Queer Hurting: Tracing <i>Invisible Footprints</i> and Queer Asian Sociality in Toronto

After coming out to family and friends, I still took years to embrace my queer Asian identity. Like most of my peers who came out and were active in Toronto in the mid to late-2000s, a time when dyed hair and colored contact lenses were still on trend, I grappled with the tension of being queer in Asian spaces and Asian in queer spaces. For us, the notion of queer and Asia holds a multitude of meanings, invoking complicated feelings and relationships, its boundaries constantly shifting. My peers and I come from different cultures, religions, and political backgrounds; what binds us together is our experience as immigrants tethered to Asia, an imagined object we are often asked to reject to assimilate. The mobility of queer Asian diasporas, along with our concurrent sense of place and placelessness, can enrich the discussion of queer Asia, whether as method2 or critique,3 pushing it beyond a regional study, perhaps as Shinsuke Eguchi suggests by exploring its wider, unstable, and continuously negotiated “temporalities and spatialities of Asia.”4 This mobility of queer Asian diasporas can also bring forth a sense of hurting, of fissures within the community between those born in Canada and newcomers, and between the old guard of queer liberations and young queer cultural shakers.In this special forum, I refer to queer hurting as our capacity to hurt ourselves and others, and for other queer bodies to hurt us, not referring to physical harm but to the psychological and emotional sediments that reside in us. Why do we feel greater pain when another person of color or a community to which we think we belong hurts us? For many queers, this hurt is the second or third we have endured by social institutions—the first being our biological families. When we cannot find comfort in our blood relations, we hope the at-large queer community will become our unconditional, wish-fulfilling refuge, and when that hope goes unfulfilled, we look further, finding queer diasporic communities. We expect diasporic community members to understand our challenges—that the shared experiences will make us more seen, heard, and accepted. When reality fails to meet our expectations, we feel we have put our faith in the wrong people.In late 2015, a prominent, white queer artist reviewing my filmic work told me that no one wanted to talk about race anymore, that the topic had the stale air of the 1980s, prompting me, partially from frustration, to bring the Invisible Footprints (IF) project to life. The idea of an intergenerational experiment within the queer Asian community had burrowed into me by 2013, but at the time, I did not have the necessary relationships to realize my aspirations. Motivated by the work of queer black feminists,5 I yearned to inspect fault lines and blind spots within my community. That same year, a close friend and I started Rice Roll Productions, a light-hearted media initiative prioritizing socially engaged art. With a few short, well-received undertakings, Rice Roll enabled us to build trust in our community and find the necessary funding for Invisible Footprints.Though IF is regularly viewed as a disruption of white, heteronormative culture and archival practices in Toronto, the project aims to highlight deficiencies within our own communities, excavating the social and economic forces that subtend queer Asian collective distortions. Our goal was to present marginalized voices—voices of queer elders, transgender members, and people of nationalities previously denied a platform. Mindful of the myriad expressions that queer Asia can take, we cautiously labelled the iterations 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3, suggesting with decimals, instead of whole numbers, that our actions are always incomplete. Through the three iterations of IF (2017–2020), I served as curator, featured artist, and workshop mentor, and from these perspectives, I will share stories highlighting how queer hurting perpetually accompanies failed expectations. I invite readers to consider queer hurting as sites to examine what it means to be, in tandem, queer and Asian.As the research for our exhibition began, I met Evan Chen,6 a well-respected figure in the queer Asian community, long-time HIV activist, and gifted community leader. In the early 1980s, he and a few friends started a community newspaper along with other seminal projects, recording and archiving queer Asian lives in Toronto. With a few esteemed novelists, filmmakers, and organizers, he and his cohort represent the first wave of documented queer Asian heritage in this city. He is dazzlingly meticulous. Many of the artifacts featured in Invisible Footprints 0.1 came from his closet, including an original copy of Gerald Chan's article “Out of the Shadows” from 1979.7 If a queer Asian community archive emerges in Toronto, it will be greatly indebted to him. His experiences and activism inform the way he wishes the queer Asian community to operate. When he advised as a committee member and, later, as a mentor to young participating artists, I saw hints of his frustration, mainly his disappointment that many artists do not understand the context of the artifacts and events, lacking the nuance to interpret them. During a conversation at a potluck, another advisory member suggested that young queers can see further into the future with a limited view of the past, but the older generation has an extended view of history. Although I partially agree with this generalization, I want to extract the underlying assumption, the unstated expectation that younger generations understand a history strapped to the queer liberation movement.Scholars have noted the hum of queer liberalist ideologies in queer spaces,8 which ranges from a gentle, background vibration to a powerful bellow muffling other voices. In the 2005 special issue of Social Text, editors David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz ask, “What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?,”9 implying a constant recalibration of not only our history but also our political understandings. This repeated nowness in queer culture stipulates social justice, tinged by its historical echo, and one that must effectively outperform previous generations. These restrictive expectations are often unmet. Many of the young participants found it challenging to access queer Asian material. When they did, the material was commonly presented by individuals outside of the queer Asian diaspora who habitually missed the necessary context. Likewise, they find it challenging to identify a lineage when much of the communities’ histories are not recorded. Often, they find recorded materials embedded with distortions and biases daunting for them to unravel. These barriers make projects like IF necessary to help bridge the gaps. At the opening reception of our exhibition, Evan shared a heartwarming speech, noting a poster that meant little to him made an emotional, far-reaching impact on young artists, teaching him to look more broadly and review his value-assigning framework.I met Daisuke Sato two years before beginning the IF project. During this meeting, he shared that although he was part of the queer Asian community during the early 1980s, as a new immigrant he felt he did not have the same experiences as others, especially those who grew up in Canada or came to further their education. His financial obligations hindered his social and political engagements, and, in the mid-2010s, he had to care for his aging mother, whom he sponsored to Canada. He started with two apartments on the same floor, allowing him to slip away and retain some privacy. When her health declined, he moved her into his unit, sold the other, and they lived together for many years. Daisuke had little to no contact with the queer community during this period and an almost barren dating life. When his mother passed away, the memory of her wrinkled, ashy hands haunted him, so he spent most of his days in seclusion painting them. He tried reaching out to queer spaces but felt ostracized, constantly needing to filter what he said to avoid offending young activists. He felt isolated from a community he once belonged to.In 2018 at IF 0.2, we asked Daisuke to share his experiences. His story is only a small sliver of the friction happening in Toronto, mainly among older queers who feel they no longer belong in spaces they once helped build. Issues of generational conflict and leadership are not exclusive to minority communities; other prominent social and cultural spaces in the city also face the same dilemma, from mass resignations of board members10 to suspicion regarding money management.11 In this context, I want to concentrate on our hurting when we expect to belong to something we have once been part of. Although it hurts to admit, community, by design, has never promised to include everyone or to do so perpetually. Due to constraints—lack of resources or lack of awareness—communities always exclude by demarcating who belongs.I first met Christine Dang at the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival in 2019 and spoke with her during the festival's reception party. Knowing that she was one of the artists involved with IF 0.3, I asked her about her progress. We both had a few drinks, so our filters were lowered. Christine revealed her anxiety and stress regarding the direction of her project and asked for my advice. I suggested, coming from a similar documentary background, that she focus on building relationships, especially with the elders involved in her project. I believe that having meaningful relationships with one's collaborators can inspire the artwork. A phenomenal artist, Christine crafted a beautiful short film, tenderly looking through photo albums of four queer Asian women navigating what it means to be queer and Asian. The film moved beyond the IF project and played at festivals both in Canada and internationally.I know intimately the anxiety that Christine referred to, the pressure of speaking for a community, and the weight of knowing that another generation is peering down. At times, this heaviness makes us hesitant. Other times, this fear of disappointing those closest to us can become debilitating—a constant, unmovable failing. The sense of being judged is also one of the reasons that many young queers hope to be mentored by elders. This appreciation, though, is not always well-received, because many members of the older generation feel that they had to find their own way and that the younger generation should too. As a collective, it is important to remind ourselves that we work hard to give the next generation the privileges we did not have; we cannot fault them for relying on those privileges.In many community discussions, young artists frequently disclosed that they felt excluded from conversations and spaces run by older artists or that the older artists’ sensibility was still guiding these spaces. These young artists wish to take over, and for some, wish to create new social, artistic spaces, detached from the histories of previous generations. This enthusiasm, when poorly translated, causes many in the older generation to feel ignored. These elders feel that they must tiptoe to prevent others from feeling hurt and themselves from being hurt. Though the frustration and lack of understanding build on both sides, there is truth in both perspectives.Many young queer folks feel insecure and ill-prepared for some of the tasks asked of them in community organizing. They speak of their inability to imagine queer futurity, harking back to Muñoz's contemplation of queer horizons.12 Some feel they travel in a fog, able to see only their feet and take one step at a time. They are in survival mode and do not have the privilege of concurrently processing the past, present, and future. This frustration by the haunting of the past can cause many young queers to feel detached from the history of queer liberation. When these historically untethered spaces are created, they too have something important to contribute to our community, not unlike spaces that have drawn directly from the queer liberalist movement. We cannot account for all our distortions and biases. When groups within our community explore and propose new perspectives, their contributions help illuminate our failings just as they will have their own biases and ignorance. By rotating the circle of influence in our community, we can mitigate our misguided thinking and expose our blind spots.The experiences of Evan, Daisuke, and Christine invoke the frustrations of unmet expectations, especially of those influenced by political leanings, as observed by scholars like Amin and demonstrated by Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz. The call for queer spaces, both physical and psychological, to be continuously political puts undue pressure on our relationships, leading us to police others with ideal images of community behaviors, as expressed by the sentiment in the epigraph starting this article. These tensions underscore a need to recalibrate our expectations of other queer and Asian individuals—shifting our focus from hurt feelings to tactics attuned to different political positions, or lack thereof, in the spaces we hold and create.No community can guarantee everyone will get along. An overemphasis on collective harmony within diasporic Asian groups, however, can mean denial, repressed resentment, or sweeping issues under the proverbial rug. These internal conflicts—coupled with spaces that loosely bind people together with different sets of knowledge, trauma, and experience—bring a multitude of entangled feelings. In Toronto, for instance, the older generation bemoans that younger generations fail to understand the hardships of the past, whereas younger generations feel frustrated that elders are uncritical of their own privileges, not questioning the economics and political forces supporting prominent voices. The community's members clutch different utopian visions of whom it should represent and how it should function. These high, behavioral expectations, often made visible by the intergenerational tension within these complicated spaces, can hurt and compel us to exert our sense of control. To strengthen our communities, we must continue to expose why we hold these expectations and examine how we enforce our influence. More important, we need to address what to do after the hurt has been done.Not everything messy is queer, but to be queer can be messy, and transformation has never been tidy. When our communities move too fast, certain members might feel lost, like they are losing social, political, or sexual spaces. We should not adopt the principle of leaving people behind, particularly our elders, but must hold compassion for one another. We have adequate room in our communities to pool our resources and create fresh, provocative spaces and work separately to find experimental voices. As individuals, we have never been able to simultaneously access every part of the queer community. Presenting a reductive image of community harmony will inevitably trigger hurtful dynamics. My purpose is not to endorse an overemphasis on disunity, but we must make room for it: conflict is a natural, vital, element of growth, even if that growth differs from what we envisioned.Although this forum discusses the conflicts lingering in sexual and gender minoritarian communities, more important, it is a personal meditation on queer hurt. My relationship with my close friend suffered tremendously during the IF project. We had unreasonable expectations of each other and hurt one another in different ways. And when the pain is fresh, it is difficult to consider paths forward. Although I understand that not every interaction or relationship is salvageable, many fractured relationships can heal. They might never be what they once were, but they have the possibility of growing stronger. Likewise, addressing contemporary conflicts among queer Asians means we cannot let our past hurting censure the present positive relationships we can build.

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