Documenting queer Asian history

On Nov. 17 the Massachusetts Area South Asian Lambda Association (MASALA) and the History Project will give Bostonians a glimpse of a new online exhibit, the QueerEast Project, that will for the first time document the history of the Boston area’s LGBT Asian community. The project will feature oral histories from diverse members of the community, and the preview event for the exhibit, which will take place at the South End’s Bernard Toale Gallery, will include a viewing of videos of the first two oral histories.

Amit Dixit, a steering committee member of MASALA, said that he conceived of the QueerEast Project about two years ago shortly after joining the board of the History Project. He saw online exhibits the organization had created to mark the history of the Boston area’s black and Latino LGBT communities, and he decided to create something similar for the Asian LGBT community.

The cornerstone of the project will be videos of oral histories. The first two interview subjects are Jacob Smith Yang, executive director of Massachusetts Asians and Pacific Islanders (MAP) for Health and vice-chair of the Massachusetts Commission on GLBT Youth, and Sudarshan Belsare, a dancer and museum educator at the Peabody Essex Museum. Dixit said the long-term goal is to collect at least 12 oral histories representing a diverse range of subjects, and he hopes that the first two histories will show public the value of the project and attract funding to allow the History Project to continue collecting histories and adding them to the exhibit. Documenting queer Asian history