Origins
The founding of the Gay Asians of Toronto was the result of two events: Richard Fung's 1979 trip to the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Washington, D.C., and Gerald Chan's 1979 publication of "Out of the Shadows" in The Asianadian. Both of these events were crucial to the formation and development of the organization. While Fung’s attendance at the march was the initial spark that inspired him to found the organization, Chan’s article showcased to Fung that there was a gay Asian community to build within Toronto. GAT would not have been what it was without the effect of both events.
The 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was a massive political rally that took place on October 14, 1979. An estimated 75,000 to 125,000 lesbians, gay men, and allies across the United States marched on Washington with the goal of showcasing to America that “We are Everywhere.”[1] Among their number was Fung, who described his admiration of the solidarity displayed at the march in a 1980 essay in The Asianadian: “200 delegates marched from…Howard University through the black community and Chinatown to meet the mammoth demonstration. The Asians, marching for the first time as a group, followed the Native American contingent and preceded the Latin Americans.”[2]
Coinciding with the march, and lasting from October 12 to 15, the National Coalition of Black Gays organized the first National Third World Gay Conference, the theme of which was "When Will the Ignorance End?" The conference focused on issues facing racialized queer communities, with workshops on topics such as immigration, Asian American gay research, the children of interracial marriages, social/sexual revolutions (focusing on Cuba), Chicano identity, and gays in the black family. Fung attended the conference and later referenced the march and the conference as inspirations for founding GAT. Fung specifically stated that he was inspired by the Asian caucus at the march and the National Third World Gay Conference, repeatedly referencing the conference as a turning point for his realization of the need for greater solidarity and community for Asian gays. He did so, for example, in his 1980 essay “Asians: Gay & Proud,” which was published in The Asianadian. Fung recognized the need that racialized caucuses fulfilled within the larger queer community, the need for intersectional perspectives within queer movements, and the inspiration of other racialized queer initiatives:
“Sponsored by the National Coalition of Black Gays, it [the conference] brought together627 men and women to talk, sing, dance, to learn from each other to discover our history, and to organize.... At the 200,000 strong rally, Asian spokeswoman Noshika Cornell reminded the crowd of America's bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and its ruthless exploits in South East Asia. She also cautioned lesbians and gay men against fighting one form of oppression while perpetrating another. For Asian gays, this Conference was very important for setting up a network of information and political support, for giving us the energy to struggle in our communities and for doing all this in the context of a third world movement.”[3]
The 1979 publication of Chan's essay “Out of the Shadows” in The Asiandian was significant for two reasons. First, “Out of the Shadows” was one of the first published works in Canada to discuss racialization and queerness in tandem. The article detailed the historical contexts that led to the double repression of Asian Canadian identity and queer identity, claiming that a large part of the issue in the 1970s was that gay Asian men and Asian lesbians had “not ‘come out’ en masse on this part of the continent.” More generally, the essay critiqued the lack of queer Asian Canadian visibility, solidarity, and community: “It is apparent that there is a great need for help among Asiandian gays and lesbians out there. But such help should ideally come not from our white brothers and sisters, but from those who are facing the problems themselves.... A lot of consciousness needs to be raised, and a lot of conflicts need to be resolved. In the process, a separate movement may be required specifically for and by Asianadian gays and lesbians.”[4] The article's publication was not just a means of historically examining Asian queerness; it was a call to action for fellow queer Asians to organize politically.
While gaining access to Asian Canadian spaces had its own challenges, GAT faced a different set of difficulties breaking into queer spaces. Queer Toronto in the 1980s was certainly more visible than it had been in the 1960s and 1970s, but there were still multiple factors surrounding queer political organizing that impacted racialized queer people within the city differently than white queer people. A majority of early queer political organizations within Toronto, including The Body Politic, a queer liberation magazine, and groups such as the University of Toronto Homophile Association, were primarily white, cisgender, male, and middle class.[5] The pervasiveness of white queerness within Toronto was a fundamental motivation to found GAT in the first place, as stated by Richard Fung in his 1984 article "Gay Asians of Toronto":
“In recent years, the Gay Liberation movement has gained a lot of ground. But the spokespeople have almost always been white men. This has reinforced the presumption among gays and non-gays alike, that women and non-whites are, unless otherwise made painfully obvious, heterosexual.… When a representative of the Gay Asians of Toronto went to make a presentation to a gay group at the University of Toronto, someone spotted him waiting for the meeting to start and told him that the Chinese Students Association was meeting on the second floor.... It is one of the main problems Gay Asians of Toronto (G.A.T.) was formed to deal with. The other goals were to pull gay and lesbian Asians out of invisibility, to research the rich gay Asian history hardly touched by Western researchers and to interact with similar groups in North America and in Asia.”[6]
[1] Amin Ghaziani, The Dividends of Dissent: How Conflict and Culture Work in Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 64-65.
[2] Richard Fung, “Asians: Gay & Proud,” The Asianadian, Winter 1979, 30, https://www.asianadian.ca/v2n3/.
[3] Fung, “Asians: Gay & Proud,” The Asianadian, 30.
[4] Gerald Chan, “Out of the Shadows,” The Asianadian, Summer 1979, 11-12, https://www.asianadian.ca/v2n1/.
[5] Tom Warner, Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 59.
[6] Richard Fung, “Gay Asians of Toronto,” The Asianadian, Spring 1984, 8-9, https://www.asianadian.ca/v5n4/.