Oscar Trinh came out in stages starting at the age of 15 four years ago and has struggled to connect with other LGBT Asians in the South Bay.
"My initial experience is I live in San Jose and there are relatively few gay Asian men. It is hard to find young guys out there to get involved in the community," said Trinh, 19, now a student at Evergreen Valley College. "It was definitely difficult finding other queer people of color. Even then being the sole Asian guy at times, I did feel culturally separate, even though I didn't advertise my Asianness that much but it is the first thing people saw."
Nor did he learn much about the LGBT community at school.
"I have always wanted to get a sense of gay history because I feel like a lot of youth, especially gay youth, don't have a sense of where we came from in terms of gay culture," said Trinh.
So when he heard about a casting call looking for teenagers to interview LGBT seniors, Trinh jumped at the chance. He made the cut and ended up being matched with Ron Rebholz, a professor emeritus of English at Stanford University who is a noted Shakespeare scholar.
In the resulting video, Coming Out in the 1950s: Stories of Our Lives, Rebholz discusses with Trinh the fear he felt hiding his sexuality during the McCarthy era when the government conducted witch hunts to ferret out homosexuals and communists.
Trinh said he was especially struck by "how lonely and depressing his life was when he had to stay in the closet." Despite their age differences, Trinh said he could relate to Rebholz's personal story.
"Yeah, I definitely felt the same loneliness," in high school, said Trinh.
The 14-minute video was created under the auspices of the newly formed Pye/Harris Project. Founded by 94-year-old Edgar Pye, whose 60-year life partner Robert Harris died in 2006, the project is aimed at educating LGBT youth that they are part of a larger community whose members have struggled with many of the same issues they are now experiencing.
The concept was hatched by San Francisco public relations professional Phil Siegel, 52, during the National Equality March on Washington in 2009, for which Siegel served as co-communications chair. At the time the movie Milk, a biopic about the late gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, represented the first time many LGBT youth saw a part of queer history dramatized on the big screen.
"I met so many enthusiastic, excited young people who only knew about Harvey Milk. They don't know a lot about our history, as well they shouldn't. They aren't taught about it in schools," said Siegel. "There is no available information for these kids."
Initially, Siegel envisioned creating a 10-part video series on LGBT history. He enlisted the help of Pye, who lives in Oakland and contributed $20,000 to underwrite the first video. But when he pitched his idea to a group of out youth, Siegel said it flopped.
"The project idea was to have a historian do the talking head kind of thing. We would do it in 10 parts, with the first one starting with the 1890s and then different decades from there," said Siegel. "I did a focus group with a bunch of kids and they said that is like school for them. We did more focus groups and we realized we needed to have kids talk directly to the elders. It couldn't be any historian; it had to be people who lived it."
Jason Galisatus, 17, who is gay and lives in Redwood City, was picked to interview lesbian pioneer Phyllis Lyon. President of the Aragon High School Gay Straight Alliance, Galisatus said he felt some trepidation at first with having to question a person he considers to be "an absolute legend."
"She was intimidating because she is one of the mothers of the gay movement. It was a little unsettling but at the same time inspirational," said Galisatus, who said he knew about Lyon from news coverage of her marrying her late partner, Del Martin, back in 2004 and again in 2008.
"I saw them all over the news, so when Phil told me I would be interviewing her I was a little star struck," he said. "What surprised me was how down to earth and normal she was. It was the most amazing thing hearing how her story is so similar to everyone else's. But she was in a position to make change and she took that opportunity."
In the interview, Lyon talks about how she knew nothing about the lesbian community until she met Martin. At a time when being gay was not openly discussed and there was no Internet to help connect people, how LGBT people met one another was something Galisatus said he was interested in learning about.
"My biggest question was how do you know you are gay when you don't know what gay is. She learned all about the lesbian community through Del," he said. "That was a very romantic love story. At the same time, it is a poignant example of the isolation people experienced at that time in the 1950s."
The project also interested Linnea Weld, 16, an Oakland resident who is straight and volunteered on the unsuccessful campaign in 2008 to block passage of Proposition 8, the ban against same-sex marriage voters passed that November.
"As a human being I see it as my job or everyone's job to seek equality. Prop 8 just struck me as wrong," said Weld.
For teens, gay and straight alike, who lived through the Prop 8 fight, it is important for them to know that the LGBT community's struggle for acceptance is decades old, said Weld.
"My friends who are thinking about gays and the LGBT community are not really thinking about the McCarthy era. The current LGBT issues like Prop 8 is what comes to mind. It is important to remember this history of issues with LGBT rights," said Weld, who interviewed Hadley Hall, an ROTC member who was outed and summarily discharged.
To date, close to 7,000 people have watched the video online, which can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGOnoPnmeH4. And reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.
In the comments, one person wrote, "God bless the children for remembering and emphasising that THERE WERE people like us yeeeears before and they still lived to talk about it !!!!!"
Another wrote, "This was very touching. As an older gay man i mostly feel invisible in the gay community. It was nice that you listened and said kind things ... rather than just snubbing these people."
The response has been a surprise for the teen journalists.
"I had no idea this amount of people would be seeing it. The older LGBT audience really has been inspired by it," said Galisatus. "The reason for that is it is coming from the point of view of youth. I think the older generation of gays have this perception the youth don't know or don't care about our community's history. For me doing this project is a way to prove everybody wrong."
If he can come up with more funding, Siegel said he would like to do more videos focused on the coming out experience during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
"We would like to show how the coming out experience has changed since 1950 but in many ways the issues are the same. That is going to be fascinating for the kids," said Siegel. "Also we would like to talk about coming out in the age of AIDS. Teens today were born long after AIDS became part of the national dialogue. They don't realize the fears."
For now he is entering the video into LGBT film festivals and hopes to have its big screen debut at this year's Frameline if it is selected. He has also sent it to festivals in Los Angeles, Boston, and New York.
And he is hoping the project goes viral like the "It Gets Better" videos aimed at preventing LGBT teen suicides. As with that project, where individuals from celebrities to political figures have taken it upon themselves to tape their own messages, Siegel would like to see teens across the country interview out elders in their community and upload the videos to YouTube.
"I know we are all hoping there will be more videos," said Weld.
For additional information, or to obtain DVD copies of the video for groups of gay youth, visit http://pyeharrisproject.org.