Note:  This is essay is part 2 of a 2 part series — a direct response to the Supreme Court’s first hearing on California’s Proposition 8.  If you’d like to read the part 1, click here.

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As a writer, this is my first public and explicit expression of my identity as a gay Vietnamese American woman – a woman who, since the beginning of her sexual consciousness, has been hopelessly attracted to other women.  I have written candidly about other difficult issues, most notably about my parents and their tumultuous relationship with the Vietnam War.

As much as I have written about their experiences, I am an outsider to their war – a spectator who can craft a vicarious moment, but is capable of escaping to a memory free of combat violence and geographic exile.  Yet, being gay is my own refuge-less war with myself, with (at times) my community, and with political sentiment.  Perhaps this is why I find it easier to write about my identity from a distance:

The girl was born in southwest Houston, Texas, raised in a neighborhood of bodegas, Vietnamese supermarkets, and Indian restaurants.  She liked basketball, birthday parties, school and, slowly and despairingly, one of her friends – a girl.  In her longing, she spent many nights wondering why the stories in her head contrasted so greatly with what everyone had to say about the world.  She constantly contemplated ways to fix herself.

The girl lived a quiet childhood – a lot of sadness, a lot of imagination, a thematic and overwhelming sense of confusion and melancholy.  She passed the time by reading, writing, and imagining the lives other people.  In adolescence, she fabricated an identity to hide in:  feigned crushes, elaborate excuses, a façade of reserve to mask how scared she was of everything, especially herself.  She started to develop a detachment from physical places because she always wanted to be somewhere else.

She did this for more than a decade until she suffocated in the very identity she had methodically constructed.  One October weekend in her twenties, she took a bus to Brooklyn to see her sister.  On a patio, peeling the wrapper off a bottled local brew, she could no longer handle feeling stifled by her lies and began to cry.  For 20 minutes, she struggled to speak until quietly she stuttered, “I’m gay.”

She would say the same phrase in iteration.  Once to one of her best friends who drove her in circles while she pled, “I have something to tell you.  Please keep driving.  Please keep driving.”  Once in an anonymous letter of desperation to a philosophy professor.  Once to her father only, this time, she didn’t cry – he did.

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If there is anything that I can appreciate about the passage of time it is that, as I age, the number of years in which I can say I have lived truly, authentically, and vibrantly will outnumber all of those years spent in fear, confusion, sorrow, and silence.

Being gay has given me much – fervent values, staunch politics, writing, a deeper understanding of how complicated life and identity can be, an incredible appreciation for love and intimacy.  In being gay, I have asked my Vietnamese parents to deconstruct their culturally ingrained notions of relationships.  I have asked my partner to consider building a life with me despite perceptions that such a life and such a love is inferior, deviant, and, in many countries around the world, still considered a crime punishable by death.  I have asked my friends to reinterpret and re-conceptualize parts of their religion, their schooling and their preconceived ideas of gay people.  What I have found is the loyalty of a family and a community that consistently challenge my notions of them and reinforce how lucky I am to be alive in this time, in this land, during this fight.

I have often been asked, what more could I want?  I could have what other people have – there are tax, adoption, and medical loopholes.  What is this really about?  Formality?  Law?  The gay agenda?

If there were a gay agenda, this would be mine:  To not make my father feel like he did something wrong when he raised me.  To hug, kiss, and hold my partner’s hand in public without fear or hesitation.  To raise self-affirming daughters who consistently surprise me with their vivacity.  To have my children bask in an imagination of what they can do, not other people they would rather be.  To know that they are on joyrides with friends rather than circling a parking lot in tears, stalling an expression of their identity, fearing that they may lose a childhood friendship.  To write and say that I am gay, Vietnamese, and American in the same sentence without someone telling me that such an identity is contradictory.

I once thought that life would be easier had I not been queer.  But, now I cannot conceive of life, in its fullness, without this identity.  I am deeply proud to be a gay Vietnamese American woman.  And, regardless of what the law, the nine bodies of the Supreme Court, and the fundamentalist electorate may tell me, I would not trade my life for any other existence.

Note:  This is part 1 of a 2-part essay.  The conclusion of this personal essay was published the morning of the Supreme Court’s first hearing on California’s Proposition 8.  Click here to read it.

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For the past five months, I have tried three times to write something entitled, “I am a Gay American.”  In November, when the people of Maryland, Washington, and Maine voted to legalize same-sex marriage, I started with cautious inspiration:  “In one fifth of our union, same-sex marriage is no longer evocative.  It is realized.”  I struggled to continue.

I stopped writing for many reasons.  I have spent more than a decade processing my identity and quite a few years battling my own negative perceptions of homosexuality and, by extension, myself.  I have acquired so many strong feelings about my sexuality and its politics, yet with every attempt to write at a coffee shop, at my desk, or on a bench, my determination to say something – anything – has turned into frustration.  In all my attempts, I have been overwhelmed by my emotions.  I often feel incapable of translating queerness, in all its complexity, into a neat, singular narrative.  I could never “find” adequate words nor create a “thesis” for whatever argument I was supposedly writing about being gay.  And why?  Who would read this?  Does it matter?  If enough people know that I am gay, that must mean that I have done enough.

Months began to pass – Obama became the first sitting President to publically support gay marriage.  I felt a surge of encouragement.  In February, a Vietnamese American LGBTQ group was banned from marching in an annual Tet parade because “LGBT is against Vietnamese tradition.”  I was steeped in disappointment.  With the oscillation of emotions came another failed attempt to properly articulate the personal and political – to depict how difficult it is to live a life where my future is an election wedge issue, a sin worthy of evangelical sermon, an example of how the human race is abject, hopeless, and disgusting.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will begin to scrutinize California’s Proposition 8, which, in 2008, effectively defined marriage between a man and a woman.  On Wednesday, the Court will question the constitutionality of the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  The outcome of either ruling will deeply affect the way I live my life – it could determine whether I can see my partner in the hospital if she is ill (or if I have to break twenty hospital windows with my bare hands to get to her), it could affect whether my future child can legally call me “Mommy,” it could constitutionally define me as an inferior American.  How can I sit idly in the comfort of people simply “knowing” that I am gay?

I fear that I am losing time to write.   And so, I will try and begin once more:

I am a gay American.

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The teleology of the modern queer narrative is this:  You spend years being teased and/or quietly hurting yourself.  You finally, after years (sometimes decades) of suppression, mutter the words “I’m gay” to someone you deeply love and trust.  A proverbial weight is lifted off your even more proverbial shoulders.  It, somehow, gets better.  “Wait,” the narrative tells you.  “You’ll be the hero of your story.  Just wait.”

Yet, here is the narrative as I have witnessed and experienced:  In the story, love is not the telos – it is the beginning, the source of conflict, and the reason for war.  In any given year, you can feel like the hero, the villain, the damsel in distress, part of the ravished village.  You can slay one enemy, only to find 50 more people who call you “faggot,” or “dyke” or simply roll their eyes in revulsion.

It can feel never-ending:  You start a new job and must meticulously assess whether your colleagues can stomach the story of how you fell in love.  You want to have children, but now you must navigate all of the laws that either obfuscate or ban your ability to adopt children.  You want to travel and experience everything with your partner, but you must research whether the destination allows you to hold hands in public.  You meet the love of your life, but must wait for at least five out of nine Supreme Court Justices to approve of this union.