LOVE YOUR ASIAN BODY

A labyrinthine study that recounts the struggle to mobilize Asian American communities against the AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles.

Wat, the author of The Making of a Gay Asian Community (2002), bases his history on interviews with 36 mainly Asian American activists, mostly connected with the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team—a group that did feisty, innovative work in AIDS education and organizing in LA in the 1980s and ’90s. Their activities included distributing safer-sex kits, staging explicit sex education sessions with simulated sex acts, and launching an ad campaign to promote HIV testing with images of gay and lesbian Asian people embracing above the slogan “Love Your Asian Body.” Wat takes a deep dive into APAIT’s history and its challenges, such as trying to connect in culturally appropriate ways with Asian immigrants who didn’t speak English; confronting homophobia in conservative immigrant communities that prevented gay Asians from discussing their needs or seeking medical treatment; and debunking a widespread impression that Asians didn’t get AIDS and were possibly immune to it—or that gay Asians didn’t exist. In this loose-limbed narrative, Wat’s interviewees, starting with Gil Mangaoang, one of APAIT’s managers on staff in the ’90s, discuss their journeys toward activism, the difficulties of gaining acceptance from older and stodgier gay organizations, the surprisingly cutthroat office politics of the nonprofit sector, and intersectional issues. At one APAIT fundraiser, for instance, the ill-advised entertainment was a drag skit that spoofed domestic violence between pop stars Ike and Tina Turner for laughs, which elicited furious denunciations of gay male sexism from lesbian attendees.

Much of the book is a saga of institutional development that delves into budgeting, hiring personnel, management structures, employee relations, and complying with the paperwork demanded by government funding agencies. Poignantly, it climaxes in APAIT’s transformation into a well-funded, impeccably credentialed professional agency that jettisons the scrappy, anti-establishment activist ethos that put it on the map. It’s an unusually detailed look at the nuts and bolts of the nonprofit sector, and readers interested in the business and culture of the social work industry will find it valuable. However, Wat’s recap bogs down in thickets of minutiae and organizational acronyms, written in prose that sometimes feels as perfunctory as a newsletter: “APAIT, LAAPIS, and GAPSN would often cosponsor social events like dances and screenings of films with LGBTQ and Asian” content for “the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (organized by Visual Communications around late April and early May).” More compelling are the interviewees’ intimate observations as they relate coming-out dramas, grieving remembrances of loved ones, defiant paeans to sexual fulfillment, and brash, in-your-face riffs on their determination to explode bourgeois propriety: “We were the ones that were boldly talking about sex in the Asian American community when no one wanted to talk about it,” says Lisa Hasegawa, a former administrative assistant at the Asian Pacific Heath Care Venture organization. In these voices, readers will hear the exuberant energy that powered the movement.

A mix of illuminating, though often dry, organizational lore and vibrant personal reflections on the war against AIDS.