Was it before or when college started when you started being cognizant of this difference?

JH: I actually felt it very early on. I think I’m one of those coming out stories where I knew very early on. I pretty much knew I was queer when I was in fifth grade or sixth grade, and I was just waiting until I could leave the house and go to college so I could come out and be myself. I think I was just planning a strategy.

I think I knew I was queer or gay. I first came out actually as bi. When I was in sixth grade, I remember writing something in my journal and wondering if I was gay or something different. I was just waiting until I was old enough to leave the house so I didn’t have to worry about my parents or anything like that. For me, that sense of freedom and independence came with leaving home to go to college, which I know not a lot of people have the privilege of experiencing. But for me, that was the occasion. Even in middle school and high school, I think whether it was in family spaces … I did go to church for a little bit, [but] I stopped at some point. Even in church spaces, that feeling of not quite belonging. Literally the word “queer” — sort of being odd, not fitting in. That feeling was something that I’ve learned to politicize, that it wasn’t just my fault. That me being queer is precisely what it means to live in a hetero-sexist or hetero-patriarchical society.

JC: I’m still in the process of figuring out how I identify with being queer. Partially, if I were to think about an “origin story,” it’s very much about feminism and reading. When I was in college, I remember reading about the lesbian continuum. That was the first time that I realized that there’s this thing called compulsive heterosexuality and that gender and sexuality could be a continuum. I think that was the first time that I opened up my mind to the possibility that there weren’t just two genders and that you’re either straight or queer. It was all intellectual and political until I got to grad school and was in a community where there was a lot more queer — you know, gay and lesbian, bi, not so many trans people at the time — but there was just more of an openness. It was then that I met Judy. I have to say that I did not think it was a big deal. I didn’t even think it was a big [enough] deal to have to tell my parents. I thought, It’s not going to last. You know what I mean? I hadn’t had any relationships that had lasted up until that point. And so I thought, This isn’t going to be some different pattern. I’ll just play it out until it ends. I was so used to basically never telling my parents the truth about anything. I lived far away from them. It was really not a big deal.

JH: For context, you’re also not a planner.

JC: Yes, maybe I live a bit in denial. Anyway, I think that is, for me, what gave me the space not to feel fear and not to be worried about, for example: What are the costs of giving up compulsive heterosexuality? I think I kept asking [Judy], “How do you know when you’re going to break up?” We would hear about all these couples breaking up around us, and I’m like, “What are the signs?”

JH: She would ask me all [emphasis added] the time.

JC: I was thinking, Okay, if we break up soon, I won’t have to deal with this. I don’t have to deal with telling my parents. And then it’s been how long? 

JH: Almost 25 years [laughs]. 

JC: Anyways! The good part of that is that I was able to work through a lot of my own fear, a lot of my own internalized homophobia in a supportive community, and to really come to terms with the fact that I did feel fear of what it would be like to choose to spend my life with a woman and what that would mean. How would people look at me? I think that’s what happens when you’re cisgender, female, and straight-passing. I would never have to deal with people thinking I was queer until they saw me with Judy. I moved [through] the world exactly like I did before. That was probably like a security blanket. Now, partly because Judy and I don’t work in a workplace where it’s stigmatized. Our first job was in Canada. We could have gotten married if we wanted to.

JH: People kept pressuring us!

JC: But you know, we have some political opinions about marriage. It’s not a huge deal, but it was never important to us. So we could have gotten married; we could have not gotten married. We work in a job now where we’re recognized as partners. In some ways, I feel like I’ve had a really easy path.

JH: For some reason, I just remembered — Do you remember going to the dog park in Oakland? You took the dogs a couple of times. She (Jenny) came and said, “You need to come with me. These lesbians are really mean, and they won’t talk to me.”

JC: Only when I was with Judy would they be nice to me [laughs]. I was not cool.

Do you believe in the concept of coming out? How was that? Have you ever come out to your family?

JC: Yes, I did. Eventually. I delayed it until the last possible minute, and if I think back on it, it wasn’t very fair to my parents, especially my mom. I’ve had a great relationship with my mom, partly because, as an adult, I started to learn Korean, and so I started to understand her better. It’s funny; she knew that I would perhaps be making a decision that she would not be 100% happy with. But our unspoken language throughout the time I was in grad school, in the many of our … we’ve [been together since] what, 2000? Maybe for five or six years, it was, ‘Jenny, I trust you. I know who you are.’ That was basically my mom preparing me to never disappoint her, giving me time to sort of — I don’t know, whatever was happening with Judy.

JH: Let’s make this more concrete. Whenever her mom visited, I was her roommate. We rearranged rooms and pretended like we were roommates. I don’t think anybody actually believed us.

JC: We were best friends!

JH: We had been together for five or six years. We were such best friends that when she got a job and needed to move to Vancouver, Canada, guess who was coming along? The roommate! So clearly, we had to tell them then.

JC: I came out to my mom when Judy was out of town, and we had two dogs. I had been at an all-day conference, and I literally had 15 minutes before I had to go back for dinner. My mom told me, ‘I’m booking the ticket.’ So I told her, “You can’t come.” And she said, ‘Why?’ I said, “Because Judy is coming.” And then she said, ‘Why?’ And I said, “Because I love her, but I have to go right now. I swear I will call you back!”

So that was my cowardly way of coming out to my mom, and it wasn’t good after that. I didn’t give her any time to process it, and I certainly did not think about it in a mature or constructive way. But I did go home. I did go home, and I have to say that my sister played a huge role. My sister is the oldest, and unlike me, she is not a pleaser. She’s super black-and-white. She thinks like a lawyer; she went to law school. She basically told me, ‘You have to grow up. You have to deal with the fact that you’re going to disappoint Mom and Dad. You just have to be okay with that.’ So for me, my coming out story with my parents is both about telling them that I’m queer and that I have a life partner, but also just growing up and disappointing them and being okay with the fact that I was going to live my life in a way that they didn’t support and that we would have to work through that. We have, and I feel really grateful that my sister has been great. My parents eventually did come around.

JH: Very quickly.

JC: Yeah, very quickly. I think it makes a difference that we’re not in a super conservative Korean Christian community, and I also don’t have any relatives in the U.S.. So you know, it’s easy for my parents to say I’m just this single old spinster professor, you know what I mean? Maybe not include that spinster part [laughs]. I’m like a single woman who’s a professor and didn’t get married. I think that’s an identity that they can tell their friends, as opposed to having to tell people I’m queer. Although now they’re getting okay with that as well. We’re all sort of adapting.

JH: Part of our story, as I’m sure you can tell, is that we’re really different. We have different personalities, [had] different childhoods, all kinds of differences … We can talk all day about the ways we’re different. She loved the color pink. I’m like, “Who, what? You actually painted your room pink?” And Jenny’s coming out story also couldn’t be more different from my coming out story because, [as] I said earlier, I [had been] planning on it since sixth grade. I was waiting for it, and I made it happen. Once that was done, there was the next thing and the next thing. It doesn’t mean that it went well by any means. I was not any more generous or fair to my parents and their struggles any more than Jenny was in her rushed way of coming out. But I wanted to come out, that’s for sure.

My parents probably took a few years to come around and feel okay enough to actually be okay. Interacting with my girlfriends, or in this case, Jenny — we’ve been together since 2000. So it has been 23 years. That’s a long time. We’ve traveled together, her parents and my parents. We had a conference in Austria once—that was the first time we all traveled together, right? To Vienna, Austria, her parents and my parents, and Jenny and me. Actually, before that, the first time her parents and my parents met in person was in Korea because we all happened to be in Korea at the same time, which had never ever happened before. We [said], “Oh, why don’t we try to all have dinner together?” This was maybe 2015 or something like that, and we were already many many years in our relationship. It’s not like we had just started dating. I’d asked friends in Seoul, “We want to have dinner with our parents. Where should we meet?” Several of them recommended this restaurant as the perfect place to have dinner with our parents.

JC: Yong Su San.

JC: In Seoul.

JH: Yeah, we were in Seoul. So we make a reservation at this restaurant, and we all show up. I sit down and look around and every single table is basically newlyweds or newly engaged couples and their parents.

JC: People celebrating their engagements.

JH: It’s the [emphasis added] place for parents to meet the other parents. The food was fine. They got along well enough that, a few years later, when Jenny happened to have a conference to attend in Vienna, Austria. We thought, Why not make it a big family trip? We rented a huge Airbnb and stayed there together: her parents and my parents. We traveled for — what is that, like six nights? Six nights and seven days. A long European trip. And it was good. They get along. My parents respect the way Jenny’s parents respect her deeply, and they value our individual presence and our presence as a couple in our families. They respect our relationship.

Do you think that Koreatown is an inclusive place for LGBTQIA+ people? If so, why? If not, why not?

JH: When I think about L.A. Koreatown, the first thing I think of, surprisingly, is the church my family used to go to. So if I think of Koreatown in the Korean community in L.A. based on these conservative, religious spaces, then of course, it’s not a very friendly or welcoming space for LGBTQ folks, feminists, social justice activists, communists, people who are political dissidents, or any of those things. Even though those spaces do exist in general, I think Koreatown is a pretty conservative space. Another way a lot of people think of Koreatown, not in terms of churches, is around businesses. Businesses that we shop at, like markets or restaurants. These businesses are also not always welcoming or friendly spaces, depending on who you are and what you’re able to afford to buy and spend money there, and that sort of thing.

What I’ve been thinking about a lot is how can we [feel] about Koreatown not as a space of churches or businesses? If we minus those two kinds of spaces from the space of Koreatown, what do we get? We actually get nonprofit organizations, social service organizations, even health services and doctor’s offices. Those are also the reasons why a lot of people, a lot of immigrants, and a lot of Korean Americans come and continue to come and spend time in L.A. Koreatown, as well as the more informal social spaces, right? That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. How can we de-center businesses as if they represent all of Koreatown? How can we think of Koreatown and the Korean American community without only centering the religious spaces? What would that look like? I think there are a lot of possibilities, and we’re trying to create more spaces like that.

JC: When I think of Koreatown, I honestly think a lot about food. That might sound cliché, but growing up, we didn’t have access to any good food — no markets or things you can get in Korea. Especially for me, having spent so much time in Korea. The first time I moved to L.A., it was very clear to me that we needed to live in Koreatown. When we first got jobs at UCLA, we were in faculty housing on the west side. And I was miserable here. I just thought, Oh my god. We couldn’t even get takeout. It was really frustrating.

JH: I’m like, “But you grew up with white people!” [laughs]

JC: I’m very food-motivated. So you know, for me, that’s a very clear relationship that I have with Koreatown. Not so much the businesses, but just the access to the diversity of things you can eat and the social spaces that come with that. Another thing that’s interesting to me because I didn’t grow up in Koreatown — because Koreatown, especially L.A. Koreatown, has loomed so large in my memory and my own psychic space about what it means to be Korean American — is that I’m continually kind of amazed with [it]. There are so many contradictions here. I think it’s huge. I think some of the most innovative and progressive organizing is happening here in Koreatown, including KYCC. Then, some of the most old-school ’80s movement organizing is preserved in L.A. Koreatown, to the extent that we don’t see it in Korea. L.A. Koreatown is such a fascinating place because it [can] hold so much of that — like food diversity, social diversity, and political diversity. It gives many different people a way in which they might not be comfortable, but it is some kind of connection to things. So I appreciate that and feel lucky to live here.

What are your hopes for the growth of the community in Koreatown, and what changes do you hope to see?

JH: I’m really inspired by the kinds of cross-racial and cross-ethnic, multi-ethnic conversations that are taking place among people who call Koreatown home — whether that’s Korean Americans, Latin Americans, Central Americans, and diverse immigrants — the kind of multiethnic convergence that is happening in Koreatown. I like seeing efforts to de-center only certain Korean experiences and instead highlighting the intersections and encounters. That’s where a lot of interesting hope and challenges [exist] for sure because it’s also going to be complex, even more complicated, right? A lot of really exciting stuff can come out of that. I would also want to make sure that, whether it’s Korean restaurants or markets or churches, they abide by laws, for instance, that prohibit discrimination and that they also learn to respect and welcome the diversity of their customer base. So I do think that there are a lot of interesting things that could happen there.

JC: Koreatown attracts so many different types of Koreans and Korean Americans, especially Korean Americans who have long been organizing a more collective, emancipatory, social justice-forward future. LGBTQ folks are leading many of the most interesting changes happening in Koreatown. Even in drumming — because I drummed when I was in my 20s — I feel like the drumming communities here have been absolutely transformed, and in really positive ways, by queer and trans Koreans.

[Since] we spent a lot of time in Korea and I’ve learned a lot from Judy’s research, there’s a lot of change happening in Korea that people in Korean-America don’t know about — partly because people in Korean America are very limited by their families. Not a lot of people have cool, progressive Korean American parents. You know, I think even [going to the series of film screenings that Judy organized for the documentary Coming to You] showed so many queer Korean Americans that [exciting changes] are happening in Korea. It’s not going to be Koreans learning from Korean Americans about how to think about the complex family politics of coming out; actually, Korean Americans have a lot to learn from Korea. I see that as kind of shaping the future, this sort of give-and-take, where Korean Americans who really understand what it means to push their families and are able to be out in a way that I think Koreans in Korea might not have experienced can share that experience. Whereas Koreans who are pushing for film festivals, more stories to be shown, and more cultural spaces to be created — that comes back here. So I find that exciting.

JH: To take another stab at the answer, one thing that we’re already seeing change is just how complicated the idea of generations is. For a long, long time, many of us assumed that first-generation meant immigrant, and that meant parents, and that meant old-school, and that meant Korean and conservative and Christian. Somehow, second generation meant everything else — more American, more queer, more free, less bound to tradition, that sort of thing. I think we have to make sure that we don’t get stuck with that kind of binary formula. I don’t think that’s ever really been the case, and I think the reality has been a lot more complicated than that. When I think about the Koreatown space in L.A. and the Korean American community, I imagine a queer, 50-something Korean person, and I imagine a straight, churchgoing young Korean American person also being in the same space in Koreatown. Once we get rid of those binaries with Koreans there and Korean Americans here, old people there and young people here, maybe we can understand better how these differences work and how commonalities can also be forged out of those differences.

What is your favorite thing about each other?

JH: My favorite thing is just how different Jenny is from me. To be honest, it really makes me question everything. It makes me question things that I had never questioned before. Everything from “You like what?” to “You really thought that?” Because it destabilizes — what would be the word? What’s the opposite of normalization? Or the opposite of normalize? It makes me question what I take as a given. I appreciate that. It gives me perspective throughout life.

JC: What do I like about Judy? Like Judy [said], we are so different. One of the differences I appreciate is that Judy is one of the most present people I know. I think I’m such a multitasker. But that means I often have my head in too many different places, and I’m not centered and grounded. You’re (referring to Judy) one of the most present and grounded people I know. Which, for me, is calming. One thing I appreciate about Judy is that I can really get in a tizzy about things, and Judy will talk me down. She’ll help me not only detach myself from a spinning-out episode but also remind me that it’s important to take a step back and, you know, assess: Is this worth spending [time] on?

JH: I was waiting for this to turn into a complaint, but it didn’t.

JC: Oh! [Laughs].

JH: Because I also require you to be present, but …

JC: Yeah, I don’t pay attention.

Where do you feel most comfortable with each other?

JH: It’s so cheesy, but I think as long as we’re somewhere in the same space, same room together, even if we’re not talking or interacting. Yeah, that’s all. We also currently have three dogs, so it’s become sort of an unruly pack. Just yesterday — was it yesterday? We went to Griffith Park for a walk and were just able to do things together, enjoy the weather, and enjoy each other.

JC: We’ve been really lucky. A lot of academic couples have to contend with living apart or having to commute, and that’s one thing we’ve never had to do. I’m so grateful partially because we’ve traveled a lot together; we’ve lived in a lot of different places. And we’ve been able to do that all together. So I think that one of the reasons we’re still together is that we’ve been able to grow in every place that we’ve been. Not to say that we don’t fight.

JH: Interestingly, her parents have been together [a long time]. They’re still together, and the same thing is true for my parents. My parents worked together for many years at the same store and they’re now retired together. This kind of relationship, this kind of partnership, is also what I’ve learned to appreciate as lifelong companionship and friendship. It’s work and it’s life.

JC: One [thing] I’ll add is that I don’t often agree to do these types of oral history interviews. Judy had to ask me many times. I remember when we were in Toronto, there was a feature like “Partners in Life” and “Partners and Work” or something like that. Partly because we work together, we’ve been writing this book together. [Something] I also really appreciate about our partnership is that there are so many things that we’ve collaborated on, whether it’s political, whether it’s activist, whether it’s professional, whether it’s taking care of our dogs, so I do feel as if there was anyone I trust most in the world with my life, that would be Judy.

JH: I would hope so [laughs].

JC: I never say anything nice about you. So this is nice. I trust you. I trust you.

JH: Better get this on the recording.