When Xiangqi Chen sketched the idea for a Chinese LGBTQ+ history museum six years ago, she was still trapped in her Shanghai apartment.
She was hemmed in not just by the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine but also by years of tightening restrictions that had increasingly limited the places where she was allowed to perform art, raise awareness and build community. She hoped to create a new space for those activities, even if only online.
Little did she know then that one day she would flee the country and that the museum she and thousands of supporters dreamed of would find a physical home in a place that would welcome them: San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Chen, surrounded by local leaders and queer activists from around the world, on May 29 cut the ribbon to open the Out Museum.
“It’s what we called the first world LGBT center for Chinese people in Chinatown,” said Abby Chen, a longtime arts leader in the neighborhood and contemporary art curator at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. She proudly described the Out Museum as “built for us, by us and for all of us — and for everyone that comes after.”
Xiangqi Chen said she established the museum to salvage China’s queer history, much of which had been censored and erased over a number of years. And in finding a home for the museum in Chinatown, a sanctuary for generations of Chinese immigrants, Chen found a new calling: documenting the neighborhood’s unarchived Chinese American LGBTQ+ stories.
“We have always been here,” said Abby Chen at the opening as she nodded with a group of older adults who have lived, organized and advocated around LGBTQ+ causes in the neighborhood for decades.
“And now this is a place we can all call home,” she said.
Chinatown ‘the best fit’
Xiangqi Chen first came to Chinatown for a short period of time in 2012 as a visiting artist invited by the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. She returned 12 years later as a resident artist, opening a temporary version of the Out Museum in a small space on Ross Alley, one of the neighborhood’s iconic passageways.
“I love Chinatown so much,” Chen said in Mandarin.
Living and working in the neighborhood, Chen said, she learned how earlier generations of immigrants fought for every block, every building, every right to exist. From merchants rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake to Wong Kim Ark winning a landmark lawsuit that ensured birthright citizenship in the United States, the immigrant experience of not having a place to call home felt familiar to Chen, who came out in China more than 20 years ago. She found that the history of Chinese immigrants fighting for space echoed her own mission. She saw herself and the museum fitting in here.
“Chinatown is like a sponge,” Chen said. “It can absorb differences, challenge and progress. But it’s also so resilient that you can’t pierce through it.”
She described the historic neighborhood as “the best fit for a Chinese-language queer archive.”
Neighbors coming out
While Chen hoped the museum would blend into the neighborhood seamlessly, she worried that the local community might not embrace it.
“Many elders here are not familiar with LGBTQ topics,” she said, adding that many words for the community that are directly translated from English often sound too academic and feel less connected to people’s everyday experience here. “But they know the words ‘same-sex love’ in Chinese.”
Because the museum sits in Chinatown, Chen’s main goal is to immerse it in the culture of those who live and work there. She spent two years getting to know the area, finding a place for the museum and building connections. Many of the neighbors showed up on opening night: her Cantonese opera teacher, local shop owners, and historians digging into Chinatown’s past.
They were joined by Chinese immigrants from across the Bay Area and around the world. When Chen sang a classic Cantonese opera piece, older Chinatown residents sang along and filmed her. When a South Bay feminist band played, young people who had driven hours to see the musicians danced and cheered.
Others who have been working to draw more activity and energy to Chinatown applauded the museum’s arrival.
“This storefront has been vacant for years,” said Lily Lo, founder of BeChinatown, which organizes a monthly night market. “It’s good that this brings so many people here.”
Visitors spoke Cantonese, Mandarin and English. But the connections came easily, passed along with pastries and shared applause.
“We tried outreach to everyone, both Bay Area cultural organizations, LGBTQ organizations, Chinese diaspora organizations,” said Yunfei Hua, curator of the Out Museum.
We are still here
Among those in the crowd were 80-year-old Crystal Jang and her wife, Sydney Yeong. Jang was born and raised in Chinatown. She and Yeong grew up together and attended the same school. Their fathers owned stores around the corner from each other.
Both women said they came out when they were 13. “But we had to hide our identities as queer people,” Jang said. “We had to hide in the culture.”
In 1996, Jang and Yeong joined the first contingent of about 100 LGBTQ+ Asian Americans who marched in the Chinatown Lunar New Year parade.
“Many people needed to wear masks,” Jang said, explaining that many in the group feared that being recognized could hurt their relationships with family members.
Chinatown has always had queer stories, Jang said. But like the neighborhood itself, those stories have been left out of the mainstream.
The Out Museum is on Tien Fuh Wu Way, a block of Joice Street recently renamed after a former household servant who rescued women and girls from sex slavery and other forms of bondage in the 19th century. Local historians say records suggest she might have had a relationship with another woman.
Local historians have long worked to preserve Chinatown’s documents and recount history left out of the mainstream. With the museum, Chen said, she hopes to do the same for queer history. For the opening event, the museum screened a documentary on that local history and exhibited artwork about a local community organization that once sheltered LGBTQ+ people, a story only recently uncovered.
“We have always been here,” Jang said. Yet “it took someone from China to make this happen.”
