Queer? Asian? Londoner? British? Migrant? Diaspora? What do these mean to us? pink dot LDN is both an event and a community.

The original Pink Dot started in 2009 in Singapore where, due to political and legal restrictions, the conventional Pride parade could not take place. Instead, Pink Dot there serves as an alternative to Pride with a greater emphasis on community and family. Over the years it has grown in popularity; so much so that Pink Dots are now found around all over Asia like Tainan, Hong Kong and Okinawa, and in Western cities with large Asian populations like Vancouver. You can even find Pink Dots running in parallel with conventional Pride parades, attesting to its appeal with certain queer East and Southeast Asian communities as an attempt to retell our LGBT stories outside, but also alongside, the dominant American and European narratives.

pink dot LDN’s hope is to create a space for LGBT people of Asian descent in the global city of London. Queer Asians are very poorly represented in the mainstream, but we have an important history here, and some of the needs of our community today, particularly around language, generations of migration and experiences of fitting in or standing out, are specific to us. We try to interrogate the impact of our own cultures on concepts of queerness, particularly around “shame”, but we also want to critically examine the default response of “Pride” through our cultural lens. Can we develop an Asian approach that avoids appropriating existing tropes of what queerness looks like, and connects to our own heritage?

By taking this opportunity to meet and talk, to share meals together, to learn about Asian art, history and culture and to make friends we hope that we can make sense of our shared experiences and explore together what that intersection of being queer and Asian means to us.

pink dot LDN – a different kind of Pride.