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Things Are Gradually Improving for Vietnamese American Gays
By Alex Hoa
First Appeared in Orange County Register, April 15, 2002. ©2002 Orange County Register.
Alex Hoa had read the story, about hundreds of homosexuals swarming a hotel in southern Vietnam, staging a parade that a Communist-run daily dubbed a "monstrosity."
The spectacle was "highly frenzied." The dances drew crowds to the city of Long Hai, viewing men who look like women in "very revealing" clothes and strutting fashion-model-style, after surgery at Thai clinics that charged up to $10,000, said the newspaper called Thanh Nien. Cheers were wild.
"It was an abnormal phenomenon," the publication wrote this month, "and this is foreign to our country's tradition.
"This monstrosity," it went on to say, "poses a headache for officials in charge of culture and education."
Why continue to write this?
I ask Hoa, active for more than a decade in Orange County's Gay Vietnamese Alliance. Friends going back to Vietnam every year tell him that accepting the political identity of lesbians, bisexuals, gays and the transgendered is a new concept. There is a desperate need for public role models to speak for the voiceless who are proud of who they are, north to south.
In our community here, total tolerance is still a dream. But the local scene is more open as he and others step up to promote social and networking opportunities in which participants can express their individuality.
Just in the past couple of years, Vietnamese nightclub- goers have seen a more visible presence of gays in the audience and on stage. The magnetic Brigitte Thuy Tien, chanteuse at area hangouts like Moulin Rouge, Music City, Can's, Majestic and MVP, charms listeners with her French songs, translated from old tango tunes. They applaud her as a male performer in glamorous gowns.
Diem, the weekly entertainment magazine, publishes ads for social and health services at the Orange County Gay and Lesbian Center. It also printed a full-page notice for Cafe Tinh Trai, a support group for Vietnamese gays that meets each Sunday and is sponsored by the Asian Pacific Aids Intervention Team.
Mimi News, a bilingual monthly, profiled Sabrina, a popular Vietnamese transsexual, in its March issue while Hop Luu, a literary journal, recently published a poem by Le Nghia Quang Tuan, celebrating sexual intimacy between two men. More and more, ethnic radio and television debate gay issues in talk shows.
"The general perception is that it's no longer a silent taboo, that homosexuality is not a physiological disease," said Hoa, in his 40s. "I believe the public has recognized my peers, that we are part of the Vietnamese Diaspora. As for their acceptance, it's only a partial embrace. The initial moral judgment persists."
And so do the myths, he adds, that gay Viets are "artistically inclined," doing well only in "beauty-oriented businesses."
Vietnamese, singer Brigitte says, "could even be more advanced, more tolerant, but they're influenced by the conservative American population. That can affect their way of thinking."
So the crooner chooses songs from the 1950s and '60s and tries to please the crowd. "It's a way to educate people. We're not bad, and we're never boring," says a laughing Brigitte, 32, a French-language graduate of California State University, Fullerton.
To make more strides, GVA members say perhaps they can set up a booth at Tet festivals or man a table on weekends outside the Asian Gardens Mall, the most visible landmark in Little Saigon.
They want to reach young, Americanized Vietnamese who flood chat rooms and are coming out at an earlier age than the previous generations.
Yet gay Viets lack an issues forum, activists say. There is no lobby group working solely on their behalf, they have no political representation.
Even the Asian Pacific Aids Intervention Team in Garden Grove trying to help has not been able to go into high schools, where officials preaching abstinence will not allow them to interact with students in gay-straight alliances.
Nolan Same, the group's youth advocate, says the Vietnamese, like many Asians, "would rather not talk about homosexuality, which they view as a dishonor. The young people know it's something you just don't bring up. You're raised to put your family first and to follow their wishes."
And many parents come from the old country, where the government considers being gay an "ill" and blames it on bad Western ideologies.
Homosexuality is not a crime in Vietnam, but such men and women are seen as "sick" people ruining local morals.
"My husband and I have been told this, time after time, it's sort of like brainwashing," says a mother from Fountain Valley who is learning to accept her daughter's gay orientation.
She isn't surprised by the newspaper story published about Vietnam's gay parade, but she is surprised that there aren't more outlets to help Vietnamese gays in Orange County.
"I suppose this attitude may not change soon, but the push has to start and it has to start here."
