Queer Asian Activism from the 1980s to the 2000s
Alan Li1
There is a popular myth that I co-founded Gay Asians Toronto, which isn’t true. But I have been involved with queer Asian community organizing since I moved to Toronto in 1981. I consider my primary community to be the LGBT Asian community and communities of people of colour. I have been part of LGBT organizing, HIV/AIDS work, the anti-racist movement, immigrant/refugee rights, and work to advance health care access for different marginalized communities.
I first moved to Winnipeg from Hong Kong when I was sixteen. I spent five years there before coming to Toronto. At the time, I was only somewhat out and aware of my sexuality. There wasn’t any queer community in Hong Kong where I had come from, and there was a gay community in Winnipeg, but you could count the queer Asians on one hand or less than two hands. There were perhaps four Asians that I would see at events, and maybe a couple of Black people. It was many years ago, and I wasn’t very involved, but I don’t think there was a whole lot of community organizing happening. I just vividly remember how isolated I felt whenever I went to the gay community events there.
Before I got into med school at the University of Toronto, and before I became so active in gay Asian community organizing, I started to stumble upon gay literature and gay novels like The Front Runner. I remember going to Coles bookstore on Portage and Main Street in Winnipeg. It’s a mainstream bookstore, but my “gaydar” would look out for paperbacks with two men on the cover. I’d buy those books and read them. There were also some newsstands that sold gay magazines. I first connected to print media to find gay spaces in Canada, and that’s where I saw an ad for Glad Day Bookshop. So when I visited Toronto, I went right to Glad Day. I think it was on Collier Street then, under the public library on Yonge and Bloor. It was a wealth of different worlds I hadn’t been exposed to, so I was really excited. And then when I moved to Toronto, I think in the summer of 1981—the bookstore might have moved to Yonge and Wellesley by then—the store manager told me about an event that was happening called Chopsticks. That’s where my real connection to communities and organizing began.
Gay Asians Toronto had just formed months before the famous bathhouse raids in February 1981 (see also Richard Fung, this book). In those raids, over three hundred people had been arrested in a sweep of Toronto’s gay bars, and it was an incredibly eye-opening time. I’d estimate that one hundred or so people were there in the auditorium at the 519 Church Street Community Centre, where Gay Asians Toronto hosted Chopsticks. This was a fundraiser for the Right to Privacy Committee, an activist organization that had formed in resistance to the raids on gay homes and businesses that were prevalent at the time. Before I experienced Chopsticks, I’d never realized that you could do something like that or have a community like that. There were songs and dance, poetry, performances, and speeches about the bathhouse raids and the need for organizing, all hosted by a core of Asian organizers from GAT, one of whom, Tony Chung, later became one of my best friends. Other core organizers of the event included Paul Cheung and Pei Lim. They were both interviewed by Richard Fung—the queer Asian filmmaker—in his first documentary about gay Asians called Orientations.2 I remember that Pei Lim performed dancing and poetry at the event. Later on he would become one of the earliest AIDS activists among the Asian communities in Canada. He passed away in the early 1990s. I remember the poster better than I remember the actual event. It was an Asian man with huge chopsticks. Most of the connections that I had made before that event had been through print and mail, but the organizers of Chopsticks invited me to discussion groups, and that’s how I got involved.
According to my early history lesson about our community’s history, GAT was conceived when Richard Fung attended an LGBT conference in Washington in 1980, where he met other gay Asian activists from Boston, San Francisco, and beyond. When Richard came back, he wanted to see if there was any interest locally. Around that time, Gerald Chan, a Chinese gay man from Hong Kong, wrote an article in The Asianadian magazine about gay Asians called “Out of the Shadows.” So they connected, and then they put an ad in Body Politic—the Canadian gay liberation magazine at the time—and called a meeting. Tony Souza and Nito Marquez showed up, and the four of them started to plan and formed GAT. I joined about half a year later. By then GAT had established enough of a community base to organize events such as Chopsticks for issues that affected the whole community.
GAT started as a bi-weekly discussion group which happened on Saturday afternoons at the 519. We usually had between eight and fifteen people each time. We discussed topics like coming out, family, sexuality, identities, and intraracial and interracial relationships. There was no such term as sexual racism at that time, but people were talking about the challenges they felt due to not being considered attractive in the gay mainstream. There was a bar called The Quest, which was on Yonge and Isabella. That’s where all the gay Asian men went on the weekend. We would see flocks of Asians that were probably ten times larger than what we would see at GAT meetups. It kind of begged the question: “Why don’t any of these people come to our discussion groups?” There was a sense that our discussions were too serious and too political, and that the social spaces were for fashion queens who didn’t care about anything. There were divisions, but after having come through many years of difficult relationships with straight-identifying men, I really appreciated the fact that there was a gay Asian community. And I really wanted to bridge those two worlds.
I wasn’t really set out to be a political queen, and I wasn’t set out to be a fashion queen; I think people can do both, and I think that the social is political. There’s value in social spaces and events that are trying to connect people. So I got more involved with GAT and advocated for more social activities to bring people in and explore ways to tap into other people’s energies. People get a little tired of the recycled discussion topics after a year and a half, because the same people talking about the same issues loses its newness or need. I think that a lot of the core organizers were Canadian-born Asians or people who were not born in Asia, so there were some cultural and language differences. But Tony and I were both first-generation immigrants, and we shared a lot of similar interests. I think he also wanted to bring in the more “social” Asians to the more political organizing, and so growing from the idea of Chopsticks, we started to organize parties. We also organized creative projects where people could work together. A lot of the Asians who wouldn’t ever come to discussion groups showed up to our events.
We organized an event called CelebrAsian in 1983, which was also at the 519. It had the same name as the magazine we later put out. I think it was the first fundraiser for HIV/AIDS, before the AIDS Committee of Toronto was even formed. It was at that very beginning, when HIV wasn’t even identified yet. People were just dying mysteriously of a gay plague. And we thought it would be helpful to make the event a benefit for something broader than our communities, so we did. I think we raised five hundred bucks. It was a smash hit at that time by any standards. We filled the auditorium at the 519, and people were very excited because we had created something together. The next year it became much more elaborate and we had a drag show and other performances. Before then GAT was pretty much an exclusively male space, and then in 1984, at the second CelebrAsian, we had Asian lesbians performing and co-hosting the event. I went in drag and Ming, an Asian lesbian, went in male drag and co-MC’d the event with me. One of the highlights of CelebrAsian 1983 was a slideshow called “The Visible Invisibles,” created by a student called Jonas Ma who was interested in doing an oral history project on gay Asians. The smart title of the slideshow referred to the visibility of race and the invisibility of sexual orientation. At that time there was also a very popular drag group called The Oriental Express. It initially had four people who started performing at The Manatee, which was a club on St. Joseph and Yonge, right where all sorts of condos are being built now. Oh goodness, it makes me feel old. The Manatee was a short street across from The Quest, which was the “rice bar.” On weekends, The Oriental Express would draw hundreds of people to see their shows, and they agreed to perform for CelebrAsian.
We were galvanized by the event itself, but also by the process of organizing it. Having people who had no sense of community before, who were willing to identify with a queer organization and come together for a cause, may not have been overtly political, but it was definitely meaningful and important. As I will discuss later, CelebrAsian(s) has been one of the key themes and threads running through the history of GAT. It became GAT’s signature event, hosted again in 1984 at the 519, in 1985 at the Ontario College of Art (later OCAD), in 1988 at Jarvis Collegiate, in 1990 at OCAD again, and in 1995 at the York Quay Theatre in Harbourfront. Shortly after the first CelebrAsian show, we also started putting out a quarterly newsletter magazine by the same name, and it published over twenty issues until the mid-1990s.3 In addition, CelebrAsian was the title of an oral history collection by Gay Asians Toronto (1996). Today, CelebrAsian is the biannual fundraising event for Asian Community AIDS Services. Through the CelebrAsian event series, GAT and its successor organizations have become a much bigger and more inclusive community.
In 1985 we co-hosted the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) conference in Toronto. GAT members were involved in the core organizing, and CelebrAsian ’85 was the conference’s closing event. It was held at OCAD, in the auditorium, which looks very different now. It wasn’t an Asian-only event; it was an event for the whole conference, so we had many different famous local LGBT performers like David Sereda and Faith Nolan. Wayson Choy, a gay Asian teacher who later won the Trillium Book Award for his first novel the Jade Peony, wrote a play especially for the show called Smashing Borders. It had a lot of different people in it, including many other activists and community leaders like Mary Woo Sims (who led the campaign for same-sex spousal benefits in Ontario), Doug Stewart (who co-founded the Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention), and gay and AIDS activists like Pei Lim and Russell Armstrong. Some professional theatre actors who hadn’t been involved in the community before volunteered to costar in the play. We also had out of town guest performers among the delegates. Asian Lesbians of the East Coast from New York did a Hawaiian dance and some skits on coming out to parents for the event.
GAT also co-organized a whole series of people of colour workshops for the conference. We planned discussions and workshops about POC and diasporic issues in white-dominated societies. We co-organized various workshops with other people of colour LGBT groups such as Zami (Black lesbian group), Khush (South Asians gay group) and ALOT (Asian Lesbians of Toronto). During the planning, we connected with groups from San Francisco, LA, New York, Calgary, and Vancouver. There were people at the conference from all over the world. One of the people who attended was the publisher of a gay magazine in Japan who was planning a gay Asian conference in Japan the following year. So through that conference we made connections, and we sent one of our members, Gary Joong—who also appeared in Richard’s Orientations video—as a delegate. I think that was our first connection outside of North American Asian organizing. The connections being made and the growth were amazing.
I mentioned The Quest as a place where queer Asians hung out. It was by no means an exclusively Asian bar, but Asians would hang out there, and it was considered a rice bar. I don’t think The Quest marketed specifically to Asians. I think what happened is that people started to go there and then they realized there’s enough of a critical crowd of similar people hanging out that they just started to claim that space. In every city, in every place there is your lesbian bar, your Latino bar, your African-Caribbean bar. People will find their own space and somehow claim it. People migrate more to a place where they see more people like them. It’s where queer Asians would go to have a sense of community and social space. It’s kind of like why people form Chinatowns; it’s because the rest of the place is racist so you need a safe place to live and survive. It was somewhat hostile in the larger gay environment, so people went there to feel like at least they wouldn’t stick out so much, and they wouldn’t feel like they didn’t have anybody to talk to.
So instead of going to mainstream dance clubs and bars, we created our own spaces and ethnic gathering places. The Quest was one. The Manatee was more like a youth bar; it was an after-hours dance club, so after the other bars closed people went there. It was for dancing rather than drinking, and community groups would perform. That’s where the Oriental Express drag group became very popular. On Saturdays, we would usually go to the Quest from ten to midnight, and then we’d migrate to The Manatee and watch the shows, and then people might go out for late night snacks and whatever else they do when they don’t want to go home. Since then, different bars got created and the ethnic concentration has become a little bit more diffused. I don’t know if there is really so much of an Asian bar now.
I think people tried to find those spaces because the sense was that we were the exception rather than the mainstream taste. So if you go to a bar where a lot of white guys hang out, the chances of you getting picked up or people finding you interesting is less. If you go to a bar with a lot of similar people hanging out, then the people who are attracted to people like you will probably frequent those places. Most couples were interracial at the time. I think Gay Asians Toronto organizing kind of changed that, because a lot of people found out they were actually attracted to each other. There were more Asian-Asian relationships. Before that, it was very isolated and we were just at the mercy of being picked by white people.
1982 was a historic year for GAT. We led the Pride march through Chinatown that year. I think that was the second year Pride happened. The Pride celebration was supposed to take place at Grange Park, which is in Chinatown. The first year it took the community by surprise, so there were no protests or oppositions to it. I think when the Pride organizers went and applied for a licence the second time, they had some opposition from the neighbourhood and the Chinese Canadian associations there, who said that this was “not culturally appropriate,” that there was “no queer Asian community,” etc. At that time, after Chopsticks, I also started volunteering at Glad Day Bookshop and hanging out there because I loved the books. One day I met one of the Pride organizers at Glad Day, and he spoke about how they were trying to find a gay Asian speaker for the event to counter the assertion that there were no gay people from the Chinese or Asian communities. For some mysterious reason, nobody else in my group was able or willing to do it. I was a relatively newer member, and it ended up in my lap. I wasn’t really that out then, but I just thought it was too important an opportunity to miss, and so I had seven mentors who helped prep me emotionally and write my speech. My speech was about coming out and negotiating how my family would feel. It was actually quite well received, and we were able to convince twenty-some people from GAT to march through Chinatown together, which is probably nothing by today’s standards but in 1982 it was groundbreaking. Marching through Chinatown was not like marching in the gay neighbourhood. There were no people lining up the streets to welcome you or applaud you. It was really quite scary but also very liberating and very inspirational. I think that it was a turning point; some of the less politicized Asians also felt that it was a moment of pride for them.
Later in the 1990s, after GAT formed the Gay Asian AIDS Project and eventually ACAS (Asian Community AIDS Services), GAT itself became quite dormant. But at the same time, the queer Asian community had also become more diverse. There was a group from Mainland China who called themselves the Toronto Tongzhi Club or TTC. Tongzhi is a Chinese term for the LGBT communities in China that means comrades in the traditional sense, but also gay. There was also the gay Vietnamese Alliance, a group called Scented Boys that specialized in organizing outdoor parties, Asian Express that hosted monthly dances, and an Asian Lesbian group that was trying to re-form again after many reincarnations since Mary Woo Sims first formed ALOT (Asian Lesbians of Toronto) in the early 1980s. They all marched in the 1998 Pride Parade. I remember this because I had a friend from Hong Kong who was here and we went and took lots and lots of pictures, and there were six or seven different banners from queer Asian communities. However, even with all these diverse groups, there was no central place where people actually discussed and strategically organized around issues or planned programs. So at the end of the 1990s, some gay Asians started to talk about the need to revive GAT because there seemed to be a void in community planning and advocacy. One of the issues that were brought up was that a lot of Asians were being carded at bars and events. It seemed discriminatory, and there was no place in the community that would take on those kinds of incidents. So we actually came together and formed a new GAT board. It became a more gender diverse and racially diverse group.
The emphasis during this time was on visibility. A major milestone was the above-mentioned oral history collection CelebrAsian: Shared Lives, which includes the stories of twelve gay Asian men, including Richard Fung’s and mine. Both the book and the longer-running CelebrAsians magazine featured people’s personal stories. Back in those days, having your photograph published in a gay magazine was a big political coming out statement, and we had to negotiate and get explicit permission from each person before we could print their picture, even if it was from a public event or party. Now, hundreds and hundreds of Asian people march at Pride and aren’t afraid to be photographed. But it was a different world then. Having our life stories published was a pretty major historic thing.
More importantly, the book was a catalyst for another event that became one of the key defining moments in our community’s history. Our book launch was covered in all the Chinese media, and that raised quite a few eyebrows from the homophobic sector of the Asian communities. A month or so after the book came out, the father of one of the guys who was interviewed in that book, Chung Tang, brought a Chinese tabloid to our office that had the front page headline: “Do people afflicted with homosexuality deserve to have pride?” He said that we should do something about it. This was the first time ever in our community’s history that a parent asked us to stand up and fight homophobia. It ended up kick-starting a whole anti-homophobia campaign for the queer Asian community, which was truly groundbreaking. The article talked about homosexuality as a disease, and that gay people should be ashamed rather than proud of themselves. They printed pictures of GAT in the parade as part of their story, so we decided to use that as a ground to threaten to sue them for libel. With pro bono support from some lawyers in our communities, we threatened them with a lawsuit, and we also mobilized many allies from diverse communities to flood them with protest letters. Within weeks we were able to get them to issue a full apology and retraction on the front page of their next issue that said: “We are wrong and we are sorry, we apologize to the lesbian and gay communities.” They also gave us equal coverage to run our side of the story.
These kinds of gay Asian cultural interventions worked to transform the mainstream Chinese Canadian community too. They were only possible because of the coalition building and partnerships we built during the years of organizing around HIV/AIDS when our communities finally came out of the shadows and claimed our place at the table among the mainstream Chinese and Asian Canadian community services network. Through our coalition work, we also built relationships with progressive allies, high profile social justice advocates and Asian community leaders like Olivia Chow, Susan Eng, and Dr. Joseph Wong. So when the time came to take a stand, we were not alone.
Even though I am a physician by profession, I think I came into HIV/AIDS work mostly as a community member and a volunteer. One day in the mid-1980s, when I was still a medical student, Doug Stewart from the Black gay group Zami, whom I knew from my GAT organizing days, called me from the AIDS Committee of Toronto where he was working as a counsellor. He had a Vietnamese factory worker with pneumonia there who needed a buddy. The first few cases in our community really highlighted the need for culturally specific support. For example, the Vietnamese factory worker wasn’t gay-identified, even though he was an MSM, a man who had sex with men. He did not speak English, and he was brought up in a very hierarchical society where you don’t question your physicians on anything. When I met him, he had already had two bouts of PCP pneumonia, which was the biggest AIDS-related infection that most people died from. He went to a Chinatown doctor who did not know anything about HIV, and he was not on any prophylactic treatment to prevent him from getting pneumonia again. During those days, alongside Tim McCaskell, Richard Fung, and other AIDS Action Now activists, we were fighting hard to get access to aerosolized Pentamadine for treatment and prophylaxis to prevent PCP pneumonia. Even though I gave him all the information about where he could access support, he was too afraid to question his doctor. So with the stigma, shame, isolation and lack of proper treatment and support, he was pretty much waiting to die. There was no organized or culturally appropriate support in the community, everything was just starting, we were all learning together. ACT at that time didn’t really have the infrastructure or volunteer pool. I think that Doug and I were the first people of colour who worked or volunteered at ACT. At that time, the City of Toronto was giving out AIDS prevention grants, so all the established community services, of course, ran to get that money. At the time of the AIDS crisis, GAT and a lot of LGBT groups weren’t publicly funded. We all just organized as volunteers, and the 519 was our safe haven. All the programming was done on a volunteer basis, and we had the space, and we met there. Hardly any groups were incorporated as a nonprofit, I think, so we didn’t have access to funding.
A turning point for me was when Olivia Chow, who was a school trustee at the time, nominated me to be on an advisory committee for an HIV prevention project at the St. Stephen’s Community Centre, which is a large settlement social service agency. I think I was the only person from the queer Asian community on the committee. It was like pulling teeth to get the centre staff to address LGBT issues. They were totally resistant to even personalizing the education messages to make them more human and relatable. To not just show people a wooden penis and how to put a condom on it, but to actually tell a human story so that people connect to the issue. I remember that one weekend Olivia and I sat down and spent the weekend trying to write out a script for a slideshow that they were doing, and we presented it to them, and they said that it was beyond their funded mandate, and the script was watered down to almost nothing. After six months of struggling with that committee, I realized there was no point. They had no interest in providing support or addressing the needs of the gay Asian communities. We needed to create our own services because we couldn’t wait for other people to save us.
Richard and I and a bunch of people from GAT really started to seriously ask how we could advocate for ourselves. We weren’t experienced in accessing public funding and we’d never really created professional services before, so that was a huge learning curve. We applied to create a Gay Asian AIDS Project (GAAP) through GAT. But since GAT was not incorporated we partnered with ACT, who trusteed our money, and we got a desk space from them to “run our service.” We decided to start GAAP knowing that we had to emphasize the gay part. At that time we were the only HIV program that had “gay” in its name. It wasn’t about showing off pride, but a survival strategy. I realized that if we were going to affect the system we had to access public funding and public institutions. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be counted. It might not have been our personal comfort or preference, but we needed to demonstrate that we were not duplicating existing services and that we were dealing with a population that was not being served. ACT was quite supportive, but after a year or so people realized the importance of having your own space and identity, and being able to independently access resources. That’s when, in 1990, Gay Asians Toronto got incorporated, and we moved into our own office.
ACT was at College and Yonge at the time. Before then, if not at the 519, then all our “programs and activities” were happening in people’s homes. For example, at Richard and Tim’s home on Seaton Street, which was a house owned by Jearld Moldenhauer, the original owner of Glad Day, where a whole bunch of gay activists from the Body Politic rented and lived. Later, in the early days of the Gay Asian AIDS project, before we had our first office, many of the gatherings and workshops took place at my apartment at Isabella and Church Streets.
Our first office was on St. Joseph, just west of Yonge. It’s no longer there; it was torn down. It became a gym then and now it’s a condo. We were there for a few years. We really tried to make it a home. We went to the government surplus places to pick up dirt cheap recycled furniture, and we rented a truck to move every single piece down to the office ourselves. I think that was the first time I remember feeling like we were actually building our own space. It wasn’t so much an office—we really did see it as a home base. Having a desk at ACT wasn’t a home, and having a meeting room at the 519 every other week wasn’t a home. People’s private houses weren’t community homes. It was really good to have your own physical space, but more than that it helped our members build a sense of community. We had a lot of meetings, workshops, and events there.
In 1990, Richard Fung made his video Fighting Chance4 because he came to one of the workshops and realized that some of our mutual friends were positive. During the prevention workshop, people were talking as if there were no positive people in the room, and it was quite stigmatizing. So he realized that combatting that invisibility of HIV among Asians was quite critical, and he made that video to help give voice to the lived experience of people with HIV in the Asian community. Soon, we were really struggling to take care of the people with HIV in our communities. A lot of our friends were dying of AIDS, and most people didn’t know what to do about it. There was a lot of shame, stigma, and gossip. And the people who were even less connected didn’t feel they had anywhere to go to access services. People were devastated and also exhausted from the epidemic and the multiple losses.
Our funding came from HIV work, but I think we also realized that GAT was an important venue to connect to people. So we had a lot of social events because people don’t all want to come to workshops and do HIV educational stuff. We had a lot of events, and we revived CelebrAsian. In 1988 we had another CelebrAsian show and did a play on HIV-related themes. We got a very negative review in the GLBTQ newspaper Xtra. They thought that our story internalized too much oppression. The reviewer was not an Asian person, but that’s beside the point. They said that our character was too sad. I think one of the characters with AIDS was struggling with family issues, and struggling with coming out to his family and the stigma and shame that are very real for our community. But it wasn’t, I guess, “proud” enough for the dominant “activist” viewpoint. They tore our events to pieces. Of course, we had no access to the Xtra editorial board. Other people were involved before an article about them would go out to the public, especially if it said anything controversial about them. But we were not part of gay journalists’ inner circle, so the only “media coverage” of our hard collective work wrote it off as an oppressed piece of theatre, and that was really not helpful at all.
My best friend Tony died at the end of 1992. I was burnt out from all the losses but also the intensive work of organizing and chairing the multiple projects and groups related to HIV in the Asian communities. By the mid-90s, many of people that were involved in the early years of GAT/GAAP organizing—Kirby, Lim, Lloyd, Alex, Neal, Jose—had passed away. Many of them had been quite instrumental in pulling the community together and mobilizing the volunteer forces, and, most importantly, had broken the silence and denial about HIV in our community. We also realized that it would be more strategic to consolidate the various efforts within the Asian communities to build a bigger, more co-ordinated and impactful response to address HIV/AIDS. So we started a long planning and consultative process to discuss a merger to form a coalition agency to serve East and South East Asian communities on HIV/AIDS, including the Gay Asian AIDS project, the Toronto Chinese Health Education Committee’s AIDS Alert, and the South East Asian Service Centre’s Vietnamese AIDS project. On World AIDS Day on the first of December 1994, the three agencies merged to form ACAS, the Asian Community AIDS Services.
In 1995, the year of the fifteenth anniversary of GAT, we did another CelebrAsian show, which was a fundraiser for our AIDS projects. It brought together a cast of over fifty people and filled the auditorium at the York Quay Theatre in Harbourfront. There were plays and performances, and it was a very galvanizing event for the community. It celebrated the legacy of GAT and GAAP and marked a key milestone when we took up leadership to build more inclusive, diverse, and supportive Asian communities.
ACAS is more diverse now. Initially, the groups we serviced were Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino, because those were the three big groups that we had. Since then, we’ve begun to service more groups, like Koreans, Thais, Japanese and other racialized groups. And our programming has gone way beyond the original target group of “gay Asians” to include other marginalized groups in our communities, such as trans people, youth, sex workers, women at risk, migrant workers, and international students.
The history of gay Asian organizing in Toronto shows that being a real visible organization in the community is critically important. GAT created a safe space to support the growth of the community but mostly stayed within the LGBT communities. In contrast, ACAS sits at the same table as bigger organizations and mainstream service institutions. I think claiming that space has been important. We didn’t do that as a political gesture; we did it because we needed to, to survive.