He speaks matter-of-factly about his first homoerotic dream. Stephano Park, 28, was only five at the time. “I was attracted to a guy on TV [who] had like this defined body. That night I had this dream about him: He was holding me in his arms and we were both bare-skinned so I was touching him,” recalls the 1.5-generation Korean American. “You know, it was the most gratifying feeling.”
From a young age, Park knew. “I was attracted to males even without knowing [about] human sexuality.” He explains almost apologetically that women excite him about as much as tofu or piles of dough. “In terms of chemistry or attraction, there’s just nothing there … but males,” he says with a nervous smile, “the male species is more mysterious for me.”
The eldest son of a Catholic family, Park kept his feelings suppressed, not knowing what to make of them or how to deal with their consequences. At one point, he started to question, Am I a woman trapped in a man’s body? “Because I desired a man’s company,” he confesses. According to Park, many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) Koreans never get past this crisis-of-identity phase. He didn’t even know gay people existed before coming to America at age 14. And not until he entered college did Park finally resolve to “find out more about this part of me that’s so strong I cannot deny it.”
What he discovered, however, was that being Korean American, Christian and gay simply do not mix well. “Life would be so much easier if I chose to live as a heterosexual man,” Park says.
‘Mistakes of Nature’
Sophomore year at Cal State, Long Beach, Park came out to members of a Christian group called Maranatha. “There were all these obligations I felt to live a heterosexual life … so I [joined the group] because they provided me with the hope of change. [I told them] if God could change me, I would cherish and devote my life to Him and they said ‘anything is possible with God.’ So I got in.”
But Pauline Park, Ph.D., points out that “people don’t desire to change apart from the society in which they find themselves.” The coordinator of IBAN/Queer Koreans of New York (iban meaning “other”) draws a parallel between efforts to convert homosexuals and efforts to assimilate Asians. The notion of the “model minority” is “clearly based on internalized racism,” says Park, a transgendered woman, “just as the desire to change [one’s sexual orientation] is based on internalized homophobia.”
She reveals the inherent prejudice behind rhetoric aimed at racial and sexual minorities: Really wanting to change, whether it involves plastic surgery to conform oneself to the Western notion of beauty or attempting to change one’s sexual orientation, is based on the assumption that homosexuality [and being Asian] “is abnormal, deviant and undesirable.”
Sandy Lee, a self-described “butch” lesbian, recalls her mother’s reaction when she found out her only child was gay. “[For a year], I think she was kinda freaking out about the fact that she had given birth to a mistake of nature,” she says with a chuckle. “[My mom] had all these perceptions about what it meant for me to be sleeping with other women.”
Apparently Lee’s mother had learned in Korea that there were women who preferred to be with other women, but she’d always thought these individuals lived as men and so she’d understood them to be mistakes of nature.
“God made men and women, not somewhere in between,” declares Reverend Jim-Bob Park. The English Ministry pastor of Young Nak Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles says, “There are certain things in the Bible that are black and white. Right is right, wrong is wrong … and homosexuality,” he asserts, “is clearly a sin.”
‘Not Doing Enough’
“I was not a happy person,” Stephano says of his time in the college ministry. When he’d decided to take up the Christian group’s offer of change, Park moved into Maranatha’s
single men’s house where, for the next three
years, he spent nearly every waking hour with fellow members. He sang praises as a member of Maranatha’s performing arts ministry which incorporated song and dance routines into their worship services. A typical day would include Bible study sessions, frequent fellowships, and constant self-reflection through prayer.
But all throughout, Park remained riddled with guilt about his homosexuality. “I tried my best [to change] even though I knew I wasn’t being true to myself.” The only advice the group suggested was to ask for forgiveness, suppress his feelings and wait for a sign from God. Determined not to give up, Park attended conferences held by an “ex-gay” group called Desert Stream ministries. Their goal is to “heal homosexuals” and “free” them from a lifestyle of sin.
The message that you always get when you’re in the midst of [the ex-gay ministries] is that you’re not doing enough. If you admit that you have [homosexual] feelings, it’s because you’re not praying enough, you’re not going to enough Bible studies, you’re not … hanging around other Christians enough. We had people in our ministry who became suicidal [as a result]. [There was one man] who deliberately slashed his genitals repeatedly with a straight-edge razor and poured Drano on the wounds because he wasn’t able to change his feelings.
— Michael Busee, a former ex-gay and one of the original founders of Exodus International (the largest of the ex-gay referral ministries)
Stephano describes his own experiences at the ex-gay conferences as “useless,” insisting that no specific strategies were offered as guidelines for change. Instead, speakers used evangelical tones of voice and shared their personal experiences to inspire reform.
“They’re always looking for some type of clue in the person’s past, and I just couldn’t relate,” says Park. The cookie-cutter formulas that ex-gay ministries claim breed homosexuality — sexual abuse or other childhood trauma, a dysfunctional family, insufficient bonding with a same sex parent — don’t necessarily apply to everyone. “And definitely not to me,” Park asserts. (Of the 10 LGBT KAs interviewed for this article, not one said sexual abuse or significant trauma caused his or her homosexuality.)
Three years and countless prayer sessions later, Park finally got out of Maranatha and the ex-gay ministries. He had tried his best to rid himself of any homosexual thoughts, but Park was unable to change.
“Being in that restraining environment for three years, it was doing nothing good. It was only killing me,” he insists.
KA lesbian Judy Han concurs. “That’s why that stuff is really screwed up and dangerous,” she says. “When stuff like this ‘ex-gay’ ministry comes out and says that [gays and lesbians are] making a choice to commit this sin; that you can simply choose not to lead the lifestyle, that’s a really dangerous message for people who might be going through a hard time.”
Parent Trap
One group of people tremendously affected by the message that ‘Gays don’t have to be gay’ is the parents. According to Laura Rutt of Equal Partners in Faith (a national network of faith-based activists), “Parents who buy into the message of the [ex-gay] movement end up alienating their child from them. So the message not only hurts gay individuals themselves, but it hurts the family structure.”
The problem is especially acute among Korean parents of LGBT individuals. And it is exacerbated by the virtual lack of dialogue and widespread ignorance about homosexuality among Koreans.
In a July ’98 front-page article in the Los Angeles Korea Times, the opening paragraph reads: “A significant number of Korean parents knows that their children are gay. However, they are agonizing over their secrets because they have no specific way of dealing with the issues.”
The article, which provides a breakdown of the numbers and types of calls made to an L.A.-based Korean gay hotline, mentions that most KA parents of LGBTs are wracked with extreme guilt, believing that somehow they caused this unspeakable thing to happen because they were inadequate as parents.
When John Kim* came out to his family and friends during his sophomore year at Stanford University, he says his mother’s whole world shattered. Typical of Korean mothers, she’d pinned all her hopes and dreams on her only son, now a successful San Francisco attorney.
“The way she took this gay thing was that it was all her fault and that it was because she wasn’t a good mother,” he explains. His father, who Kim describes as “more of an intellectual,” simply tried to convince him that “this was an American thing which doesn’t exist in Korea.”
However, according to Gary P. Leupp, the author of Male Colors, “homosexuality was at times common in [Korean] courtly society.” Professor John Duncan of the University of California, Los Angeles, backs up this claim with a reference to the Koryo-sa (History of the Koryo Dynasty) in which King Mokchong (997-1009) is described as having “really cherished one of his officials through his namsaek (male sexuality).” Duncan, who has taught Korean history at UCLA for the past nine years, says this clearly indicates that “the king and his favorite official were probably engaged in some sort of hanky panky … This is not the kind of stuff Confucian scholars like to talk about,” he acknowledges, “but there’s no question that there must’ve been some sort of that activity going on.”
Still, Kim couldn’t help but feel that he was imposing “this modern, Western thing” on his parents, especially on his mother’s “pre-industrial, Korean countryside mentality.” She consequently turned to God and became a fundamentalist Christian. She contacted ex-gay ministries and urged her son to read their literature in the hopes that he would convert to heterosexuality. But having to read the material amounted to a “very, very painful” experience for Kim.
“Most gay people would agree with me that it is filthy, lame, idiotic stuff … it’s abusive,” he says. “To have someone tell you either that what you are is wrong or somehow you can change it? That’s very patronizing. It’s offensive,” he says.
‘BASIC INSTINCT’
“Trust me, homosexuality is not such a great deal,” says Pastor Sukhwan Oh. The head pastor of the non-denominational Oikos Community Church in Bellflower, California believes “the homosexual issue is made bigger than what it really is” by gay rights activists and extremist liberals. He says he deals with much greater issues on a daily basis, issues such as child and sexual abuse.
Oh affirms that homosexuality is absolutely incompatible with Christianity, equating it to the sin of alcoholism. Though he admits that “everybody has a certain tendency or attraction to certain areas of sin,” he believes that just as alcoholics can live dry the rest of their lives, homosexuals too can change their sexual orientation. “Just because you have a certain tendency doesn’t mean you’re wired that way.”
Tim Lee*, however, would beg to differ. The 36-year-old computer engineer says he never wanted to be gay. Why would I put myself through that kind of torture, he asks, explaining that in Korean society men and women with same sex attractions are relegated to less-than-human status.
So rather than subject himself to social persecution, Lee did what all Korean men are expected to do — he got married and fathered a child. Five turbulent years later, his marriage ended in divorce. Lee, who attends a Korean church in Los Angeles, was left broken and alone. “I tried to be a regular, normal man,” he insists. “But [being gay], it’s like a basic instinct. You cannot hide it … and you cannot change.”
‘More Harm Than Good’
After undergoing three years of intense self-deprivation and self-loathing, Stephano says he finally realized that the people in the ex-gay ministries were deluding themselves and others about the possibility of sexual reorientation. They feel totally justified in their actions, he says, but having personally undergone the experience, he concludes that “they actually do more harm than good.”
Last December, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) stated: “The very existence of therapy that is supposed to change people’s sexuality, even for people who don’t take it, is harmful because it implies that they have a disease.” And according to Dr. Nada Scotland, head of public affairs for APA, “all evidence would indicate this is the way people are born.” Scotland warned that continued use of rhetoric positioning homosexuality as a disease or evil may cause people to “feel less inhibited about beating up gays or not giving them jobs.”
In the fall of 1996, four KA LGBTs were walking down 32nd Street in New York City’s Koreatown when they were assaulted by a group of Korean American males. The attack occurred during the early morning hours against the four who were apparently targeted as “fags.”
The incident led to an unprecedented KA forum on LGBT issues, cosponsored by the Korean American Association of Greater New York (Haninhwe) and the Korean gay organization Chingusai (“between friends”). Though the event brought awareness to the problem, it did not offer viable solutions to what Pauline Park describes as “the greater violence of the ostracism and marginalization within the Korean American community. LGBT Koreans are very afraid of exposure.”
Stephano believes much of the problem lies in the lack of awareness about LGBTs in the Korean community. “People shun us without particularly knowing who we are. We could very well be your neighbors, your sons and daughters, even mothers and fathers. We’re not any different from you,” he insists.
John Kim says people often mistake being gay with the so-called “gay lifestyle” which is popularly perceived to include promiscuity and endless partying. He clarifies that just as heterosexuals are not automatically associated with Hugh Heffner (the quintessential Playboy), gays too should not be stereotyped. Most gays, he says, simply want what everybody else wants: “Being settled down, pursuing [personal] goals, being happy and having a life partner.”
“Really, there’s no difference,” he explains. “There’s just this minor little difference, the sex of your other partner. Everything else, I’m very Korean. I’m about as Korean American as you can get.”
Living Out Loud
For Kim, it has been an 11-year ordeal — a heart-wrenching battle of wills — since he first came out. His parents immediately became embroiled in a bitter religious battle sparked by his mother’s extreme response to Kim’s revelation. And his father blamed him for the conflict saying, “She was never this religious before. You made her that way.”
The 30-year-old attorney has come to terms with the fact that his parents may never understand their son. “If they can’t, they can’t. I accept that it might be beyond them,” he resolves. But he admits that, at times, he gets frustrated at having to deal with their preconceptions about gays.
“It was curious, my mother and father would keep saying to me, ‘You’re gonna end up being alone.’ That was a big fear of theirs,” he explains. “But I [thought to myself], ‘Well yeah, if you reject me, then I truly am alone, aren’t I?’”
As for Stephano, he came out to his family seven years ago. Though he says it was a frightening and painful experience, he feels that, in the end, it was also “very empowering,” especially because it broadened his parents’ perspective on LGBTs and thereby liberated him.
Park is now an “ex-ex-gay,” one of many who have undergone reparative therapy through the ex-gay ministries only to end up disillusioned and wholly unchanged. That is, unchanged in terms of his attractions to the same sex but fundamentally changed in his outlook on life. Everyday he’s alive, Park says he’s thankful since his focus has shifted from living in guilt and shame to celebrating his uniqueness as a gift. “There’s nothing shameful about me,” he says with a smile. “I’m a wonderful creation of God.”
Park remains a faithful Christian and he now receives support from fellow gay Christians with stories similar to his own. He has also made a new choice in life: “To let other people know [about] this core side of me that is so powerful, I couldn’t do anything about it … Being a gay man is not a privilege,” he admits, “but I was born this way and I’m thankful for the way I turned out to be.”
* Name has been changed according to the wishes of the individual.
