How to say gay in vietnamese
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You are Straight
And your ally is gay.
What you are gonna do ?
Báo cáo bài viết này
How do you say 'I'm gay' in Vietnamese?
Finding the words to express ourselves can be tricky. Conclusion the words to describe our sexual identities, in a second language where some words aren’t fully translatable? That’s even more challenging.
Last summer, staff at Oakland’s Asian Health Services had an idea to construct a glossary of LGBTQ terms translated in Burmese, Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean. While the reference was originally meant for doctors and translators, it’s proving useful in other ways as adv.
LOTUS DAO: Whereas I think in the home, favor my home, the sort of standard way of contact is very non-verbal. And for me, as a second generation person, that can be very distressing. 'Cause I'm growing up and I'm like, "But I'm a queer woman , dammit!" My mom's like, "Don't communicate about it."
Click the audio player above to listen to the complete story.
Lotus Dao remembers asking his mother at young age, “What if I appreciate girls?”
His mom was cooking on the stove. She stopped, looked at him, and said “No.”
“I was like, ‘What do you mean, no?’” Dao said.
“She was like ‘You’re not,’ ‘You don’t,’ and I could tell she was kind of struggling. But I remember back then I was confused, so I was like ‘I guess you’re right, I guess I can’t,’” enjoy girls, Dao said.
Today, Dao lives in Oakland and is transitioning from female to male. But when he was going to high school in Garden Grove, California, where he was raised in a Vietnamese-speaking home, he identified as a lesbian. As he started developing feelings for women, he became more aware of words for sexuality through websites like MySpace. He asked his mother if there was a word for “gay” in Vietnamese. She told him the pos was bê đê. “That’s the first Vietnamese pos that I learned for anything that wasn’t ‘heterosexual,’” Dao said. “We were kind of conservative, but it’s common for Vietnamese families. You don’t chat about sex. You don’t talk about sexuality.”
Before starting his transition, Dao used the word his mother taught him to appear out as a dyke to his family during h