#arthurdong

Remember Arthur? He’s back! Couldn’t move on without including this Chinese-American legend!!

Arthur Dong is a Chinese-American filmmaker who endeavours to shine light on the history of Asian immigrants in North America and act against anti-2SLGBTQIA+ prejudice. As he focuses on “documenting” Asian American history within the US, he actively uses real footage from historic productions of the past. 

Arthur is famous for his documentary “Forbidden City, USA” (1989), which is record of interviews and footages on the Forbidden City: the iconic San Francisco all-Chinese American night club in the 30s and 40s. 

Arthur points out how a certain amount of surviving performers from the Forbidden City expressed to be gay or lesbian, and how he endeavoured to carefully deliver their queer stories without “outing” them. As a gay Asian American himself, Arthur made sure the proper ethics of producing a documentary was conducted by respecting/honouring the requests of his queer interviewees. This is such an important move, as we see many documentaries where privacy and dignity of queer (specifically Trans folks) people are violated and disrespected (I mean, no offence/full offence to Jennie Livingston and “Paris is Burning”....now that’s a different story for a different Tumblr post;)).