“In the arts as well, Asian lesbians took to the stage in the form of a feminist Asian women’s performance group in 1979 called Unbound Feet. Kitty Tsui, Merle Woo, and Canyon Sam formed three of the six women. Their very presence as performers proved radical due to the fact that few, if any, Asian American women appeared on stage at the time. Tsui and Sam had previously met at Asian American Feminists, an Asian women’s rap group initiated two years earlier by Doreena Wong and Canyon Sam.
Unbound Feet’s first show took place at the James Moore Oakland Museum Theater and proved to be immediately successful. As the group continued to perform over the next two years, audiences of up to six hundred flocked to their shows. While the performances of Tsui, Sam, and Woo did not address lesbianism, the program explicitly stated their sexuality. Unbound Feet thus exposed prominently and without shame the real existence of lesbians within the Asian American community and drew a significant Asian lesbian following.
After performances, women crowded into the home of Zee Wong which became a popular gathering place and for meeting lesbians of color generally. Wong, a master of party planning with a wide network, later initiated a series of Asian lesbian potlucks in which large groups of women would gather to share food and build community for the first time. Wong simultaneously began organizing multiracial BBQs. […] By 1982 Wong had over seventy women on her list of people to invite. A year later, Lisa Chun who had earlier in 1978 cofounded Asian Women, an Oakland-based nonpolitical support group for Asian lesbians, combined her list of contacts with Wong’s and the number of APIs grew to 112.
In 1981, Unbound Feet would disband over one member Merle Woo’s grievance against University of California, Berkeley’s refusal to renew her contract as a lecturer in Asian American Studies. Woo hoped Unbound Feet would publicly support her position when she charged that the university had discriminated against her as a lesbian and for her radical political ideology. The group, unable to come to an agreement on whether they should make a public statement, splintered. Half of the members stood opposed to using Unbound Feet as a platform for workplace grievances that would put them in direct conflict with the Asian American community. Four years later in 1985 when three of the original members regrouped as Unbound Feet Three, they more actively brought lesbian content to the stage.”
—Amy Sueyoshi, “Breathing Fire: Remembering Asian Pacific Activism in Queer History,“ in LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History, ed., Megan Springate (Washington, D.C.: National Park Foundation, 2016). [x]
Above: Unbound Feet Three, 1981. Left to right: Nellie Wong, Kitty Tsui, Merle Woo. Photo by Cathy Cade.
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