Young, Gay and APA
By Joyce Nishioka

Nineteen-year-old Eric Aquino remembers a day not that long ago when he kneeled down to tie his shoe during P.E. class. He looked up to find a boy towering over him, saying, ‘That’s where you belong” and making a comment about oral sex.

“People teased me because they perceived me as a gay, fag queer,” he remembers. “What could I do but ignore it? One thing I always did was ignore it.”

Desmond Kwok, on the other hand, says his peers have long been supportive of his sexuality. At 17, he is articulate and popular, but it is clear that he, too, has suffered: Some 40 jagged scars mar his left arm.

Kwok said he slashed himself three times last week when he learned that his boyfriend had been cheating on him. “Heterosexuals have the same problems,” explains Kwok, “but with gays there’s a higher level of depression because it’s harder to find love, and the pain is enhanced by being gay and not part of the community.”

While feelings of rejection and questions about “being normal” haunt most adolescents, they often hit harder at those who are minorities, either racial or sexual. And too often, those are the kids who get the least support.

ANTI-BIAS BILL FAILS
A 1989 study from the Department of Health and Human Services found that a gay teen who comes out to his or her parents faced about a 50-50 chance of being rejected and 1 in 4 had to leave home. Ten years later, a study in The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine found that gay and bisexual teens are more than three times as likely to attempt suicide as other youths.

Surveys indicate that 80 percent of gay students do not feel safe in schools, and one poll by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed 1 in 13 high school students had been attacked or harassed because they were perceived to be homosexual. Nationwide, 18 percent of all gay students are physically injured to the point they require medical treatment, and they are seven times as likely as their straight peers to be threatened with a weapon at school, according to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

Help seemed on the way this year when Southern California Democrat Sheila Kuehl, one of the Assembly’s two openly gay members, introduced legislation that would have made discrimination based on sexual orientation illegal in public education. But the Christian right lobbied hard against the bill. Democrats in districts with a large number of Republicans were targeted, and Latino voters were sent a flyer showing a black man and a Latino man kissing.

In the end, the bill’s 40-38 defeat showed that “legislators in conservative districts were listening to the interests of conservatives,” said Bob Kim, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in gay and lesbian issues.

Despite the defeat, the Assembly last month did pass a bill sponsored by Carole Migden, its other openly gay member, that mandates domestic partner benefits for unmarried couples. And with strong Republican support, it passed Assemblyman Willie Knox’s bill calling for life imprisonment without parole or the death penalty for those convicted of murdering someone because of disability, gender or sexual orientation.

Though Kuehl’s bill has now failed three times, Kim said he is optimistic that one like it will soon be put into place to protect gay youths. “I hope they [lawmakers] realize that whatever their views of homosexuality are, preventing discrimination is an obligation,” he said.

DOUBLE DISCRIMINATION
Protecting homosexual Asian teens from discrimination requires double-duty measures, advocates say. Ofie Virtucio, a coordinator for AQUA, San Francisco’s only citywide organization for gay Asian American teenagers, maintains that they are especially likely to be closeted and ignored. “Asians are the model minorities,” she says, describing a common stereotype. “They can’t be gay or at risk; they don’t commit suicide or self-mutilate.”

In reality, Kim says, “There are many API youths in the California public school system who are gay or perceived as being gay and face angry discrimination and harassment. And there is nothing to adequately protect them.”

As Kwok and thousands of others might attest, to be young, gay and APA is to simultaneously confront the ugly specters of barriers and discrimination that come with being gay in America and those that come with being Asian in America. “With the anti-Asian sentiment, students are harassed more for being Asian because it’s more visible than sexuality.” says San Francisco school district counselor Crystal Jang.

“People don’t think there are API gays and lesbians,” Virtucio says. “There is hardly any research, and no money goes to them.”

Consequently, no one knows precisely how many of San Francisco’s Asian American children are gay. But if the often quoted figure of 10 percent of a population holds, the figure could exceed 1,300 in the public junior high and high schools alone.

Despite that, Jang recalled that teachers asked to identify students whom they thought might be gay or lesbian select mostly white teens, even though the district is less than 15 percent Caucasian and close to half Asian and Asian American. But Asian American students, says Jang, account for about 90 percent of the kids she sees through the district’s Support Services for Sexual Minorities Youth Program.

Though there are more support groups for gay youths than ever before, Virtucio said many Asian American teens find it difficult to fit in. Nor do they have any role models. This decade’s most noted gays and lesbians -- actresses Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, Ambassador James Hormel and former Wisconsin congressman Steve Gunderson, Migden and Kuehl -- are all white, and so is society’s perception of gay America.

‘A CHANNEL TO COME OUT’
Virtucio says that lack of representation means that most Asian American kids come out at later ages than their white counterparts. “People look at the community and based on that ask, ‘Would I want to be like that; would I fit in?’ But they often cannot relate to their white peers.

“They can’t go to programs for queer gay youths when no one speaks their language,” Virtucio says. “How can they be understood when they talk about their close-knit family they can never come out to? They need to see people like them.

“Even if it’s just serving rice, they need something familiar so they could [relate] and feel like they could be part of this community,” says Virtucio, who touts her four-year-old group as “a channel to come out.”

In the summer, 20 to 30 teens -- half of whom are immigrants -- go to AQUA’s weekly drop-in sessions. Though the group initially attracted mostly college-age men, most of its members today are younger, and half are female.

At a recent get-together, the girls seemed much less vocal than boys, and though several young men agreed to be interviewed, no girls did. Jang explains that girls are more likely than boys to refrain from expressing their sexuality, possibly because of the shame they think they may bring on themselves and their families. One girl, she recalled, fell in love with her godsister and wanted to tell her, but she was afraid that if she did, everyone in Chinatown would find out.

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