Queering Premodern Asia – (Nuances Season 5)
Queering Premodern Asia is a limited series and the 5th season of the Nuances podcast about Our Asian Stories. Each episode explores different aspects of sexual diversity in premodern Asia with commentary from guest scholars. Episodes are divided into a narrative portion, and a discussion with a guest co-host from the queer Asian community.
Find Nuances: Our Asian Stories anywhere you get podcasts.
S5: Queering Premodern Asia – Ep.0 – An Introduction – Nuances: Our Asian Stories
Episodes
1. In search of Prince Charming (and his King)
2. But where are the lesbians?
4. Love, marriage & their casual relationship
5. Gods, sex, and the patriarchy
6. The West: savior or demonizer?
7. Iconic gender benders
8. For the record…
9. In search of the socially acceptable
Transcript
You’re listening to Queering Premodern Asia, a limited series by the Nuances Podcast.
Episode zero: In search of our queer Asian roots – an introduction
Hello everyone. My name is Lazou. Im your host and producer for this series. I host the nuances podcast about our asian stories.
Although this series is about queerness, I am cis & straight. Now, you might be wondering… Why is a cis straight woman doing a show about queerness? Excellent question!
First off, I’m not doing this alone. I will be joined by guest co-hosts from the queer Asian community, some of whom you’ve already met, as well as influential academics studying these topics. It is never my goal to speak for the queer community, but rather to elevate the voices of the community. So if at any point, I say something that you find problematic, please reach out to me. I do my best but I know I’m not perfect and I might make mistakes. I want to do better, so please don’t hesitate.
Now, to understand why I’m doing this, here’s some background.
The idea for this series came about a year ago, inspired by my interviews with the queer Asian community.
Many of the guests shared a desire to connect more with their culture, but also a feeling of being rejected by it because of their queerness. For example, here’s Cece from S1E7 talking about becoming the black sheep of the family after coming out as trans, and having trouble explaining that grief to white queers:
I’m not just me, I’m my family and my family is me. And so a lot of queer Asian people can’t come with the closet because they’re like, “I’m going to lose everything”. And in, white queer spaces people would be like “fuck your family. Just be you and be yourself, you’re amazing”. But I don’t understand like. You don’t understand what you are asking me. You’re asking me to give up me. It’s not just this group of people, it’s this really big part of me. And I don’t know who I am or what I am apart from them.
Queer representation in the media has primarily centered white narratives which is often not relatable to queer Asian folks, like Josh explains in S1 E6
I know that people have their own connections to these particular parts of, media or these movies. But like every time another story about a white teenager who comes out, who’s embraced by their family, I’m like, I, I never had that. Where’s the story about the Asian that’s coming out, right?
S1 E06: Josh Decolongon (@sommeligay) on bringing diversity to the wine & beverage industry.
A lot of families see queerness as a Western concept that is incompatible with their Asian heritage or cultural tradition, especially the part of our culture that expects us to get married and have kids. Here’s Travis on S3E6:
She still thinks that homosexuality is something of the heart, right? Like you can feel things for, people of the same sex or the same gender, but you still have to, marry a woman and have kids. I think it’s a mix between recognizing that people do have same sex attractions, but you still have some sort of piety to your ancestors to continue the lineage it still sticks with her.
During my research, I actually found out that how Travis’ parents view his being gay is actually not too far off from how our Chinese ancestors viewed male male love, but our ancestors were not against being gay as our families might think today. You’ll learn more about this on episode 1 and 4 of the series.
My queer guests also often feel like queer spaces aren’t safe for them, as those are typically very white spaces and often have very overt anti-Asian sentiment. Here’s an excerpt from Edmond Chan’s interview on S1 E8:
But this was in the days of gay.com. I don’t even know if that website still exists, but I’m not one to go to clubs. So I had an online profile and as I started reading other people’s profiles, the Holy Trinity of the gay profile in the nineties and early two thousands was “no fats, no fems, no Asians”. So if you are going to respond to somebody or send them a message, you can’t be fat. So fat phobia. No fems, so no feminine men. And no Asians. They would not communicate with an Asian person. And that has been my entire out life.
Another issue our queer Asian community faces is fetishization, as well as misogyny in their Asian family circles. Here’s an excerpt from Sally, S1 E9.
I’m both trying to navigate any kind of Orientalism lens being placed on me and trying to avoid that in a north American context and in east Asian and in Chinese context specifically, also trying to resist inheriting 5,000 years of sexism.
For some of my guests, it was religion, more specifically Christianity, that made it hard for their parents to accept their queerness. Here’s Dani Saldo from S3 E5.
“Because my parents are Christian people, they said that because of Jesus and their relationship with God and the church, if I had a girlfriend they would support me, but they’ll never truly accept it, which sucked. And it felt like they were committing to not knowing me and committing to not accept a part of me, which I still honestly struggle with.”
A common theme I also picked up in those conversations is how lonely it was for them as young people trying to navigate their queerness. Here’s Tonie from S1E3.
There weren’t a lot of openly queer people in my life. So I just had to be the person who was queer. And that was really hard.
S1 E03: Tonie on being a Vietnamese-American, nonbinary, pop artist and producer in NYC
I was really struck by how little I knew of these experiences. As a straight woman, I lived decades completely oblivious of these experiences. But the more I heard, the more I wanted to encourage my fellow straight folks to be curious, to care, and to engage with these stories.
One day, I was scrolling on TikTok when I saw a video about how in 1651, there was a Chinese play that featured lesbian characters. It immediately piqued my interest. If that story was out there in a hit play in 1651, what else is out there? Could history bridge the gap between our current diasporic existence and conversations that seem too futuristic for our parents? More importantly, what if we could validate the idea that queerness and cultural pride are not alien concepts, but in fact intertwined in our past?
And thus began my journey.
The thing is, sexual diversity was super common in premodern Asia, but that history has been buried. Academics in the last few decades have started to uncover some of these stories, but how the heck would YOU know that most of the Chinese emperors had a DOCUMENTED male favorite in the historical records? Yup, you heard me right. Oh and get this, even premodern Chinese porn included gay scenes. Ok, now I have your attention right?
So how many of those stories are out there, and why were they buried and by whom? Can we even use the terms like Lesbian, Gay or even Queer in those contexts? How come they weren’t able to erase all the history? So many questions, so little time to cover them all. Come with me on this quest to find the truth about our queer Asian roots.
Trust me, this series is not your average boring history lecture. History was my least favorite subject in high school because the people teaching it focused on the least interesting parts, like the exact dates the British and the French battled over this and that land. But I promise you, we’ll make the history of sexual diversity in premodern Asia so fun, you’ll never guess I read like a hundred academic articles and books to make it happen. Oh yeah, I’m not making all this up. All the stories I’ll be sharing are from academic sources and I will link to those in the full show notes. But the point is to present all this material in a way that isn’t full of jargon and overwhelming detail but still based in research.
Another reason I’m making this series is simply because I enjoy doing this work and I had the resources and the time to put into it. I may be a cis straight person but I find this topic utterly fascinating and I know for a fact that I’m not the only one. It has made me question a lot of my preconceived notions, and I hope it will do so for many of my fellow cis-straight folks as well as queer folks too. Again, this is not to say that we should go back to the ways of our ancestors. Rather, it’s an exercise in stretching our imagination around queerness, and how we approach conversations about queer rights.
For my Queer Asian listeners, my hope is that this series will help you feel more connected to your Asian roots, and that these stories will bring hope and healing as you laugh and cry with us on this journey.
For my fellow straight folks, I hope it makes you curious to learn more, and maybe go back and listen to the interviews I’ve done with our queer community on nuancespod.com. Because I don’t think creating a society that is more inclusive of queer folks should fall squarely on our queer community’s shoulders. In a society where cis-hetero folks like us are the norm, we’d get much further if more of us pitched in however we could, no? Just as we need male feminists, we need straight folks to advocate for the queer community too. And we can start by listening.
And for the activists and educators listening, I hope this series helps you reflect on the language you use in your activism, whether it perpetuates orientalist tropes, and how we might do better together.
Some of the common themes that came up during my research was that the current Western framework we use to understand and fight for queer rights, the use of the LGBTQIA+ terms, often don’t map quite neatly onto other cultures or eras.
There’s also the fact that in the West, queerness is seen as part of your core identity. But this was not the case in premodern Asia at all. Who you slept with did not put you in a different “gay” category.
In fact, it seems a lot of people were bisexual. Another one is that we think of Lesbians as the female version of Gays. That equivalence also didn’t exist.
In some cultures, the English language doesn’t have the appropriate terms to describe their gender constructs.
I learned so much from researching this series and I can’t wait for you to go on that journey too.
Queering Premodern Asia drops on June 2nd, 2024.
Subscribe to Nuances: Our Asian Stories wherever you get your podcasts or go to nuancespod.com to learn more. You can also follow us on all social media: @nuancespod
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