Introduction
The Gay Asians of Toronto was an activist group founded in 1980 by Richard Fung following his participation in the 1979 National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Washington, D.C. After his return to Toronto, Fung reached out to Gerald Chan, author of the 1980 article “Out of The Shadows,” which detailed the experience of being queer and Asian in The Asianadian, an Asian Canadian Toronto-based magazine. After making contact, Fung and Chan posted fliers around the city, calling for queer Asians to join a “discussion group” and meet at 519 Church, Toronto’s queer community center, which had been founded in the early 1970s in Toronto’s gay village. The discussion group eventually became the Gay Asians of Toronto (GAT).
GAT was founded with dual intentions: politically organizing around the experiences of queer Asian Canadians in Toronto and building a community around queer Asian diasporic experiences. It was the first queer group in Canada to organize explicitly along racialized lines. While GAT was originally founded with the goals of political organizing and community building, the emergence of the first documented AIDS case in Toronto in 1982 led to a sharp shift in queer organizing, not just within Canada but across North America. GAT's shift to AIDS prevention is well documented, most notably in relation to the organization's successful 1989 grant application to the Toronto Board of Health. The grant created the Gay Asian AIDS Project (GAAP), an AIDS prevention group that provided health information and services to gay Asian men in Toronto. While GAT disbanded in the early 2000s, Asian Canadian AIDS Services (ACAS) is a direct offshoot of GAAP and is still operating as of 2025.
GAT was far from the first or only queer political organization in the city. Other local groups, such as The Body Politic, the Toronto Gay Alliance Toward Equality (GATE), and the Lesbian Organization of Toronto (LOOT), were active in the 1970s. GAT, however, was unique in that it was the first queer group in Toronto that organized along explicitly racialized lines. Church and Wellesley, Toronto's gay village, was known for being overwhelmingly white, male, and cisgender. GAT was a stark departure from this demographic and became a notable fixture within the local landscape of both queer and Asian organizing. GAT’s activism eventually extended globally, becoming an instrumental part of queer political organizing in both Hong Kong and Japan.