FEW PEOPLE expected the announcement last year of the creation of an LGBT literary award in South Korea, the first such book prize in the “Confucian cultural sphere,” which includes China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. The announcement came at a time when LGBT issues are gaining increased, though still insufficient, exposure in Korean media. All over the country, campus and local human rights ordinances supporting gay rights have been enacted, and issues such as same-sex marriage, the repeal of anti-gay military codes, and passage of a national anti-discrimination bill have begun to gain traction with the public.
However, in a country where thirty percent of the population identify as Christian, gay visibility has stirred up new anti-gay rhetoric of a directness rarely heard before. “Ung” (an alias), an activist at Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights, which created the book award, commented: “Anti-homosexuality is becoming organized. All media—journalism, television and radio, Internet, and even textbooks—are putting homosexuality on the cutting board, for or against. Hate slogans, from jokes to protest marches and even violence, are being perpetrated.” A harrowing face-off between pride marchers and anti-gay Christians marred the Seoul Gay Pride festivities this year, with marchers chanting, “We love! You hate!” as their parade was forced to circumvent a religious sit-in blocking their path.
The Yook Woo Dang Literary Award honors the memory of Yun Hyunseok, whose suicide eleven years ago shocked Seoul’s activist community. The award bears the name of his nom de plume, Yook Woo Dang, meaning “the one with six friends.” Little was known about nineteen-year-old Yun when his lifeless body was found at the Solidarity headquarters in 2003. A volunteer worker at the headquarters for just a month before his death, Yun had joined in several pro-gay and anti-war demonstrations, building a cautious rapport with staffers using a false name. But over 75 gay-themed poems found near his corpse shed a disturbing light on his tortured inner life. The poems, together with Yun’s diary entries detailing his final weeks, were published by Solidarity in 2006. The book grabbed the attention of Seoul’s gay activist community for its unprecedented portrayal of a Korean teen’s losing battle with depression and isolation in a society blind or hostile to sexual minorities. Teen suicides of LGBT people in South Korea still go largely unreported. Whispers of young casualties circulate within the closed gay community. (A rumor last spring told of a young man who killed himself after being spotted in a compromising photo on display at the Gwangju Biennale.) Lack of media coverage reflects persistent fear that disclosure will bring public shame to the family, and still operates to keep gay youths silent in death as in life. Yun’s refusal to go quietly into the night is exemplified in the following passage from his farewell letter: “It’s worth dying if gay websites will be removed from the classification of ‘dangerous media’ and if it brings some realization to the fake Christians with their talk of Sodom and Gomorrah. If ignorant discrimination and the fucking society come to know one person [in the LGBT community], they’ll see the inhumanity of driving so many of us over a cliff.” It was at a memorial service commemorating the tenth anniversary of Yun’s death that Solidarity announced the annual literary award in his honor. More than a decade after Yun’s passing, South Korea’s sexual minorities still live in straitened circumstances. The consequences of being “outed” include bullying and ostracism by peers at school and rejection by family and relatives. Most troubling in connection with Yun, whose isolation led him to drop out of high school, are textbooks for high school students that debate the pros and cons of discrimination against sexual minorities rather than straightforwardly recognizing their humanity and their right to exist. Chang Suh Yeon, a lawyer at the Human Rights Legal Group Gonggam, reported: “Before 2009, textbooks almost never mentioned sexual minorities, but now some do. But recently anti-gay and conservative Christian groups have intervened to make LGBT minority rights into a moral debate in the classroom.” Inside and outside the schools, Christian groups protest gay rights agendas, routinely using misinformation about hiv/aids to argue that homosexuality is a “threat” to young people. The same arguments that were used in Uganda and Russia to promote anti-gay legislation have been used in South Korea, whose legal code outlaws any homosexuality-related content for minors. While exposed to anti-gay messages authorized by government and religious institutions, Korean youths are denied access to educational material on the topic. A Solidarity representative explains: “Under the logic that homosexuality is harmful to their own person, the homophobic powers form alliances with conservative journalists, political parties and Christians, and broaden the orbit of the right wing. Against this background, it’s hard to make the voices of sexual minorities heard.” Literature is an important means to broadcast those voices. The Yook award was created to bring South Korea’s LGBT voices together and provide a space for their stories. In a seemingly unfertile environment, the award, now in its second year, is a milestone for Korean gay politics and culture that’s intended to encourage young Korean writers to come out in their writing and to address topics of concern to gay people. It is also hoped that, through translation, the award will bring greater visibility to Korean literary studies and literature in the international arena.
Gabe Sylvian is a researcher in Korean LGBT history and literature at Seoul National University.
