May 01, 2009  |  By: Amy Cavanaugh  | COMMENTS     

One month before Capital Pride celebrations turn D.C. into a glittery rainbow, gay Asian Americans are coming together to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Pride & Heritage as part of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May.

Pride & Heritage is a coalition of four local groups for LGBT Asian/Pacific Islanders: API Queer Sisters, an organization for gay Asian and Pacific Islander women; API Queer United for Action, a group that predominantly caters to Asian men and works to promote advocacy, education, outreach and social events; KhushDC, a support, social and political group for gays who have ties to South Asia; and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum which is not LGBT but includes a lesbian, bisexual and transgender arm that addresses issues of importance to gay Asian-American women.

When the coalition formed 10 years ago, it was a chance for organizers to bring the API community together in discussions about sexuality and heritage.

“When we first started, it was always a challenge of invisibility,” Ben de Guzman of the Pride & Heritage committee says. “The first guest speaker at the first event was Helen Zia … who talked about how Asian/Pacific Islanders have always been missing in history.”

He says the community has dealt with “Asian Americans who would rather be in denial about the LGBT people in their communities or LGBT organizations who aren’t willing to look at what constitutes gay issues,” but now “in many ways I think we have moved past that. I think people are beginning to realize that all gay folks aren’t white and that all Asian people aren’t straight.”

Times are changing, but as Pride & Heritage readies to celebrate its 10th anniversary with an event Saturday, organizers say it’s still important for the API/LGBT community to come together.

“Each group maintains its autonomy, but representatives from each group are on the planning committee for Pride & Heritage,” says Hyacinth Alvaran, co-chair of Pride & Heritage. “We do this event every year and then one other big thing, but we do smaller things where each group invites members of the other groups to come together, like with the Dragon Boat event that AQUA does.”

Alvaran, a member of the Queer Sisters, says the event “provides folks a chance to see each other face to face … and celebrate the different parts of identifying as queer and as Asian.”

The event, which typically draws 100 people, will include performances by Bollywood singers, spoken word artist Jenny Lares and drag king Jake Badger. It will also honor Asian Pacific Islander Equality-LA and Shiva Subbaraman with visibility awards.

“We want to show and highlight the work of people of color who are making change in our community as kind of a way to show people that they do have role models and they can be active like Shiva or API Equality in LA,” Alvaran says.

Subbaraman is the first director of the only LGBT resource center at a Catholic/Jesuit university in the U.S. at Georgetown University, and API Equality-LA was active during the Proposition 8 campaign in California.

Proceeds from the event will help send local people to “Transgress, Transform, Transcend: A National Conference of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Asian Americans, South Asians and Pacific Islanders,” which will be held in Seattle in August.

API Heritage Month comes as D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty cut the District’s budget of the Office of Asian Pacific Islander Affairs, which employs seven people.

“We’ve rallied around the office, which has been an institution to us,” de Guzman says. “The cuts would be primarily among staff involved in direct linguistic outreach, and the office provides services that are not available for our community. Some groups in Pride & Heritage were working with the mayor for a number of years [to provide an LGBT perspective].”