Despite hysterical calls for the community
to boycott the annual Tet parade in Orange County's Little Saigon if gay
Vietnamese Americans were allowed to participate, gay Vietnamese Americans
not only marched today but were welcomed as one of many groups involved in
the festivities.
This is according to Hao-Nhien Vu, the acclaimed veteran journalist at Bolsavik.com.
"With the religious leaders' boycott in the balance, the Vietnamese gay contingent
marched in the Tet Parade and was just as well received and well applauded
as everybody else, ending the controversy on an up note," he observed. "The
[gay and lesbian] contingent came in at number 70, right after the former
South Vietnamese armed forces peoples, and the audience was applauding too.
Reportedly there were about three or four boo-ing at some point."
I'm not willing to move on so fast. The attempted boycott was, in part, the
brainchild of Westminster Republican councilman Andy Quach, a Chapman University
graduate who always makes a big deal about his own family's flight from persecution
after the Vietnam War. In a letter to his "compatriots," he called gay Vietnamese
Americans "these people" and assured folks that if it was up to him he would
openly discriminate.
A few religious leaders like Hoi Dong Lien Ton, Tran Thanh Van and Catholic
Rev. Si Nguyen held a pre-parade press conference to support Quach. There,
Nguyen admitted he's a deceitful propagandist and bigot. "During Tet, we
don't bring up ugly matters. Anything unseemly in the family we hide it away.
We only bring out what's good," he said, according to Bolsavik.com
The last time I saw Quach was several year ago. He was eating dinner with
KCAL's Leyna Nguyen at table next to me. The last time I wrote about him
was in August when I first obtained his mug shot after he got extremely drunk
late one night, crashed his car into several other vehicles and then slammed
into an electrical pole. The incident sparked a 12-hour electrical outage
for more than 300 houses. After weeks of unsuccessfully plotting a way out
of his crimes, he eventually pleaded guilty.
So was Quach's weird, out-of-the-blue anti-gay stunt an attempt to divert
attention away from his own character problems? Who knows? But what has emerged
is a picture of a juvenile politician who can't handle his liquor and isn't
secure in his own sexuality.
As Bolsavik.com points out, Quach--who based his anti-gay stance on the assertion
that the parade should be a "traditional" family affair--himself participated
in the parade and was driven in a vehicle that carried semi-pornographic
images on the rear hood: three, young barely-clothed Asian girls pulling
their underwear down and exposing breasts in a strip joint. One girl in the
artwork is even massaging her vagina on a steel pole for the audience. Go
to Bolsavik.com to see the images.
--R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
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Quach's 2009 drunk driving mug shot
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