In a small office space near Lower Manhattan one recent Sunday evening, four young Korean Americans are trading thoughts about growing up LGBTQ in a culture that often shuns non-conformists.
There’s Mark Ro Beyersdorf, a mixed-race activist originally from San Diego, who bluntly points out the contradictions in attitudes around his identity: It’s OK for him not to speak Korean fluently, he said, but apparently it’s not OK for him to be gay since, “‘You can’t be gay because you’re Korean.’”
Across from him sits Eli Rhee, a queer-identified native New Yorker who weighs in on the challenges unique to young Korean Americans reluctant to come out to family.
“You’re not awarded for being outspoken in Asian culture. You just do what you’re told,” she said, as Rej, a grad student, and Elena Chang, an artist and activist, voice their agreement.
Here in this room, there’s a shared understanding of what it means to be Korean, gay and proud, even in the face of these challenges.
That’s part of what’s brought these four individuals together over the last few years: the shared goal to complete and publish an anthology of stories and artwork from lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Korean Americans. Titled the Dari Project, the book, to be released this month, features 24 personal essays and four pieces of art, conveying a range of experiences of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) Koreans, as they navigate relationships with their families, friends and the Korean community at large. The book, which will include Korean translations in the first bilingual effort of its kind around this subject, is intended to build a bridge (true to one meaning of the word, dari) among Korean American families, their faith communities and other institutions.
As representative as the Dari Project has tried to be with regard to age, geography and narratives reflecting the range of the LGBTQ spectrum, said Chang, it’s not intended to be a definitive authority on the Korean experience.
“I don’t want people to think this is the Bible for LGBTQ people. The point is just to give a glimpse of the experiences,” she said. “Someone may find comfort [in one of the stories]. Hopefully, this book will spark the beginning of those conversations.”
The idea behind the Dari Project actually originated in 2005 when a group of Korean Americans in New York felt compelled to spread awareness within the Korean community about LGBTQ identity. These first organizers canvassed college campuses, spoke on panels and solicited and selected entries for the book in its nascent stage.
The project’s motivation, for some, had in part to do with the personal reverberations from an incident that occurred a decade prior within the Korean community. As then-Dari Project organizer Hyun Lee recounted to a Korean American Students Conference audience in 2006, several gay Korean activists were brutally beaten in New York’s Koreatown after leaving a nightclub in 1996.
“The fact that people were violently beaten just because of who they were—because of their identity as gay people—in the center of Koreatown shocked all of us,” Lee said at the time, according to a transcript of her talk.
What was doubly wounding, however, was the response: When the victims and their advocates reached out to various Korean community organizations to get their support, many of these so-called progressive groups balked. “It was evident there was a lot of fear among leaders of community organizations about taking a public position in support of LGBTs,” said Lee in 2006. “They said, ‘I really sympathize and want to support you, but other people in my organization wouldn’t understand it,’ and ‘Do you think our community is ready for this?’”
Such attitudes, in many ways, gave way to the impetus for the Dari Project, which was put on pause for several years as jobs and families occupied these early volunteer organizers.
In late 2010, however, a new band of coordinators—mostly 20-something New Yorkers who are involved in community organizing and activism in their day-to-day lives—revived the project. These new organizers successfully turned to online fundraising vehicle Crowdrise to raise nearly $12,000 to cover the costs of printing, editing and professional translation services from English to Korean. They’ve ordered 1,000 copies of the book and are planning a release party—while spending their free Sundays making final edits on the book.
Alex Myung, a 25-year-old illustrator and designer who lives in New York, understands firsthand the challenge of being gay and also strongly identifying with his Korean heritage.
When his Korean best friend’s mother first met him, he said, she didn’t grasp the concept of his sexual identity, thinking the word “gay” denoted a strong display of femininity.
“I slowly found out that all across the board, a lot of Koreans don’t fully understand the concept of being homosexual,” said Myung, a Korean adoptee. “A lot of Korean people are also, for lack of a better word, a little naïve to what homosexuality really means.”
“Dirty Laundry,” Myung’s stark depiction of his own family’s reaction to his coming out publicly in high school, is included among the artwork in the Dari Project.
“I’ve never had a problem about being gay, and my family has always known,” said Myung. “But back then, it was, ‘We love you and support you but let’s not air the dirty laundry, let’s not let everyone know.’ At that age when you hear that, you get kind of defensive about it: ‘It’s great that they support me, but it sucks that I’m this piece of dirty laundry that I have and they don’t want the world to see it.’ ”
Myung, who said his parents have become much more open about his sexuality since those earlier years, believes a trait inherent in Korean culture that could explain the reluctance to accept homosexuality is an “overwhelming sense of pride.”
“We’re a very proud culture and [to some Koreans], it can’t be possible that we have this ‘hiccup,’” he said. “Because of that, it stops people from learning about it and spreading knowledge about it. The only way other people have to deal with it is that their daughters and sons might be homosexual.”
As the foreword to the Dari Project notes, this new collection of stories may just be a “starting point” to that dialogue.
This article was published in the March 2013 issue of KoreAm. Subscribe today! To purchase a single issue copy of the March issue, click the “Buy Now” button below. (U.S. customers only. Expect delivery in 5-7 business days).
