Apex Express Logo
, ,

Diving Deep into #PulseOrlando – Guest speaker on APEX Express

Apex Express Logo

On June 23rd, Visibility Project Director, Mia Nakano was a guest host on APEX Express and moderated a discussion around how #PulseOrlando impacted the LGBTQ AAPI community, particularly with Queer Muslims.

Download or listen to the program here.

Tonight on APEX Express, we have guest host Mia Nakano with the Visibility Project, a national portrait and video collection dedicated to the Queer Asian American Women & Trans* community. She helps us delve into a discussion with our community about life after the Pulse Orlando tragedy.  We bring you perspectives from queer, radical Asian American, South Asian, and Muslim community members including Cayden Mak from 18 Million Rising, an AAPI political advocacy and awareness organization, Poonam Kapoor and Mohammed Shaik Hussain Ali from Trikone, a Bay Area based LGBTQ South Asian group, and writer and activist Canyon Sam.

MIA’S INTRO

On Sunday, June 12th, 49 people were killed during one of the largest mass shootings in US history. A hate crime where a single shooter targeted the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer community. A hate crime that took the lives of many young Puerto Rican men, black and brown folks, and people of color who were targeted at a Latinx night. This crime took place at Pulse, and much of the media is reporting Pulse as a nightclub. But Pulse was much more than that to the residents of central florida, it was a community center, it was a gathering space to spend time with other LGBTQ folks, it was a safe space whose safety was violently shattered in one of the most horrific and violating ways.

What happened at PulseOrlando is a tragedy, but to me, it wasn’t senseless. It’s a large scale manifestation that shows how the LGBTQ community consistently faces violence, oppression, and isolation. Every 29 hours a transgender person is either killed or commits suicide. When an LGBTQ person comes out to their close family or friends, if they experience rejection, they’re 7 times more likely to attempt suicide. I state these two facts, because even though we see many more LGBTQ people in the media, on television, and in movies, the violence enacted against our community is on the rise, and is disproportionately affecting people of color and specifically black and brown transgender people.

Community centers, like Pulse, places to dance and be free, and pride, are all supposed to be safe spaces for the LGBTQ community. What happened at PulseOrlando has shattered that in a very large way.

ABOUT APEX EXPRESS

APEX Express is a weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Asian Americans from all corners of our communities.  The show is produced by a collective of media makers, djs, and activists and airs each week on KPFA 94.1FM.

/by
,

Out and Successful, Mia Nakano

Mia has been attracting a lot of attention in the Queer API world with her incredible photos of folks who are Queer API for the Visibility Project. Asian, Gay and Proud is extremely excited to welcome her here to this space to get to know her better. Interview by Miyuki Baker

Read more
/by

November Southern tour 2014: Raleigh, Louisville, Memphis, Little Rock, Birmingham, Jackson, New Orleans

About the Visibility Project Southern tour

This November the Visibility Project is hitting the road and visiting seven cities in the South. The Visibility Project is a photo portrait series and video/oral history collection dedicated to the Queer Asian American Women and Trans* community. It’s inclusive to South Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islanders, East Asians, and mixed Asian Americans who identify as trans* or a queer woman. This intergenerational project embraces the intersections of being Queer and Asian. It’s a start to ensuring queer stories are represented in AAPI communities and that AAPIs are represented in LGBTQ communities. A dream is to interview 6 people in each city, help us make that happen!

Share your story

Be a part of one of the largest archives of the Q/TAAPI community. Contact (mia (at) visibilityproject (dot) org) if you’re interested in sharing your story and want more details OR sign up for the newsletter to get updated information on how to register for a shoot. Here’s info on what to expect during a shoot.

Have community housing?

Let us know if you have a spare room to host project director, Mia Nakano, for a couple of nights. She loves all fuzzy creatures!

Donate a shoot space!

Photo studios are the best place to do a photoshoot. So are conference rooms, community centers, or any space large enough for a couple of lights and a backdrop. It’s a photo and video project, so low noise is best.

Book a lecture, exhibition, or workshop

Project Director, Mia Nakano, is a photographer, filmmaker, and a founder & LGBTQ editor of Hyphen magazine. Her work has been published in numerous print and online media outlets from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center to the Leeway Foundation in Philadelphia. She is a frequent guest/artist lecturer at national conferences, universities, grassroots organizations, and galleries. Some topics her workshops/lectures cover are: photography, lighting, pre-production, gender & sexuality, community documentation, and more.

Sponsor the tour & Leaving Evidence

Sponsor the tour by donating a shoot space and putting a call out on social media and organizational networks. Community is the most successful through the cultivation of individual relationships and solidarity work. One goal of this tour is to help document stories from local communities and to “leave evidence” by providing video or photography services in each city. Connect with us if you want to sponsor the tour or have a great community organization whose story should be documented.

Southern Tour Dates

[table tablesorter=”1″ file=”https://www.visibilityproject.orgwp-content/uploads/2014/10/Visibility-Project-Midwest-Tour-Sheet2-1.csv”]

/by
,

Columbus, OH shoot, October 19th

The Visibility Project is a national community powered media arts project. We document stories and use photography to create impact and make the Queer AAPI Women and Trans* community visible.
VisibilityProject_Columbus5

Thanks so much for your interest in the Visibility Project. Stoked to work, engage, and build community. The VP will be in Columbus at Ohio State University’s Multicultural Center on October 19th!! Below are some FAQs about participating. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions.

Click to register and share your story.

 

ELIGIBILITY  This project is open to Queer Asian American Women, Gender non-conforming, and Trans people, and the definitions of this are broad: mixed-race asian, asian born/living in the US, south asian, southeast asian, pacific islanders, etc. If you are a gay/bi asian american cis male, or queer person of non Asian/Asian American descent, support by allyship, giving shout outs on social media, or whatever ways you’re excited about support.

 

WHAT TO EXPECT

The shoots take 1 hour and are a combination of photography and video. We’ll do the video first and I’ll leave time at the beginning to answer any questions. You’ll fill out a survey + model release prior to starting.

 

WHAT TO WEAR

Wear colors and no logos, unless you really wanna rep that logo. A lot of folks have historically worn black, white, or grey, I’m trying to spice up the colors. BUT! If black/white/grey is what floats your boat, go for it.

 

HOW WILL THE PHOTOS & VIDEOS BE USED

All content will be posted on the Visibility Project website, the VP social media outlets (twitter, tumblr, facebook, etc) and open to publication in a soon to be published photo-book. The Videos will ultimately be transcribed into english, so text is searchable online, and translated into an Asian language from participant backgrounds. Basically this means that these stories will have an international reach! The Videos will also be “locked down” so that no website outside of the VP or Hyphen magazine can embed or download them. We cannot guarantee the unlicensed distribution of the photos, just because the internets is hard to control.

 

HYPHEN MAGAZINE

The midwest & southern tours are a collaboration between the VP and Hyphen magazine. Nakano is a founder of Hyphen and the creator of Hyphen’s LGBTQ section. Your story may be shared on Hyphen’s website and social media, which has a huge national reach in the mainstream AAPI community.

 

DO I GET THE PHOTOS & VIDEOS

You will get low resolution images of 3 images from the shoot. You’ll receive the images in 6-8 weeks. You are free to use them for facebook + social media + bio pics + etc, credit must be given to Mia Nakano Photography & The Visibility Project.

The videos are very backlogged, by a three years. Just to be real about that. When they are finished, you’ll have 1 week to review the final video and request edits/content removal. They will be uploaded to a password protected space during that review time. You may also choose to not have your video published, and instead have your story shared anonymously through a full or partial written transcription.  

MODEL RELEASE

All participants must sign a “catch all” model release. However if you ever want to be removed from the project website, we are happy to accommodate that. Printed materials or final video productions already in distribution cannot be retracted.

 

CONFIRMATIONS & CANCELLATIONS

We work with registered participants on a first come first serve basis, if you find you can’t make your session let us know asap so other folks may participate!  Also register with an email address you check frequently, because more information will be sent to confirmed participants.

 

The Visibility Project is fiscally sponsored by Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality (AACRE). Funded by the Creative Work Fund, Red Envelope Giving Circle, generous individual donors, and community supporters!

/by
,

Chicago shoot dates: 10/11 & 10/12

The Visibility Project is a national community powered media arts project. 
We document stories and use photography to create impact and 
make the Queer AAPI Women and Trans* community visible.

Thanks so much for your interest in the Visibility Project. Stoked to work, engage, and build community. We are hosting two days of story gathering in Chicago! Saturday will be hosted at the Uptown offices of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago and Sunday will be hosted at the Lakeview home of an allied community member. Both are close to public transportation, have some street parking, and are wheelchair accessible. Below are some FAQs about participating. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions. 

Click to register and share your story.

Mia Nakano 
Director, Visibility Project 
mia@visibilityproject.org 

ELIGIBILITY 
This project is open to Queer Asian American Women, Gender non-conforming, and Trans people, and the definitions of this are broad: mixed-race asian, asian born/living in the US, south asian, southeast asian, pacific islanders, etc. If you are a gay/bi asian american cis male, or queer person of non Asian/Asian American descent, support by allyship, giving shout outs on social media, or whatever ways you’re excited about support. 

WHAT TO EXPECT

The shoots take 1 hour and are a combination of photography and video. We’ll do the video first and I’ll leave time at the beginning to answer any questions. You’ll fill out a survey + model release prior to starting.

WHAT TO WEAR

Wear colors and no logos, unless you really wanna rep that logo. A lot of folks have historically worn black, white, or grey, I’m trying to spice up the colors. BUT! If black/white/grey is what floats your boat, go for it.

HOW WILL THE PHOTOS & VIDEOS BE USED

All content will be posted on the Visibility Project website, the VP social media outlets (twitter, tumblr, facebook, etc) and open to publication in a soon to be published photo-book. The Videos will ultimately be transcribed into english, so text is searchable online, and translated into an Asian language from participant backgrounds. Basically this means that these stories will have an international reach! The Videos will also be “locked down” so that no website outside of the VP or Hyphen magazine can embed or download them. We cannot guarantee the unlicensed distribution of the photos, just because the internets is hard to control.

HYPHEN MAGAZINE

The midwest & southern tours are a collaboration between the VP and Hyphen magazine. Nakano is a founder of Hyphen and the creator of Hyphen’s LGBTQ section. Your story may be shared on Hyphen’s website and social media, which has a huge national reach in the mainstream AAPI community. 

DO I GET THE PHOTOS & VIDEOS

You will get low resolution images of 3 images from the shoot. You’ll receive the images in 6-8 weeks. You are free to use them for facebook + social media + bio pics + etc, credit must be given to Mia Nakano Photography & The Visibility Project. 

The videos are very backlogged, by a three years. Just to be real about that. When they are finished, you’ll have 1 week to review the final video and request edits/content removal. They will be uploaded to a password protected space during that review time. You may also choose to not have your video published, and instead have your story shared anonymously through a full or partial written transcription. 

MODEL RELEASE

All participants must sign a “catch all” model release. However if you ever want to be removed from the project website, we are happy to accommodate that. Printed materials or final video productions already in distribution cannot be retracted.

CONFIRMATIONS & CANCELLATIONS

We work with registered participants on a first come first serve basis, if you find you can’t make your session let us know asap so other folks may participate!  Also register with an email address you check frequently, because more information will be sent to confirmed participants.

The Visibility Project is fiscally sponsored by Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality (AACRE). Funded by the Creative Work Fund, Red Envelope Giving Circle, generous individual donors, and community supporters!

/by

October Midwest tour: St.Paul/Minneapolis, Madison, Chicago, Detroit, Columbus

About the Visibility Project Midwest tour

This October the Visibility Project is hitting the road and visiting five cities in the Midwest. The Visibility Project is a photo portrait series and video/oral history collection dedicated to the Queer Asian American Women and Trans* community. It’s inclusive to South Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islanders, East Asians, and mixed Asian Americans who identify as trans* or a queer woman. This intergenerational project embraces the intersections of being Queer and Asian. It’s a start to ensuring queer stories are represented in AAPI communities and that AAPIs are represented in LGBTQ communities. A dream is to interview 6 people in each city, help us make that happen!

Share your story

Be a part of one of the largest archives of the Q/TAAPI community. Contact (mia (at) visibilityproject (dot) org) if you’re interested in sharing your story and want more details OR sign up for the newsletter to get updated information on how to register for a shoot. Here’s info on what to expect during a shoot.

Have community housing?

Let us know if you have a spare room to host project director, Mia Nakano, for a couple of nights. She loves all fuzzy creatures!

Donate a shoot space!

Photo studios are the best place to do a photoshoot. So are conference rooms, community centers, or any space large enough for a couple of lights and a backdrop. It’s a photo and video project, so low noise is best.

Book a lecture, exhibition, or workshop

Project Director, Mia Nakano, is a photographer, filmmaker, and a founder & LGBTQ editor of Hyphen magazine. Her work has been published in numerous print and online media outlets from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center to the Leeway Foundation in Philadelphia. She is a frequent guest/artist lecturer at national conferences, universities, grassroots organizations, and galleries. Some topics her workshops/lectures cover are: photography, lighting, pre-production, gender & sexuality, community documentation, and more.

Sponsor the tour & Leaving Evidence

Sponsor the tour by donating a shoot space and putting a call out on social media and organizational networks. Community is the most successful through the cultivation of individual relationships and solidarity work. One goal of this tour is to help document stories from local communities and to “leave evidence” by providing video or photography services in each city. Connect with us if you want to sponsor the tour or have a great community organization whose story should be documented.

Midwest Tour Dates

[table tablesorter=”1″ file=”https://www.visibilityproject.orgwp-content/uploads/2014/09/Visibility-Project-Midwest-Tour-Sheet1.csv”]

/by

Trans Leadership Exchange – Applications due October 15th

The 2015 Trans Leadership Exchange
Building the Power of Trans and Genderqueer Leaders

Goals of the Trans Leadership Exchange

1. Build personal leadership capacity: By exploring unique values, learning tools to cultivate greater self-awareness, deepening mind-body connection, and identifying leadership styles;

2. Connect trans and genderqueer leaders: By introducing people from different part of the movement and the nation to one another in order to build a deeper community of colleagues and a thriving support network;

3. Explore power, privilege, and oppression: By learning how social identities (such as race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, faith, age) impact us, develop shared understanding of a framework, and practice communication skills for engaging across lines of significant difference;

4. Develop organizing and management skills: By distinguishing between leading, managing and supervising, we will share and identify tools for investing in teams and individuals;

5. Recognize and appreciate different strategies within our movement: By recognizing different strategies and tactics for achieving political change, foster a more collaborative and generative LGBTQ movement.

Three Weeks of Residency

The Trans Leadership Exchange will open at the Conference on LGBTQ Equality: Creating Change in February of 2015, with two further meetings in April and July. In between session retreats, participants will be expected to complete online assignments and team projects.

Who Should Apply?

Trans and genderqueer identified leaders working in the LGBTQ movement are welcome to apply. This means campaigns and community organizers, policy advocates, faith leaders, higher education and community center professionals, and others working for LGBTQ liberation are all welcome to apply. Trans and genderqueer leaders from other social justice movements (such as immigration rights, reproductive justice, and economic and racial justice) are also welcome to apply. This program is aimed at leaders with a wide range of professional or volunteer experience. Applicants who do not identify as trans or genderqueer will not be considered.

We welcome participants from a range of backgrounds and traditions; the Task Force is committed to creating multi-racial, gender diverse, accessible spaces in our leadership programs. The Trans Leadership Exchange is available at low or no cost to all accepted participants, based on a sliding scale. No one will be turned away based on finances.

We welcome inquiries about the program. Please contact Evangeline Weiss, Leadership Programs Director at the Task Force: eweiss@thetaskforce.org, 919-236-3049.

Applications are due by October 15th and we will notify you by November 20th.

/by

Queer South Asian Anthology – Submit today

The South Asian LGBTQ Anthology is a project in progress, aimed at addressing the unique and intersectional lives of South Asian LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer/questioning) individuals living in the United States. After a panel called “Building a South Asian Queer Movement” at Creating Change (the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force annual conference) in February 2014, the panelists, Vinita Chaudhry, Ami Patel, and Sasha W, hoped for a new version of A Lotus of Another Color (published in 1993); that is, a more current anthology of creative, visual, academic, and activist work representing the realities for South Asian LGBTQ individuals in the United States particularly.

Currently, we hope for the anthology to be published in early 2016. If you have any questions about the project, or if you would like to join the editorial team, check out our FAQ section or e-mail queerdesianthology@gmail.com.

Submit your work today

/by

Deaf and Queer Sisters

Imagine that you are the voice and ears for two people.
Imagine deciding what information to convey and how to convey it.

I played these roles frequently for my profoundly deaf sister, from short interactions at the grocery store, to valiant yet failed attempts at interpreting Sunday school lessons. She is two and a half years older, and we grew up Signing Exact English (SEE), which meant we signed each word we spoke. We didn’t take sign language classes, and this cultivated a habit of inventing our own signs. Today, sometimes her friends have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about when I sign, but my sister usually does.

My interest around language and how it changes began when I was a young, uninformed bystander watching my sister navigate the (ear)th built for the hearing. Later I realized that Sign is a language in and unto itself. People have accents, others stutter, there are regional signs and colloquialisms, and new signs are invented or take on different meanings.

While my sister navigates the predominantly hearing world as a deaf Japanese American woman, I’ve learned to negotiate the predominantly straight world as a Queer Japanese American woman. Last year I visited my sister in Austin, a strong hub for the deaf community in the U.S., and did a day long Visibility Project shoot. The Visibility Project documents Queer/Trans AAPIs’ personal stories and identities through an oral history series. (I’m working hard to transcribe these interviews so that deaf people can also have access to them via subtitles.)

Mia Nakano Sign Language-002
Mia Nakano
Mia (L) & Alisa (R). Photo credit: Mia Nakano

I was excited to share my day with her, but realized I didn’t know how to sign Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, etc. I assumed she would know because she was now fluent in American Sign Language (ASL), and even taught ASL for a few years. When I asked her to show me these signs, she was very hesitant. The only signs she knew that meant Gay or Lesbian alluded to oral sex, and not surprisingly this is not how deaf LGBTQs prefer to be named. She didn’t know the sign for Queer. To get around this, she spelled out each word, and told me to connect with a deaf LGBTQ person who knew the newest signs for that community.

As my sister learns new signs, I learn new words and infuse them into my Queer vernacular. As we blend our regional dialects and Asian cultural influences, new words are created and old words are reclaimed: Dyke, Queer, Stone Butch, Hard Femme, Ma’msir, Ze, Zir, They, Them, Fa’afaine, Bakla, Mahu, Mitini, and so many more words I’ve learned over the years. From Tagolog to Nepali, we are so much more complex than the alphabet soup of *LGBTQQIAATP. In our Deaf and Queer worlds, we challenge each other to evolve through our shared experiences living life on the margins.

/by

LGBTQ Hyphen is now online

Back in 2002, before the first pages of Hyphen were printed, I was a 24-year-old first time photo editor and the only “visible” queer staff person. A high priority of mine was to infuse Hyphen with Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans Queer AAPI stories. I set-up google alerts to learn what was happening nationally, but the rare trickle of news was frequently filled with NSFW [Not safe for work] content. This was when LGBTQ AAPI orgs rarely had websites and usually existed as closed list-serves. Hours and hours of online research usually resulted in one or two potential stories. Looking back, I celebrate our decision to put a South Asian gender nonconforming performer on the cover of Hyphen Issue 4, long before Laverne Cox hit the cover of Time.

After Hyphen, I began work on the Visibility Project a national photo and oral history archive of the Queer Asian American Women and Trans* community. Like Hyphen, the inspiration and heart of the Visibility Project breaks down stereotypes, but the Visibility Project more directly embraces the intersections of being queer AND Asian through personal storytelling and portraits. Over the years, it’s become an intergenerational archive filled with over 120 Q/TAAPI’s faces and stories, from Oakland to Atlanta to Philadelphia.

Now it’s come full circle, the Visibility Project and Hyphen magazine have partnered to create LGBTQ Hyphen, the first dedicated LGBTQ online section in a mainstream and nationwide Asian American publication. This is historic. We raise and highlight LGBTQ AAPI voices like never before and bring LGBTQ AAPI opinions and lenses to national debates: Kay Ulanday Barrett interviews Patty Berne about disability justice and arts, Ben de Guzman combines his personal story and talks about the fight for comprehensive immigration reform, Celeste Chan raises up transgender HIV/AIDS activist and performer Tita Aida and Tony Tonnu shares a deeply personal experience of coming out as trans to his Vietnamese mother.

Are you as excited as we are? We hope so!

Mia Nakano | mia.nakano@hyphenmagazine.com
Founder + LGBTQ Editor, Hyphen magazine
Director, Visibility Project

***

TREND IT #LGBTQHyphen #visibilityproject #lgbtqaapivoicesmatter

***

TAKE ACTION

Send story links or videos from LGBTQ Hyphen and the Visibility Project to a classroom, student, teacher, or organization. Feel inspired? Add your personal comments! Pitch a story, suggest a topic, and be a part of actively creating more visibility for LGBTQ AAPIs.

***

GET PUBLISHED

Stories in LGBTQ Hyphen are about or written by the LGBTQ AAPI community. Allies are welcome to pitch stories or submit work with content focused on LGBTQ AAPIs. We are currently accepting pitches, blogger applications, section ideas, sponsorships, and partnerships.

***

AACRE NETWORK & FISCAL SPONSORSHIP

Hyphen and the Visibility Project are fiscally sponsored by Asian Americans for Civil Rights and Equality (AACRE), a network of Asian American social justice groups with shared values that are working to create positive change. Network groups include Alliance for South Asians Taking Action (ASATA), Asian Pacific Islander Equality – Northern California (APIENC), Asian Prisoner Support Committee, APEX Express, and Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA).

/by