Kyoung Park, former SC member of GAPIMNY, wrote a beautiful tribute for GAPIMNY’s 25th anniversary:
“Theater artists are my tribe, but queer Asian-Americans are my community. Congratulations to Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY) for 25 years of life! I had the most amazing time volunteering for this organization and it totally changed my life.
This one time, I volunteered myself to be auctioned off to raise funds for Q-Wave, our sister organization, in an event called Dumplings and Dates. Before I was auctioned off, I bid on a handsome fellow but was constantly outdone by this guy’s friend. When I was auctioned off, this handsome fellow bid on me, and he won! So I took this guy out to see Fernanda Coppel’s “Chimichangas and Zoloft” at the Atlantic Theater as out first, platonic date. We kept seeing each other and marched together in Pride 2012.
Another year later, for pride 2013 (the year DOMA was repealed), I told this handsome fellow on the corner of 32nd Street and 6th Av that this was the street on which I had come out to my father. And at that very corner, I asked Danny Lim to marry me and he said yes.
I know that my life wouldn’t be the way it is now, if I had not found my community and a safe space where my problems were not “abnormal,” that my race didn’t make me a “minority,” and that my life experience didn’t make me “the only one.”