ABSTRACT
During the past decade, Asian lesbians began to form cultural, social, and political networks in major cities across the country. In May 1987 the first West Coast Asian/Pacific Lesbian Retreat, “Coming Out and Coming Together,” drew about eighty women, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area. The following October, a group of sixty Asian lesbians and gay men from across the country formed an Asian contingent at the 1987 March on Washington for Gay Rights in Washington, D.C. This organizing had ripple effects. In 1988, the Asian/Pacific Lesbian Network formed and sponsored the first national retreat in September 1989, bringing together over one hundred forty Asian and Pacific Islander lesbians from the U.S., Canada, and England. That same year, the Asia-based international organization of lesbians, the Asian Lesbian Network, held its first conference in December 1989 in Bangkok, Thailand. Networks of Asian and Pacific Islander lesbians continue to build in North America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and the Pacific Basin.
