Recently I re-watched the TV series Gaycation with Ellen Page and Ian Daniels. The show shines a light on LGBTQ culture around the world, exploring the good, the bad, and the ugly. The first episode visits Japan and touches on the struggles of being gay and Asian. In the West, particularly in the US and Australia, the bias against the LGBTQ community is driven mainly by religion. And in the East, however, it’s something much closer to home. In the show, it’s described as Asian shame. I wanted to dive more deeply into this topic to understand it and to share with you my own experience.
Only 5% of China’s LGBTQ are out.
The journey of discovering your own sexuality and identity is a nerve-racking experience. Not only do Asians have the daunting experience of coming out, we also have to deal with the Asian shame that comes with it. It’s no wonder only 5% of China’s LGBTQ citizens have disclosed their sexual orientation. It’s alarming when you compare that to the US, where it’s reported that 59% of LGBTQ adults have come out to either one or both of their parents.*
What is Asian Shame?
To understand Asian shame, we must first understand the Asian cultures and the ways in which they differ from the West. Asian cultures are collectivist in nature—they prioritize the fulfillment of oneself primarily to benefit the group.^ Consequently, your identity and actions reflect upon your family, ancestors, hometown, province, and even the country. This is especially true when we look at shame and honor, which are both deeply rooted in the culture.
Growing up and the internal struggles
Western cultures are individualistic in nature—there is a greater emphasis on self-fulfillment and independent thought. I remember growing up in Australia and the internal struggles I had with these two conflicting ideologies. At school, I learned to value my own happiness and to focus on what I wanted to do in life. But at home, where I was brought up with traditional Chinese values, these decisions—such as my career path to be a doctor, lawyer, or accountant—were made for me.
Don’t rock the boat.
This feeling of connectedness in Asian cultures means that when one is faced with shame, it extends to the collective, and those affected the most are those closest to the individual, which is usually the family. This is exactly why people are reluctant to come out—they fear rejection, sullying the family name, or even worse, they fear retaliation from society upon those closest to them. It’s this collective consciousness that discourages individuals from straying from the norm and creates the “don’t rock the boat” mentality, which causes social stigma.
My own experience dealing with Asian shame
I understand these fears (of rejection and bringing shame to the family) all too well after my own experience of coming out to my parents. When I was younger, I had thought I would never come out to them. For years, I carried this weight on my shoulders. I remember the conversation I once had with a boyfriend. He asked me whether I would come out to my parents, even if I met the love of my life and got married. My response was, “No, it’s not something they need to know. I would never put that burden on my parents.” As blunt as it sounded, I said it with absolute conviction that I had come to terms with my fate.
Living a lie
Over the years, I learned to be kinder to myself and to have more compassion. I started to realize I was creating more hurt by not telling and felt it was the reason why my relationship with my parents was transactional and sterile. I was living a lie, and I wasn’t able to be honest with them, let alone with myself. It got to a stage where I couldn’t allow myself to suffer any longer. I couldn’t keep lying to my family.
The cost of losing my family
When I finally did come out to my parents, I felt all this weight lift from my shoulders; I felt as if I had set myself free. In doing so, it allowed me to flourish and become the person I am today, but it came at a cost.
Two years of silence
Shortly afterward, my ties with my family broke, and I didn’t speak to my parents for more than two years. During that time, I even started to accept it as the way of life—my friends became my family. In a way, I had it easy. I have friends and have heard from others who have been in far worse situations, some experiencing public shaming or even violence. Please know I’m not after anyone’s sympathy; I’m here simply to share my story with you.
There is hope.
Over the years, our relationship has improved; as they say, time heals all wounds. We’re closer and more intimate than we have ever been, but there is still ground that needs work. I don’t regret my decision, nor can you simply look at it through the lens of right vs. wrong. I do, however, genuinely believe everyone has the right to come out and be true to themselves. For anyone reading this who is in a similar situation, I would say there is hope, and I’m proof of that.
As a society, we can tackle Asian shame.
Asian shame and the stigma attached to it are primarily due to the society’s lack of awareness of and education about the LGBTQ community. These ideologies were conceived during a prehistoric time, and as society has advanced and grown, so has the need to shift these views. I believe the more stories we share, the more awareness we raise. As a society, we have the ability to tackle Asian shame. I see a future where no one has to deal with Asian shame, no one ever needs to experience “coming out.” It will be a world where we truly accept everyone for who they are, no matter what skin color, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. That future is within our reach and just around the corner.
*Only 5 of China’s LGBT citizens have come out of the closet. Quartz, 2016
^Asian Shame. Psychology Today, 2018
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I’m glad to be part of your family ❤️
Me too!
Thanks for sharing. I’m glad you brought up the collective experience because it’s something that’s often overlooked in the West where the individual experience is more talked about. When I look at the Black American house holds, there’s a collective experience where many of us were told the following
“You have to be twice as good to have the same opportunities as your white counterparts”
Part of me wonders whether this pandemic is the perfect opportunity for a collective shift. This free time has given(or forced) people to slow down to reflect on their own lives, beliefs and hopefully confront the toxic ones.
I believe the experience of coming out was generally two-fold. On one hand it was meant to serve as a liberating experience but I think we need to redefine what coming out means. There are so many videos and stories of people harboring feelings to confide in someone they trust about their sexuality, hoping to hear words like “I love you no matter what” or “It doesn’t matter, I still love you”
In the moment, it’s such a beautiful moment and our loved ones mean well, but sometimes I worry that it perpetuates this power dynamic that puts LGBTQ below Straightness, and it’s not as empowering as telling someone “Diversity in sexuality is a beautiful and a natural thing”
So I think a great way to tackle Asian shame is changing the narrative by normalizing and celebrating Asian queerness. And the more momentum it gets and the more that Queer Asians internalize it, the more influential the shift will be on a collective consciousness in my opinion. In the Black community there’s been a rise in “Black Excellence” where we’re changing the narrative of our success being this extraordinary feat, and instead just saying it’s the norm and inspiring our youth to internalize that belief.
I wish you luck in this movement. You definitely have my support.
Hey Thomas,
Thank you for sharing your comments and the beautiful words of encouragement. You raise a fascinating point about the experience of coming out is somewhat two-folds and that we need to change the definition of what coming out means.
I agree there is a risk that it perpetuates an unhealthy power dynamic between the LGBTQ community and heterosexuals. But at the same time, I recognize there is this greater need from a psychological sense. Coming out allows many an emotional liberation as a result of bottling up emotions related to their sexual identity (I agree, that in itself is an issue we need to tackle). I do feel though this process is transformative in understanding their identity.
Back to your other point about tackling Asian shame through changing the narrative. I absolutely agree with you – it’s one of the reasons why I started this blog and continue to share with others my own experiences.
Thanks,
David
I personally have a problem with the concept of a person being described by their sexual attraction as a noun, or as an adjective, in the formal, objective sense as an overarching narrative that governs their identity.
What do I mean by this?
Okay, firstly to clear things up, anyone can and should feel free to describe themselves as however they want to, for identity is one of the most personal and subjective traits of our humanity. But the concept of people being a heterosexual, a homosexual, or a bisexual, is a European concept that only goes back 120 years or so. In terms of human history, this isn’t a long time: and this is far from “prehistoric” as you say. The term “gay” only became used in the latter half of the 20th century, in part as a political act to try to rename, and hence redefine one’s self, or a group of people, with a term that doesn’t directly deal with sexual attraction. And forming a group identity is a very important concept in society and politics because it gives you strength in numbers which is the basis for demanding your human rights. Hence we had the various LGBT rights movements under many names, which achieved great success with a lot of hard work.
But “gay” is still is a loaded term that we use to pigeonhole others, and ourselves by: “gay” or “not gay”. And hence it has been a double-edged sword as I believe many many people of different societies across the world are deeply misinformed about the nuances of all types of sexual attraction, generally speaking. The psychological mechanisms and reasonings behind affection, relationships, intimacy and sexuality is probably still the most mysterious and misunderstood aspect of humanity. Scientists still don’t know how to properly describe it beyond taking people at their word for what they see, feel and do.
The phenomenon of same-sex attraction has been demonstrably shown to be older than the human species itself. Much much older. In the middle of the last century, Alfred Kinsey was the first to introduce to modern Western science constructs of the concept of a scale or a range of different types of sexual attraction to the sexes, known as the Kinsey Scale. However, in my own explorations of people and their sexualities, I am convinced it is far more complex than this. This has been reflected by the addition of terms like “pansexual” but I feel this is overcomplicating it. Simply put, from the most objective, scientific perspective, same-sex sexual attraction is same-sex attraction. That is it. That is all.
Now what our type of sexual attraction means for each of us depends upon who we are, how it manifests (ie the part that is indisputably beyond our control), what we are informed about what it means, and how we choose it to mean in our lives (ie the part that is within our control… which isn’t always black and white). Various scientists from psychologists to anthropologists are still debating how much is genetic, how much is pre-natal, how much is post-natal and how could it be a part of any species when an elementary interpretation of Darwinism is applied. But Western Science has made great strides since only about 50 years ago when same-sex sexual attraction was still characterised as a psychiatric disorder. It has now been fairly well established that there is no “gay gene” yet it is accepted that there is no great choice in sexual attraction, and it is now being widely theorised that same-sex sexual attraction has an evolutionary purpose. But that’s just Western Science’s ever evolving perspective, which has a strong influence from the chains of millennia of Christian moral teachings.
In many Islamic cultures, they would not even have a word for someone who is gay. It would often be frowned upon, often with severe penalty for men being in an exclusively gay relationship, all the while being commonly accepted that men would often engage in sex with each other, provided it was behind closed doors and provided if those men would seek to have a wife and children (ie adultery was only when it was sex between man and a woman who were not married to each other: male to male sex was not considered in this category at all). In many Pacific and African cultures, prior to the introduction of Christianity, male to male sex was just seen as a way of bonding, or even a rite of passage. In parts of remote tribes that still exist today, same-sex sexual practices are still very much a part of their culture, a culture resembling “prehistoric” times which demonstrates that these horrendous ideas towards same-sex attracted people have only developed far more recently, largely due to an overthinking of what it means in tandem with developing ideas about pre-scientific age science, and pre-Renaissance philosophy (ie Abrahamic religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam). Don’t forget too that the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans, the forebears of most Western philosophical traditions, had societies where homosexuality was nothing short of open, encouraged and outrageously rife. Which brings us to Asian cultures…
Asia is obviously a big place with, depending on locality, a great influence by traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Confucionism, Shintoism, and more recently, Islam, and even more recently Christianity and Western “Enlightenment” (that oxymoron of Western History of “all men are created equal” whilst owning slaves and colonising, even genociding entire civilisations). India had for millennia been dominated by Hinduist-inspired thought, spawning things like the Karma Sutra, with influences ranging from the Greeks to the Persians to the Mongols only to then experience 7 or 8 centuries of Islamic Empire, then replaced by 1 or 2 centuries of primarily British colonialism. Similarly China was by far the world’s greatest civilisation in terms of size, feats and magnitude until Europeans, primarily British, forced dominance upon them, including submitting the people of China by brutal means to be slaves to opium. The British weren’t drug dealers, they were drug pushers, and very brutal.
Now keeping all this in mind, in an effort to “modernise” and basically just to be able to compete enough to survive, these societies and civilisations that had spent generations, or even centuries under western dominance, decided (for want of a better term) to adopt many western practices, philosophies, technologies, religions and teachings. And often these were done to either a far greater level than existed in the West, or they were adopted at a time when the West had a very backward and barbaric approach, and while the West had since moved on, these practices stayed the same in the colonies. For instance: India up until very recently had Victorian era laws regarding homosexuality; Polynesian cultures are now some of the most homophobic in the world despite their pre-Christianity historical embracement of same-sex attraction; and even when Queen Elizabeth first visited Australia, she saw a type of Victorianism that had never existed in Britain in her lifetime. Another example could be how much of the East adopted Western notions of racism, and pursued it to the nth degree in some instances (for instance, WW2 era Japan and their horrible attitudes to people of many other races).
So in this long-winded response, I am not trying to give any definitive answers, just a perspective of where we are in place and time. It is quite probable that in Chinese culture for millenia that same-sex sexual attraction and interaction was far more commonplace and in balance with the broader culture, prior to the 19th century. In Japan for instance, it was expected for the Samurai class to have a “master-apprentice” relationship (exactly what you think it means) where bonds between samurai soldiers where not only accepted but *mandated* along these lines. But it is very hard to establish history with definitive evidence a lot of what went on, simply because intimacy is almost universally considered a private matter, not one that has always been written down, painted, sung aloud or spoken aloud. And history is not untainted: it has frequently been revised to suit the predominating intellectual power structures of the day.
So bringing it back to the modern day, what might have been a society with a balanced place for people with same-sex attraction, got upturned by 2 Opium Wars, a Boxer Rebellion, many vicious civil wars, a major war, followed by another major war, a very warped ideology in Eastern derivatves of Marxism-Leninism and the resulting many famines and cultural revolutions in China, and 3 wars in neighbouring Vietnam, has probably meant that for a lot of people that their introduction to the idea of people who are same-sex attracted is the visual image of the Western Pride March, which couldn’t contrast more to what people have been raised to believe as how one ought to behave. Even in the west, sexual education is disturbingly limited in scope: it’s even moreso elsewhere. So when you say you are gay to someone who is completely ignorant, it is almost as if it’s a lie, as their misconceptions are as warped from the truth as they could possibly be. But you need a starting point for communicating these truths, and you often need to do that by tackling the misconceptions head on, in order to smash them.
So all I have to say is that we all have a duty to ourselves and to others to be as honest as we can. And that can be hard. And that can also be an unsure path especially if you have been raised in a culture where even just thoughts of same-sex attraction are considered among the most gravest of sins, and hence the deepest source of self-doubt and self-hate, often leading to the hatred of others (hence you’ve probably noticed why other types of prejudices seem only to be amplified amongst LGBT people). But just as I found when I came out that others that by me opening up about my journey, means others can be more honest and open and comfortable with their deepest insecurities and vulnerabilities, you too are an educator and a role model just by explaining your truth as honestly as you can, helping others overcome their misconceptions and unnecessary vulnerabilities too. It’s a wonderful journey once you get past the part where you doubt if you can make it or not.
Hey Joe,
Firstly thank you for taking the time to read my post. Your comments are very insightful, and you raised several excellent points. I agree with you that our sexuality shouldn’t be our only identifier. Still, we need to recognize for some, and including myself, it forms a big part of our identity because of the experience of struggling to make sense of what it meant while growing up.
I also agree with your point around the misconceptions of the term ‘gay.’ I decided to use the term as a way to strike a common basis with the audience. I understand there needs to be work done on reeducating what the term truly means, and that is one where it is beyond just being rooted in sexual attraction.
I loved the historical points you raised in particular when discussing the influences in Asian. I do have plans to address some of these topics in later posts, but as you have eluded in your comment, this topic is far more complex, and there is no one simple answer. My hopes through writing and sharing my own experience, I can break these down over time and address these topics. To me, this was my starting point and my journey to hopefully educate others on areas that aren’t commonly discussed, even in the LGBTQ community, let alone in media or the broader society. If there is anything I can promise you, is that I try to be as honest as I can with my writing. Only time can tell, and I ask you to continually keep me honest.
Thanks,
David
Thanks for the reply. A lot of my comment was just me thinking aloud about this subject upon being elicited to by your post. I’m not a person who’s about giving definitive answers on topics that the scientific method hasn’t given us definitive answers for: for those topics, I more prefer to just frame things in hopefully different ways to whomever I have been talking to has thus far viewed that topic. You/they can accept/modify/reject whatever you wish.
As the topic is on identity and sexuality, what matters not to me is whether you agree with me or not. What matters to me is if you (or anyone) have and/or are building a strong sense of self, a unique-to-you perception of life, and an ethic of how to live a life that’s well lived for both yourself and others you encounter and can influence (never mind those who are out of reach). Anyway, I promise that you won’t need me to keep you honest, as by virtue of yourself asking difficult questions and challenging yourself, I see that you’re the type of person who would prefer a life of humble, but wondrous honesty to an overglorified high life of lies (truth is always far more interesting and beautiful than fiction anyway). So have faith in yourself to keep yourself honest. Best wishes.
I’m impressed and inspired by your honesty. Thank you 🙂
Hope you don’t mind me commenting (I realise my inherent privilege as a white male).
I’m always called a rice queen, even though I date/have dated people from other races. Maybe it’s simply cos I choose to live in Japan. But I hate being called that, and I hate the term. ‘Potato queen’ is equally irksome. I don’t let race limit or decree who I’m romantically or sexually attracted to (I’m making that sound like a conscious decision – maybe it is?). I’m pansexual anyway – I am more interested in a person’s personality before I look at gender, or race for that matter.
These ideals need to grow up and move on! However I think Hollywood perpetuates the cliches (white/black men with Asian women, but very few white/black women with Asian men etc).
On a more personal level, you’re effing smoking, and if some people can’t see and recognise that they are not worthy ❤️
Awww Wang you Could never be a burden!
Love you David. It’s been a honor watching you grow and develop into the amazing person you are. Breaks my heart that you have to go through this, thank you for raising awareness through your story and inspiring others to be true to themselves.