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CHAPTER 4 Eric C. Wat Gay Asian Men in Los Angeles Before the 1980s Gay bars were once the major site of community formation for gay men in metropolitan American cities. When most gay men had to keep a watchful eye in their own neighborhoods and workplaces, they could not very well form communities where they lived and worked. Bars, many of them lifeless and inconspicuous in broad daylight , became safe (or, at least, safer) havens for men who reserved expressions of their sexuality for the night. As the historian John D'Emilio has written about his experience as a young gay undergraduate at Columbia University in the mid-1960s, "Virtually all of the visual images of gay experience that I can conjure up from those days are shaded in darkness" (1992: xix). Yet even when homosexual or even homosocial behavior (such as men holding hands or dancing in public) was heavily persecuted and vice cops posed as potential tricks and laid traps like landmines in a brutal war, many patrons frequented these establishments with a mixture of caution and abandon. The darkness in D'Emilio's memories can be accounted for only partly "by nighttime hours looking for... sex? .. love? .. closeness? .. comfort?" (1992: xix). The cover of night was also a metaphorical shield-from an acquaintance or a co-worker who was prone to tattling, from an undercover cop who spoke sweeter words than a one-night stand, or from a gay-basher who had nothing to do on a Saturday night. The bars, then, were a contradictory space. It is hard to imagine that a community could be formed in spaces where telephone numbers could be as imaginary as the names people exchanged with one another. Granted, there were other sites of socialization for gay men, especially after Stonewall in 1969 and the AIDS epidemic in the mid-'80s. They included churches, organizations, publications, support groups, community centers, even restaurants and other informal networks of friends that developed Copyrighted Material 76 CHAPTER FOUR out of these spaces. Yet gay bars have remained a rite of passage for any man coming out in a city, and for most, a point of entry into the gay community. Not all gay bars are created equal, however. There are enough varieties to accommodate different "tastes" and "specialties." In this chapter, using information gathered from in-depth interviews, I will describe the role of various gay bars in both hindering and facilitating the formation of gay Asian men's community in Los Angeles. It will encompass the years leading to the founding of Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays (A/PLG) in 1980, the first formal gay Asian organization in Los Angeles. I retrieved the names of most of my first narrators from early A/PLG newsletters . Some of them were familiar to me because they had remained active in the queer Asian Pacific Islander community. From my first interviews I collected more contacts. Twenty interviews (not counting follow-ups) were conducted between October 1997 and March 1998. All of the narrators are Asians, except one, who is Caucasian. All lived in Los Angeles during the 1970s or early '80s. Most of them were members of A/PLG or the Gay Asian Rap Group, another gay Asian organization in Los Angeles that was founded in 1984. (It is not the Gay Asian Pacific Support Network, or GAPSN). Five of the nineteen Asian narrators are immigrants; at the time of the interviews, they ranged in age from their late thirties and to the early sixties. A general theme emerged from their experiences. Before the River Club, which in the mid-1970s became the first of the gay bars in Los Angeles to attract a significant Asian clientele, gay Asians were so scattered in the many gay establishments spread across Los Angeles that it was rare for most of the narrators to find and meet other gay Asians in a bar. Usually, a non-Asian friend would introduce them to the gay scene. Because Asians were not, as one narrator put it, a "commodity" at that time, many felt ignored or unwelcome in these establishments. Here lies the first contradiction : These bars were the few spaces that they could claim as gay men, yet they could not completely own them because of their racial difference. Their experiences in these spaces were sometimes discouraging, and in cases where Asians were refused entrance, even humiliating. The environment coerced many into dissociating their racial identity from their sexual identity...

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