#VietPride2019
The 2019 LGBTQ Pride parade in Ho Chi Minh City (VietPride Saigon) began in six locations. People traveled together via bicycle, motorbike, and on foot. Students took buses from far-away colleges. One parade contingent marched by Notre Dame Cathedral Saigon, and a group of Catholics came out to greet them and bless them. Contingents from a handful of companies marched out from Aeon shopping mall, including a huge group wearing t-shirts for the popular gay dating app Blued.
By 4pm, over 2,000 people converged on Nguyen Hue Walking Street, Saigon’s recently built public plaza by the waterfront. They unfurled a giant 30 meter by 20 meter rainbow flag, which has been present at every VietPride Saigon since it began in 2012. Hundreds of the marchers gathered and danced underneath the flag, carrying it back and forth across the length of the plaza.
There were no parade floats, vendors, pride marshals, or performers at Nguyen Hue Walking Street, in fact at that point it was more of a gathering than a parade. Yet VietPride Saigon 2019 was nevertheless an exuberant affair. It was simply about the sheer joy of LGBTQ people coming together en masse, out and in public. For many Vietnamese, this was the only time each year — or even the first time in their life — that they could openly celebrate their identity, surrounded by other people like them.
The Meaning of Pride in Vietnam
I must admit though that at first, I was a bit confused and underwhelmed when I arrived at Nguyen Hue Walking Street. I thought, is this it, just a big public gathering, and where’s the parade? But then as I reflected, I gradually realized my privilege as a longtime resident of a liberal US City —Washington, DC — blinded me to how radical this gathering was.
Almost all my LGBTQ friends in the US are out to their families, their friends, their places of higher education, and in their workplaces. But that is not true for many of the Vietnamese people who attended VietPride Saigon. And while 2,000 people in a city of 9 million doesn’t feel like a huge number (by comparison, Washington, DC’s Capital Pride brought out 400,000 people), VietPride perhaps needs to be measured not in terms of numbers, but on the impact it had on the collective imagination of the LGBTQ community. Even for those who stayed at home and followed it via the livestream, Facebook, or other social media, VietPride helped people envision a future where all LGBTQ Vietnamese can be out and proud in every aspect of their lives.
But to truly understand the importance of VietPride, we must first understand what being “proud” means to many Vietnamese people. The Thursday after Pride I attended an “LGBT Tea Talk” discussion group with 11 Vietnamese LGBTQ people where participants discussed their experiences with VietPride and why it was important to them. One participant, when asked what made him feel “proud,” answered quite differently than we might expect in the US. As he stated:
“I am proud when I am a good person to my parents and take care of them. I want to be a better person for society, to improve myself, be kind to other people, and always try to be successful.”
This was a bit of a shock coming from the US, where pride is typically measured on an individual basis. Pride there is about embracing one’s identity despite what society may think, to love who you want despite what your parents may think, and to measure your life not based on money or career success, but on a sense of self-actualization pursuing your individual passion.
This definition of pride illustrates why many Vietnamese LGBTQ people feel that being out may be a negative thing if it disrupts the social fabric of family and society. That does not mean that LGBTQ people don’t hope for a society that fully embraces them, but the US/Western strategy of coming out in order to advance LGBTQ rights, and/or confrontational tactics (i.e. direct action), are not seen here as the most desirable or effective strategies. One odd result of this is that the official date of the Saigon #VietPride was not released less than 2 weeks before the event, after Vietnam celebrated National Day on September 2. An organizer with VietPride explained to me that promoting VietPride before National Day was over might be seen as disrespectful to the holiday and the nation as a whole. Regarding the choice to be out as LGBTQ, one participant at the Tea Talk shared this:
I don’t tell anybody [I am gay] at the workplace or my hometown. I live as two different people. I keep to myself, but I don’t feel it’s a “secret,” because it’s not their business. I only tell people when I’m ready and I feel other people should respect that, not expect LGBTQ people to tell.
Also, there seems to be a reluctance to attempt to educate and challenge the beliefs of others who may be anti-LGBTQ. When asked what they would do if someone they knew didn’t accept their identity, a participant stated: “If they are a friend, I would reject that person. If they are a stranger, I would just ignore them.” As this opinion was voiced, there seemed to be widespread agreement in the room, with one person who stated “yes, that is the best strategy” while others nodded their heads.
Saving Face and Honoring Family
This ambivalence around publicly asserting one’s LGBTQ identity is tied to the Vietnamese concept of “saving face”, i.e. not being seen as disruptive to social unity. Even if a person may have valid reasons to stand up for themselves, confronting someone may cause them to be deemed to “lose face” and be seen as in the wrong regardless of the validity of their arguments. Not only does “losing face” affect an individual, it is also seen as bringing shame on their family. In a culture where “pride” is tied to honoring your family, it’s no surprise that there’s a hesitance to openly challenge anti-LGBTQ bigotry.
The importance of honoring one’s family and ancestors cannot be underestimated, especially for the older generation. Indeed, almost all the participants at Pride seemed to be in their 20s or younger, with anyone above age 40 an incredibly rare sight. I asked at the “LGBT Tea Talk” why this was. One participant shared a story of their uncle who recently came out as gay in his 50s. He waited until he had married a woman and raised kids, in order to show he was responsible and a “good son” by maintaining the family tree.
Another participant shared that “the older generation were raised in a very old-fashioned conservative environment, and even if they are out, they look at pride in a different way. For them, the important thing is to live a happy life for someone they love. They don’t want to take a risk…[they’re] not willing to fight for their rights and what they believe, and instead feel happy with what they have; [they] don’t feel they need to fight for something.”
It’s unclear how much of an influence religions have on LGBTQ acceptance, as most Vietnamese people follow a mixture of folk religions and/or Buddhism, with a small percentage of Catholics and Protestants. However, much of the homophobia/biphobia/transphobia in the country is no doubt a result of French/Catholic colonial influence, even if many lay Catholics today, such as Notre Dame Cathedral of Saigon’s congregation, are more accepting of LGBTQ people.
Growing LGBTQ Visibility in Vietnam
Despite all the barriers to LGBTQ visibility in Vietnam, there are still positive signs for change. As one participant at the LGBT Tea Talk explained, the younger generation is more attuned to and educated about human rights and LGBTQ history. Others pointed to the role of social media for inspiring LGBTQ people to feel that being free to be themselves IS a human right worth fighting for.
There has also been an increase in positive media coverage of LGBTQ people in Vietnam. Coverage of VietPride 2019 appeared in both English-language media including the Saigoneer and Vietnamese-language media including Tuổi Trẻ. Also, news of Taiwan legalizing same-sex marriages in May was met with a lot of positivity in the local media, and left many Vietnamese LGBTQ people hopeful. Lots of people tuned into the parade via Facebook and Instagram. The LGBTI organization ICS Center has been one of the main organizers of the parade for years, and they provided extensive coverage of the event.
Recently MCV Media, a major news corporation based in Saigon, began airing bilingual webisodes of a new show called “Come Out: Step Into the Light” sharing stories of local Vietnamese and expat LGBTQ people. I was one of the people MCV Media interviewed, and I was able to share my perspective as a transgender writer on the struggles of transgender people around the world, including in Vietnam.
The reaction to pro-LGBTQ media coverage by everyday Vietnamese people has been mixed though. The ICS Center has seen a significant increase in hateful comments on their Facebook page in 2019, many comments similar to alt-right anti-LGBTQ hate speech in America. Comments to Tuổi Trẻ’s articles and videos for VietPride were overwhelmingly negative. I spoke to a gay Vietnamese man who’d lived both in Vietnam and California, and he felt intense despair over the comments he’d read. One comment he translated for me read “I can accept LGBTQ people, but they shouldn’t flaunt who they are,” again pointing to the idea that being seen as disrupting the social fabric is strongly looked down on.
Serving Face: Building Community Through Drag and Dance
An incredibly important way the Vietnamese LGBTQ community has grown in visibility is through performance. Saigon boasts numerous regular drag shows, in addition to Lô Tô shows, which are a uniquely Vietnamese blend of Bingo night with drag, cabaret, and comedy.
Jessica Cà is a well-known transgender leader in Saigon who helped create a supportive community for Vietnamese transgender women and drag queens through a drag troupe known as JSBand, which operates out of a venue and community center she started known as Cà Boutique. Even when Jessica isn’t performing drag, she can regularly be seen at drag nights and Lo To shows supporting the community she helped build. Jessica worked with FTM Vietnam in organizing the VietPride Trans Party, and JSBand performed there.
Genderfunk is a newer drag and performance group in Saigon whose leadership consists of both Vietnamese people and expats. Genderfunk espouses an inclusive philosophy where anyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, can do drag. Genderfunk members regularly runs drag and dance workshops.
Before Pride, they invited Amazon Sun, a professional dancer from Bangkok, to run three voguing workshops, including “All Style” and “Vogue Femme.” Both taught ways you can learn to pose and dance properly to show off your stuff — including how to walk on a runway and how to “serve face” (think posing for a magazine cover photo).
Genderfunk also held their own “Viet Pride Ball” celebration runway and drag show (I competed in the runway part), and hosted a Viet Pride late night after-party as well.
Ngô Thái Tử (Prinz Illusion) is one of Genderfunk’s leaders and star performers, and they’ve been making headlines recently with interviews in both Vietcetera and the South China Morning Post. In both, they spoke about the importance of drag for LGBTQ self-expression in Vietnam. Prinz Illusion is a transgender man who performs as a drag queen, and by sharing their story they have helped to bring positive visibility to transgender people in addition to highlighting their struggles in the face of a society that has a lot of rules and boundaries around gender roles. To Prinz, who is also a professional dancer, drag is an art form that unlike the dance industry and society in general, does not expect you to be a masculine man or feminine woman. As he stated in the second interview, “I would love to have more Vietnamese people to know [drag] and I hope my voice could bring the community together.”
LGBTQ Rights Advocacy in Vietnam
Legal progress for LGBTQ rights in Vietnam seems to come in fits and starts, not what in the USA we often saw as the steady march to progress especially around same-sex marriage (although this “progress” often left many communities behind, including transgender people). The two most significant recent advances for LGBTQ rights both happened over four years ago.
In 2014, when the Vietnamese government removed a ban on same-sex marriage ceremonies, although notably these marriage ceremonies would continue to be unrecognized by the law. On 22 January 2019, during a review by the United Nations Human Rights Committee, Iceland, the Netherlands and Canada recommended that Vietnam legalize same-sex marriage. In July the Vietnamese Government rejected the recommendations.
Without same-sex marriage, it is impossible for many LGBTQ people to have their relationships recognized by the state, making it harder for them to adopt and/or raise a family. As raising children is seen as a sign of success and an important way to honor your family’s legacy, this contributes to additional stigma and shame towards same-sex relationships. One participant at the LGBT Tea Talk stated that they believed that same-sex relationships were “easily broken” because of societal pressure and the lack of marriage or children to “tie them together” when things became difficult.
2015 was a major year for transgender rights. As I explored in my blog post about FTM Vietnam, after extensive advocacy by the transgender community, the Vietnamese civil code was amended in 2015 to provide a path for transgender people to change their gender markers on legal documents, and to provide new guidelines for transgender health providers. However, this amendment to the civil code has yet to be implemented.
Transgender people face extensive discrimination in all aspects of life. Without the ability to change their documents, they are constantly “outed” to employers, face difficulty with legal issues, and things like opening a bank account. In a society that values career success, this can be damning.
The Past and Future of VietPride
VietPride itself is now eight years old, and many LGBTQ Vietnamese whom I’ve spoken to feel it has indeed helped change many hearts and minds across the country—in addition to Saigon, it’s also celebrated in Hanoi and thirty other cities/provinces. The first pride in Saigon had about 500 people, this year had a modest turnout of about 2,000. 2015 remains the largest year on record, with over 4,000 coming out, largely in thanks to celebrity performers and the ability to host a massive concert and dance party.
One gay Vietnamese man I spoke to at a gay club who grew up in Saigon felt that in order to be himself, he had to move to Australia in 2009. But now, on a visit to his hometown ten years later with his Australian partner, he feels society is far more open towards him and his relationship.
2019 was also the first year that VietPride included specific events for the transgender community, which were organized through a joint effort between transgender women including Jessica Ca and transgender lesbian advocate Vit Vit Con, and transgender men including Ân, the founder of FTM Vietnam. This same group of leaders is now working towards a future transgender pride as its own event, possibly in 2020. These all point to positive signs for change for the transgender community, which is perhaps more united now than it has been since the fight to change the civil code in 2015.
Finally, in a culture that values family, PFLAG Vietnam (an organization for parents, families, and allies of LGBTQ people) has been an important force for change here.
At the LGBT Tea talk after pride, participants discussed a recent event where a mom from PFLAG spoke about accepting their gay son. This was met with incredulity, even some awkward laughter, as many of the people in the room had no experience with seeing openly supportive, pro-LGBTQ families. It’s perhaps why one of the most inspiring parts of VietPride was spotting families present with their children. A more accepting future for LGBTQ people in Vietnam seems within reach, and VietPride is helping make that happen.
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