Queer Land Walking
Korea has queered.
In 2018, I said, “Korea is queering.” It was. It actually still is. But this might imply the wrong thing. This is not to suggest that there is a battle to simply make more queer people vs. non-queer people, that there is a battle of attrition to win by numbers, to “out-gay” the rest of society by sheer force.
Such an argument makes little sense, as there is no way to make someone queer, just as one cannot turn a person straight, i.e. “pray away the gay.” Nay, this is really a battle of and for decency using the logic of 2022 Korean society’s deepest values — a sense of democracy and fairness.
HATRED ON A STICK
Back in 2018, when the battle lines were clearly drawn and things got physically intense, the Korean Christian/political right tried to make a semiotically strange argument for the supremacy of purity-as-goodness through an appeal to the goodness of Tradition.
It was a poorly-considered mix of signs and symbols, in which Tradition got literally turned upside-down (like the traditional Korean jang-gu drum above turned on its end and slammed like any ole’ western drum) while draping the traditional Korean hanbok chima (dress) with a jeogeori (blouse) of Hate. Her vest says “I hate homosexuality” and I fully believe her. A True Believer in the church of Hate, she boasts a rictus smile fully reminiscent of the culture of spritual/cultural death she channels as she strains to repurpose items of Tradition into new amulets of power.
But their demonstration was an abject failure and a slow-burning embarrassment. Turning relatively neutral-to-positive cultural symbols into would-be Spartan shields of hate is a pretty long-shot, Hail Mary shot, though I get the (very old) logic: Gay stuff is foreign and bad, whereas (our) inherent goodness is domestic; the Devil wears Prada and a red dress, whereas our good and fair maidens wear a hanbok. Bad, queer shit is foreign. Sugar and spice and freedom from vice is Korean. The iconography of good was argued in this strange display of accidentally fascist art that actually says the opposite of what the drum performance was saying:
The Blue Danube Waltz was, of course, exalted to become the very soundtrack of Nazi aesthetics, along with the idea of pure, Aryan maidens who would be both the moral and maternal engine of growth for a powerful German race. In all of my studies, across all of my knowledge, never have I ever seen maiden-ness itself — a display of young, virginal girls being nothing other than young, virginal girls — being put on display as an argument for cultural supremacy aside from the “Nazi League of German Girls”, pictured below.
In short, the fascist “art” staged by the Korean Right borrowed questionable iconography from the only real source of aesthetics that had a similar ideological conception of how women and girls, culture, and Tradition relate together. This fascist DNA was wrapped into the aesthetics of how Strauss’s music got used by the Nazis, and how white dresses, Mary Janes, and maternal beauty became State aesthetics. So it is easy to see how the aesthetically clumsy, intellectually dim minds who put together the screaming display of Tradition in 2018 became Accidental Fascists.
Not only is it fascist, it just might be child abuse.
Queerness Triumphant
But as I said at the start of this essay, queerness won. Because the queer argument was one a quiet, assiduous decency. Which defined the very high ground the Korean Christian Right tried to occupy but could not even take. The picture above is of two lesbian activists staging a wedding picture. It’s not the strident, throwing-gay-in-your-face, bare-buttocked gay man in backless, leather chaps threat to children that the Right claimed the crazed Lefties represented.
It’s simply a message of Love, uninterrupted. It is pure and normalized. And it’s plaintively insistent in that claim to normalcy. It speaks the Straight visual language of Love. And that’s what makes it so very, very smart. And that convergence of symbols and elements, put together by two ingenious activist/models, is what added up to become probably one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken in my career, and which shall surely outlive me.
Which is why the Lefty Queers won the symbolic war; because they speak the language of Christ better than the putative Christians do. If Christ’s is a message of unconditional Love, then what does it look like to adorn oneself in the literal accoutrements (and garments) of Hate?
One telling thing I noticed as an ongoing pattern in this year’s Queer Culture Festival was indeed a culture of openness, approachability, and a much more Christ-like Love. As a photographer, when I would go over to the Other side (of the Righties), I would be physically threatened, screamed at, and one time bodily attacked enough for the riot police to take notice and physically move the man with a hateful sign (not pictured here) away from me. I also noticed that when I took pictures of Righties holding signs in a public plaza at a political demonstration (both sides applied for permits to be there), I was constantly questioned (“Why are you shooting me??? WHO ARE YOU??”) or even threatened. And many of the “Right” worked hard to hide their faces behind their signs.
Logically speaking, if one is literally bearing a cross for one’s cause, why would one feel the need to hide one’s face, as every single person whom I photographed holding this cross did that day? I saw the cross passed between several anti-protestors that day and every single one of them hid their face when I pulled up my camera to shoot them.
This was very different from the many smiling faces I saw from the Queer Culture side, who were, without exception, friendly at the very least. And many of them showed their faces and smiled despite having every reason to suffer real and actual social discrimination in Korean society.
But they still put their faces and bodies on the line. And you could feel the smiles even underneath the masks worn for safety.
And It may be small thing, but the side the nuns go to is generally a safe bet to be the actual side of Right.
A Post-script on Strategy
Since Corona, the Righties have been fighting to win a War of Maneuver by dirty tricks and fighting to block permits to demonstrate and the like. They’ve abandoned waging a War of Position, of having a moral high ground because they actually have no moral positioning other than “y’all being young and having wild sex isn’t right!” Which is a tough argument to push against a younger generation that generally — and this is across nations and culture — tend to like to have fun and fuck more than the mostly senior citizens wagging their fingers at youngsters.
But the Right has pushed itself into a really strange War of Manuver that makes them an eventual loser on a War of Position on the matter of LGBTQ+ people in a society. They've tied themselves to the political fight over a mostly theoretical (once-attempted), omnibus Anti-discrimination Bill that is seen by the right as the Trojan horse for eventual elimination of the right to engage in sexual discrimination. Which places than politically on the side favor and the right to discriminate. That political position will not age well, especially since most people in the younger generation actually believe in the values of democracy, equality, and fairness that were won through the copious letting of the blood of activists on the political left. This political stance will not age well.
A clever and subtle tool to borrow from the American Right would be to put the Korean Right into a disadvantageous symbolic positioning by using loaded words against them, a la “pro-life.” In both English and Korean, the word "discrimination" (차별/cha-byeol) has heavily negative connotations, to the point that even American racists who are busy being racist don't want to be actually called “racist” and take great affront to it. Since the Korean Right has gotten hardcore behind the phrase “찹별금지법…반대 / opposed to the Anti-discrimination Bill” an rhetorically placed themsleves on the side of “opposed to antidiscrimination” as a political point, the Korean Left should pull the judo move of referring to the Korean Right as “pro-discrimination” as a political point and implied moral stance. Because everything is lined up that way and the right is so caught up in its own political maneuvering that it can't see how much it has put itself into an untenable moral position, on the side of unsmiling Hate, the side of physical threats, and the side that would accept across-the-board social discrimination as long as their singular political agenda point gets through.
Strangely, and for all the talk of Christ thrown around by Righties that day, the only Christian vibes from on high I got from people in City Hall last July 16 was from people sporting rainbows.
In the End
Put simply, the blurring of Korean modernity’s old-fashioned, rigid mental categories of strict gender binaries, singular loyalties, and pre-set statuses (e.g. boy/girl, simplistic nationalism, or one’s job as identity) have been smeared, well actually, queered to the point that those categories do not define the structure of social reality anymore. Young Koreans are not a political monolith, nor do they all want a singular thing. (Well, I’d say them wanting a fair shot at a stable job might be one.) But I do think it fair to say that the younger generation under the age of 30 do live in a universe that takes the notion of equality as a fundamental social right as defined by having equal access to the societal resources that allow for the realization of individual success and dreams. While it may sound like wishy washy woo woo, the words seong-gong (success) and ggoom (dream) are weighty words in the South Korean mind and neo-liberal, capitalist imaginary. When one uses the Old Ways of age, status, and connections power to not only get ahead but stifle the advance of others through society, one is playing with a dangerously volatile chemical fire.
It is simply not on culture code to push an agenda of blatantly denying social rights in the New Korea while demanding youth to be silent. And it simply just doesn’t look good to play the role of societal ggondae (a vampiric, old geezer) by using gapjil (an arrogant/authoritarian abuse of power) to cheat one’s way into maintaining social supremacy. It just doesn’t make Korean social sense.
And another key difference I notice about Korean “Pride” (besides the fact that Koreans using Korean don’t refer to the US-based notion of “Pride” parades or that term at all — a flub/mental conversion I notice a lot of North American observers of the Queer Culture Festival making — despite actively utilizing the catch-all, English term “queer”, cuz why reinvent the wheel) is that women and girls seem to be running thangs in the Korean case. Or at least, people are operating within the idiom of the “Girl,” conceptually speaking. If there is a standing waveform defining a key note that permeates Korean youth culture, its voice is a female soprano that can shatter wine glasses and one of its harmonic tones is feminism, which happens to be the third rail of Korean society right now, even as the chord grows slowly in power.
But one thing that queer and feminist activists seem to have figured out is a critically engaged pop femininity that is comfortable with using the putative shackles of the Girl as decorative armor, while also performing the same kind of judo in terms of the kinds of identity performance that invite smiles instead of sneers (before the Festival, the city warned the event organizers that overly exposing outfits or lewd dress could result in “problems in the future” regarding permits, which is a very Korean way of saying to not dress nasty or get shut down, while also setting up the excuse to actually do it later). And actually, to no almost one’s surprise amongst those familiar with Korean queer activism and organizing, people wore more pink than provocative, more cawaii and 귀여워 than Cardi.
And that’s why the smart money is on the long game of the youngsters in this thing. They know how to play their Position even as the other side just maneuvers around their chairs on the deck of their Titanic. Hell, the ggondae Righties probably even like that very song.
