25 Years Out: Celebrating the Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY) Records

UPDATE: Registration has closed. Walk-ins will be admitted as capacity allows.

Co-presented by the A/P/A Institute at NYU, GAPIMNY, and NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives.

Since 1990, the Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY) has worked to empower queer and trans A/P/A people to create positive change through a range of social, educational, peer-support, cultural, and political activities. On the occasion of the organization’s 25th birthday, GAPIMNY’s records, which include video footage, flyers, and more documenting queer A/P/A history in New York, have been donated to the NYU Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, where they will be preserved and made accessible to community members, researchers, and students.

Current and former GAPIMNY co-chairs offer reflections on the organization’s 25-year history and visions for the future. Leeroy Kun Young Kang contextualizes the significance of GAPIMNY’s Records in regards to queer A/P/A community-based archives and history in New York City. Tim Johnson (Head, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives), Tim Naftali (Co-director, NYU Center for the United States and the Cold War and Associate Professor, NYU Wagner), and Jack Tchen (Founding Director, A/P/A Institute) offer welcome remarks.

Nothing Lost in Translation: Twenty-five Years of the Gay Asian Pacific Islander Men of New York, curated by A/P/A Graduate Archives Scholar Paul Tran, Jason Tseng (GAPIMNY), and Dennis Chin (GAPIMNY), will be on display and remain on view through Friday, December 11.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, NYU Archives and Public History Program, and NYU LGBTQ Student Center.

Timothy V. Johnson is Head of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU. He is a librarian and historian who studies the intersection of communism and the African American community and has authored articles in the journals Science & Society and American Communist History. Johnson joined NYU in 2005 as librarian for Africana Studies, Food Studies, and Anthropology. He holds an MA in African History with a minor in African American history from City College of New York, where his thesis was on the reaction to the Haitian Revolution in the United States, 1791-1804. Johnson holds a master’s degree in Library Science from Case Western Reserve University, specializing in Academic Librarianship, and a BA from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

Tim Naftali is co-director of the NYU Center for the United States and the Cold War and Associate Professor at NYU Wagner. Previously, he was the head of Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU. Naftali is the author of numerous books including Kruschev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of An American Adversary (2006) and George H.W. Bush (2007). Naftali holds both an MA and a PhD in History from Harvard, an MA from Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies and a BA in History from Yale University. He appears frequently to discuss public issues on C-SPAN and in other venues. Before joining NYU, Naftalia taught at the University of Virginia, Yale University, and the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Leeroy Kun Young Kang is an archivist, visual artist, and independent film curator based in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara with an emphasis in experimental video and a Master in Library and Information Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Kang’s main areas of research include the preservation and access of legacy audiovisual collections, experimental Asian Pacific film and video, and queer and transgender history and visual culture. Kang’s archival work includes collections at Brooklyn Academy of Music, New-York Historical Society, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MTV Networks, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art–where he also served as an Audiovisual Technician for the Library of Congress’ National Digital Stewardship award winning exhibition, XFR STN. His film and video work have screened both nationally and internationally at various festivals and venues including CAAMFest, Human Resources Los Angeles, MIX: New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, and Studio 2224 in Taipei. Since 2013, Kang has been an LGBT film curator for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and was recently a guest curator for Dirty Looks NYC’s biennial On Location, a month-long series of site-specific screenings of queer cinema around New York City.

Jack Tchen is the founding director of the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program at NYU. He co-founded the Museum of Chinese in America in 1979-80, where he continues to serve as senior historian. He is the author of New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 and Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown, 1895-1905, and co-editor, with Dylan Yeats, of Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear. His research interests include the present, past, and future of New York City; identity formations; trans-local cross cultural communications; archives and epistemologies; progressive pedagogy; decolonizing Eurocentric ideas, theories, and practices; and making cultural organizations and institutions more representative and democratic. He is co-principal investigator of Imagining America’s Community Knowledge Collaboratory.

Paul Tran is the Graduate Archives Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. He researches twentieth century US Cold War civil rights and transnational Asian American history. His current project examines how American higher education supported domestic and foreign policies after 1945. He is interested in the programs, epistemologies, and community partnerships Asian American students pioneered to advance the Third World Freedom Struggle, an anti-imperial movement demanding self-determination for people of color at home and abroad. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, Imagining America, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Paul writes and teaches spoken word poetry in NYC.