Williams Institute Reading Room: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resources in Law and Public Policy: LGBT Asian Americans

The stories of second-generation immigrant gay men coming of age in Los Angeles. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA could not have felt further removed from a world where queerness was accepted and celebrated. Instead, the men profiled here maneuver through family and friendship circles where masculinity dominates, gay sexuality is unspoken, and heterosexuality is strictly enforced. For these men, the path to sexual freedom often involves chasing the dreams while resisting the expectations of their immigrant parents--and finding community in each other. Ocampo also details his own story of reconciling his queer Filipino American identity and those of men like him. He shows what it was like for these young men to grow up gay in an immigrant family, to be the one gay person in their school and ethnic community, and to be a person of color in predominantly White gay spaces. Brown and Gay in LA is an homage to second-generation gay men and their radical redefinition of what it means to be gay, to be a man, to be a person of color, and, ultimately, what it means to be an American.
*Available online (UC users only)

Shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards. "A nuanced mediation on love, identity, and belonging. This story of survival radiates with resilience and hope." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "This openhearted memoir . . . opens the door to include queer descendants of war survivors into the growing American library of love." --Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show
When Putsata Reang was eleven months old, her family fled war-torn Cambodia, spending twenty-three days on an overcrowded navy vessel before finding sanctuary at an American naval base in the Philippines. Holding what appeared to be a lifeless baby in her arms, Ma resisted the captain's orders to throw her bundle overboard. Instead, on landing, Ma rushed her baby into the arms of American military nurses and doctors, who saved the child's life. "I had hope, just a little, you were still alive," Ma would tell Put in an oft-repeated story that became family legend. Over the years, Put lived to please Ma and make her proud, hustling to repay her life debt by becoming the consummate good Cambodian daughter, working steadfastly by Ma's side in the berry fields each summer and eventually building a successful career as an award-winning journalist. But Put's adoration and efforts are no match for Ma's expectations. When she comes out to Ma in her twenties, it's just a phase. When she fails to bring home a Khmer boyfriend, it's because she's not trying hard enough. When, at the age of forty, Put tells Ma she is finally getting married--to a woman--it breaks their bond in two. In her startling memoir, Reang explores the long legacy of inherited trauma and the crushing weight of cultural and filial duty. With rare clarity and lyric wisdom, Ma and Me is a stunning, deeply moving memoir about love, debt, and duty.

Moon in Full, a contemporary coming-of-age story shines light on the search for truth and compassion, and unwinds the deep-seated challenges of finding authentic voice and true identity in our complicated era. Author Marpheen Chann's journey weaves through housing projects and foster homes, into houses of worship and across college campuses, and plays out in working-class Maine, where he struggles to find his place in a majority white community and to reconcile his fears and longings as a young gay man with the devoutly religious beliefs of his adopted family. Chann, a second-generation Asian American, recounts what he has learned, what he has lost, and what he has found during his evolution from hungry refugee's son to religious youth to an advocate for acceptance and equality.

Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics examines media representations and everyday interpersonal intercultural negotiations of vernacular discourses around sticky rice--an "Asian" man building sexual and romantic relationships with other "Asian" men. Specifically, Eguchi interrogates the following elements of sticky rice: the way sticky rice recycles, rethinks, and shifts the settler colonialist logics of whiteness that sustain ongoing histories of anti-Asian racism; the way sticky rice resists and reifies the mundane operation and execution of whiteness that organizes gay sexual cultures; the way sticky rice reproduces, reconstitutes, and challenges intra-regional political rivalries, economic hierarchies, and historical tensions in and across Asia and Asian diasporas; and the way sticky rice suggests alternative mappings of queer sex, desire, intimacy, and relationality. By taking further steps to unpack the complexities and contradictions of sticky rice as a gay vernacular, Eguchi offers an additional and alternative space to question and critique "Asians loving Asians."

When Neema Avashia tells people where she's from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving "There are Indian people in West Virginia?" A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles. Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia's identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.
*Also available as eBook (UC users only)

First published in 1998,Q & A: Queer in Asian America, edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, became a canonical work in Asian American studies and queer studies. This new edition of Q & A& is neither a sequel nor an update, but an entirely new work borne out of the progressive political and cultural advances of the queer experiences of Asian North American communities. The artists, activists, community organizers, creative writers, poets, scholars, and visual artists that contribute to this exciting new volume make visible the complicated intertwining of sexuality with race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Sections address activism, radicalism, and social justice; transformations in the meaning of Asian-ness and queerness in various mass media issues of queerness in relation to settler colonialism and diaspora; and issues of bodies, health, disability, gender transitions, death, healing, and resilience.The visual art, autobiographical writings, poetry, scholarly essays, meditations, and analyses of histories and popular culture in the new Q & A gesture to enduring everyday racial-gender-sexual experiences of mis-recognition, micro-aggressions, loss, and trauma when racialized Asian bodies are questioned, pathologized, marginalized, or violated. This anthology seeks to expand the idea of Asian and American in LGBTQ studies.

From a writer whose work has been called "breathtaking and dazzling" by Roxane Gay, this moving, illuminating, and multifaceted memoir explores, in a series of essays, the emotional scars we carry when dealing with mental and physical illnesses--reminiscent of The Collected Schizophrenias and An Unquiet Mind. In this stunning debut, Laura Lee weaves unforgettable and eye-opening essays on a variety of taboo topics. In "History of Scars" and "Aluminum's Erosions," Laura dives head-first into heavier themes revolving around intimacy, sexuality, trauma, mental illness, and the passage of time. In "Poetry of the World," Laura shifts and addresses the grief she feels by being geographically distant from her mother whom, after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, is relocated to a nursing home in Korea. Through the vivid imagery of mountain climbing, cooking, studying writing, and growing up Korean American, Lee explores the legacy of trauma on a young queer child of immigrants as she reconciles the disparate pieces of existence that make her whole. By tapping into her own personal, emotional, and psychological struggles in these powerful and relatable essays, Lee encourages all of us to not be afraid to face our own hardships and inner truths.

A riotous collection of "witty and captivating" essays by a gay Filipino immigrant in America who is learning that everything is about sex (Bitch Magazine) -- and sex is about power. When Matt Ortile moved from Manila to Las Vegas, the locals couldn't pronounce his name. Harassed as a kid for his brown skin, accent, and femininity, he believed he could belong in America by marrying a white man and shedding his Filipino identity. This was the first myth he told himself. The Groom Will Keep His Name explores the various tales Ortile spun about what it means to be a Vassar Girl, an American Boy, and a Filipino immigrant in New York looking to build a home. As we meet and mate, we tell stories about ourselves, revealing not just who we are, but who we want to be. Ortile recounts the relationships and whateverships that pushed him to confront his notions of sex, power, and the model minority myth. Whether swiping on Grindr, analyzing DMs, or cruising steam rooms, Ortile brings us on his journey toward radical self-love with intelligence, wit, and his heart on his sleeve.

When Trisha Low moves west, her journey is motivated by the need to arrive "somewhere better"--someplace utopian, like revolution; or safe, like home; or even clarifying, like identity. Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose values she has difficulty sharing, and America's casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this book-length essay, the problem of how to account for one's life comes to the fore--sliding unpredictably between memory, speculation,self-criticism, and art criticism, Low seeks answers that she knows she won't find. Attempting to reconcile her desires with her radical politics, she asks: do our quests to fulfill our deepest wishes propel us forward, or keep us trapped in the rubble of our deteriorating world?

Brown White Black is a portrait of Nishta J. Mehra's family: her wife, who is white; her adopted child, Shiv, who is black; and their experiences dealing with America's rigid ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Her clear-eyed and incisive writing on her family's daily struggle to make space for themselves amid racial intolerance and stereotypes personalizes some of America's most fraught issues. Mehra writes candidly about her efforts to protect and shelter Shiv from racial slurs on the playground and from intrusive questions by strangers while educating her child on the realities and dangers of being black in America. In other essays, she discusses growing up in the racially polarized city of Memphis; coming out as queer; being an adoptive mother who is brown; and what it's like to be constantly confronted by people's confusion, concern, and expectations about her child and her family. Above all, Mehra argues passionately for a more nuanced and compassionate understanding of identity and family. Both poignant and challenging, Brown White Black is a remarkable portrait of a loving family on the front lines of some of the most highly charged conversations in our culture.

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called "the most famous undocumented immigrant in America," tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms. "This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book--at its core--is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can't. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home. After 25 years of living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own, this book is the closest thing I have to freedom." --Jose Antonio Vargas, from Dear America

This book utilizes personal narratives and survey data from over 500 respondents to explore the diversity of experiences across Asian and Pacific Islander LGBT communities within the United States. Additionally, the authors document and celebrate many of the everyday strengths and strategies employed by this extraordinary population to navigate and negotiate their daily lives.

This autobiography by one of rock-and-roll's most important foremothers, June Millington, tells the story that's never been told: how girls in the mid-60's started all-girl bands, learned to play electric, and became Fanny, one of the first all-female rock bands to be signed to a major label. Fanny soon began recording and touring worldwide with bands like Chicago and Dr. John. After Fanny, June became involved in the women's music movement when she was asked to play on and tour behind Cris Williamson's "The changer and the changed," which would become the defining album of that genre. Women's music quickly evolved into an independent feminist music network that included (often collectively run) production companies,venues, festivals, record labels, and distribution networks. Land of a thousand bridges chronicles the story of a young girl born to a mixed-race couple in the Philippines, who traveled to the US with big dreams of becoming a rock star, and made those dreams come true.

The author, a gay Indonesian who feels he is "not much of a looker," immigrates to the USA and is inundated with shirtless joggers, same-sex public displays of affection, and the constant drive to psychoanalyze. In this poignant, witty, flippant, and trenchant collection of personal essays the author recounts his and two friends' paths to cross-cultural gay marriage and adjusting to very new lives in the USA. Yuska Lutfi Tuanakotta came from Indonesia to San Francisco in 2011 to study dance and creative writing, has two MFAs in Writing, has presented work at AWP, and was a 2014 Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow.

*eBook (UC users only); also available at Young Research Library.
Repeatedly marginalized by both the white-centric queer community that values a hyper-masculine sexuality and a homophobic Asian American community that often privileges masculine heterosexuality, gay Asian American men largely have been silenced and alienated in present-day culture and society. In Geisha of a Different Kind, C. Winter Han travels from West Coast Asian drag shows to the internationally sought-after Thai kathoey, or "ladyboy," to construct a theory of queerness that is inclusive of the race and gender particularities of the gay Asian male experience in the United States. Through ethnographic observation of queer Asian American communities and Asian American drag shows, interviews with gay Asian American men, and a reading of current media and popular culture depictions of Asian Americans, Han argues that gay Asian American men, used to gender privilege within their own communities, must grapple with the idea that, as Asians, they have historically been feminized as a result of Western domination and colonization, and as a result, they are minorities within the gay community, which is itself marginalized within the overall American society. Han also shows that many Asian American gay men can turn their unusual position in the gay and Asian American communities into a positive identity.

*At Young Research Library.

*See Chapter 17, Searching for home: voices of Gay Asian American youth in West Hollywood, by Mark Tristan Ng. At Young Research Library and College Library.

*At Young Research Library and College Library.

*At Young Research Library and College Library.

*At Asian American Studies Center and College Library.