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Interview with Tak Yamamoto
This month we are celebrating the history of gay Asian movement in Los Angeles by bringing together different generations of activists and organizers whose contributions have been valuable to this movement. Remember, before 1980, there was no gay Asian organization in Los Angeles. A lot of us are not familiar with the history of how this happened and the people who made it happen. So I thought an interview with one of these pioneers in our community is appropriate.
Tak Yamamoto was the first president of Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays or A/PLG (now Asian Pacific Gays and Friends APGF), in 1980, at a time when A/PLG founders were concentrating on fostering a positive and independent gay Asian identity and on developing gay Asian leadership. These are goals that organizations like GAPSN also strive to achieve today. Tak came to A/PLG with a lot of leadership experience. He protested against police abuses with Morris Kight in the gay community. He was president of the San Fernando Valley chapter of Japanese American Citizen League. For years, his name has been virtually synonymous with the Manzanar Committee, an organization that made annual pilgrimages to the internment camp.
Excerpts from interview with Tak Yamamoto: My leadership number is one; I wanted to be the first person to join A/PLG.
I went to one of the first discussion meeting at Paul Chen's house. Scarce furniture, which was a good thing, because there were seventy people in his apartment that day. It was a mixed group, so there were Caucasians here, too. There were a lot more Asians than they'd ever seen. All the people I could think of went to that meeting. And in the middle of this thing… this got me and I got really adamant about this… in the middle of these Asian Pacific people trying to come together and feeling we could do things with seventy people in the room, some white person came up and said, "Why do we need another organization? Why don't wee just joining all these other existing organizations?"
And I said, "Because it doesn't meet our Asian Pacific needs." See, if we join a mainstream organization, we would be the tokens again. We wanted an organization that was going to address our issues. I told him, "If you don't think you need this, then you need to get out, because there are seventy of us here. We are here because we feel there is a need." I kept him quiet. I was so vocal and upset that he shouldn't suggest why we didn't need an organization for gay Asians. Maybe for his own personal needs, there was no need for it. But as Asian Pacific people, we felt there was a certain power that we were now bringing together. There we were: we never had seventy of anybody speaking on the same subject, coming from the same location, and feeling a certain power that we never would've been able to generate otherwise, if we went into a white organization with our Asian faces.
One of the needs we felt was validation. We didn't say that in so many words, but the idea was: Why haven't we talked to each other until now? Why is it necessary that we look for validation outside of ourselves? Many people asked that. And with the realization that we could come together now, we could say we're okay. That was the beginning of something. Before that, we were always asking someone else to tell us we were okay. That seems ludicrous now, I know, but back then, who was going to tell us that it was okay to say that we were okay?"
After the meeting at Paul's, we really got into high gear. We decided to have rap groups because we got to find out where we were coming from. Before A/PLG, we socialized, we had dinners, we hung out. We could talk to another Asian person, but we still didn't reveal ourselves heart-to-heart. Not until A/PLG did we actually develop heart-to-heart. We were then able to focus on specific things that put us down. You know, in bars and other functions, you don't want to hear all kind of grips that go on in the real world. You want to be light and airy, and you want to feel good. But we weren't making a real impact, and until a group like A/PLG formed, there was no one to discuss these issues with.
