Recently several famous Korean have been speaking up about queerness. Bain from Just B came out at an LA concert. Youn Yuh Jung, one of the biggest Korean actors of all time, recently talked about when her gay son got married, and several other K-pop stars as well as K-Dramas are having more conversations about queerness.
This is a big deal.
Growing up in Korea, the only time that I heard about queer people was when they were on the news getting arrested. Getting arrested just for being queer. Similar to many timeframes in the United States Empire, we were called “criminals,” “deviants,” “sinners,” “immoral homosexuals,” and a slew of other slurs.
I remember watching a news segment as a kid, where there were two people in a video clip, but their faces were completely blurred out. The news announcer was talking about them as if they had committed the most heinous crime. They were saying that police caught “homosexual criminals.” And I recall thinking even as a young child, “Oh, I guess I’m just going to have to live as a criminal.”
I have known that I’m queer for as long as I can remember. But growing up in Korea, there was not an opportunity for me to explore that at the time. Also because of study culture, there was not even time for me to think about it, because I was studying around the clock, before, during, and after classes. I barely had time to sleep, let alone explore my queerness.
Because of the weaponization of Confucianism, colonization, generational weight, and cultural pressure, the thought of coming out in Korea seemed impossible to me back then.
A lot has changed. I have gone to queer clubs, and have met other queer Koreans in Korea. This is not to say that being queer in Korea is easy. It is not.
But as anyone from any identity that is marginalized understands, truly living means living our truth. So we push forward.
I am grateful for this conversation to be brought up more in Korea, because queerness is still not spoken about as an everyday existence.
Particularly with what is happening globally, especially within western Empires, around homophobia and transphobia, I hope Korea is willing to have more conversations about queerness and transness within Korea and with Koreans even more.
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