QBits

South Korea celebrates gay pride

This Saturday sees the 13th annual Korea Queer Love Festival in Seoul

31 May 2012| By Anna Leach

South Korea will celebrate gay pride on Saturday with the Korea Queer Love Festival (KQLF) in Hanbit Media Park in central Seoul. According to the website, this is the 13th KQLF in Seoul.

Indicating the stigma around homosexuality in South Korea, people at the festival who don’t want to be photographed will wear a ‘no photography’ sticker and a red band. Only press will be permitted to take photographs and videos of the festival, and they must get permission of the individuals captured before publishing.

In the run up to Saturday’s event, the festival included an art exhibition, Living with Red Ribbon, that tackles the negative perceptions of people with HIV and AIDS in Korea. ‘We hope this is useful to get right information about HIV/AIDS and a great opportunity to represent the activists’ opinion on this subject,’ the festival organizers said.

Tonight the festival is holding a discussion about anti-gay discrimination in South Korea, following the protests against Lady Gaga’s concert earlier this month.

The festival also celebrates the end of the 12th Seoul LGBT Film Festival which ran from 24 to 30 May with Korean films (Girl Princes, Wandering Stars, Summer Days in Bloom) and international films (The Perfect Family, Loose Cannons, Children of Srikandi).

Despite being more developed than Asian neighbours North Korea and China, South Korea’s LGBT community is still relatively underground, with few openly gay clubs, public displays of affection or celebrities.

A queer Seoul occupation

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

BY NATASHA BARSOTTI - Fifty-four said yea, 28 said nay, and four decided not to commit.

After six days of protest and armed with 97,000-plus signatures, queers in Seoul, South Korea got the result they were hoping for. The Seoul Municipal Council’s passage of a Students Rights Ordinance with all clauses intact, including ones that affect the well-being of queer students.

Articles 6, 13, 20 and 28 speak to issues of freedom of privacy, non-discrimination, and the right to access resources -financial and otherwise - for students regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity.

It was the queer-specific clauses that bent the council out of shape, particularly a few conservative folks on the council’s education committee that singled out sexual orientation and gender identity for exclusion from the draft bill.

In an interview with Grace Poore posted on The New Civil Rights Movement site prior to the final vote, Jihye Kim, of Common Action for Sexual Minority Students in Seoul, said: “The significance of the Seoul Students Rights Ordinance cannot be overemphasized. Seoul is not just the capital of Korea but also the center of everything in my country. A negative outcome now would send a dangerous message to schools in the rest of the country. And it would further delay the possibility of a national anti–discrimination law that would protect LGBT people.”

Kim’s reaction after the vote: “We fought, and we won. We debated and we taught people. So many of you participated in and passed along the petition and sent us support statements. The whole process was more educational than just political.”

That South Korean queers have a well-positioned ally in the person of UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has been helpful. Poore notes a Dec 8 statement he made to a UN panel on Ending Bullying on The Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, where he expressed concern over the bullying and violence that young people confront because of their presumed sexual orientation or gender identity.

“But the roots go deeper,” Ban Ki Moon added. “They lie in prevailing harmful attitudes in society at large, sometimes encouraged by divisive public figures and discriminatory laws and practices sanctioned by State authorities.”