When Hieu Nguyen decided to come out as gay to his large Vietnamese American family, he started with his youngest sister.
She was 10, and she adored him. No problem.
Then he went from sibling to sibling. The older ones cried. They told him it was a phase. He assured them it wasn’t. By the end of one month, he had built up the courage to talk to his parents.
“I was really sad in the beginning. I cried a lot,” his mother, Hue Nguyen, said in Vietnamese.
“This was something people don’t talk about.”
Vo Nguyen, Hieu’s dad, was more accepting and matter-of-fact.
“He’s my son. Of course I’m going to accept him,” the Garden Grove resident said through a translator.
Nguyen came out to his family about nine years ago. And, while accepting, his mother went through a several-year grieving process, said Nguyen, now 29 and a licensed clinical social worker specializing in LGBT issues.
“For her, I was her golden child. I was the first in the family to go to a four-year university and grad school,” he said. “My parents had a lot of hopes and dreams for me.
“And those hopes and dreams had to change.”
• • •
The clash between American and Vietnamese cultures – and between generations – on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender acceptance is surfacing again in the heart of Orange County’s Little Saigon. An organization vying to put on next February’s Tet Parade wants to exclude LGBT members from participating.
The issue is making the rounds on local Vietnamese-language radio and TV programs, where even the term “LGBT” is novel. Until just a year ago, the term was not commonly used in local Vietnamese media. And that’s not a small victory, say advocates who are working to connect the generations and expand the Vietnamese Diaspora to include the voice of its LGBT members.
“In the Vietnamese gay community, it’s a work in progress,” said Tai Phan, 39, of Los Angeles, who came out to his family when he was 20. “Today, it’s more open and accepted. The more we educate them, the more they are willing to accept it.”
Phan is a member of a group that evolved from the dispute surrounding the Tet Parade in February, when LGBT members were booted out by organizers. Viet Rainbow of Orange County was a 2-year-old social group for LGBT members. In February, its members decided to restructure into a nonprofit that would include advocacy, education and support for not only people with diverse sexual orientation and gender identity, but also for their parents.
For Tracy Nguyen of Westminster, it’s made a big difference.
“When my son first came out, it was very hard for me,” she said. “I was shocked.”
She took him to a therapist.
“(The therapist) said my son is like that and we can’t change him. I accept it, and (I’ve) tried to find out more about gays and what I can do for my kid and for myself.”
Someone referred her to social worker Hieu Nguyen, and she talked to him about the need for a support group for parents.
“Everywhere I went, it was all American groups, no Vietnamese. I wanted a group with the same language and culture,” she said in English.
Today, along with at least six other parents, she is active in VROC’s Parents of Rainbow Children support group and she is looking forward to an upcoming Christmas party.
“We love the kids. They’re all good. You can tell too. We raise them. They have good careers. Good education. They grow up in nice families,” she said.
Ha Nguyen of Garden Grove also turned to the group earlier this year.
“This is my son,” she says as she introduces her child, who was born a female and identifies as male.
Her 19-year-old son, who asked to not be named, is not involved in VROC – or any other group. “I never felt uncomfortable about it,” he said.
But his mother needed an outlet for support. Nguyen said she needed to get through “the struggle over losing that child and getting a new one.”
In an interview with mom and son at their home, she softly reiterated in Vietnamese her love for him. At one point, she pulled out old portraits where her child was dressed in a pretty blue Japanese kimono and made up with blue eye shadow and an updo. The mom talked about being worried for him. The son, in turn, said he wasn’t worried about himself, but worried about his parents.
Nguyen then pulled out a poem that she dedicated to her transgender child last Mother’s Day. The poem ended with: “I hugged you and thought of how I gave you my flesh and blood. Now everything changed. But one important thing will remain inextinguishable, which is my love for you. Even though you are a boy, you are still my beloved son.”
As a member of VROC, Nguyen said she sees how its LGBT members are “happy and successful.”
She wants them all, including her son, to be received with respect.
• • •
Within Vietnamese American culture in Little Saigon, views on homosexuality are mixed.
Gay Vietnamese Americans talk about how difficult it is to come out to their families and how homosexuality was seen, until recently, as a disease.
But academics in the field said longstanding traditional Vietnamese views did not outright discriminate against homosexual, bisexual or transgender people.
“For the most part, the homophobia is from Christian tradition,” said Gina Masequesmay, chair of the Asian American Studies department at Cal State Northridge. “The history of Vietnam has been more accepting.”
What traditionally has been more important in Vietnam is the fulfillment of expected gender roles.
“As long as you play your role – good husband, father, provider – you can do your side thing,” Masequesmay said.
“Same-sex couples can’t have children, so that’s seen as not normal. The heterosexism – the assumption that everyone is straight and straight is normal – that has to do more with gender roles. It goes back to Confucianism. We have these rules and when you don’t play by them … then you are going against nature rules, yin and yang,” Masequesmay said.
Vietnamese history has included a prolific and respected gay author, an emperor who was widely reported to be a homosexual and cross-dresser and spiritual shamans who cross-dress as women during rituals, said Natalie Newton, a UC Irvine junior fellow in the Department of Anthropology.
“What is happening is, we set up this dichotomy where being gay is inauthentic Vietnamese, and that’s not true. Our homosexual and transgender history (started) long before our history of homophobia,” said Newton, who created an online Viet LGBT History Campaign website during this year’s Tet Parade controversy.
Meanwhile, in Vietnam, officials on Nov. 12 amended laws to allow gay and lesbian couples to hold relationship ceremonies by removing a ban on same-sex marriages, though they stopped short of sanctioning the marriages and the unions won’t be legally recognized.
• • •
In Orange County, the VROC group is busy organizing social events and working to put out a series of public service announcements featuring Vietnamese American LGBT members who are successful in their fields.
With the help of a $1,000 grant, the group also hired a videographer to prepare short clips featuring parents and their gay children.
Some of the group’s members were active in January, when they first learned they would be excluded from the annual Little Saigon Tet Parade. For three years, starting in 2010, they participated. But this year, the city could not pay for the event so a private coalition, headed by the Vietnamese American Federation of Southern California, stepped in to organize it.
During a two-week flurry of activity early this year, a LGBT coalition garnered the support of more than two dozen local and national organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Garden Grove Unified School district and the Vietnamese American Chamber of Commerce of Orange County. They filed an injunction in court and lost. But its members felt they had won in the court of public opinion and hailed it as a victory.
This time around, the group again is considering legal action and members are busy contacting parade sponsors and others to advise them that the same Federation group recently voted to bar them from participating.
Both sides are expected to square off before the Westminster City Council on Wednesday, when Federation representatives will ask the city for an event permit.
Viet Rainbow of Orange County already has the backing of the Democratic Party of Orange County, which on Nov. 18 issued a resolution asking public officials and candidates to not participate or support next year’s parade “until a policy of full inclusion is adopted.” It also has the support of GLAAD, which offered to advise and promote VROC, billed as the first Vietnamese LGBT advocacy, education and support group in Orange County.
Hieu Nguyen, the LGBT social worker, is one of VROC’s co-chairs.
The fight for inclusion in next year’s parade, he told a group of members at a recent strategy meeting, “will come from the parents.” The message, he said: “You may not speak of our children that way.”
A couple of days later, in his own home, which he shares with a partner and two dogs, Nguyen brought together three of his sisters and his parents to talk about his coming-out experience.
They all spoke of their support for him. And they spoke about the importance of family in the Vietnamese community; not just the immediate family, but the extended one.
After several years of pulling away from his folks to become independent, Nguyen said he needed to be close to them again. So he bought a house across the street from his parents.
His mother invites him and his partner to dinner daily. “It doesn’t mean we eat there every day,” he joked.
“She can see my house through her kitchen window,” Nguyen said.
“For the first six months, when she didn’t see my car in the driveway, she would call me. So I had to set some boundaries and say, ‘Mom, you can’t do that’” he said.
Nguyen did not believe his mother previously had ever spoken publicly about his role in the LGBT community, or about gay rights.
“Now that we’re here in America, everybody has the right to fight for their freedom and be treated equally,” she said.
Her children reacted with surprise and big smiles. Said Nguyen: “All right, Mom!”
Contact the writer: 714-796-7829 or rkopetman@ocregister.com
