An Asian man with shoulder-length hair reads aloud from a letter he's written to his mom.
"I'm not gay because of the food you fed me while I was growing up. I'm not gay because of the medicine you gave me when I was sick," he says. "It's just who I am," another man with shorter hair reads from his own letter.
These two men are joined by a queer woman, a drag queen, a transgender woman, and a transgender man, all of them of Asian descent and reading letters to their own parents who immigrated to the U.S. They pour their hearts out in their letters, talking about suicidal thoughts, hardships they've endured as queer and gender non-conforming people, and feeling guilty for adding extra burden on their parents' shoulders.
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Yet, their parents aren't with them, and we don't know whether they'll ever actually read these letters. The video, “Unspoken: Asian Americans On Coming Out To Immigrant Parents,” shows what these six people would say if language and cultural barriers didn't exist and it hopes to show Asian parents of LGBTQ kids that "they don’t have to choose between loving their children and being faithful to their culture or to their religion," filmmaker Patrick G. Lee told The Huffington Post.
The nearly 7-minute video is just a short part of a longer documentary Lee plans to screen at at Asian American community events across the country and use as part of family acceptance support groups for LGBTQ people.
Lee, a queer Korean man, came out to his own parents this summer but realized that differences in American and Korean culture kept him from opening up as much as he wanted, he told HuffPost. The video, in addition to helping parents of LGBTQ kids understand, is for "all of us who remember growing up and feeling weird or different from everyone else," he said.
Watch the video below:
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