CLGS

“All API Families are LGBT Families”

The unique work undertaken by the CLGS Asian Pacific Islander Roundtable integrates sexuality, ethnicity, and religion at every turn. This important work of integration will form the basis of a new project specifically designed for API faith communities.

The API Roundtable, as part of the CLGS Racial/Ethnic Roundtable Project, is developing a community-based curriculum at the intersection of sexuality, ethnicity and religion, which draws from the community cultural work of the Network on Religion and Justice for API-LGBT people. This coalition of API-LGBT organizations and individuals, their faith communities, families, and friends, works to nurture and support efforts toward the full inclusion of LGBT people in API communities – work to which the API Roundtable has been a major contributing partner.

There are two unique and related features in the community experience that has informed the Network’s mission and in the approach to the intersections will shape this curriculum. First, the Network is mission-oriented rather than identity-oriented. Allies (family, friends, clergy) are not considered to be peripheral to API-LGBT lives. Indeed, the sensibility of extended family helps to explain the saying, “All API families are LGBT families.”

Second, the community activities that form the core of the curriculum integrates sexuality, ethnicity, and religion at every turn. API ethnicity is not an additional layer on some foundational LGBT sexuality. The curriculum operates from the perspective that ethnicity basically reconfigures any “universal” LGBT sexuality, just as the multi-faith nature of API cultures reconfigures the Western understanding of religion.

While CLGS envisions the Racial/Ethnic Roundtable Project as addressing the self-determined needs of communities of color for effective research, educational programming, and strategies, the community knowledge that emerges from the API Roundtable challenges the basic understanding of sexuality, religion, and family/community in mainstream LGBT thinking.

This curriculum will help to articulate these important insights and extend their reach.Look for more information coming soon!