VIEWPOINTS Landmarks in Literature by Asian American Lesbians

'F OR FUN THE OTHER DAY a lesbian colleague and I tried to rattle off as many names of U.S. lesbian writers as we could, limiting ourselves to the years between 1960 and 1980. In a few minutes, we came up with fifteen ames, but although we listed white, Jewish, and African American women and Latinas, we could not come up with even one Asian American.1 Asian American lesbians have had many reasons for silence. We are relative latecomers to the lesbian/gay writing scene, in part because it has taken us a long time to declare ourselves as lesbians. In the early 1980s, Kitty Tsui emerged as one of our few published writers and role models, and some of us exalted her fire-breathing poems, as if they-actually having appeared in print-were better proof of our existence than our own flesh and blood could ever be. In The Words of a Woman Who Breathes Fire (1983), a collection of poetry and prose, Tsui offered us an image of a proud, defiant, "no bullshit " woman, the dyke we all wanted to be: i am not afraid of talking back to those who presume to know who i am Mona Oikawa and Milyoung Cho provided helpful insights for this essay. 1 During the extensive process of revising this piece to address the many valid ques-tions raised by the special issue editors, I frequently wondered whether I was the right person to do this piece. After all, just because I am an Asian American dyke does not mean that I have read everything any Asian American dyke ever has written. I see this essay as a place for me to put forth political insights that I have developed over the years in my work as a publisher and activist and, thus, to make some small contribution to-ward the debates we shall continue to have about the purpose of literature, the direction of the lesbian/gay community, the direction of the Asian American community, and so on