Artist Profile: Gou Qi - Rainbow on the Eastside

Gou Qi (Pronouns: he / they / 他) is a genderqueer immigrant who has lived in Redmond for many years. They create digital art inspired by traditional East Asian brush painting.

You can find his cat pictures on Redbubble.

从我小时候，我的父母就注意到我的性别意识与众不同。我参加跨性別人士和非异性恋者的社群活动，我的父母都知道并接受。

Dealing with stereotypes as a non-Western LGBTQ individual

I had no closet to come out of. My parents were aware of my queerness since I was a child. In retrospect, people outside my friends/family circle treated me unkindly because of their implicit bias, but I had NEVER been called a slur because of my same-sex attraction or gender expression. And I had never heard of anti-LGBTQ violence before I came to the United States.

I have great respect for the pioneers of the gay and transgender rights movements in the U.S., who fought for the dignity, safety and health of their communities at great physical risk and social risk to themselves.

But there is one thing that I wish was different here: people tend to make assumptions about my queer experience based on my ethnicity. They assume off the bat that I’m not out to my family, that my parents must be closed-minded towards LGBTQIA+ people. Reality is quite the opposite. Some people also tend to assume that my ethnic group is more homophobic or transphobic than what they consider ‘mainstream’ or Western society. I can only speak for myself, but none of these assumptions apply to my experience.

Perhaps consider learning about LGBTQIA+ people in other cultures before coming to conclusions. Bisexuality and homoromanticism for both men and women were recorded in millennia of Chinese and Japanese history and literature. Non-cisgender identities and non-heterosexual behaviors were all present in the history, traditions and folklore of many non-European cultures.

History is more interesting than stereotypes.