ABSTRACT
Including more than twenty local lesbian and gay organizations, T'ung Chih Space Action Network (TCSAN) is a newly established coalition in Taiwan to launch a campaign for protecting gay rights using the Taipei New Park. 1 To achieve this aim, TCSAN organized a local event in 1996, inviting lesbians and gays in Taiwan to vote for ‘The Top Ten Queer Valentines’. A total of 5,000 votes were distributed through various channels, including lesbian and gay organizations, bars, newspapers, radio stations, and BBS (electronic bulletin board), and the final voting result was announced in the media on the eve of Saint Valentine's Day. This event epitomizes the recent attempt of Taiwan lesbian and gay organizations to bring queer issues out into mainstream culture through a media camping/campaign and has also had a crucial impact on both the studies of popular culture and queer movements in Taiwan. This chapter attempts to explore its strategies and to chart its significance. It is divided into four parts: the first sketches the paper's theoretical framework and its discursive point of departure; the second focuses on the event's strategy of bringing out queer desire; the third investigates the social impact caused by the activity and the unstable structure of identification/desire as revealed in the final list; and the fourth highlights the contradiction of homophobia/homophilia in Taiwan's popular culture.
