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Films reflect growing acceptance of Asian gays

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While the festival's diverse span of topics and genres includes characters who navigate jagged gender and sexuality terrains, gay Asian characters also must tread along racial and cultural lines.

Industry insiders say the recent swell in gay Asian cinema is partly because of a growing acceptance of gayculture within the Asian and Asian-American communities.

``Ten years ago, there were certainly (gay) Asian stories, but I didn't see very many of them. I didn't see people who looked like myself on screen,'' said Corey Tong, former co-director of the San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival who was hired by the Lesbian & Gay Film Festival organizers to help select the Asian movies. But in recent years, Tong adds, ``Filmmakers are slowly able to come out in a cultural and social context as being gay and lesbian and not fear social or political persecution of any kind.''

Award-winning director Kwan is leading the way. He came out publicly in his 1996 documentary ``Yang & Yin,'' and says homosexuality was and still is taboo throughout China.

Yet, there appears to be a receptive -- if still closeted -- audience for films such as his latest, ``Lan Yu.'' The movie failed to get distribution approval from the Chinese government for release in China, partly because of the gay content, Kwan said. It recently opened to unremarkable box office in Taiwan and Hong Kong, he said -- but DVD sales there soared.

``The gay people didn't go to the cinema to see this film in public, but they bought the DVD to watch the film at home,'' Kwan said. He believes that the more accessible films are to a wider audience, the more acceptance countries such as China will confer on gay cinema and culture.

What makes ``Lan Yu,'' which Kwan adapted from an anonymous novel published on the Internet, accessible are the characters: Chen Handong, a wealthy businessman hooks up with an ostensibly short-on-cash architectural student, Lan Yu, for what both believe will be a one-night stand. Unexpectedly, their lives come together and move apart over the next 10 years with strained break-ups and passionate make-ups.

Whether the characters are gay or straight doesn't matter, Kwan said. ``They're just human beings. The relationship can happen in heterosexual couples.''

Other filmmakers are also working to bring honest images of gay Asians to the forefront.

In Doris Ng's ``The Snake Boy,'' viewers get a glimpse of gay culture in Shanghai while following the career of popular gay jazz singer Coco Zahn. Love between two women unfolds against a backdrop of traditional Chinese society in ``Fish & Elephant.'' In the Japanese film ``Revolutionary Girl Utena,'' a new student comes to school and ends up fighting for the affection of a mysterious girl.

The festival also showcases local Asian-American talent.

San Francisco filmmaker Machiko Saito offers up a satirical glimpse into the chaotic world of independent filmmaking in ``Pink Eye,'' and Eugenia Chan recounts the birth of drag queen Peaches Christ and her popular Midnight Mass Movie Series in ``Peaches Christ Superstar.''

For San Francisco filmmaker Vu T. Thu Ha, dealing head-on with Asian stereotypes became the inspiration for her short film ``Shut Up White Boy.''

New to filmmaking, Vu, a Vietnamese immigrant, uses three versions of the same scene to build an air of fantasy or reality as a group of Asian lesbians chase down a white boy with yellow fever.

``In Hollywood movies, there's the exotic Asian female, the submissive Asian, the kung fu masters who can kill you and the lotus blossom type,'' Vu said. Her film, she says, is about, ``going back to reclaim what is ours.''