Asia Chevron. South Korea Chevron. Seoul Chevron. This Pride month, we are celebrating travel's capacity for discovery, renewal, and love through a lens of queerness—and its power to open up ourselves to seeing not just the world, but also who we are, in a new light. Rosetta and I were only a few drinks in, but I felt unsteady when I heard my friend offer the question. Short women with boyish haircuts dressed in collared shirts, slacks, and suspenders.
Taller women with flowing jet-black hair in short skirts that showed off their legs. Club Ace was different from most of the other hundreds of clubs and bars in Hongdae , a district north of the Han River in Seoul known for its urban and indie arts culture, in that it lacked men entirely. These rules resonated in most, if not all, of the lesbian clubs—or L clubs—of Seoul. I suppose that was the root of my apprehension—not speaking about desire but specifically of my desire for women.
There she had introduced me to several of her queer friends that she had grown up with. As a result, I inhabited a kind of liminality between being out and being closeted. People assume that if someone is anything other than cisgender heterosexual, they need to announce that in some way.
This was especially true growing up in the particular suburb of Toronto that I did. Outside of my queerness, which is fairly accepted there, there were very few East Asians. I would rather just exist and let people think what they want to think. Before I moved to Seoul—following my graduation from university—I had never been to a lesbian club. I had long been aware of my sexuality so did not feel the need to reach out to a community for support, and while Toronto is ripe with queer spaces, I could never imagine myself as part of them.
The lesbian clubs of Hongdae are not like gay clubs back home, which often are frequented with a mix of queer and non-queer individuals. Their rules are specifically meant to keep out cisgender heterosexual men, which also might keep out other members of the queer community such as trans individuals who identify differently from what sex they were assigned at birth.
