On both the East and West coasts, Asian/Pacific gay and lesbian organizations make visible their constituencies through newsletters featuring poetry, short stories, and autobiographical narratives. San Francisco's Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA) began publishing the The Lavender Godzilla in 1987, a monthly newsletter producing literary supplements three times a year. In New York, the Asian Lesbians of the East Coast (ALOEC) began publishing the ALOEC Newsletter in 1984, and a year later, in San Francisco, the Asian Pacifica Sisters (APS) put out its first newsletter, Phoenix Rising.

These newsletters provide a forum for Asian/Pacific gays and lesbians to discuss issues close to home: domestic violence, AIDS in their communities, safe sex, possibilities for coalition, the politics of publishing.

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Video and Film Expressions

Gay and lesbian Asian/Pacific artistic creativity blossoms in video and film, media more accessible to marginalized peoples, perhaps, than mainstream commercial publishing. Both the 1993 New York and San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals featured videos by Asian/Pacific artists Pablo Bautista, Quentin Lee, and Ming-Yuen S. Ma. In addition, films by Gregg Araki (The Living End) and Rico Martinez (Glamazon) recently premiered with notable acclaim.

Many of these works are available on videotape from the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA), which also distributes lesbian films, including Ann Moriyasu's Issei Wahine and Eileen Lee and Marilyn Abbink's Women of Gold.

Conclusion

Productions by these talented artists, as well as many others, attest to the ways Asian/Pacific gays and lesbians will continue to gain recognition for their different communities. In 1994, two additional collections brought together gay and lesbian writers: Jessica Hagedorn's Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction hosts a large gay and lesbian presence, and Amerasia Journal published a critical and literary issue entitled "New Dimensions, New Desires."

As Kitty Tsui reminds us in her poem "It's in the Name," we are "each with a name / each with a face / blood, bone breath."

In the twenty years since its first appearance in the West, AIDS has been the subject of a large body of literature, most of it written by gay men and much of it designed to expose readers as closely as possible to the emergency of the epidemic and the suffering of affected individuals.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

Since Stonewall various political agendas have dominated American lesbian literature.

Relatively little beyond the anecdotal is known of the unique problems and attitudes of glbtq Asia/Pacific Islander Americans since no comprehensive, representative studies of them have been undertaken.

The gay and lesbian press is of prime importance in sustaining a frequently embattled minority and has been crucial in the development of a national mass movement for gay rights.

A vigorous gay and lesbian literature emerged in the Philippines in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

Queer video art explores diverse issues, but because it can be such a personally expressive medium, it frequently focuses on issues directly concerned with queer experience.

The poster boy of radical and militant queer cinema, Gregg Araki disdains the ghettoizing label of "gay filmmaker."

Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai has emerged as a significant figure in post-colonial and gay writing by virtue of the style, wit, and perspicacity of his three novels.

Critically acclaimed Asian-American playwright Chay Yew has consistently produced provocative drama addressing issues of racism, homophobia, and censorship.