By Eric Wat
Posted on this website in November 2002
First Printed in Nikkei Heritage, National Japanese American Historical Society, Vol XIV, Number 3, Summer 2002
Copyright © 2002 by National Japanese American Historical Society

When I first met and interviewed Tak Yamamoto in 1997, he was almost sixty years old. At the time, he was still coordinating the annual pilgrimage to Manzanar for the Manzanar Committee, an organization he had belonged to since 1975. Tak was only three when his family was forced to relocate to the internment camp in Poston, Arizona. Although he remembered very little of that experience, it was important to him that this page of American history would not be left out of the community memory. So when he met Sue Kunitomi Embrey, the Committee's founding chair, he did not miss the opportunity to join the organization. "She knew I was gay," Tak tells me. "All of the members of the Manzanar Committee and I talked about it, and they got to meet my partner Carl. Then in 1976, I joined JACL. By that time, I was finding some acceptance by straights, Asian Pacific straights. That was important to me."

Around the same time, June Lagmay was schooling her professors and fellow students at UCLA about what it meant to be an Asian lesbian. Born in Yokohama, Japan, to a Filipino American serviceman and a Japanese national, June grew up in Echo Park, where she met her partner Rita in high school. She began attending UCLA in 1975. When a sociology class on deviant behavior included homosexuality in its syllabus, June addressed the class and told them she was a lesbian. "The whole topic started to ride on me because what Rita and I had was so natural and so good. In a philosophy class, my paper was on why it is unreasonable philosophically to say that homosexuality is wrong," June remembers. "And born-again Christians would pester me at lunch and tried to convert me. I would get into these voracious philosophic arguments with them. I was so fired up then that if I got people telling me that I was a sinner and going to hell, I liked it. It was like, I got a reaction out of you!"

At a time when the issue of homosexuality barely registered a blip on the Asian American radar, Tak Yamamoto, June Lagmay and other Japanese Americans refused to live in anonymity. Nowhere did they wear their sexuality more proudly than in their home community. In 1980, Tak and June, with a close circle of both Asian and non-Asian friends, founded Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays (A/PLG), the first organization of its kind in Los Angeles. As the organization was building its infrastructure the first year, June agreed to serve as its co-chair with her dear friend Paul Chen. They had met earlier at the Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center. Being two of a small handful of Asian Americans working at the Center at the time, it did not take long for Chris and June to find each other.

"I remember sometime around that time Morris Kight, who knew me and Paul and Tak and Roy Kawasaki and a number of other people, asked us to come to his house, which to me was like going to the house of God," says June. "Morris has such a wonderful reputation for being such a patriotic father of the gay and lesbian movement. He would say, 'You got to have a way of expressing yourselves and don't depend on the European community to do that.' I never forgot that." That meeting at Kight's house was Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays' first. The organization still exists today.

Some of June's most vivid memories of those days include staffing an A/PLG booth at Nisei Week festivals. Indeed, not satisfied by having its own safe space, the organization had made a deliberate effort from the beginning to make an impact on the larger Asian American community.

In 1981, after the bylaws were written, an election was held and Tak became the president of A/PLG. That year, he also ascended to the presidency of the San Fernando chapter of Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). It was not long before he smelled an opportunity brewing. "I said I wanted to do a lesbian and gay coming out to the chapter. They said, 'Gee, okay.'" He says with a mischievous grin. For that evening, Tak invited the "usual suspects": June Lagmay, Roy Kawasaki and Dean Goishi. During dinner before the meeting, he had the three of them dispersed among the JACL members, who had no idea that they were sitting next to the gay panelists.

"Before we started," he says, "I told them that they were exposed to some gay people and hopefully, I joked, they wouldn't catch any germs. And of course, during the panel, they asked the very kinds of questions that had been addressed by gays and lesbians for a long time, but just not in our community. Like what made you gay? Was it in the genes? Were you raped by your uncle? I mean, who cares? But we had to work from there."

That was just the beginning.

In its early years, A/PLG members outreached to other Asian American organizations and churches. The dialogue was not always easy. Sometimes, without the benefit of a historical lens, they themselves were not sure if they were making a difference at the time. Still they persisted. After all, what would be the alternative to doing what needs to be done?

History is their best evidence yet. As Terry Gock, one of the leaders in A/PLG in its beginning, suggests, "It's not like you could do it with just one presentation or two, but our presence could not be affect the agenda of many a group."

JACL is a perfect example. It is one of the earliest Asian American organizations to officially endorse gay and lesbian marriages. During the 1994 JACL Convention in Salt Lake City, Tak talked to other members from across the country. "There was a tendency of some members to say that the resolution to support gay marriages was going to divide the organization," Tak remembers. "I heard them say, 'We'll take you but you got to deny your gayness.' Give me a break!. We'd gone that route before. Why should we continue doing that?" With education and lobbying, the resolution passed by a narrow margin.

The victory was not too surprising to many who had done this work for years. Terry Gock says, "How did that happen? From last fifteen, twenty years, starting with A/PLG getting involved with JACL. When Tak was the president of the San Fernando Valley chapter, he got us into JACL to talk about gay Asian issues and got the chapter to support many, many efforts that went on from there. It's all these connections and contacts that A/PLG made!"