Four Decades of Queer of Colour Art and Activism in Toronto
Jin Haritaworn interview with Richard Fung1
Jin Haritaworn: You are not only an internationally acclaimed writer and filmmaker but have also co-founded and been part of various queer of colour spaces in Toronto. How did you come into queer of colour consciousness?
Richard Fung: Queer of colour, that convergence for me first came about in 1979, when I read an article by Gerald Chan called “Out of the Shadows”2 in the pan-Asian magazine Asianadian. It was the first time I’d ever seen gay identity articulated within an Asian context, so I became involved in the magazine. In the same year, Tony Souza and I went to the First National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights and attended the First National Conference of Third World Lesbians and Gays, which was organized by the National Coalition of Black Gays. Audre Lorde gave the keynote speech, and that was the first time I came into conversation with other people who identified as gay and lesbian Asians. A year later, I helped found Gay Asians Toronto (GAT). That was the main period of organizing.
JH: You’ve written a lot about that period. Could you take us back to a few of these organizing spaces? Since we’re both interested in queering urban space, I’d love it if you could map them out for us.
RF: Let’s start with Gay Asians Toronto (see also Alan Li, this book). Three spaces were significant. The first is the 519 Church Street Community Centre at Church and Wellesley, which is where we met. At that point, things were just shifting from Yonge Street, which is where all the gay bars had been until then. The second is the Body Politic (TBP) journal, which was in many ways a forerunner of what later became queer theory, through which GAT was advertised. A lot of early articles were published there. The Body Politic—located at Richmond and Duncan—was then the most exciting queer intellectual publishing venture. My partner Tim McCaskell was a member of the TBP collective and I volunteered. The third significant space would be Chinatown because that’s where we first advertised outside of the Yonge Street area.
JH: You mentioned that things were happening in Yonge rather than Church then.
RF: At the time, people hung out in that strip of Yonge Street between Bloor and Carlton. That’s where all the action was—where all the bars and the clubs were. In fact, when I first came to Canada as a student, before I came out, I remember hearing about people going to Yonge Street to throw eggs and tomatoes at the drag queens entering the St. Charles Tavern on Halloween. So queerness was very spatialized in that area. There were gay baths, but they weren’t really part of my world then. Paul Cheung says in Orientations,3 my first documentary, that race mattered less in spaces for anonymous sex. For example, if you go to parks and have sex at night, you’re not really seeing people that well, right? From what I’ve heard from friends who did washrooms, it was less about hierarchies of body types, including race. He says where race mattered more was if somebody saw him in a bar and did not know whether he spoke English or not.
JH: Were there specific bars on Yonge Street that gay Asians would go to?
RF: Yes, there was a place called The Quest, a bar just south of Bloor on the east side of Yonge. Paul Cheung, in his interview for Re:Orientations,4 my follow-up to Orientations in 2016, reminded me of that. He says you’d see all these Asian guys lined up against the wall. So, talking about space, I remember in the early 1980s going to a bar on Yonge Street. I forget the name, but it was upstairs, just south of Wellesley, it didn’t last long. I’m going upstairs, and the person at the door is asking over and over, “You know this is a gay bar? This is a gay bar. You know this is a gay bar?” And then my realizing that somehow he was thinking that “Asianness” and “queerness” were mutually exclusive. Because I’m pretty faggy, but he couldn’t even read the code. He just assumed.
JH: Was that more likely to happen then than now?
RF: I think so. It was a homophobic period. I haven’t recently seen that kind of concern about security, about who might get in and cause trouble. I think now they’d be happy to have anybody in the Village. My sense is that the neighbourhood is dying. I think this is due to a number of things, including the way nonconforming sexual and gender identities have become more naturalized and are able to flourish in other parts of the city, particularly in the West End, Queen Street. And so it’s very much generational and subcultural, who hangs out on Church.
JH: How did queers of colour engage with Church and Wellesley?
RF: It was a place where everybody went. There wasn’t a lot of choice after things moved from Yonge Street. Yonge Street was interesting because it’s also the major spine of commerce in the city before Bloor Street, right? Bloor Street was on the rise, but it wasn’t upscale the way it is now, where you could walk on this block and see the names of international designer brands. Yonge Street had more traffic, was more important to the life of the city at that point. Queer folks could go there but you would also blend in with everybody else because it was not a queer-only space. You couldn’t really tell who was there and for what. It provided a certain visual or spatial alibi. But when things moved to Church and Wellesley, you definitely were in Church and Wellesley—there was nothing else there. It became suspicious why you were there, right? There is a way in which queer bodies or queer and trans performances became more visible in that space. There was not much choice of where to go, so people all went there. And I think there are different registers of the space. You might have read about The Steps in front of the Second Cup coffee shop, where a lot of youth and less entitled folks hung out. And there were all kinds of debates as to whether they should get rid of The Steps (see Aemilius “Milo” Ramirez, this book).
JH: The third significant space was Chinatown . . .
RF: Yes. We would put up posters in Chinatown. Tony Chung would tell us which places we shouldn’t poster on because they were connected to triads. He knew the Chinatown community really well. Tony died in the AIDS crisis in the 1990s. He came from a working-class Chinese family from Hong Kong, and he lived down the street from me in a Toronto Housing complex. He was one of the earliest, most committed members of GAT. In many ways, he was the backbone of the organization, but he never took a leadership position. I think this had a lot to do with class and language—English fluency and cultural capital, basically.
JH: So it was the middle-class people who ended up in leadership roles in Gay Asians Toronto?
RF: People like me. I’ve always reflected on the fact that I’m Asian but also that I’m from the Caribbean, so English is my first language. There are all kinds of privileges that allowed me to . . . even come out, right? A lot of the people who were involved in that early movement were international students from places like Hong Kong. In some ways, they literally had the capital, they had time and a certain entitlement that comes with class. But also, the families were mostly not here, so they could enjoy the freedom to be out and move through space and not worry about who saw them. One of the early people involved was part of a set of identical twins. I knew the family because they were also from the Caribbean. He had never discussed his sexuality with his identical twin. And he lived in terror because someone might approach his brother thinking it was him and have a conversation they shouldn’t be having. As it turns out his brother, who was married at the time, subsequently came out as well.
JH: How about power distributed along intersectional lines of gender, race, and class?
RF: I envisioned Gay Asians as a pan-Asian and multi-gendered organization. But there were many more people of Chinese descent than any other ethnicity, both in the city and in the lesbian and gay scene at that time. Tony Souza, who is from Kolkata, India, was one of the four founders but he fell away relatively quickly. There were some Filipinos who came and stayed involved, like Nito Marquez. I remember one particularly active Vietnamese man. There were no Koreans, which had to do with the later migration history. So Gay Asians became very much Chinese dominated. Before we launched the group, we tried to find other people. I remember having a conversation with the poet Suniti Namjoshi and trying to convince her to join before the official founding. But she wasn’t interested, and there was never a critical mass of women. So, you know, we would get one woman, and there wouldn’t be any other women there. She would not return the next week, but another woman would come the next week. So that remained the case.
JH: What do you think about the new generation of queer Asian organizing?
RF: In 2014, I went to a Freedom School performance in a church on Bloor Street. I was taken aback because it was the Asian Arts Freedom School, but it was very mixed.5 There were white, Palestinian, and Black participants, and there were different kinds of Asians. So that was really interesting. Also, I’d say Tim McCaskell and I were the oldest people there by far. There were a lot of teenagers, some with their parents. It was certainly not a space that I had experienced before. There were parents who were supportive. The odd parent would come to events at Asian Community AIDS Services, Gay Asians Toronto, Khush, or Desh Pardesh. But we weren’t teenagers. I think there is a big generational shift among parents who came of age after the 1980s and who have themselves grown up in an era of sexual and women’s liberation, in which questions of gender and sexuality are thought of as much more fluid, which influences the way they are thinking of their own children.
JH: In Re:Orientations, self-reflexivity is key. You invited a few of us to watch the rough cut at OCADU together in 2015. And you spent a lot of time reflecting on who was represented in the earlier Orientations, and who wasn’t.
RF: Already in the making of Orientations, I was doing some engineering. Even at that time, I remember having a critique of a certain “born again” Asian sensibility that was developing. It was developing because for many people, their Asian identity, living in this particular diaspora, was a source of pain, of shame, of minor traumas, of feeling outside, feeling unattractive, feeling unwanted. This was around questions of desire, but also around stereotypes of Asian cultural expressions—like the media controversies around dog eating in California. So people were rediscovering their identities, but I had a number of critiques. One of them was around the question of class. In order to justify queerness, people were reclaiming stories, for example the Chinese stories of the shared peach or the cut sleeve, which were really stories of emperors. And I was thinking, what does my queerness have to do with emperors? What do emperors have to do with my peasant background? Another thing was my having come to thinking about organizing gay Asians through an anti-racist framework that was formed through Black Power in Trinidad in the 1960s. I was disturbed by an incipient ethnic nationalism, where Asianness was only thought of in relation to white supremacy and not in relation to other people of colour, and not in relation to the relative privilege that Chinese origin, say, has in relation to people of other “racial groups,” including other Asians. I remember having this conversation with Nito Marquez, who was from the Philippines, about the way Filipinos signify in an Asian regional context, where Filipinos are often domestic workers in places like Hong Kong or Japan. So I became disturbed by the self-satisfaction that I saw among some light-skinned Asians, to put it crudely. I’m not talking about GAT; this was a continental phenomenon. And so I found myself kind of drifting away from that organizing and into doing other things. This was a period when I didn’t feel connected to a lot of initiatives that were happening around Asianness because I didn’t see the Asian umbrella being necessarily progressive. I feel more connected to the QPOC or QTBIPOC reframing because it is more of an anti-racist and social justice framework. In terms of my own journey, I moved into doing other things that were more anti-racist and perhaps less queer-focused. As a filmmaker, my next project after Orientations was Chinese Characters,6 which is about gay Asian men’s spectatorship of porn. And then I felt I was being made into a kind of “gay-Asian-video artist,” and that’s when I did My Mother’s Place and The Way to My Father’s Village. In that same period, I made Out of the Blue, which was about police racial profiling of a young Black man whom I knew. And I started thinking about questions about colonialism particularly in relation to the Caribbean.
JH: You were also part of Desh Pardesh, “a festival of culture, politics and activism,” which became one of Toronto’s major cultural events and one of the most important expressions of South Asian contemporary culture and politics in the diaspora in the late 1980s and 1990s.
RF: I was not an organizer of Desh Pardesh, but I think I attended every one and was close to that crowd. Having grown up in Trinidad, in a country in which the majority of the people are of South Asian origin, I always felt comfortable in South Asian spaces. I worked with Ian Iqbal Rashid, the poet and filmmaker who was an organizer of the South Asian gay group Khush. He initiated Salaam Toronto, which then became Desh Pardesh. I still feel more comfortable in South Asian spaces in some ways than I do in Chinese spaces because in South Asian spaces, most people have come through the same British colonial formation that I have. I’ve now also spent a fair amount of time in India, so when I’m around people with a background in Hong Kong, say, I feel outside of the conversation, whereas in the South Asian context, I have much more sense of the landscape.
Desh Pardesh happened at the Euclid Theatre. The Euclid was at the corner of Euclid and College Streets, west of Bathurst. It was birthed in 1989 by the Development Education Centre (DEC), where I worked alongside Ian Rashid. I was part of DEC films, which at that time distributed the largest collection of documentaries in Canada. The Euclid was an interesting queer and anti-racist space. In 1991, it hosted the launch of Inside Out, Toronto’s LGBT Film Festival. And that same year we organized Race to the Screen, a series of panels, lectures, workshops, and screenings about race/ism and cinema. We had people like Kobena Mercer, Molly Shinhat, Atom Egoyan, Jamelie Hassan, and Richard Dyer come to the conference. It was an anti-racist film festival with a queer component.
DEC was a huge organization that housed a radio project and independent left-wing publisher Between the Lines. Another publisher that was a hub of Black feminist, Black queer, and queer feminist of colour organizing in Toronto was Sister Vision Press. Sister Vision was founded in 1984, in the same year and place as Zami—in the Dewson Street house, which is close to Dovercourt and College. In that collective house lived Makeda Silvera and Stephanie Martin who ran Sister Vision. But it also housed other Black, Indigenous, and Asian queer folks including writer Connie Fife and Debbie Douglas and Doug Stewart who in 1984 helped found Zami, the first Black lesbian and gay group in Toronto.
The timing of the Euclid Theatre was just slightly off. We were at College and Euclid, which at that time was not yet fashionable. It was just not a destination. I think today it would totally be sustainable, but at that point it wasn’t.
JH: I am interested in this intimate history of contact, both spatially and politically, between Black people and people of various Asian origins. How did these coalitions, solidarities, and affinities play out in your personal and professional life?
RF: Relatively early on, Gay Asians organized the Grassroots Conference with Zami at 519 Church Street. It was Toronto’s contribution to the Third World conferences. In 1993, the gay Black men’s group AYA succeeded Zami. AYA’s fashion shows and GAT’s CelebrAsian concerts were important in Toronto’s cultural calendar. AYA collaborated with artist-run centre YYZ to bring the theatre troupe Pomo Afro Homos to Toronto in 1994.
Now Zami’s interesting because it was Black and Caribbean. This is a problematic to be worked out, because Caribbean spaces are so different. If you come from Jamaica or anywhere in the Anglo-Caribbean north of Trinidad, it’s very much an African Creole space. But if you come from Trinidad or Guyana, the majority are Indian. It’s interesting to think of that geographical relationship, because I’m from the Caribbean. I have one foot in the Asian community and one foot in the Caribbean community.
I was pretty close to Debbie Douglas and Douglas Stewart, who were very much the leaders of a number of organizations around Black queer convergences. In fact, Debbie and I met when we were both students working for Tony Souza at the Toronto Board of Education. She was a high school student and I was making videos, and we became friends. So in that period, there was much more solidarity among the groups that, decades later, have now come back in the form of QPOC and other initiatives. I see a critical mass of different groups of people of colour working more closely together now.
JH: How have queer of colour solidarities developed over the years?
RF: I see more of an openness, even though people may not be of African descent, to be attentive to supporting Black Lives Matter, for instance. I think that’s a kind of political literacy that affects people who are QPOC identified, because QPOC identity has more of that anti-racist orientation. It is a kind of pan-ethnic, pan-racial identity, which means that people are negotiating the differences.
JH: There’s something about being in a small community that’s shot through with difference, right?
RF: Yeah, people have to be aware that they’re different from each other and it seems to be negotiated more elegantly, whereas much of Chinese Canadian discourse was thinking only in relation to white supremacy. When I did Chinese Characters in 1986, I purposely cast Lloyd Wong making out with Doug Stewart. Many of us had never seen Asian-Black bodies in a sexual embrace in film. It’s always the white man who’s imagined as the object of desire.
This was also one of the big issues for GAT. There, it was more around the right to have Asian-only spaces. We often had discussions about people bringing partners, particularly white men who wanted to attend meetings because they somehow felt Asian or were interested in Asian men or whatever. I was one of the people who remained firm about this because the kinds of things people were sharing, when it was their first time in an Asian-only space, about racism, couldn’t happen in a mixed space in the same way.
JH: I’m struck by how much of your work is about de-centring whiteness in our interactions with each other and with other people of colour. Could you speak about the relationship between non-Indigenous people of colour and Indigenous people in your organizing?
RF: In the 1980s and 1990s when Indigenous cultural politics really blossomed, there was a tendency to create a separate space. In discussions between people of colour and Indigenous people around filmmaking, for example, Indigenous people would often say “This is not just about racism, but it’s primarily about sovereignty,” and make clear the difference between just an anti-racist lens and an anti-colonial one. Since that period, I think racialized activists and artists have become better at recognizing the settler colonial character of Canadian identity, and I for one have been in more working relationships and friendships with Indigenous peers.
JH: You once mentioned Chinatown as a queer space to me. Could you talk about that?
RF: One of the first Pride marches was at the Grange, which is near Chinatown, and went through Chinatown.
JH: That’s interesting, because in summer 2015, there was an event in Chinatown that in the invite was announced along the lines of “Let’s reclaim Chinatown.” Chinatown was described as a homophobic space. Some queer Chinese folks I talked to actually had questions about this, because they didn’t experience Chinatown that way.
RF: No, in fact, Chinatown was a site of early lesbian culture in Toronto in the 1940s and 1950s, which is documented in Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman’s feature film Forbidden Love.7 It’s a classic of Canadian cinema, a classic lesbian documentary, and has just been re-released. I was doing a book project with Elaine Chang, who is a Korean Canadian film scholar and English scholar at Guelph University. We wanted to do a book on Keith Lock, who is the earliest Chinese Canadian filmmaker. We couldn’t find a publisher, but one of the things in Keith’s amazing recollections is hanging out as a child in his father’s pharmacy in old Chinatown. Keith actually has a lot of memories about Chinatown as a lesbian space. He remembers the dykes and their partners and the whole scene. You know there’s the idea that in Chinatowns, anything could happen and the outside rules didn’t really apply. Yes, it was a heterotopia.
That was one of the frustrations I had within the group discussions at Gay Asians. People would always narrate the homophobia they’d experienced with an Orientalist explanation. “My parents are Indian,” or “My parents are Chinese, so therefore they can’t deal with these sexualities and will throw their kids out.” But when I thought about the levels of acceptance and rejection, it’s not really different from the stories of white families that I know. Except white people don’t narrate their homophobic experiences as about whiteness: “Oh this is like a Christian family.” Whereas racialized people tend to use that fall-back.
I just had this conversation with El-Farouk Khaki. Twenty years ago or so, he asked me to write an affidavit in support of a Trinidadian refugee claimant. And I remember having to write that letter, which I was happy to do, to get this person out, but also realizing how I had to construct that space as barbarous and this space as tolerant. I remember thinking that the stereotypes that had to be engaged to get the claimant in would then dog him once he came to Canada.
I still find it interesting how so many people are still resistant to acknowledging that space is always complicated. Like the discourse around Jamaica, for example. When you talk to people who are very close to Jamaica, there is an acknowledgement that things are changing. For people who are in Jamaica, often there is no choice. They’re committed to that space. Whereas the refugee discourse is: “We have to get people out.” And in Canada, Jamaica often stands in for the whole Caribbean. People seem shocked that in Trinidad and Tobago, according to a survey a few years ago, sixty percent of citizens support LGBT rights. So who speaks for the space? How does space get characterized?
JH: I’m interested in how the suburbs emerge as a geography in Re:Orientations—interviewee Paul Cheung talks about growing up there. Because the suburbs are also racialized spaces, right? There’s Peel Pride, which was QPOC organized, but got defunded, I think in part because of racism. It was an interesting attempt to queer Peel and de-centre downtown Toronto as the place where queerness happens. Because for many QTBIPOC, in our context of gentrification, the downtown is a whitening space that’s no longer where it’s at.
RF: In Re:Orientations, Ponni Arasu says that one of the first things she did when she moved to Toronto was to participate in one of the first conversations about queer issues in a Tamil context. This happened in Scarborough, I think it might have been Malvern. She said that if you look downtown, talking about queer stuff, moving in queer circles in academia or the arts, racism would be the experience you feel. That would be the thing that marks you. But if you’re Tamil or Sri Lankan and living in one of the city’s working-class immigrant neighbourhoods, racism might not be the most pressing issue—like if you’re living with your family, among all the uncles and aunties and the extended community. I really appreciate this insight because I think that’s true.
JH: That’s really interesting. I still think racism impacts why this isn’t happening more. Now that homonationalism and gay imperialism have become the queer discourse, there are more opportunities for racialized queers to claim voice and visibility. There are more incentives to go on about the homophobia in our communities. At the same time, there’s less incentive to actually engage in this complicated work to challenge queerphobia in racialized communities and anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, and transphobia in lesbian and gay of colour spaces. I think the people who specialize in performing their communities as barbaric, who capitalize on the gay imperialist discourse, are actually less likely to engage in this complicated work. Because racism orients us towards whiteness and away from other people of colour, straight and cis POC, but also other QTPOCs.
RF: That’s exactly so. I think there was a way in which people talked about homophobia back in the 1980s that would often orientalize it. But then those of us who are more conscious around anti-colonial discourses, we sometimes avoid that discussion altogether, right?