion of our local queer API groups are of necessity a crucial component of the launching pad for any successful and effective political movement.

Another component must be work through the media — both the mainstream media and the ethnic media, especially Asian-language print and broadcast media outlets. For all the good work that the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) does in monitoring English-language media in the United States, given the huge budget that the organization operates on — enormous by the standards of queer API organizations in this country — it is a matter of some disappointment to me that our leading national LGBT media organization (still) has no department that monitors Asian-language media both here and in Asia itself.  Without a culturally competent GLAAD,  our community is left with intermittent and scattershot attempts to monitor Asian-language media, which play such an important role in shaping Asian and Asian American perceptions of queer APIs.

In addition to media monitoring and the education of the public through existing media, we need to create media outlets of our own. Here, even the newsletters of local queer API groups can play a role, especially those that are digitized and uploaded to organizational websites and thus available to a far wider audience than such newsletters could have reached in the pre-Internet age. We as queer APIs must also increase LGBT participation in the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) as well as on the staffs of Asian American ethnic media outlets.

And of course, we must begin to elect queer APIs to public office, while at the same time being aware of the ever-present possibility that those elected from our community may succumb to the temptation of using identity politics to advance a self-interested political agenda that does not serve but may in fact undermine the community’s agenda of empowerment. The larger need is for participation in the political process, not merely to increase the representation of queer APIs in public office, but to advance an agenda of social justice and social change.

Student Activism: Academics & Alumni

Since this is a student conference and we are on a university campus, I would like to address one important component of any queer API movement, and that is student activism. If there are any students here who think there is little that they can do to participate actively in anything called a ‘movement,’ then they are laboring under a misconception. Let me point out three ways that students can do so.

First, queer API students can participate in student organizations, to ‘Asianize’ the LGBT student groups — which are often predominantly white — and to ‘queer’ the Asian American organizations on campus, which on some campuses may be overwhelmingly non-LGBT. From what I hear, some Asian American student organizations are little more than glorified straight dating sites. So if your college KSA or CSA or PSA isn’t doing much more than providing future marriage mates for the straight set, why not challenge them to do something really queer? Non-API or LGBT organizations can also provide opportunities for activism, including your on-campus chapter of Amnesty International or other human rights organizations, for example.

Second, there is the academic side, with Asian and Asian American studies programs and departments just ripe for the queering, not to mention the opportunities to ‘Asianize’ the LGBT studies or queer theory program at your school. If the AAS program on campus isn’t doing anything queer, propose something; same for LGBT studies programs that have no courses on queer APIs.

Third, follow the money. Students may often feel powerless, especially on large university campuses with distant administrators running the show. I wonder whether senior administrators sometimes are influenced by the model minority myth in making decisions on resources available to people of color, afraid that African American and Latino students may act up if they do not get adequate resources but complacent about API students because they think that APIs will not agitate. It took years of agitation for the University of Illinois to build the APA Cultural Center, which now shares the same building as the AAS program. If the opinions of students are often blithely disregarded by senior administrators at many colleges and universities, those of alumni cannot be, because alumni are usually the single largest group of regular donors to their alma maters. But instead of giving to the college- or university-wide alumni association, why not start an API or LGBT alumni association or even a queer API alumni association? An alumni association run by queer API alumni that is independent of the college or university can create an endowment that can fund queer API-specific programs and projects.

In short, there is so much that you can do to help create a queer API movement even before you graduate, and even more once you do. There are many significant and even daunting challenges, including the ones that I have mentioned here. But don’t be afraid to think big. The goal of a queer API movement must be nothing less than the transformation of society — our own as well as the societies of our communities and cultures of origin — so that all of us of Asian or Pacific Islander descent who identify with the L, G, B and/or T can reclaim our rightful place in those communities and participate actively in the articulation of the governing narratives that shape our life chances and opportunities as human beings.

Thank you.

Isfahan: Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque

First North American LGBTQ Muslim Conference Held in New York
By Pauline Park
Lesbian & Gay New York (LGNY)
3 June 1999

Think “Islam and homosexuality.” The mind immediately conjures up images of a gay man in Iran being stoned to death by an angry mob while an imam fulminates against the abomination of men who lie with men and women who lie with women. Such images capture part of the reality, but they also render invisible the lives of queer Muslims and the complexity of their struggle.

Certainly, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission have amply documented the horrendous record of human rights abuses against queer people in Muslim countries. Honan, the exiled Iranian gay rights group, has estimated that over 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed — some stoned to death, others burned alive — since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan last year, scores of accused homosexuals have apparently been killed by having brick walls
collapse on them or by being thrown from tall buildings or mountaintops. But behind the veil of clichéd images of Islamic fundamentalism, a movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims is beginning to coalesce.

The Al-Fatiha Foundation convened the First North American Conference for LGBTQ Muslims and Friends, “Creating a Community,” here in New York Memorial Day weekend. Conference participants demonstrated the geographic and demographic diversity of the queer Muslim community, with blond-haired and blue-eyed European Americans mingling with olive-skinned Americans and Europeans of Arab and South Asian descent. Among the 60 or so attendees, there were practicing Muslims, including recent converts, non-observant individuals raised Muslim but alienated from their faith, as well as representatives of other faiths.

Al-Fatiha is an international organization founded in 1997 to provide a safe space for LGBTQ Muslims to share individual experiences and institutional resources, and help them reconcile their sexual orientation and/or gender identity with their faith. This last task is not made easy by passages in the Quran that seem to contain explicit proscriptions against homosexuality and cross-dressing. Interpreting such Quranic passages was the subject of a rather intense debate at the conference. Even Al-Fatiha’s founder, Faisal Alam, admits that he himself has not fully reconciled his sexuality and his faith.

“But when you face God and the Prophet on the day of judgment, the first question he’ll ask is not whether you are gay or how many sex partners you had, but did you believe in me?” Alam declared. “Male homosexuality in the Quran is conceptualized in heterosexual terms, and those Quranic proscriptions on homosexuality can be understood in the patriarchal context in which they were conceived,” Dr. Ghazala Anwar argued, “hence women and gay men have common cause in a feminist re-interpretation of Islam.”

Anwar was critical of the selective way in which fundamentalist governments had implemented traditional Islamic law. “Under sharia law, due process requires that four males witness anal penetration in order to make it subject to prosecution, which would make it practically impossible to prove,” Anwar said. “But in the contemporary Muslim world, people have forgotten about such provisions for due process.” Anwar also noted that the punishment of stoning someone to death was derived from sharia law and is not mentioned in the Quran itself. Anwar said that both Islamic fundamentalists and progressives were selective in quoting from the Quran on the subject of homosexuality and transgender, and that both had to develop a more rigorous methodology for interpreting scripture.

On a panel on interfaith perspectives on homosexuality, Will Berger, representing Dignity (the organization for LGBT Catholics), challenged literal interpretations of scripture. “Sometimes we just have to say that scripture is wrong,” he argued, citing the example of the Biblical justification of slavery. The panel found consensus on the need to recognize the full humanity of those in the religious Right opposed to LGBT equality. “Love well those who are your enemies right now, because in a few years, they will be your friends,” urged Dr. Louie Crew, who 25 years ago founded Integrity for lesbian and gay Episcopalians and described the progress the group has made since then. “A victory that diminishes your enemy is no victory.”

On a panel on the progressive interfaith movement, Surina Khan, a research analyst at Political Research Associates who studies authoritarian and racists movements in the U.S. said, “We need to be careful not to demonize the followers in [the religious right] movement, most of whom are sincere.” Khan suggested that the movement’s leaders were manipulating their followers.

A discussion on the merits of establishing a gay mosque sparked lively debate across a number of faiths represented. Donald Maher of the Spiritual Rainbow talked of the need to minister to lesbian and gay Catholics within the church, while Berger of Dignity and Rabbi Robert Young of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah spoke enthusiastically about the special energy that comes from having an LGBT-specific worship space. Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, described the work of the Jerusalem Open House, an LGBT community center that seeks to meet the needs of Muslim and Christian Arabs as well as Jews.

More informal and intimate discussion sessions also addressed the lives of queer Muslims in the US and abroad. In a women’s discussion group, for example, one young Pakistani-born lesbian told of how she was pursuing a master’s degree in part because she needed an excuse to avoid being married, and said only half in jest that she would probably end up with a Ph.D. A first-generation immigrant mother expressed the need for a Muslim P-FLAG because non-Muslim parents could not fully understand the religious and cultural context in which she was struggling to be supportive
of her transsexual daughter’s transition. A transgendered Irish Catholic convert to Islam told of his concern for his children should his involvement with a queer Muslim group become known in his small Muslim community in Florida. On a more hopeful note, an African American lesbian told of how she had found a progressive mosque in New Jersey in which she could be “out” even to the female imam.

In Arabic, Al-Fatiha means “the Opening,” and refers to the opening passage of the Quran; but the organization’s name may refer to a different kind of opening as well, expressing the hope that Al-Fatiha may begin to open the heart of Islam to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Muslims
everywhere.

Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (interior)

For further information contact:
Al-Fatiha Foundation,
212.752.3188

Arab & Persian LBT Women & Friends Gathering
(718.596.0342, x35)

Gay & Lesbian Arab Society (GLAS)
http://www.leb.net/glas
Jerusalem Open House, 617.247.8420,
http://www.poboxes.com/gayj

South Asian Lesbian & Gay Association (SALGA)
212.358.5132

Al-Fatiha is an international organization dedicated to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims & their friends!

Al-Fatiha Foundation
Tel./Fax: (212) 752-3188
405 Park Avenue, Suite 1500
New York, NY 10022
http://www.al-fatiha.org

Patrick Cheng’s mother reads a statement in Chinese in support of her son and the LGBT/queer API community at the QAPI press conference in Chinatown on Jan. 30.  At left: lead organizers Irene Tung & Aries Liao.

NYAGRA statement on the participation of LGBT/queer APIs in the 2010 Chinese lunar new year parade in Chinatown
Pauline Park, chair
30 January 2010

On February 21, a contingent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) or ‘queer’ Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs) will participate in the annual Chinese lunar new year parade in New York’s Chinatown for the first time. The New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) — a transgender advocacy organization founded in 1998 — is proud to join Q-Wave, the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), Barangay, and a host of organizations in co-sponsoring the LGBT contingent in the parade. On behalf of our members, as chair of NYAGRA, I would especially like to acknowledge and thank Aries Liao and Irene Tung of Q-Wave for spearheading this historic initiative.

I would also 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 China and in every other Asian or Pacific Island society — since time immemorial.

China has homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions going back centuries. The ‘passion of the cut sleeve‘ (duan xiu) — 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‘ — goes back even further, to the Zhou dynasty Duke Ling of Wei (534-403 BC) and his male lover, Mixi Zia. 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.

So when we join the Chinese lunar new year parade in Chinatown on Feb. 21 as the first LGBT contingent in that parade, we are simply reclaiming our rightful place in our communities of origin and reinscribing ourselves in the dominant narratives of Asian and Asian American cultures. My message for non-LGBT participants in the parade who are shocked or confused by our presence is this: we are you and you are us. We have been here (all along), we have been queer, and you have been used to it, you just forgot.

Pauline Park reads a statement on behalf of NYAGRA at the QAPI press conference.