By Alice Lee '10
Arts Editor
Pauline Park, co-founder of the first statewide transgender advocacy group in New York, can share a bathroom story that upturns the quotidian stall-and-hand dryer experience.
Transgender and queer rights activist Pauline Park. (Courtesy of Pauline Park)
A few years back, she left the women's restroom at the Manhattan Mall only to be accosted by five security guards. They encircled her and demanded to see proper identification, to which Park replied that she identified as a woman. She followed the incident with a complaint that would mobilize a new amendment to the New York City Human Rights Law, which protects a person's right to a gender identity even if it differs from his or her given sex.
Park, who presented a Transgender 101 workshop last Tuesday in the Harambee House, has an extensive history of such Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) advocacy to her credit, most of which make her one of a kind in the realm of queer activism.
"I'm the only openly transgendered Asian American in the country who has founded a transgender specific organization," Park said. She attributes her novelty to the majority of LGBT, Asian and Pacific Islanders (APIs) who have "heavily bifurcated lives"; while many are out within white-dominant queer circles, they remain closeted within their communities of ethnic origin, often due to the code of silence that continues to stymie public discussion of sexuality amongst Asian Americans.
According to Park, the binary existence of many queer and transgender Asian Americans is understandable.
With the cultural values surrounding the strict assignment of gender roles and the common fundamentalist attitudes of first-generation parents, many find the coming out experience less than affirming. Queer and transgender activism, as a result, often suffers within communities of color. "It's very difficult, if not impossible, to be openly LGBT if you don't come out to your family. You have the fear that at some point, someone in the community might find out and tell your parents," Park said.
New grassroots efforts have begun to increase awareness amongst first-generation Asian Americans, one being the New York-based Dari Project, likewise founded with help from Park.
"The Dari Project is designed to develop materials for people of Korean descent so that they can understand LGBT issues. There are some good organizations like PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) but their material for the most part is for a white, middle-class American audience," Park explained. "So even if their reading English is good, the parents are going to have a hard time relating to it culturally. The Dari project is really the first of its kind."
In the workshop, Park likewise addressed the numerous misconceptions held by families of Asian American descent, especially concerning the origins of queer and transgender circles.
"Most contemporary Asians tend to buy into the idea that LGBT ideas are an epiphenomenon of the late 20thcentury urban American society," she said. "They assume that if you come out as LGBT, you've been hanging out with white people too much. But the truth is there is documentation of pre-modern Asian traditions that anticipate contemporary LGBT identities."
Queer origins in Asia, in fact, can be charted back to the seventh century, in which an elite cadre of Korean archers known as the hwarang dressed in women's gowns and wore makeup. Documentation of a pre-modern theatrical troupe from Korea known as the namsadang also suggests a long-entrenched history of gender-blurring in human behavior. There is evidence that the women's roles were played by teenage boys, who were usually the lovers of the adult actors.
"As I like to say, it's not just we're here and we're queer, get used to it, but we have been queer and we have been here for over two thousand years—you just forgot. Therefore, as LGBT queer APIs, it's important to reinsert ourselves into the governing narratives of our cultures of origin," Park said.
But for Park, returning to her roots has proved more difficult than looking to her childhood or place of birth. She and her twin brother were born in Korea and then adopted eight months later by her Norwegian American father and German American mother. Park and her brother grew up in Milwaukee, which—she writes in her nonfiction essay, "Homeward Bound"—"was a white working-class city of beer and bratwurst with the feel of a small town, despite its 1.5 million people."
It was when she left America to study abroad in London in 1981 that she began to dress publicly as a woman. She returned to the States two years later and finally settled in New York where she continues to devote herself to transgender and LGBT specific legislative work.
Park has held transgender awareness workshops on other college and university campuses such as Swarthmore, Oberlin, and Smith, where she was the first transgender keynote speaker for the college's Asian American Awareness Month.
"Administrations do not do nearly enough to fund LGBT related curriculum or student services," Park said. She pointed to Wellesley's lack of a multicultural space and full-time LBGT student coordinator as a problem in need of immediate address.
"I think it should be an obligation for colleges and universities that pay lip-service to diversity and that are supposed to be so progressive, so inclusive, to be more concerned with creating a self-affirming environment on campus for LGBT and other minority students," she said. "After all, when the colleges enhance the experience for these students, they actually generate more good will from those students as alumnae."