Interview: One of the founders of Viet Pride talks about being gay in Vietnam, about self and society
Viet Pride started in 2012, this is its third year. & Of Other Things caught up with one of the founders, Tam Nguyen, a young gay woman originally from Saigon. Sitting in a quiet Hanoian café, her travel bags on the seat next to her, Tam is back to visit from the US where she is studying for her Master’s in Psychology, in a sleepy town just outside of Philadelphia.
Tam Nguyen at Vietpride 2013
Interview by Sam Heaps ● Photos of Viet Pride by Jiri Pasz ● Photo of Tam by Gavin Woolard.
&: So how did you get involved in the movement and start Viet Pride?
Tam Nguyen: In Saigon I grew up in a very conservative family, I tried very hard to do well in school and get a scholarship. I was very socially isolated so I didn’t have a concept of what… gay people looked like. So maybe I was around them but I just didn’t recognise it.
When I was 18 I got sponsorship from the Singaporean government and [studied] psychology there. But I felt like I wanted to do something with social change. I didn’t have any connection with the LGBT community in Vietnam. And then in 2010 there was a same-sex couple who organised a wedding and there were a lot of headlines about the event and I read this in Singapore and I was like, oh, so they exist in Vietnam! I thought that there were no gays in Vietnam. Nowadays we use Facebook and the internet intensively so people can always find community, that’s a big difference from my generation.
Pride in Vietnam is surprising to everyone, even the Vietnamese. In 2012 when I had this idea and I talked to people I didn’t receive much support or enthusiasm. Most of the opinions were that the LGBT community in Vietnam wasn’t ready for it. Society was still very conservative and they said Pride is a very festive festival, not acceptable for an East Asian society like Vietnam. I guess they were thinking that Pride was all about loud music and colourful costumes so imagining that thing in this context you would see a mismatch. That is why every year we try to contextualise Pride in order to make it suitable for our society and also to uphold our traditional values of being very family oriented and subtle.
&: Do you feel like you face a lot of the same attitudes or issues with the LGBT community in Vietnam as you do abroad?
Tam Nguyen: In Vietnam the message that we get was to be like everyone else. Conformity is very much enforced by people, by society, but now there are advertisements [with messages] like “be yourself”, “just do it”, things that encourage individuality. Young people grow up in that kind of climate so they now believe that they have the right and space to express themselves in a way we didn’t back in the 1980s.
&: Does that space extend to the family?
Tam Nguyen: It’s not a yes or no answer, it’s a process. Before I came back to Vietnam [in my family] we never talked about it. Throughout my childhood I never was a very feminine girl so my mom kind of always expected something to happen but she just wanted to deny it as much as possible. So there was a long time of silence. But then I started talking to my mom about sexuality in general, about people’s very legitimate right to live their life the way they want and to love other people the way they want. There was some resistance and still there is resistance. My mom is not totally accepting at this moment but there is progress.
In every case [of people I’ve talked to and interviewed] family is the last place people come out to. Some people chose to lead their entire life not coming out to their parents but being out to friends and colleagues.
Another striking thing is that many young people that we interviewed had attempted suicide. There was one who actually died, his friend told us his story. Most of the reasons they attempted suicide was because they felt guilty about their family. They were afraid if the family found out they would be excluded and disowned. We are living in a society where the idea of the family unit, of family piety, is central in everyone’s life. It’s the duty of the child to continue the family line.
&: What do we have to look forward to this year at Viet Pride?
Tam Nguyen: In the long run we want to make Vietpride not just an event that we do in three days but more like a year long thing. In 2013 we launched the equalities campaign and the Vietpride scholarship. These are both year long things. This year we are giving the scholarship to two people, one transgender woman and one bisexual man.
And this year we have a documentary film, [Red Over the Rainbow] made by [Almaz Media], I think the film is very significant.
&: What makes Hanoi’s Pride different from others?
Tam Nguyen: The bicycle rally! Nowhere else in the world is the Pride march a bicycle rally. In Vietnam we don’t have the right to peaceful assembly so it’s technically impossible to gather a large group of people, but everyone can ride a bike.
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Viet Pride is on from 1 August until 3 August. Find out more about the schedule of events on over the three days here: Viet Pride program.
