The queer community is in a constant process of negotiating the definition of terms. Much of what constitutes
"queerness" is the idea of inclusiveness, implying a rejection of absolute borders.



In the last few decades in the U.S., what was simply "Gay and Lesbian" became more inclusive of other identities "LGBT" (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender), which then became "LGBTQIA" (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer-or-Questioning, Intersex, Asexual-Androgenous-Ally?) and then LGBTQ+. And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the official one is anymore. This is why I personally choose to use "Queer", though I'm
aware that this presents a generational rift since the word was once used with a derogatory connotation and some people "could not conceive of people calling themselves 'queer' unless they were either self-hating lunatics or
secret agents of some kind." ^[3]



At a northern California conference in 2011, I came across some presenters who comically rearranged the letters in LGBTQIA (adding "u" for "unsure") to form the easily memorable acronym, QUILTBAG.

Even with defining one part of the acronym, "lesbian," there can be disagreement. My roommate once pointed out the difference between how we use the word "lesbian": while she uses it as a noun [e.g. "That lesbian has a cat."], I tend to use the word as an adjective [e.g. "That lesbian person has a cat."] At first, I hadn't noticed that the way I use
the word is different from the usual way it is used, but I prefer it as an adjective since it puts the emphasis on the person and not the single aspect of their identity. Such specificity in language, I believe, are important in forming how people feel toward something -- and thus commences the most difficult part of my project.


Amy Sim cites in her work "Lesbianism among Indonesian Migrant Workers in Hong Kong,"  that most of the people
she interviewed would only use "lesbian" as a last resort because they didn't believe it correctly encompassed their experience and because of the negative connotations that come with it (38). Recognizing that the term "lesbian" is sometimes considered of "Euro-American connotations," and possibly not appropriate for non-Western sexual relationships, is an important reminder that words are arbitrary constructions that both create and reflect social institutions. In other words, "lesbian" is not a universal way of describing women who love women, but a construction that makes sense within the framework of how we understand our society.

So, let’s start by avoiding the many problems associated with asking, “How do you say ‘gay’ in Chinese?” by first recognizing that there are no direct translations.

Not being a Cantonese speaker, picking up words in general was difficult and finding the words people used to describe themselves was an even more difficult task. I asked some of my Cantonese-speaking friends (non-queer identifying) what they knew:

"gay lo" - derogatory connotation, literally means “gay man”

"tomboy"

"lala" – lesbian woman

Words I learned when I looked them up:

"les" – shortened version of “lesbian”

"Tongzhi" - Reappropriated from its previous use as "comrade," at the inaugural Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in Hong Kong in 1989 to suggest solidarity between LGBT people. A pun of the formal (but unpopular because it connotes disease) word for homosexuality, tóngxìnglìan (同性戀), it provides an indigenous term to capture the Chinese experience of same-sex love (Chou 2).


BINARIES AND SPECTRUMS

Let's be real, queer folk don't appreciate constructing binaries. Perhaps this comes from feminist discourse about gender as a social construct (i.e. rejecting traditional notions that men and women are opposite of each other).
Instead, we like to think of things on a fluid spectrum. Here, we can similarly begin to think about deconstructing notions of East and West being separate and opposite entities. Hong Kong and Macau, which are often referred to as the places in which "East meets West,” blur some of these borders for us.


In his book "Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies", Wah-shan Chou claims that "The concept of sexual orientation, i.e., diving people by the gender of the erotic object of choice, did not exist" and have been established "only recently in the relentless process of modernization (read Westernization) through which many Western categories have been translated and superimposed on the Chinese language and culture" (13). It could be argued that such dividing notions are relatively new as well in the West where the English term "homosexual" is first known to have appeared in an 1892 translation of Richard von Kraft-Ebing's "Psychopathia Sexualis" (Halperin 15).



Speaking of which, though I don't delve deeply into this topic in my short project, I want to note that I make a distinction between sexual orientation/preference and gender expression. In her work, Amy Sim discusses the binary roles of what we in the U.S. attribute to "butch/femme." Among these women workers, there's less occurrence of androgynous, or "gender-neutral" looking women (Sim 40). However, women who are "identifiable instantly by what appears to be generic wear...baggy pants, large t-shirts, and baseball hats" rarely report being men. Such examples
of gender performance complicate even the most specific of terminology.