Gi Hyeong-do :: 1960-1989
13 June 2010
Yesterday I marched in the 11th LGBTQ Pride Parade in Seoul. It was by far the smallest, wettest (as in rain– mind the gutter) Pride Parade I’ve ever attended. It was also the bravest, since there are, as far as I know, no legal protections for queer folk in Korea. One misplaced photo could cost you your job. Hence, I have none to share.
And yet there weren’t so many masks. Countless gay high school students stomped around fearlessly, like they owned the place [which, indeed, they shall inherit]. Sopping rainbow flags were that much brighter. The dancing “Catwomen” were that much more provocative in their soaked black hot pants. The torrential downpour didn’t stop the march; weigh your struggles, and it’s a pretty inconsequential obstacle, when all’s said and done.
On the Facebook event page for the festival, someone posted a link to an article on the late Korean poet Gi Hyeong-do. Gi died of heart failure in a gay bar in Jongno sam-ga, not far from the location of yesterday’s Pride Parade:
His corpse was found in the early hours of a spring morning at the Pagoda Theater, a gay sex venue in Jongro 3-ga central Seoul, dead of a heart attack at the age of 29. The circumstances of Gi’s death and his homosexuality have been systematically covered up and/or ignored by mainstream scholars trying to “protect” his image from any association with sexual minorities.
I am saddened, yet not surprised, that Gi hasn’t been studied all that seriously since his premature death. At best (as the above excerpt describes), academic discussion carefully avoids the conditions of his life and circumstances of his death. Forget that academic tendency toward the death of the author– this selective, wilful ignorance extends to expunging Gi’s work of one of its most important contexts. And it denies Korean LGTBQ people an ally.
But don’t take my word for it; the article reproduces a number of poems in translation.
