It was 1989, and Park had recently begun her doctoral degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Political Science. Books were her portal into new worlds-including the world of the paksu mudang. Even her understanding of what Asian adults looked like was remote, culled mostly from magazines, library books, and the Encyclopedia Britannica at home. Born in Korea, she was adopted and raised by white, Christian fundamentalist parents in the south side of Milwaukee during the 1960s, shortly after the Korean War ended.Īs an adopted child, Park grew up without a sense of what she would look like when she got older. Pauline Park, 58, is a prominent trans activist in New York City known for her work in passing city legislation to protect rights for transgender people and cofounding several queer organizations, including Queens Pride House. I interview three trans API Americans-of Korean, native Hawaiian, and Vietnamese ethnicity respectively-in order to understand: How did it feel when they “found out” they had a queer ancestral lineage? How does this knowledge inform their queerness, or how they see themselves as a whole? But queer API folks who may feel displaced or alienated within their families, are gradually rediscovering their heritage, in search of other ways to belong to their kin and culture. Knowledge of Asian and Pacific Islander (API) queer histories is not widespread-it’s not taught in most schools or mainstream media. Together, they resist categorization by a modern, Western vocabulary. The queer figures of Asia’s past-and, to an extent, present-generally occupied roles as spirit mediums, shamans, and healers their gender and sexuality were mutually intertwined with each other, and also with their communal and spiritual roles.
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Much of Asia’s queer historical and cultural traditions did not fit neatly into the individualistic containers of L, G, B, and T. As part of a larger “witch-hunt” in Europe and its colonies, Spanish Catholics explicitly linked femininity and sodomy with devilish witchcraft and paganism. In the Philippines, for example, Spanish colonizers routinely demonized religious shamans and priests, whose ranks consisted of both women and “effeminate men” who appear as women and marry other men. However, much of that acceptance has been erased over the past century due to a confluence of factors, from the establishment of global religions to Western imperialism.
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Queerness has historically been accepted, even respected, within many indigenous Asian and Pacific Islander religions and societies. It was a familiar but largely false argument. Her implication was specific: Not that America made me “gay,” but rather that embracing my attraction-identifying with it and acting upon it-was an American, or Western, phenomenon.
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You would just go along with what everyone else did.” That may not even have been on your radar. She replied, “You might have still felt a certain way, but you probably would not have chosen your path. “I’m sure my attraction wouldn’t have changed,” I objected. She was referring to a number of things: my abandonment of conservative Christianity, my lack of deference to my parents compared to my peers who stayed behind in Malaysia, and most obviously, my decision to be in a relationship with a woman. We were chatting together while walking down the streets of Manhattan. “If we didn’t move to America, you wouldn’t be like this,” my mom told me casually, one afternoon a few years ago.