By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

At this time of year we are deep into planning our Annual Presentation Banquet. This year’s Banquet will be on June 15 in the ballroom of the Whitcomb Hotel in San Francisco. It is our ninth Banquet and we are amazed, has it really been that long? Other LGBT events have a longer history, but our Banquet depends on API LGBTs who publicly want to honor their parents and family who stuck by them. Without them, there would be no Banquet. Since our first Banquet, our community has made such phenomenal progress that when we started planning for this ninth one, we wondered if it is still a rare occurrence for API parents and family to stick by their LGBT children. Read the rest of this entry »

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

This Sunday is Mother’s Day. As far as traditional holidays go, this one is not that old. Anna Jarvis is credited with starting Mother’s Day as we now know it in 1908. A few years later she regretted having started the tradition because its commercialization was so blatant that to her profit seekers had obliterated the intent of Mother’s Day. Anna Jarvis had lost control of the celebration and spent her later years trying to abolish the holiday she created. Read the rest of this entry »

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

Belinda’s mother recently passed away. She was 91 years old and ailing so her death was not unexpected. Still, there was grief, sharing memories, and solemn eulogies. Her large family and many friends came to the service, the burial, and the 40-days celebration. At all three gatherings people came forward to share stories how this matron from the Philippines touched their lives. People remembered her dispensing advice during difficulties early in a marriage, helping out with their young children, cooking for fiestas, and just being there when she was needed. For one she was a second mother, another called her Ate. Read the rest of this entry »

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

Roll back the years to, oh, say 1970, and imagine what it was like. You are Asian, where do you go? Back in those days, there was overt racial prejudice, usually unpunished. Taunts, gestures that tug eyes into a mock epicanthic fold, cruel ostracizing, and even physical violence.

What if you are Asian and LGBT? Read the rest of this entry »

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

Here is an exercise you should do. Pick something you are doing right now, something important, and describe it with one sentence, as short as possible. Could you do it? You’ll leave a lot of things out, things you think are so important that they shouldn’t be left out, but what this exercise forces you to do is to consider the essence of what you are doing. Read the rest of this entry »

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

We are making a film. Actually, we are updating an existing film, but the plans for the update are sufficiently different from the original that it might as well be a new film. We are talking here about API Family Pride’s Coming Out, Coming Home. The cost of making films astounds us, roughly $1000 per minute, so we will have to do some serious fundraising. Fundraising means convincing people that what you do is necessary and worthwhile so that they gladly contribute. This blog is not about fundraising, but in preparing to persuade people to donate, we went back to the history of our film. We discovered something interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

Maxwell Ng wrote this blog. His reference to City Hall below is to Boston’s City Hall.

Max wrote a previous blog for us (November 9, 2012). We introduced him to you then, but just in case you missed it, we enjoy introducing him again.

Maxwell Ng is an American Asian transman who has lived in Boston for almost 15 years. He is the Vice-Chair of the Massachusetts Trans Political Coalition (MTPC), a founding member of the Trailblazers, the Boston based softball team for trans and gender variant people, and serves on the Steering Committee for QAPA (Queer Asian Pacific-Islander Alliance). He is passionate about visibility for Queer Asians, and strives to bring the issues that impact our enriched communities to the forefront. In his professional life, he works as an architect.

——————–

A few weeks ago John and Belinda poised the question, How Do We Make The Transgender Community Part Of Our Conversation? Read the rest of this entry »

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

This Sunday, in a formal ceremony, API Family Pride will be awarded a grant to help pay for a film project. The grant is awarded by the Red Envelope Giving Circle. We are grateful for the grant and proud that they believe in what we are doing enough to trust us with their gift. But we wondered what is a “giving circle?” We began looking things up and the story that emerged makes us proud to be part of the LGBT API community. Read the rest of this entry »

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

Let’s built an LGBT monument in San Francisco. It would honor the contributions to American life made by LGBTs and all that was done by LGBTs and their allies to force America on its promise: liberty and justice for all, and, yes, equality. It would memorialize those who suffered a lifetime of harassment, those who were unjustly persecuted, and, sadly, those for whom the strain and despair became too much to bear.

Why not a monument? Barcelona has one, so does Amsterdam, so do a number of other cities. Read the rest of this entry »

Our first blog of the new year is about ‘language.’ We want to begin a periodic conversation about the way the meaning of words describing or relating to the LGBT community has changed and is changing still. We hypothesize that progress of the community’s struggle for total acceptance may be measured by the change in words used when people talk and papers print stories about LGBT people. In her admirable study Intolerance: A General Survey, Lise Noel states that language reflects the hierarchical relationships of a society, and those who dominate use language as one of the ways to keep invisible those being dominated. It wouldn’t be too far fetched to postulate that as a hierarchy changes, the language that reflects that hierarchy changes as well. Read the rest of this entry »