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PARENTAL SUSPICIONS
For both genders, though, coming out to family and friends is a huge issue, one that Virtucio says cannot be put off indefinitely.

“Parents want to know,” she said, adding that many AQUA members have told her that they suspected that their parents knew about their sexuality long before their children would admit it to themselves. Mothers, she said, might ask daughters questions like, “Why to you dress that way? Wear a skirt.” Or they might tell their sons, “Don’t walk like that.”

“When you’re in the closet as a gay young person, there is nothing worse than someone noticing you’re gay,” Virtucio said, but warned, “There is constant bickering no one can live with.”

At the same time, she said, cultural pressures to put the family first or to hide one’s feelings often convince Asian and Asian American youth to internalize their sexuality. Each family member often is expected to fill an explicit role. For example, she explained, a Filipina, particularly the first-born daughter, “is supposed to take care of the family, and get married and have kids.” A first-born Chinese son, she added, “can never be gay. He is supposed to extend the family name.”

‘STARVATION FOR LOVE’
Desmond Kwok says his parents accept his sexual orientation -- though they don’t necessarily support him emotionally. He acknowledges an ongoing “starvation for love” that he blames on his parents. Both have been distant, he says, especially his father, a businessman who lives in Chicago. “My father honestly told me, ‘I don’t care about you. All I care about is the money.’ ”

Kwok says he found support for coming out not from his family, but from a gang he was in two years ago. “They were really cool with it, and it boosted my confidence in the whole coming-out process,” he said. “They’d say, ‘If someone has a grudge against you for being gay, we’re there for you. We’ll kick their asses.’ ”

He had a relationship with a boy who maintained that he was straight. “I had no problem for him being with girls,” Kwok maintains. But seconds later, he adds: “I still didn’t understand. I went into my mass-depressive mode. It’s not that he didn’t accept me for being gay, but he didn’t accept me as his boyfriend.”

Now, Kwok dates “older” Asian and Asian American men -- at least 19 -- because few come out before then, he says. He admits that he has tried to find boyfriends over the Internet, at bars and cafes, “the worst places to meet a good boyfriend.

“I madly fell in love with one guy who slept around a lot,” said Kwok, who says he’s no “slut” and emphasized he is looking for love. “On the second night I was with him, he told me I was his 25th accomplishment on his two-week vacation in San Francisco. I was just crushed.”

A graduate of the School of the Arts, a magnet academy, Kwok said he intends to continue his work as an advocate for gay Asian and Asian American teens. Yet even now he cannot rid “the feeling of being alone -- being around people who really love you, but still knowing they are heterosexual. They’ll be with their girlfriends or boyfriends, and here I am all alone, sitting around, boo-hoo, no boyfriend.”

‘MAYBE ... WHEN I’M 18’
Eric Aquino never had such peer support growing up in Vallejo, Calif., and especially in junior high school. “People I knew in elementary would smear [my reputation] with all the new people I was trying to meet, saying things like, ‘I remember Eric used to jump rope with all the girls.’ ”

“I felt alone,” Aquino said. He avoided his locker, where the popular kids hung out, and instead took long, circuitous paths to classes to dodge their cruel comments.

“A good day for me was being able to walk down the hall without having anyone ask, ‘Are you gay? Do you suck dick?’ ”

His grades fell. “I would be late to class and wouldn’t bring my books,” he explained. “I couldn’t concentrate. I looked at the clock until it was 3 o’clock and time to go.”

Aquino’s high school years were both the happiest and one of the most depressing times of his life. He joined marching band and had friends for the first time, but he also started feeling that he was, in fact, gay. “Friends were important to me because I never had any, but they didn’t know me for what I was,” he said.

Aquino thought perhaps he should wait until he was 18 to come out, so that if his parents rejected him, he could run away. He also considered living in the closet and spent much of his time thinking of ways to keep his secret. “I thought of different alternatives, other options. Like, I’ll get married and have kids, [then divorce] and be a single parent, and my parents would just think I never found love again.

“Every day, I was coming up with these things. Every day I was, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?’ ”

‘TRYING TO BE STRAIGHT’
Ofie Virtucio, 21, can relate to the feeling of isolation. “Maybe it’s the feeling where you know you’re Asian but sometimes in situations you’re embarrassed to be,” she said. “That’s where I was for a long time. Of course I was lonely.”

When she was 13 and still in the Philippines, she recalls, her mother asked her, “Tomboy ca ba?’ -- are you gay?”

“She looked me in the eyes; she was worried,” Virtucio said. “I said, ‘No!’ ” She wishes that her mom had replied, “Whatever you are, it’s OK. I still love you, Ofie.’ ”

Two years later, the family came to the United States. “I had to be white in a month,” she recalled.

“When I started talking, I had an American accent that I could use, so I could make friends,” she said. “During senior year, I was in denial being Filipino and didn’t talk about being gay. Most importantly, I had to get friends. I had to get to know what America is all about. I had to survive.”

She recalled: “I was trying to be straight but didn’t want to have sex. I didn’t want a man’s penis in me.”

Though she had a boyfriend in high school, she secretly had crushes on girls, especially the teenage lesbians who were “out.” At the same time, she recalls, she “couldn’t relate. They were more ‘we’re-here-we’re-queer’ ... I knew I was gay, but I thought, ‘I’m not like that.’ It made me think I could never be like that.”

So, she said, “When my friends would talk about cute guys, I would jump into the conversation. I thought, ‘OK, I have to do this right now,’ so I’d say things like, ‘Oh, he’s so cute.’

“Then when I would go home, I’d be like ... oh,” said Virtucio, covering her eyes with her palms. “It hurts. It really, really hurts.”

FINALLY, RECONCILIATION
Virtucio finally acknowledged her sexuality during her college years, “the happiest time in my life.” At age 18, she found her first girlfriend and experienced her first kiss, but it took many more years before she felt truly comfortable about being a lesbian.

“I knew it was going to be a hard life,” she said. “I thought, ‘How am I going to tell my siblings? How am I going to get a job? Am I going to be constrained to having only gay friends? What are people going to think of me? I thought people would know now -- just because I know I’m gay -- that they’ll just see it.”

Virtucio never had the opportunity to come out to her mother, who passed away when she was 15.

But in college, she did tell her father. She remembers he was in the garden watering plants when he asked her, out of the blue, whether her girlfriend was more than a friend. Startled, Virtucio says she denied it, but later that day, she opened the door to his bedroom and said it was true.

They took a walk on the beach after that. “He told me whatever made me happy was fine,” Virtucio recalls.

“My father used to be mean to my mom, pot-bellied, chauvinistic,” she says. “But for some reason he found it in his heart to understand. That moment was amazing for me. I thought if my dad could understand, I really don’t care what the world thinks. I’m just going to be the person I am.”

For more information on AQUA, visit www.aquanet.org.