Gay Asians Toronto
Lim joined a Toronto LGBTQ community scrambling against state repression on multiple fronts. As The Body Politic fought ongoing police censorship efforts, it simultaneously served as a site of debate about free sexual expression within LGBTQ communities, which were divided between a sexual libertarian position and views more attentive to how expressions of desire might reflect, reproduce, or challenge power asymmetries in the wider social context. The Right to Privacy Committee mobilized in defense of the men arrested in the 1978 Barracks bathhouse raids, and its fight only expanded after the mass arrests of over 300 men in “Operation Soap” in January 1981, which prompted an uprising of over 3,000 LGBTQ people fed up with police abuse.[1] As Toronto’s LGBTQ people color participated in these struggles, they also sought to find each other and forge new political and sexual identities through the formation of organizations such as Zami, Khush, and Gay Asians Toronto (GAT).[2] The relationships Lim built within GAT – with filmmaker Richard Fung, the late novelist Wayson Choy, and community physician Alan Li – provided crucial infrastructure for much of his political and creative work.
Lim’s contributions to GAT were myriad. He gave an extended interview to the organization’s oral history project, created hand-drawn artworks affirming gay Asian sexualities for its newsletter, and choreographed and performed dances at its numerous events. [3] Perhaps his most iconic dance, “Reconnaissance,” was created for a GAT cultural festival, then filmed for inclusion as the opening sequence of Fung’s landmark 1984 documentary, Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians.[4] Evoking both anticolonial theories of liberation and BDSM imagery, “Reconnaisance” begins with Lim’s face concealed by a white mask, his limbs bound by rope.[5] Lim struggles to untie himself, eventually casting off the white mask with triumph and verve. In Orientations, he performs “Reconnaissance” in front of a mirror, linking the dance to struggles against the exclusive equation of gay and white identities and for the affirmative self-recognition of LGBTQ people of color.[6]
Lim’s contributions to Fung’s films continued in Chinese Characters (1986), a more experimental work juxtaposing reflections from gay Asian men on race and the role of pornography in shaping sexual desires. In the film’s concluding voiceover, Lim elaborates a fantasy about an erotic encounter with an airline pilot with a Chinese surname – one possibly drawn from his own experience working as a flight attendant – thus displacing the primacy of white men at the top of gay hierarchies of sexual desirability.[7]
GAT also made central contributions to debates about race, desire, and censorship in TBP, which became both the site and the subject of sustained controversy over the tensions between sexual libertarianism and more intersectional and egalitarian perspectives. The magazine’s long history of struggle against homophobic repression led some to argue that all expressions of sexual desire were necessarily beyond reproach for a sexual liberationist publication. Others disagreed, arguing that even if sexual desires were not totally malleable, their expressions were shaped by social context and power asymmetries, and could both reinforce and challenge those asymmetries.[8]
In 1981, a contributor wrote an unapologetic defense of all manner of discriminatory expressions of desire, panning any criticism as “so damn stuffy, so disapproving, so…small-town-Ontario-50s-protestant.”[9] Writing on behalf of GAT, Lim replied that racial divides in access to capital meant that “bar and bath owners, magazine producers, [and] fashion designers operate with the unconscious idea that ‘gay’ implies white gay.”[10] Without seeking to dictate others’ desires, Lim invited TBP’s predominantly white gay male readers and editorial collective to connect the dots between their own oppression and the multiple oppressions faced by LGBTQ people of color.
The debate recurred in 1983, when TBP collective member Ken Popert, among the sexual libertarian position’s most outspoken advocates, published an op-ed comparing his avowed preference for men with mustaches to racial sexual preferences and arguing for desire as mysterious and beyond scrutiny.[11] The frivolity of this analogy provoked further frustration from LGBTQ people of color, and critical responses continued to pour in well into 1984.[12] An extended response to Popert by Lim’s friend, TBP collective member Tim McCaskell, concluded by quoting Lim at length:
“It’s not that I just want these racist white people to change so that they will go to bed with me. Thank you very much, but I’ve got lots of partners. But I do want to be able to stand up and say, ‘No, it’s not okay for you to be racist. I won’t let you have that power. And not because I’m jealous, or because it stands in my way, but because it stands in everybody’s way: to gay liberation and to a better world.’”[13]
Then in 1985, as McCaskell put it, “the shit hit the fan.”[14] TBP ran a personal ad from a “handsome, successful GWM [gay white man]” seeking a “young, well built BM [Black man] for houseboy. Some traveling and affection required.” A torrent of incensed letters from Black, Asian, and antiracist white readers again poured in. Flanked by letters from Fung and Li, Lim’s response challenged a position that would only “take care of the desire of some” at the expense of others. “If the philosophy of the BP collective is sexual libertarianism at any cost,” he advised, “then please do not call yourself a gay liberation journal, ‘cos I’m part of the gay liberation, and when your liberation oppresses my life, it ain’t no liberation.”[15] That June, a divided TBP collective announced that it would continue to permit advertisements that involved asymmetries of power in the domain of consensual fantasy, but would no longer publish those “which seem racially abusive or stereotypical… and which appear to be asking for a relationship of real subservience”[16]
If TBP’s policy change did not satisfy the magazine’s critics, including Lim, or its own egalitarian collective members, the controversy nevertheless demonstrated what McCaskell describes as the “increasing assertiveness” and organizational strength of Toronto’s LGBTQ people color.[17] Amidst such dissatisfaction with TBP’s treatment of race and gender, longstanding desires for a more intersectional approach to gay and lesbian media led to the debut of another community magazine, Rites for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, in May 1984, and Lim contributed graphic design to the publication through 1985.[18] People of color and organizations such as Zami and GAT also played a major role when the International Gay Association held its seventh annual international conference in Toronto in 1985.[19] Lim’s busy conference schedule included leading a workshop on porn and sexual stereotypes, directing a production of Choy’s play Smashing Borders, and performing a piece of his own, a reflection on the loss of a beloved uncle.[20] Rites praised Choy’s play, which “drew on the tradition of Chinese revolutionary drama” to address “imperialism, racism and lesbian/gay oppression” in a series of “moving and challenging scenes.” Although granting that “the performances were uneven,” Rites lauded Lim’s direction of “a volunteer cast of fourteen men and women many with no previous acting experience.”[21]
[1] Track Two; McCaskell, Queer Progress; Hooper, “Enough is Enough.”
[2] Orientations; McCaskell, Queer Progress, 215-218; John Paul Catungal, “The Racial Politics of Precarity: Understanding Ethno-Specific AIDS Service Organizations in Neoliberal Times,” in Petra L. Doan, ed., Planning and LGBTQ Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces (New York: Routledge, 2015), 235; Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, Syrus Marcus Ware, and Río Rodríguez, eds., Queering Urban Justice: Queer of Colour Formations in Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press); Ryan Conrad, ed., Toronto Living with AIDS (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2024).
[3] “Lim,” May 9, 1983; Orientations.
[4] Conrad, Toronto Living with AIDS, 67-90.
[5] See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]). See e.g. Richard Fung, “Looking for My Penis,” in Bad Object-Choices, eds., How Do I Look?: Queer Film and Video (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 145; David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
[6] For more interpretation of “Reconnaissance,” see, for example, “Orientations: A Video – Gay Asians Speak Out,” Rites for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, Dec. 1984, 20; Liz Kim, “Calling on Queer Asians: Richard Fung’s Orientations (1984),” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 9 no. 1-2 (2024): 101; David K. Seitz, “What Do Gay Asian Men Want?: Desiring Otherwise in the Work of Richard Fung,” Emotion, Space and Society, 31 (2019): 1458; David K. Seitz, “Looking for Pei Lim’s Penis: Melancholia, Mimicry, Pedagogy,” in Ricky Varghese, ed., Porn on the Couch: Sex, Psychoanalysis, and Screen Cultures/Memories (London: Routledge, 2023), 45.
[7] Chinese Characters, directed by Richard Fung (Charles Street Video, 1986). Lim’s work as a flight attendant for Canadian Airlines International is noted in “AIDS Awareness… and Chinese Medicine,” Angles, Dec. 1991, 7; “Former Miss Ohio Went All for Broker in L.A.,” Vancouver Sun, Nov. 25, 1993, B2.
[8] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 185-189; David S. Churchill, “Personal Ad Politics: Race, Sexuality, and Power at The Body Politic,” Left History 8, no. 2 (Mar. 2003): 116.
[9] “So What’s Wrong with Discrimination?,” The Body Politic, Oct. 1981, 6-7.
[10] “GWM,” The Body Politic, Nov. 1981, 4-5.
[11] “Race, Moustaches, and Sexual Prejudice,” The Body Politic, June 1983, 34; McCaskell, Queer Progress, 185-189; Churchill, “Personal Ad Politics.”
[12] Lim would later revel in the irony that the top three winners of the 1985 International Facial Hair Contest were Japanese. “Racism and Gay Male Porn.”
[13] “You’ve Got a Nice Body… For an Oriental.”
[14] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 218.
[15] “Letters,” The Body Politic, Apr. 1985, 30.
[16] “The New Policy…” The Body Politic, June 1985, 8, qtd. in McCaskell, Queer Progress, 221.
[17] “TBP Crash Survivor,” Rites for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, Mar. 1987, 3; McCaskell, Queer Progress, 221.
[18] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 206-207.
[19] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 221.
[20] “1985 IGA Conference,” Rites for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, July 1985, 4-6; “People of Colour Organize,” Rites for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, Sept. 1985, 7; “CelebrAsian ’85: Borders Smashed,” Rites for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, Sept. 1985, 20.
[21] “CelebrAsian ’85: Borders Smashed.”