After her first year at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Temple City resident Amy Fan came out to her mom as a queer woman.

Struggling to find the right words to use with her mom, Fan turned to the Internet and found some articles that helped her explain her gender identity and sexuality.

“I was able to change my mom’s views,” Fan said. “She’s no longer openly homophobic towards me.”

She said her search for help online showed her that more resources were needed for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (L.G.B.T.) Asian-American youth.

“I realized there’s so much potential for people to understand and for things to change,” Fan said. “I wanted to find a way to educate people.”

To do that, Fan interviewed seven L.G.B.T. Asian-Americans from all over the San Gabriel Valley, and made a short documentary about their responses. Their stories revealed the close ties Asian-Americans have to their families, while also showing how parts of the community in Southern California fractured over the issues of gay marriage and sexuality.

“My participants talked about how you can’t just leave the family,” she said. “Everything is so interweaved with the family.”

Karin Wang, a civil rights attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ), explained how the role of family impacts lesbian, L.G.B.T. Asian-Americans.

“It’s all about family first in Asian American cultures, even before your neighborhood or community,” she said. “Over the years I’ve seen that for many L.G.B.T. Asian Americans, it’s very difficult to come out to the family because there’s a lot of pressure on not ‘shaming the family’ or doing anything to have your family be involved in gossip.”

Some of the San Gabriel Valley residents Fan interviewed shared stories of discrimination by local churches with large Asian-American congregations.

One participant, Yani Leon, went to church with her aunt only to find the entire congregation praying away her homosexuality.

One of her interviewees, Shelly Chen, remembered seeing a rally at a church in Alhambra and flags supporting Proposition 8, the 2008 statewide ballot proposition in California calling to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry.

In 2009, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center along with other organizations released data on how social factors such as religion affected support or opposition to L.G.B.T. rights and Prop 8 in the Asian American community.

“We found that the more religious someone identified themselves as being, the higher correlation there was to opposing marriage equality or supporting Prop 8,” Wang said. “It was the strongest indicator of how someone voted on Prop 8.”

Wang said that some Asian-American communities continue to oppose L.G.B.T. rights. But overall, she said that the views of many Asian-Americans are shifting, particularly when it comes to marriage equality.

An Advancing Justice poll with about 3,500 participants showed that 53.6 percent of Asian-American voters supported the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that found bans on marraiges between same-sex couples unconstitutional. The poll also showed that among Asian Americans ages 18 to 44, there was 69.5 percent support.

Fan said she observed “significant” shifts in support of gay rights with her own family and that of her interviewees.

The documentary premiered on Feb. 8 at the University of California, Irvine. Since then, it has been shown with the API SGV PFLAG in Alhambra, the Genders and Sexualities Alliance Network Youth Summit in Los Angeles and at Cal State LA with the Sex, Gender, and Sexuality & Asian and Asian American Studies department.

The production team behind the documentary, Divercity Productions, is working on uploading full interviews for all their participants.

“Those videos will have lives of their own because they’ll be shared by the people who are participants and then they’ll be taken in by other groups who want to share them,” Fan said. “I want the documentary to start a dialogue in the San Gabriel Valley especially among people from the older generations. I hope it inspires people to be supportive of gay rights.”