An interview with Jae Kim, curator of the exhibit Of Kin and Other Impossible Homes at The ArQuives
Elizabeth Riddolls, Staff Writer
Photo source: Elizabeth Riddolls
A COUPLE months ago, I stood on the stoop of an unassuming house in the heart of Toronto’s gay village. It was rather charming, with its tan brick and arched windows, and the only indication that it contained anything out of the ordinary was a small pride flag hung in a window. Summoned by a student newsletter, I’d dragged a friend along with me, unaware that the exhibit I’d been so eager to see was a drop in the bucket in comparison to the building’s greater project.
We stood in front of a home that held one of the largest LGBTQ+ archival collections in the world. The ArQuives, first established as the Canadian Gay Liberation Movement Archives in 1973, grew out of The Body Politic newspaper collection stored in the basement of Jearld Moldenhauer. Moldenhauer was a founding member of The Body Politic collective, formed in Toronto in 1971, and offered his home as office space and storage in its early years. The Body Politic, published monthly by the collective, documented queer culture, history and activism alongside instances of homophobic discrimination.
In an important turning point for the collective, The Body Politic published an article detailing the early expansion of the homosexual emancipation movement in Germany, and its subsequent collapse under the Nazi regime. Chilled by how quickly fascism had extinguished all records of early gay liberation in Germany, the collective began to fear that their work could be similarly erased. This sense of urgency led to a proposal to develop an archive of Canadian gay liberation work, which eventually became The ArQuives.
The ArQuives evolved over the years, and acquired its permanent home on Isabella Street in 2009. This summer, it hosted the exhibit Of Kin and Other Impossible Homes, curated by Jae Kim and The ArQuives’ curatorial committee, which explored the diverse experiences of queer and trans people across the Asian diaspora in Canada.
I had the chance to chat with Kim over email about his work and what it meant to him to curate an exhibit that centered both trans and Asian identities. The exhibit, they said, stemmed from a desire to create representation they lacked as a young queer and trans Korean, hoping that the exhibit would help youth that were in his position feel less alone.
The room was arranged fluidly, moving through generations, across Asia and across the spectrum of queerness. The interpretations were numerous—first, queer history has always been preserved with the care of community members and often in unconventional forms, whether that be through pins, flyers, or zines. Second, networks of queer Asian kinship are complex and often defy normative models of biological kinship. Most importantly, no matter the complexity of your connection to your Asian and queer identities, there was a place for you in this room.
The importance of kinship, especially alternative forms of kinship among Asian queer and trans communities, formed the crux of the exhibit. Kinship, in the biological and normative sense, has always been a site of displacement for queer and trans people of colour, Kim explained.
“We’re often told that coming out leads to either total rejection or full acceptance, but this black-and-white perspective erases the nuance of navigating cultural expectations, secrecy, shame, and survival. We have no choice but to disrupt and remake ideas of kinship for ourselves.”
Kim highlighted how important it was to them to push back against the narrative of fragmented, “undesirable” kinship, instead showing “the value of alternative modes of care that create(d), sustain(ed), and support(ed) trans Asians in the diaspora.”
Asian Canadian history has always been queer, he explained. Through the mid-1800s, Asian migrants, mostly men, were recruited to work in mining, railroads, and other forms of extractive labour. The Canadian government valued the labour they performed while simultaneously isolating them from their families and denying them civil rights. Kinship for early Asian migrants, therefore, was built upon intergenerational and homosocial networks of support, relying on chosen family, mutual aid, and informal relations of care.
As I entered the exhibit, I noticed a small table carrying colourful bookmarks that read:
IF YOU ARE GAY/LESBIAN/TRANS AND ASIAN
YOU ARE NOT ALONE!
They were inspired by an early flyer put out by Gay Asians Toronto in the 1980s, one of Canada’s first queer Asian organizations. The display encouraged visitors to grab one, in the same way that flyers would have been passed between hands forty years ago.
Photo source: Elizabeth Riddolls
Networks of support between early Asian migrants formed the framework for the community-building work done by Gay Asians Toronto forty years ago, who influenced the work being done by queer Asians today. Queer Asian-Canadian communities, said Kim, rest upon this “ancestral legacy of reimagining belonging under constraint.”
I moved to the corner, where a small bookcase blossoming with flowers held titles from QuALiTY: Queer Asian Library. Beside the bookcase, works from the organization Queer Asian Youth were featured, including zines, poetry, and other art pieces.
Photo source: Elizabeth Riddolls
There was something comforting to it, as I flipped through the binder packed with comics, poems, and zines. It felt like my friends and I, who existed in varying shades of Asian-ness and queerness, had our experiences packed into this book. Whether it be grappling with parental expectations around marrying a predetermined man, fighting to cut their hair short, or hiding name changes from family, I saw the people I loved dearly in those pages.
“Youth have always been at the forefront of preserving and creating queer culture,” said Kim. The Queer Asian Library was a perfect example—built from donated art, zines, and resources from the community, the youth-led project was rooted in grassroots care, not institutional funding.
Queer history has often been documented through unconventional means, which has sharply distinguished queer community archives from traditional archives. Many traditional archives, said Kim, operate through extraction: taking materials, classifying them, and holding them at a distance. Instead, he approached the curation process as a collaborator, not a collector, prioritizing flexibility, consent and trust with the participants featured in the exhibit.
“Curation wasn’t about me assembling a narrative,” they said, “it was about holding space for people to tell their own.”
Two participants, Cece Chow and Tien Neo Eamas, contributed short videos towards the exhibit. Chow spoke in front of a crowd on Transgender Day of Visibility, observing that trans people, especially trans women, did not need more visibility—they were already hypervisible. Targeted by lawmakers and harassed on the street and on the Internet, trans women did not owe anyone more visibility.
Instead, she called for greater ally visibility: allies have the privilege to step back, while trans people cannot. In schools, in the workplace, in the streets and in your everyday life, she called on allies to question anti-trans conversations, defend trans people from verbal and physical assault, and actively create supportive environments.
The screen faded to black, and a man with a wide grin came up: this was Tien Neo Eamas. He lamented the fact that trans suffering was spotlighted, over and over, noting that Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honoured the dead and murdered, had no counterpart celebrating trans joy. In 2007, he founded the first public celebration of trans joy in the world, which evolved into Gender Euphoria Day in 2009 and paved the way for Transgender Day of Visibility.
Photo source: Elizabeth Riddolls
Organizing, protesting, and resisting were important—he never doubted that—but celebrating trans joy was also of the utmost importance. As the first Asian trans man to come out on the gay/lesbian scene in Vancouver in 2001, Eamas knew intimately what it was like to feel alone, especially in queer spaces that felt overwhelmingly white.
Finding joy, through friends and through celebration, led him to his current calling as a wizard and spiritual teacher. Still, existing as both Asian and trans was difficult for him and Chow. Chow recounted a first date during the COVID-19 pandemic, fearful as a newly out trans woman. That afternoon, she met another Chinese trans person for the first time.
Visibility was important, she knew, for Asian youth to see the possibilities in their lives and for Asian elders to potentially experience late-in-life gender euphoria.
Photo source: Elizabeth Riddolls
While queer Asian youth make up a significant portion of my day-to-day interactions, I had never met a queer Asian person over thirty. Hearing Eamas, with a laugh eerily similar to my grandfather’s, talk openly about being queer and trans made me emotional. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but I hadn’t known Asian people could be queer, despite all evidence to the contrary. I briefly fantasized about what it would be like to go to a family gathering and have someone like him sitting across the table who would understand, rather than pretending I hadn’t just snuck away to spend the day with my girlfriend before being corralled into a family dinner.
Curious, I asked Kim how he, personally, reconciled his Asian identity with his queer identity. His answer surprised me.
“I don’t know if I’ve ‘reconciled’ anything, honestly,” they said. “I feel like I’ve just stopped expecting resolution. Growing up, I felt like I was constantly failing at being Korean and Canadian. Add queerness and transness, and I really didn’t know where I fit. But I’ve learned that belonging isn’t something you find, it’s something you build.”
“If you’re a queer and/or trans Asian person feeling like you don’t belong anywhere, that feeling is real, and it makes sense. A lot of us grew up feeling like we had to split ourselves: be the ‘good kid’ at home and someone completely different elsewhere, or choose between being seen as queer or being seen as Asian.”
Finding spaces and people that make you feel a little more like yourself, he said, was a good starting point.
“Just don’t give up on the idea that belonging is possible, even if you have to build it yourself,” he said.
What I hope to impart is simple, especially for queer and trans Asian youth that may feel isolated in both queer and Asian spaces: you are not alone. You will find your space and you will find your people—once you do, embrace that joy and hold them tight.
Thank you to Jae Kim for giving me insight into the intricacies of curating this exhibit and for his hard work making it come to life alongside The ArQuives’ curatorial committee.
Learn more about The ArQuives at arquives.ca, and check out the Queer Asian Library on Instagram at @queerasianlibrary.
