omonatheydid | Life and Death in Queer Korea

Life and Death in Queer Korea
Part 1: A Queer Exorcism
How religion and violence shadow lgbt Koreans.

By Huso Yi

(Huso Yi)

MARCH 7, 2003. I remember very clearly the first time my cell phone rang late at night on the Spring of 1995. I answered it and a male voice hissed in my ear, "Go burn in hell!" The next night, another anonymous phone voice spat, "I'm gonna kill you."

Almost every night for a year my cell phone was bombarded with hateful, threatening voices. I had done something terrible and dirty. I had become a public homosexual, co-founding Come Together, South Korea's first queer student activist group.

The Walls of Jericho
My life on campus changed. Violence became a daily possibility, sometimes a reality. Once, friends whom I had known since elementary school physically assaulted me for being a gay man.

That Fall I organized the first Sexual Politics Festival on campus. Right after the festival started, a group of Christian fundamentalist students holding red crosses marched on the LGBT students' exhibit. They circled our kiosks, praying and singing hymns. I realized they were reenacting that passage in the Book of Joshua where God tells the people to circle the town of their enemies seven times while praying and when they do so the town is demolished by God's hand. In this case, when the kiosks didn't come tumbling down, the Christian fundamentalists tried to smash them with their crosses.

The Festival, and the violent use of crosses, triggered a huge controversy, not just on campus, but nationally. All the national news networks covered it. After the Festival, the university's Student Council held a panel discussion on homosexuality and Christianity. During the event, I was suddenly accosted by the chair of the Christian student group, who performed a public exorcism on me. That exorcism was the most painful memory I have of those years: I, too, am a Christian.

Internalized Violence
I consider myself lucky, though. Between 1997 and 1999, three of my gay friends in South Korea committed suicide. In May 1998, Oh disclosed his homosexuality to his family. They immediately rejected him and expelled him from their home. After living and suffering on the streets for months, and at one point sleeping in an office, Oh killed himself.

The other two went to Seoul National University, which is South Korea's Harvard or Yale. One was in Law School; the other was a graduate student in biology. Their success in society was "guaranteed." However, when they came to the age of marriage, they both faced a brutal dilemma. Neither wanted to marry. But they also didn't want to disown their families and disappoint their parents. So, they chose to kill themselves. One in 1997, the other in 1999. No funerals were held for these three young men: their families considered them "bad" sons.

After two years studying in the U.S., I returned to Seoul in 1998 and started an online counseling service for Korean lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. As a provider of a service despised by many and desperately needed by others, I was well positioned to gauge rabid homophobia, from one side, and despair from the other.

A heterosexual woman contacted me one day. A friend had come out to her as a lesbian and she wanted my advice on what to do. A week later, the woman emailed me that her friend had killed herself because she couldn't deal with her lesbianism. The heterosexual woman felt deeply guilty about her friend's suicide, because she hadn't talked to her again after she'd come out to her. As to the parents, they were angry at their daughter's suicide.

Compulsory Marriage
Suicide shadows many lesbians, gays and bisexuals in South Korea as they approach the late 20s or early 30s. At that age, they are compelled into heterosexual marriage, to fulfill every person's paramount obligation in South Korean society: the continuation of the family lineage.

One silver lining of compulsory heterosexual marriage is that married people are regarded as adults and can be independent from their families. The unmarried ones, including recalcitrant queers, still have to live under their parents' thumb.
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Life and Death in Queer Korea
Part 2: Homo Koreanus
Under the official microscope.

By Huso Yi

MARCH 20, 2003. The Lonely Planet guidebook cautions gay and lesbian travelers in South Korea to watch their behavior: Koreans, it says, are somewhat schizophrenic when it comes to gay and lesbian issues.

On the one hand, the country has never passed any laws that overtly discriminate against homosexuals. On the other, this superficially non-hostile legal environment is no sign of tolerance.

South Korean law does not mention homosexuality simply because it's considered so bizarre that it's unmentionable in public. When uncomfortably confronted with the issue, most Koreans will insist that there are no gays or lesbians in Korea: it's a "foreign problem." As long as the "problem" remains invisible, Koreans will ignore it.

Seventeen of the eighteen Korean language dictionaries found in Seoul today define homosexuality as a "sexual perversion." All Korean-English and English-Korean dictionaries listing homosexuality define it as "falling in unnatural love."

Under pressure from Korea's Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Federation and other gay groups, five Korean dictionary publishers said last November that they would use non-discriminatory language in their future, revised editions. Four others and the National Academy of the Korean Language, the publisher of the standard Korean dictionary, just said they would study the matter.

In a clinical setting, the concept of "homosexuality" was first introduced in Korea in 1970 by D. S. Han in a case study published in the Journal of Korean Neuropsychiatry, entitled "Sexual Perversions in Korea." The research, based on records of homosexual patients from the 1960's, concluded that the reason why their numbers were small was that Koreans were sexually more mature than Westerners.

Korean psychiatry forged its own views of homosexuality by repeating ad nauseam its own, home-grown gender-based ideological drivel, and strategically importing Western views of homosexuality as perversion. Even today, when homosexuality is no longer considered a mental illness, Korean psychiatry still classifies it as a behavioral disorder, socially unacceptable and dysfunctional.

When it comes to homosexuality, the Korean Standard Disease Classification (KSDC) visibly departs from the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD), on which it is based.

The ICD's definition of "Sexual Maturation Disorder" reads as follows: "The patient is suffering from uncertainty about his gender identity or sexual orientation, causing anxiety or depression. Most commonly this occurs in adolescents who are not certain whether they are homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual in orientation, or individuals who, after a period of apparently stable sexual orientation (often with a longstanding relationship), find that their sexual orientation is changing." (italics added)

In the Korean version, the italicized phrase above has been replaced by "older married individuals who, after a period of apparently normal heterosexuality, often within marriage, find themselves experiencing homosexual feelings."

Korean mental health professionals are quick to saddle lesbian, gay and bisexual people with the "sexual maturation disorder" label. Many firmly believe, on the basis of the KSDC definition, that "homosexual attraction" is nothing but a phase of heterosexual development. Homosexuality can thus be "diagnosed," in some contexts, as being either "pseudo-homosexuality" or "true homosexuality."

Lesbianism is even more unfathomable for Korean researchers. A 1996 study on the sexual behavior and attitudes of high school girls by the Korean Research Institute for Culture and Sexuality lumped homosexuality together with "sexual violence." Another Institute study, in 1997, asked girls the question, "Have you ever fallen in love with a woman whom you consider a man?"

Sinful or just plain wrong. Against nature and society. A mental illness or a developmental disorder and a sexual dysfunction. A sexually violent behavior. And, last but not least, a foreign phenomenon. Homosexuality in Korea positively cries out for cure or repression.

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LINK TO PART THREE CLICK HERE

LINK TO PART FOUR CLICK HERE

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

curiousnono.livejournal.com

om-g....korea.....:(

i hope jokown safe from evil ppl and dont judge him T-T

From:

czarny.livejournal.com

Who's jokown? :(

endless charms, endless possibilities

Life and Death in Queer Korea - A four part article