‘Back Then, Lesbians Didn’t Exist’
But now, APA women have OASIS
By Joyce Nishioka

As a student at Francisco Middle School in San Francisco, Crystal Jang didn’t know what the word “lesbian” meant when, at age 13, she read through the Kinsey Report and found a world that to her seemed instinctively comfortable.

Soon after that, she wrote a letter to a girlfriend professing her love. It got passed around, and before long, the whole school knew what Jang had hoped to keep private -- feelings that even now, 40 years later, remain largely hidden among Asian Americans.

“They were not confrontational; they just thought it was odd,” recalls Jang. “Back then, lesbians didn’t exist. There were no visual images.”

Jang, now 51, has dedicated her career to helping gay Asian American students as a counselor for the San Francisco school district. In 1991, she help found Older Asian Sisters in Solidarity (OASIS), geared for Asian American lesbians who are at least 35. Organizers purposely left out the word ‘lesbian’ in the title because “many folks were still closeted,” Jang explains.

“They came from a generation when lesbians weren’t talked about. There were no Asian lesbian role models.”

OASIS is now part of the API Queer Women’s Coalition, which consists of over 20 different groups, including Singaporean, Malaysian, and Southeast Asian lesbian organizations. The group plans to make its debut in next week’s Dyke March, part of the citywide Gay Pride Celebration, and it hopes to set up a resource hotline to provide information to Asian American lesbians with diverse backgrounds.

But while most Asian American lesbian groups are geared toward younger women, OASIS focuses on older women and their issues, such as caregiving and menopause. Since its inception, the group has grown from 16 members to 80, and its membership has grown older as well. Many are approaching retirement age and, says Jang, “there are lots of grandmas.”

Even more than their straight counterparts, older Asian American lesbians often find themselves the primary caregiver for older parents. “Because they are the single women, the responsibility of caretaking of parents falls on them,” she said. “If the parents get sick, they’re the ones that have to go to wherever the parents live because how could anyone else leave their families?”

Strong Confucian-style family ties, however, make it difficult for many older lesbians to come out to family members, for fear it will bring shame to the family name. Many also feel shame for going against a system that dictates that men carry on the family name and that women marry and have children.

Like many of her peers, Jang had tried to act as if she were straight, given the pressure she’d often get from traditional Chinese relatives. They would ask questions like, “When is the [wedding] banquet?” and “Do you have a boyfriend?”

In fact, Jang says, she was engaged for four years in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet while her fiance worked on his doctorate, Jang was embarking on her own research quest on her identity as an Asian American lesbian. “The two didn’t merge because there were no other Asian gays that I knew of,” she explains.

Coming out was a multi-step process. When Jang and her fiance split up, she remembers her father telling her, “You have up to the time you get to the altar to change your mind.”

“He told me he loved me no matter who I was,” she recalls. After that, she became more open about her sexuality, and her mother attended gay events and ceremonies with her. Still, she says, “there wasn’t real acceptance” until she developed a relationship with an Asian American lesbian.

Today, Jang has a steady partner. She is also the mother of an adopted 3-year-old -- a dream she had thought could never be fulfilled. “I always wanted a child, but coming out in the ’60s and ’70s, it was not an option for lesbians,” Jang remembers. “We were in the mindset that we had to give up the idea of having a family.”