 |
 |
 |
 |
My Peaceful Gay Life
By Vinh Do
Posted on this Website in March 2001
Vinh Do is a staff writer of the International
Examiner in Seattle, Washington.
I sometimes feel people project more drama in my life than there actually exists. Because I'm a gay Asian man, they presume two things: that I'm living it up in the queer world or that my life is difficult because I live in two cultures (a queer one and a Vietnamese-American one) whose values sometimes conflict. My life really lies in the realm of the ordinary and the mundane.
For me, the image of the gay men's lives surpass the drama of my own. Gay men, the image says, are social butterflies and party queens. It's true that we love the nightlife - we just don't do it all the time.
I was in the office the other day writing this article when a new staff member, having discovered that I'm gay, launched immediately into what he thought I should include. Fred wanted to know about how I go out and how I talk among other gay men about "other guys." He demanded, "Tell us what you do when you go to the Vogue on Fetish Night." He wanted the insider's story of the seamy, action-packed underworld of gay nightlife. The Vogue was hardly such a scene and I was hardly its spokesperson. When Fred asked what I would wear for fetish, I was tempted to make up something incrediby lurid, but I told the truth. I had never been to the Vogue and though the thought of a black leather jockstrap does set my pulse racing, I don't own anything like it.
The truth is my life is not melodramatic. It has none of the stuff of headlines: it packs none of the drama of AIDS and none of the camp and high jinks of the gay lifestyle as presented by that wonderfully over the top film Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. (If it did, life would be joyous indeed and this would be a different story.) But the stuff that grabs people's attention - the situations of those living with HIV, the demonstrations of ACT-UP, the media surrounding unsafe sex and safe sex - are none of the stories that immediately affect me.
The drama that rules my life comes from daily living. What I can speak to is the omnipresent awareness of being gay, Catholic and Vietnamese American. I'm still trying to figure what that means.
I belong to a support group comprised of queer Asian men in Seattle called Q & A (for Queer and Asian). Each of us in this group have a personal definition of what it means to be Q & A. Together, we create a space where we can be honest about our feelings. It is a milieu where we can joke about experiences and concerns that once pained us.
When we met last January at Kitto's on Capitol Hill - Seattle's very scaled-down version of San Francisco's Castro district, the evening was a verbal volley of jokes and catty remarks. We were having an informal dinner after a meeting. The topic under dissection was "snow queens" and "sticky rice." (In gay lingo, "snow queens" are Asian men who prefer to date white men and "sticky rice" are Asians who prefer to stick with each other.) Into this conversation, Jerry admitted to certain "asssimilationist" tastes. "I'm into Banana Republic," he proclaimed with deliberate affection. One of us mentioned that a while back a fellow had wandered in our Q & A meeting looking for Jerry. This member reported to Jerry: "This guy was glancing around the room looking for you and just turned around and left. He said something like, "I'm into Banana Republic, not bananas." It was a little joke that got a little laugh.
Gay men are good at dishing and dissing each other. Sometimes the more we dish, the more it resembles a show we're putting on to the world that we lead happy lives. It's a demonstration to the world that our lives are OK, that we exist. Inevitably though, after the encounters, the meetings and the dinners, we return to our lives and to the sometimes private desperation that few in the wider world of heterosexuality often hear about.
It's in these moments of desperation that life reveals itself most clearly to me - that I find myself most honest. In these interludes, I confide in my closest confidant about loneliness, about the hopelessness of finding the right person when you're gay and Catholic.
Kim, a good Vietnamese friend whom I sometimes attend mass with, stopped by my place last President's Day weekend. Over tea and soup, she told me how it was with her and her boyfriend. The conversation was mostly her talking out her frustrations. I dispensed my usual "Well, as I see it" take on the situation. After dispensing some lengthy advice, I admitted sheepishly to her that I really wish I had more experience in the area I was dishing advice on. She knew me enough to understand what I was alluding to. She knows that I had been without someone for quite sometime. Then, a rare and frank moment occurred - rare because it passed between one Vietnamese Catholic to another. Kim gathered herself upright, gripped her cup of tea and said, "Vinh, I don't know if I should say this, but maybe you should give a little." Kim went on to say that I could afford to be less "exacting" in my expectations and that I could perhaps fool around a bit. What she meant to say but didn't was, "Go ahead, Vinh, open the gate a little." I gave an embarrassed little giggle. She was not off base. Here was a situation where a straight woman was dispensing sex advice to a gay man.
I have another friend named Kathy who thinks my life is invested in more conflict because of my being gay in a Vietnamese family. When I sat down to tell her what I sought to write here, she asked if I was going to discuss the confining elements of coming out in an Asian family. I was almost sorry to tell her that in that particular arena the drama had subsided with the coming out incident.
In fact, everything since September 1991 - when I came out to my mother and grandmother - feels like an anti-climax. My mother and father both stunned me with their support. Their assurance that the matter was alright marks one of the few occassions when I actually felt support from them. My mother actually finds it OK to laugh about my mannerisms now - she finds gay men to be funny. My father, too, shocked me once when he called me at work to caution me in the most explicit way (as only an Asian father could) to play it safe. He's a case worker with the state and his coming in contact with people living with AIDS has actually furthered my case.
With my grandmother, I've adopted a different strategy. Since coming out to her, I've let her abide her time on getting used to the idea. I won't press the topic unless she asks how I spent my day. If I spent it doing gay activism, I'll tell her. But on the whole there's a lack of drama because there's a lack of vehemence on the matter. On two occasions at least she has mentioned marriage and a wife - posing the event in future tense as if it were inevitable - and on those two occasions I've said simply that I won't be marrying. My strategy with her is patience not confrontation. At the very least, I've demonstrated to everyone in my family that my life would not be formed according to their conceptions.
What propelled me to come out to my family was a sense of honesty I owed to myself. I wanted to share that honesty with them but, in my particular case, they were almost a secondary consideration.
It is also the honesty of living a life as a gay, Catholic, Vietnamese-American man that carries the challenge and the drama in my life. What those three aspects means to me depends upon the day, because each day brings a different revelation, a different clarification. The climax of my daily drama lies in the day when it all becomes brilliantly clear.
