The path to gay marriage in California may start in Chinatown.
After a double defeat at the voting booth and in court, gay advocates are reassessing their plans to push for legal same-sex marriage in the most populous US state.
The new drive, focused on getting the issue on the ballot again as soon as November next year, is more personal and reaches farther beyond the liberal confines of San Francisco’s Castro or Los Angeles’ gay heartland West Hollywood.
Lost in this year’s election wreckage for gays was the marriage campaign’s relative success in Asian communities, which have swung toward support of same-sex marriage at a faster rate than the rest of California and have become a model for other groups.
Asian Americans have been building grass-roots support in Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Filipinotown for four years. Gays, lesbians and straight allies have talked about the often-taboo topic of homosexuality, set up booths at festivals, harangued non-English language media to change coverage and lobbied elected officials for support.
“What we felt we had to do is talk to people who aren’t on our side. So that’s why we do these crazy things like walk through the streets of Chinatown as part of the New Year’s Parade. That’s why we go out to festivals from Little India to Little Tokyo and talk to complete strangers,” said Marshall Wong, co-chair of Asia Pacific Islander group API Equality.
From California Controller John Chiang to Star Trek’s Mr Sulu — actor George Takei — and dismissed US Army lieutenant Dan Choi, who said he cannot stay silent about his sexuality, Asian community heavyweights have come out in support of gay marriage.
Californians voted to ban gay marriage last November, ending same-sex nuptials a few months after the top court legalized it. The same court in May backed the new ban.
Arnold Pamplona, president of the Philippine American Bar Association, said his group was goaded into supporting gay marriage even though it did not seem like a Filipino issue.
“That wasn’t something we were going to touch, because being Filipino American, a great majority of our members are Roman Catholic,” he said.
Gay groups lobbied hard and said past discrimination against the Filipino community was similar to what gays faced, eventually closing the deal on an endorsement from the group — and many other ethnic bar associations and alliances.
“Until not too long ago it was illegal for Filipinos and whites to marry, and a lot of our board members are married to Caucasians,” Pamplona said.
Gay and lesbian groups say the Asian push is a strong rebuttal to the view that ethnic groups can foster change.
“I just want to be like them,” said Ron Buckmire of the Jordan/Rustin Coalition, a black group focused on gay and lesbian issues, but he said the black community needs a different approach than Asians or Latinos.
Buckmire, who once gave a lecture “Gay is Not the New Black,” said his community is wary of easy comparisons between African-American civil rights and gay rights.
“Three hundred years of slavery, that is not the same thing as not being allowed to get married,” he said.
Ari Gutierrez, a leader of the new Latino Equality Alliance, has also been watching the way Asians organized. One big lesson is the success of connecting the issue to family members and individuals and their stories, rather than dealing in abstracts.
“Familia trumps religion,” she said.
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