Mia Nakano is an American photographer, filmmaker, educator, printer, activist, a founding editor of Hyphen magazine, and Project Director of the Visibility Project. [1]
Mia co-founded Hyphen magazine in 2003 as the photo editor. [2] As of 2014, she launched the LGBT section of Hyphen. [3]
In 2007, Nakano travelled to Nepal for a photojournalism internship with the Kathmandu Post. [4] [5] There, Nakano connected with the Blue Diamond Society, an LGBT organization, and collaborated with them to take photos of Nepal's LGBT community.
Mia continued documenting LGBT communities once she returned to the United States through the Visibility Project. The Visibility Project is a collaboration with Hyphen Magazine. [6]
The Visibility Project has been exhibited at Ohio State University, [7] the Leeway Foundation in Philadelphia, [8] the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center's Asian-Latino Festival in 2013. [9]
Nakano was a panelist at Leeway Foundation's REVOLVE: An Art for Social Change Symposium. [10]
Her work has been featured in Colorlines, Kathmandu Post, Motherjones.com, DemocracyNow!, and freethehikers.org. [11]
In 2014, The Visibility Project collaborated with Hyphen Magazine to create LGBTQ Hyphen, the first LGBTQ-dedicated section in a nationwide and mainstream magazine. [12]
Urvashi Vaid was an Indian-born American LGBT rights activist, lawyer, and writer. An expert in gender and sexuality law, she was a consultant in attaining specific goals of social justice. She held a series of roles at the National LGBTQ Task Force, serving as executive director from 1989-1992 — the first woman of color to lead a national gay-and-lesbian organization. She is the author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (1995) and Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics (2012).
LGBT History Month is an annual month-long observance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history, and the history of the gay rights and related civil rights movements. It was founded in 1994 by Missouri high-school history teacher Rodney Wilson. LGBT History Month provides role models, builds community, and represents a civil rights statement about the contributions of the LGBTQ+ community. As of 2022, LGBT History Month is a month-long celebration that is specific to Australia, Canada, Cuba, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Hyphen is an American print and online magazine, founded in 2002 by a group of San Francisco Bay Area journalists, activists, and artists including Melissa Hung, a former reporter for the Houston Press and East Bay Express; Claire Light, former executive director at Kearny Street Workshop; Yuki Tessitore, of Mother Jones; Mia Nakano, photojournalist; filmmaker Jennifer Huang; Stefanie Liang, a graphic designer from Red Herring magazine; journalist Bernice Yeung; and Christopher Fan, now a professor of English and Asian American Studies. Its advisory board included notable Asian American journalists such as Helen Zia and Nguyen Qui Duc, the host of Pacific Time. The first issue was released in June 2003. Hyphen was one of several Asian American media ventures created in the wake of A Magazine's demise.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in Nepal have evolved significantly during the 21st century, though barriers to full equality still exist within the nation. In 2007, Nepal repealed the laws against gay sex and introduced several laws which explicitly protected "gender and sexual minorities". The Nepalese Constitution now recognizes LGBT rights as fundamental rights. On 28 June 2023, a single judge bench of Justice Til Prasad Shrestha issued a historic interim order directing the government to make necessary arrangements to "temporarily register" the marriages of "non-traditional couples and sexual minorities". The full bench of the Supreme Court has yet to deliver a final verdict. The first same-sex marriage of a trans woman and a cisgender gay man occurred in November 2023. Nepal will be the first least developed country and the first in South Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, and the second in Asia after Taiwan.
The Supreme Court of Nepal has ruled in favor of same-sex marriage since 2008. On 28 June 2023, Supreme Court Justice Til Prasad Shrestha directed the government to establish a "separate register" for "sexual minorities and non-traditional couples" and to "temporarily register them". However, the Supreme Court has yet to deliver a final verdict.
Sushma Joshi is a Nepali writer, filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Her fiction and non-fiction deal with Nepal's civil conflict, as well as stories of globalization, migration and diaspora.
Prabal Gurung is a Nepalese–American fashion designer based in New York City.
The Arcus Foundation is an international charitable foundation focused on issues related to LGBT rights, social justice, ape conservation, and environmental preservation. The foundation's stated mission is "to ensure that LGBT people and our fellow apes thrive in a world where social and environmental justice are a reality."
India's LGBTQ culture has recently progressed in its cities due to the growing acceptance of the LGBTQ community in urban India in the 21st century. However, in rural India, LGBTQ culture is still absent or heavily restricted due to more conservative attitudes and opinions of rural Indian society.
Axel Michaels is a Professor of Classical Indology and Religious Studies at Heidelberg University, former Co-Director of the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" (2014-2019) and since 2014 the Director of the research project Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Pre-modern Nepal. He also was the Speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 619 “Ritual Dynamics” from 2002 until 2013.
This is a timeline of notable events in the history of non-heterosexual conforming people of South Asian ancestry, who may identify as LGBTIQGNC, men who have sex with men, or related culturally-specific identities such as Hijra, Aravani, Thirunangaigal, Khwajasara, Kothi, Thirunambigal, Jogappa, Jogatha, or Shiva Shakti. The recorded history traces back at least two millennia.
Nikki Calma, better known as Tita Aida, is a social activist from San Francisco, California. She is a long-time advocate for HIV/AIDS awareness, particularly among Asian American communities, and for transgender people.
The National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) is an American federation of Asian American, South Asian, Southeast Asian. and Pacific Islander LGBTQ organizations. NQAPIA was formed in 2007, as an outgrowth of the LGBT APA Roundtable working groups at the 2005 National Gay Lesbian Task Force Creating Change Conference in Oakland, California. NQAPIA seeks to build the capacity of local LGBT AAPI organizations, invigorate grassroots organizing, develop leadership, and challenge homophobia, racism, and anti-immigrant bias. The organization "focuses on grass-roots organizing and leadership development."
Mia McKenzie is an American writer, activist, and the founder of the website Black Girl Dangerous (BGD). She grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and attended the University of Pittsburgh. McKenzie identifies as a queer Black feminist and uses her writing and website to write about LGBTQ people of color. She is a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for her debut novel, The Summer We Got Free, as well as her 2021 novel, Skye Falling. Her essays and short stories appear regularly on BGD as well as various publications, such as the Kenyon Review.
Artemis Singers is an American lesbian feminist chorus based in Chicago, Illinois. Its goals are to create positive change in cultural attitudes toward women and female artists and to "increase the visibility of lesbian feminists."
Rev. Trinity Ordoña is a lesbian Filipino-American college teacher, activist, community organizer, and ordained minister currently residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is notable for her grassroots work on intersectional social justice. Her activism includes issues of voice and visibility for Asian/Pacific gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals and their families, Lesbians of color, and survivors of sexual abuse. Her works include her dissertation Coming Out Together: an ethnohistory of the Asian and Pacific Islander queer women's and transgendered people's movement of San Francisco, as well as various interviews and articles published in anthologies like Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity and Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology. She co-founded Asian and Pacific Islander Family Pride (APIFP), which "[sustains] support networks for API families with members who are LGBTQ," founded Healing for Change, "a CCSF student organization that sponsors campus-community healing events directed to survivors of violence and abuse," and is currently an instructor in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Department at City College of San Francisco.
The Gai Jatra Third Gender March is an LGBT March on the Newar festival Gai Jatra. The Blue Diamond Society organizes the march, which celebrates different forms of Pride. Blue Diamond Society organizes, and brings LGBT people to dance on the streets during this festival. Unlike other Pride marches in Nepal, it isn't seen as a political movement, but a celebration of an existing festival.
Mia Mingus is an American writer, educator, and community organizer who focuses on issues of disability justice. She is known for coining the term "access intimacy". She advocates for disability studies and activism to centralize the experiences of marginalized people within disability organizing. She is a prison abolitionist, and she advocates for transformative justice in her work against child sexual abuse.
Tracy Baim is a Chicago-based LGBT journalist, editor, author, and filmmaker. She is also a former publisher of the Chicago Reader newspaper.