In the early 1990s, famed editor and writer Helen Zia found herself in Missoula, Mont., working on a story about white supremacists. She arrived in time for the Montana's first gay pride parade.
"I expected the event to be the high point in an otherwise somber trip," said Zia. "I wanted to go, to be part of it and show my support." Instead, she found herself to be the only person of color as far as she could tell. The crowd gave her wide berth, and Zia walked the whole march as if enclosed in a bubble. She considered raising a banner proclaiming, "I may be Asian but I'm a lesbian, too!"
Zia's account of her experience is told in her recent essay for the fall 2006 edition of Amerasia Journal, the foremost national scholarly journal in Asian American Studies and a publication of UCLA's Asian American Asian Studies Press. "Where the Queer Zone Meets the Asian Zone: Marriage Equality and Other Intersections" is part of a special issue entitled "Asian Americans and the Marriage Equality Debate," which brings together for the first time the views of Asian Americans on the same-sex marriage debate.
The experience in Montana wasn't the first time was not the first time that Zia has encountered such alienation. In the early 1970s, fellow activists from the Asian American and the feminist movements asked pointed questions about her sexuality, implying that being a lesbian was incompatible with the movements' goals. The threatening messages kept her in the closet for the next several years.
Zia has been a prominent voice for both the Asian American and feminist movements from her undergraduate days at Princeton University to her work as a journalist covering labor issues in Detroit. More recently, she is the author of "Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) and coauthor with Wen Ho Lee of "My Country Versus Me" (Hyperion, 2001).
Today, Zia acknowledges that people have become more accepting, thanks to the work of generations of gay and lesbian and Asian activists. Part of it may be due to people like Zia, who have been willing to push through the barriers and speak on these issues.
According to statistics from the UCLA Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation, Law and Public Policy, almost 40,000 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders identify themselves as living with a same-sex partner. Furthermore, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders comprise 3 percent of individuals in same sex couples in the United States, with California, Hawaii and New York hosting the greatest populations.
Zia counts herself lucky in many respects. She is in a committed relationship, and both she and partner Lia had family members who were tolerant and accepting. In fact, it was Zia's mother who suggested marriage.
"Helen, gay people can get married in San Francisco now," her mother said upon seeing the news on Chinese television. "Why don't you and Lia go?"
Their wedding was held at the San Francisco City Hall, where Lia's father, a retired judge, pronounced the pair "spouses for life." After the wedding, Zia also noticed a "subtle yet profound" shift in the way their respective families saw one another.
"Lia's father and my mother now saw each other as related, too," she said. "Our respective families transformed their relationship to each other to reflect the more intimate relative status."
Zia's 16-year old niece threw her arms around Lia, who was now "a real auntie."
Zia sees encouraging changes in larger society as well. Colleagues in the Asian American and feminist movements now recall their previous homophobia with regret, and some are now allies. But still, progress in terms of recognition and acceptance of such complex identities has been glacial.
There are still people who mouth "simplistic and un-provable assertions," she said. "It's nature's law" or "It's always been this way" or "God says so."
Zia credits Asian American activists like Judges Kevin Chang in Hawaii and Doris Ling Cohan in California, who both ruled that banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional and discriminatory. Asian Americans like Stuart Gaffney with his partner John Lewis, and spouses Jennifer Lin and Jeannie Fong were part of the Marriage Equality Bus that brought the issue of same-sex marriage to Wal-Mart parking lots across the country. Asian Americans were the chief plaintiffs in the first lawsuits filed challenging state bans on same-sex marriage.
This visibility forces others to look beyond caricatures and stereotypes.
"Queer folks have long known that homophobic attitudes change when people get to know someone who is gay," Zia wrote in the Amerasia Journal article.
Many activists are also challenged to re-think their position that gay and lesbian rights are not an Asian American issue. "With each individual who comes to realize that there are Asian queers and queer Asians," Zia wrote, "that space where the gay zone meets the Asian zone opens up a little more."
The key, according to Zia, lies in "moving people, one person at a time."
The special issue of Amerasia Journal's "Asian Americans in the Marriage and Equality Debate" can be ordered directly through the website of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center: http://www.aasc.ucla.edu. The cost is $15 plus $5 for shipping and handling and 8.25 percent sales tax for California residents. Make checks payable to "Regents of U.C." Visa, Mastercard and Discover also are accepted; include expiration date and phone number on correspondence. The mailing address is: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 3230 Campbell Hall, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1546.
Annual subscriptions for Amerasia Journal are $35 for individuals, and $295 for libraries and other institutions. Amerasia Journal is published three times a year: winter, spring and fall. A free subscription to the Center's Crosscurrents Newsmagazine is included in a subscription to Amerasia Journal.
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