BY IRENA FISCHER-HWANG, LINA TAKAHASHI AND GWENDOLYN WU

Note: Some subjects asked to be identified only by their first names because they have not come out to their entire communities.

An hour into the argument, Le Tang, a Chinese-Vietnamese American lesbian woman from San Jose, decided that she just wanted it to be over.

She had been dropping hints about her relationship with her girlfriend Lexi Reichman to her parents for days, showing them pictures from their recent trip to El Paso and discussing the couple’s plans to study abroad in Copenhagen. Finally, two days before Christmas and just as Tang left the bathroom, her mom cornered her in the hallway and demanded to know what Reichman and Tang were.

They raised their voices at each other. Her mom called her “broken” and “tainted.”

Tang started to cry. She had always been close with her mother, the undisputed matriarch of their family, from whom she had inherited her headstrong attitude, confidence, and smile. Tang thought telling her mom about her sexuality would strengthen their bond, but she never expected this.

So she told her parents she would break up with her girlfriend just to end the fight.

There are many Asian American LGBTQ stories like these, with imperfect endings that never make it to mainstream discussions of queer identity. Asian Americans contend with mothers who mourn their coming out as if they have lost their children, and face extended families who sometimes lack the language to comprehend their complex sexual identities.

Tang never saw these stories in the coming out videos — mostly featuring white gay men — that were so ubiquitous on YouTube.

“They’d be like ‘I told my family, and they like, started crying because they knew and they hugged me and they told me they would love me no matter what,’” Tang said. “And that just wasn’t my narrative.”