Into the Archives of Queer Asian Canadian History
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CONTENT NOTE: mentions of anti-Blackness, HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s in Canada
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This essay was originally written for an undergrad course on Asian Canadian history. As someone who is heavily involved in political struggle and liberation work, I have previously erased my Asianness in my political framework, as I had associated Asianness (especially that in Canada) as complicit in white supremacist violence at worst and depoliticized or politically liberal and limited to pursuits of inclusion and representation based on state recognition at best.
However, through this course, I came across many stories of resistance, intimacy, and political organizing, which are difficult to find in mainstream narratives in Asian Canadian history. In emphasizing the importance of political lineage, this research into Queer Asian Canadian history was really affirming for me, as I recognized that I am a part of a lineage of queer Asians in exploring ways of being and relating that are non-normative, political, and potentially radical and liberatory. I share this essay, especially for my fellow queer Asians, such that we can re-story what it means to be diasporic queer Asians in the pursuit of collective liberation.
On a technicality note, I use the category Asian through the framework of Orientalism, which particularly emphasizes the West’s perception of East and South Asia(ns). I do not go over the complexity of the racial category of Asian or of its roots in Orientalism in this essay. In this context, I also use the term Canadian to mean diasporic Asians based in what is colonially known as Canada, encompassing the full range of categories for nationality, from citizenship to undocumented migrants. Citizenship/nationality status is often an overlooked category of power/privilege in some mainstream race discourse and must be at least acknowledged, as I do not address the full complexity of it in this essay.
In the recent years, I have experienced a flourishing queer Asian community in so-called Vancouver. Coming across queer Asian artists, events, and organizations such as Paul Wong, Love Intersections, Pride in Chinatown, House of Rice, and Rice Cake has been really affirming in my exploration of queerness as a diasporic Corean femme and has allowed me to cultivate community with other queer, diasporic Asians. Given that even cis/het Asian identities are often neglected in mainstream art spaces and events, I became curious about the histories that have paved the path for queer Asians to have such a presence in Vancouver and beyond in Canada.
Despite limited academic literature about Queer Asian Canadian history, I was delighted to find an abundance of archives of newsletter publications by queer Asian Canadian organizations from the 1980s and 90s. Through my research into these archives, I discovered that in late 20th century Canada, queer Asians prioritized community-building and political organizing as a part of local, national, and transnational networks, using newsletter publications as a primary way of finding and connecting with one another. Navigating the tensions of dominant narratives that divide queer and Asian, the relational work of these queer Asian organizations built the foundations of queer Asian Canadian communities today.
Third World Conference of Lesbians and Gays,
Washington D.C (1979) Source: The ArQuives
In the recognition of much longer histories of how queerness and Asianness have intersected in Canada, I will begin this essay with a brief history of queer(ing) Asian Canadians that go back to late 19th century migrant workers. I will then highlight the relational work of three queer Asian Canadian organizations of the late 20th century based on their newsletter publications: Gay Asians of Toronto and their newsletter, Celebrasian, Khush: South Asian Gay Men of Toronto and their newsletter Khush Kayal, and Gay Asians of Vancouver Area and their newsletter, Voices.¹
Queer(ing) Asian Canadians
Despite queerness usually centering whiteness and Asianness usually associated with conservative heteronormativity, a queer analysis of Asian Canadian history offers a different perspective. In Canada, queer Asians come from a lineage and history of queer(ing) Asians. I use the term queer based on Queer of Colour critique; queer, not limited to describe sexual orientation, but also as a verb of being made non-normative and/or challenging state-sanctioned normativities based on relations to power.²
Historian Nayan Shah has produced extensive literature on the history of diasporic Asians being queered and made deviant by the nation-states of Canada and the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To prevent the permanent settlement of migrant workers who would obstruct the white settler nation-building of Canada, several state policies prevented Chinese migrant workers from building families, such as bringing home wives from China or entering interracial marriages. This forced Chinese men into living in bachelor societies, which “produced several types of queer domesticity”, in contrast to “the ideal of respectable domesticity” of white households in the form of hetero marriage nuclear families.³ Thus, Chinese men were made non-normative and deviant based on their imposed living conditions and social dynamics, “rendered queer in an aspiring white settler” state.⁴
Similarly, South Asian men who worked in Western Canada were also forced to navigate alternative relations and intimacies due to immigration policy and legal obstacles to longer-term settlement through hetero marriage. Labelled as sexually deviant by the state, legal archives show how South Asian men were especially targeted, policed and accused of interracial and same-sex encounters with fellow migrant men, white men, and Native American men. While recognizing systemic subjugation, Shah re-orients sexual deviance as stranger intimacy, arguing that “legal records of vagrancy, public indecency, and sodomy (to) illustrate how insistently migrant laborers crafted alternative publics and communicated codes of male honor, privileges, and hierarchy as they strategically remapped spaces and sensibilities labeled as deviant.”⁵ Racialized migrant men who did not have access to the possibility of respectable domesticity due to state policies engaged in a type of creative experiments, creating alternative forms of kinship, intimacy, and social life. They queered relations, challenging state-imposed normativities and institutions of hetero nuclear families and finding other ways of relating.
Given the interlocking systems of cisheteropatriarchy, whiteness, and settler colonialism in the building of white settler futurity, Asians have been queered and rendered sexually deviant and non-normative in the history of Canada. Simultaneously, these Asians, the migrant workers of the 19th and 20th centuries were brilliantly queer, imagining and creating alternative forms of kinship as a means of survival. Canada queered Asians, and yes, we are queer! A lineage of Queer Asian Canada connects the queer brilliance of our Asian migrant working ancestors and the creative relational work of queer Asian Canadian groups of the late 20th century.
The Newsletter Archives of GAT, Khush, and GAVA
In the sociopolitical context of several liberation movements in the 1960s and 70s in North America, as well as the HIV/AIDS epidemic and organizing by LGBTQ communities in the 80s, queer Asians came together and formed the first few organizations of their kind in the 1980s in Canada. While organizations are not equivalent to communities, these organizations were crucial in cultivating queer Asian communities, as they came into being “out of the need to create affirming spaces for queer Asian people and also out of the context of the racial exclusions enacted by multiculturalist queer community formations.”⁶ Especially during times of non-existent or limited access to the internet, self-published media publications by these organizations were a crucial form of community-building and political organizing for queer Asians who were “often under constant threat of double erasure” due to lack of access to dominant spaces in white gay liberal communities and heteronormative Asian communities.⁷
In this research, I analyzed the newsletters of three queer Asian Canadian organizations — Celebrasian by Gay Asians of Toronto (GAT), Khush Kayal by Khush, and Voices by Gay Asians of Vancouver Area (GAVA) — to illustrate their community-building and political organizing efforts across local, national, and transnational networks. The following are some of my findings on how newsletters worked as a medium for community-building and political organizing and/or documented and represented the relational work of the organizations.
Gay Asians of Toronto Newsletter Image circa 1980s
Source: The Arquives
Example 1: Two of the founders of GAT, the first Queer POC group in Canada, found each other through a newsletter publication. While Richard Fung was grappling with the division of his community as racist white gays and homophobic straight Asians, he came across Gerald Chan’s essay on being Chinese and gay, called “Out of the Shadows” in the pan-Asian, Toronto-based magazine called Asianadian. After attending the first National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference in 1979 in Washington where Fung met several queer Asians, he reached out to Gerald Chan to start a gay Asian group in Toronto. GAT was also co-founded by Nito Marquez (Filipino) and Tony Souza (Indian), one of Fung’s friends who joined him in Washington.⁸ In a time when the intersections of queerness and Asianness were rarely addressed, Gerald Chan’s essay helped bring together the founding members of the first Queer POC group in Canada.
Example 2: The newsletters of each queer Asian group featured directories and information on other queer Asian groups, not only in Canada but also around the world. As the first queer Asian publication in Canada, Celebrasian’s 1984 vol 2 issue 3 featured their first group directory of 9 groups based in California, Boston, Chicago, London and Japan.⁹ GAT continued to feature extensive summaries of new groups listed in their directory, and Khush eventually followed suit in featuring directories and summaries of new groups and updates as well. Khush Kayal’s 1989 vol 1 issue 4 featured the first group directory of 8 groups based in London, India, and across Canada and the US with PO Box information and phone numbers¹⁰. By 1993, the group directory expanded to 28 listings, including GAT, GAVA, AIDS groups and journals around the world.¹¹
While GAVA’s Voices didn’t have a dedicated group directory, a few of their issues mentioned other queer Asian groups based in LA, Seattle, and GAT, naming their relationships to these groups across provincial and national borders.¹² Beyond queer Asian groups, Khush also amplified other queer POC groups and their events such as Zami, the first Canadian group for Black and West Indian gays and lesbians, and their events for Black History Month.¹³ While each group had their own localized audience, they all participated in creating a transnational network of queer Asian groups so that queer Asians and queer people of colour could find one another around the world.
Example 3: The members of queer Asian organizations often contributed to each other’s newsletters. GAT’s Celebrasian published a Special South Asian Issue in 1988, which was largely composed of the contributions by Khush members.¹⁴ In the first publication of Khush Kayal in 1989, Richard Fung of GAT contributed with a review of the 1988 film, Madame Sousatzka, in relation to issues of race and sexuality.¹⁵ Later issues of Khush Kayal also featured excerpts from the Gay Asian Pacific Alliance about HIV/AIDS organizing in California.¹⁶ Similarly, GAVA made extensive efforts to include contributions from other Gay Asian Groups in their 1992 vol 2 issue 5 publication which revolved around the theme “Building Gay Asian Community.” This issue featured writings from non-founding members of GAT, a member of Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays, and a friend of GAVA from Calgary.¹⁷
Example 4: Members of Gay Asians of Toronto were proactive in resisting anti-Blackness and racism in mainstream (white) gay spaces. In 1985, a mainstream gay magazine called the Body Politic published a racist ad by a white man looking for a Black man to fulfill his racist, sexual fantasies. GAT and Zami raised concerns about the ad to the Body Politic (BP), which sparked ongoing discussion around race issues being dismissed as “superficialities” by white liberal gays. The Celebrasian issue 6 of spring 1985 featured a 12-page article on this event, titled “Racism: one word too many,” including letters by Richard Fung and Lim of GAT to BP and response letters of pro-ad BP members. In response to the pro-ad sentiments of white liberal gays who prioritized the expression of (white gay) sexual desire and sexual libertarianism, Fung wrote “to champion the cause of uninhibited desire without addressing the impact of racism and sexism in the sexual arena is to call for the entrenchment of white male privilege.”¹⁸ Lim, in his letter, pointed the question to the white liberal gay audience, “Why is the fulfillment of your desire more important than the struggle of my oppression?”¹⁹
Members of GAT and Zami, joined by POC and white supporters of this anti-racist resistance, engaged in discussions around sexuality and race following the incident. These included a panel discussion, co-organized by GAT and Zami, called “Lesbians, Gays, and Race” about “the difficulty of coming out and being a part of the gay community as people of colour.”²⁰ Beyond identity-based community-building, GAT was proactive in political, anti-racist, intersectional resistance.²¹
Scan of an Xtra’s 1984 December issue with Zami on the front page, Source: The Arquives
Example 5: GAT and Khush were a part of organizing several international conferences and gatherings in bringing queer communities together on a global scale. In 1985, GAT was a big part of organizing the Seventh International Gay Association Conference that brought together an international network of groups in over 25 countries around the world. As a predominantly Eurocentric organization, this was the first time that the conference was held in Canada. In GAT’s words, the theme, “Smashing Borders, Opening Spaces” encompassed “the international dimensions of our struggles for freedom, our needs to build networks of solidarity across the borders of nation-states and to open up more social spaces for exploring our desires and the diversity of our lives.” As a part of the conference, GAT, Lesbians of Colour and Zami organized a series of workshops and discussions on Gay Asian/Third World issues, covering topics such as interracial relationships, sexual stereotypes, internalized racism and sexism, Indigenous queer traditions, and feminist movements. The Summer 1985 issue of Celebrasian included a list of these workshops and events, and summaries of Gay Asian/Third World Delegates from around the world who participated in the conference.²²
In 1988, GAT and Khush co-hosted the first North American Asian Lesbian and Gay Conference called Unity Amongst Asians, and it was largely promoted through Celebrasian, which included registration documents and applications for housing for the conference.²³
In 1993, Khush organized Discover ’93, the first international South Asian Gay Men’s Conference, bringing together a web of South Asian Queers around the world in Toronto.²⁴ While these organizations were localized in many of their efforts and audience, they played key roles in international network-building among Queer Asians around the world.
Example 6: Queer Asian groups played significant roles in organizing around the HIV/AIDS epidemic, especially given the lack of mainstream support for racialized gay men. In 1989, Khush co-founded the South Asian Aids Coalition (SAAC) in Toronto, along with the AIDS Committee of Toronto and the Toronto Counselling Centre for Lesbians and Gays. The SAAC later changed their name to Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention (ASAAP), which is still around today. The advocacy and support work of SAAC/ASAAP is documented in Khush Kayal’s publications from the late 80s into the 90s.²⁵ Khush Kayal was also used to spread education on HIV/AIDS to the gay South Asian community in order to address the gaps of mainstream HIV/AIDS education that didn’t address both the sexualized and racialized myths around the virus. Khush was also involved in international solidarity work, as documented by the letters they received from AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA), an HIV/AIDS advocacy group in India. Members of Khush, as gay, diasporic South Asians, were invited to participate in an international letter-writing campaign to the Indian government to petition against the criminalization of homosexuality and the resulting neglect of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.²⁶ At Khush’s signature annual event, Desh Pardesh Festival, ASAAP also hosted the first North American South Asian AIDS Activist Forum in 1995.²⁷
Gay Asians of Toronto started the Gay Asian AIDS Project (GAAP) in 1990. They offered education and training around safer sex, testing through workshops and a phone line. They also offered individual client services for gay Asian men such as counselling, treatment information, buddy support, medical services, and case management. Dr. Alan Li, one of the key members of GAT and a founding member of GAAP outlined the work of GAAP in its first 8 months of being in service, in an article titled “Asians Against AIDS” in the 1990 fall issue of Celebrasian.²⁸ GAAP later merged with the Vietnamese AIDS Project and the Toronto Chinese Health Education Committee to form the Asian Community AIDS Services, which is also still around today.²⁹ In his article on Queer of Colour HIV/AIDS organizing in Toronto, John Paul Catungal argues that the emergence of AIDS service organizations by queers of colour were “in response to the racial erasures, with deadly consequences, engendered by mainstream responses to HIV/AIDS in the 1980s” as well as a “testament to the political presence, savvy, and activism of already existing local organizations for queers of colour.”³⁰ Queer Asian organizations such as GAT and Khush refused state neglect that erased queer Asians and their fight against HIV/AIDS and created culturally competent services for their own communities.³¹
These examples offer a partial insight into the work of queer Asian groups of Canada in the 1980s and 90s.³² Despite stereotypes of Asians as depoliticized “model minorities” who solely assimilate into the nation-state, these queer Asian organizations went beyond creating identity-oriented social spaces and pursuing representation and inclusion based on state recognition. They played significant roles in building national and transnational networks and politically organized against state violence and neglect. Despite the lack of intersectional praxis in mainstream gay liberation movements and racial justice movements for Asians, this glimpse into Queer Asian Canadian history illustrates how queer Asians have been active participants in the pursuit of collective liberation. While most academic and non-academic literature on this topic is brief in the mentions of GAT and Richard Fung’s films, Queer Asian Canadian history is much more expansive and complex. The wealth of information on this history through the archives that are newsletter publications is available for exploration and learning.³³ In getting curious about Queer Asian Canadian history, we can resist the erasure of the brilliant histories and ongoing lineages of community-building and political organizing of Queer Asians in Canada, which can then inform our current political movements for intersectional queer liberation and racial justice.
Notes
These newsletters can all be found in the Archives of Sexuality and Gender, in the collections, Gay and Lesbian Politics and Social Activism: Selected Newsletters and Periodicals and International Gay and Lesbian Periodicals and Newsletters. Unfortunately, there is a paywall so university students can try to access them through student access.
For Queer of Colour critique, see Cohen, Cathy J. "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" Glq 3, no. 4 (1997): 437-465. Ferguson, Roderick A. "Queer of Color Critique." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. 28 Mar. 2018.
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 13.
Dai Kojima, John Paul Catungal, and Robert Diaz, "Introduction: Feeling Queer, Feeling Asian, Feeling Canadian," Topia (Montreal) 38 (2017): 71.
Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law In the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 10.
Kojima, Catungal and Diaz, “Introduction,” 74.
Kojima, Catungal and Diaz, “Introduction,” 70.
Celebrasian November 1983 vol. 1 issue 1, Archives of Sexuality and Gender. Celebrasian June 1984 vol. 2 issue 3, Archives of Sexuality and Gender. Richard Fung documented this origin story of GAT in their first publication of Celebrasian in 1983, 3 years after the beginning of GAT and a timeline of the earlier years of GAT was published in their June 1984 publication.
Celebrasian June 1984 vol. 2 issue 3, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Khush Kayal, November 1989 vol. 1 issue 4, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Khush Kayal, December 1993 vol. 4 issue 4, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Voices, 1991 vol. 1 issue 5, Archives of Sexuality and Gender. Voices, December-January 1992 vol. 2 issue 5, Archives of Sexuality and Gender. Voices, 1991 vol. 1 issue 6 also offers a thanks to Alan Li of GAT for offering advice on establishing GAVA during a trip to Vancouver for AIDS research.
Khush Kayal, November 1989 vol. 1 issue 4, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Celebrasian, May 1988 issue 15, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Khush Kayal, February 1989 vol. 1 issue 1, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Khush Kayal, November 1989 vol. 1 issue 4, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Voices, September 1992, vol. 2 issue 5, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Celebrasian, May 1985 issue 6, page 12, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Celebrasian, May 1985 issue 6, page 14, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Celebrasian, August 1985 issue 7, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
As documented throughout Khush Kayal publications, Khush also continuously engaged in political discourse and action, thinking about working with feminist movements in light of the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989, contemplating on the issues of the Gulf Crisis of 1990, and getting involved with the Toronto Coalition Against Racism.
Celebrasian, August 1985 issue 7, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Celebrasian, May 1988 issue 15, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Event was mentioned in Khush Kayal, July 1995 vol. 6 issue 1, Archives of Sexuality and Gender in a timeline of international conferences for South Asian Queers. The second was organized by the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association in New York in ’94. The third was Pride Utsav ’95 which featured a keynote speech by Urvashi Vaid.
Khush Kayal, November 1989 vol. 1 issue 4, Archives of Sexuality and Gender. Khush Kayal, 1990 vol. 2 issue 1, Archives of Sexuality and Gender. Khush Kayal, 1990 vol. 2 issue 4, Archives of Sexuality and Gender. Khush Kayal, 1995 vol. 6 issue 1, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Khush Kayal, December 1994 vol. 5 issue 3, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Khush Kayal, July 1995 vol. 6 issue 1, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Celebrasian, November 1990 vol. 18, Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
John Paul Catungal, “We Had to Take Space, We Had to Create Space: Locating Queer of Colour Politics in 1980s Toronto,” in Queering Urban Justice, ed. Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa and Syrus Marcus Ware (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).
Catungal, “We Had to Take Space, We Had to Create Space,” 59. According to Catungal’s research, GAT began HIV/AIDS organizing much earlier in the early 80s, with fundraising money for HIV and educational outreach on HIV prevention. This article also elaborates on Zami, the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention, and their relationships with GAT and GAAP through Douglas Stewart and Alan Li.
This work was largely possible through Doug Stewart, one of the co-founders of Zami and for a time, a support counsellor for a mainstream AIDS organization in Toronto. When Alan Li of GAT was still a medical student, Stewart contacted him about an AIDS positive Vietnamese client with limited access to language. I highly recommend the reading in Footnote 30.
The three organizations are predominantly led by and composed of cis men. Check out Asian Lesbians of Toronto, which had close relations to Khush, SamiYoni, a journal by and for South Asian Lesbians, and Rupert Raj, a pansexual Eurasian trans man who is one of the most prominent figures in trans activism in Canada.
In my research through the newsletter archives, I read several pieces on contemplations on how to engage with gay white spaces and the nation state, which I found so intriguing! One of my favourite parts of these newsletters were the personal ads, looking for pen pals, dates, roommates and friends, which I couldn’t find the room to include in my final research paper. If you have access to these archives through an academic portal, I highly recommend!
Bibliography
Primary sources
Celebrasian, n.d. Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Khush Khayal, n.d. Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Voices, n.d. Archives of Sexuality and Gender.
Secondary sources
Catungal, John Paul. “We Had to Take Space, We Had to Create Space: Locating Queer of Colour Politics in 1980s Toronto.” In Queering Urban Justice, edited by. Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa and Syrus Marcus Ware, 45-61. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018.
Kojima, Dai, John Paul Catungal, and Robert Diaz. "Introduction: Feeling Queer, Feeling Asian, Feeling Canadian," Topia. 38. (2017): 69-80.
Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Shah, Nayan. Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.