Unsettled: Seeking Refuge in America. Directed by Tom Shepard. Los Angeles: GOOD DOCS, 2019. 81 minutes.

Unspoken. Directed by Patrick G. Lee. New York: Third World Newsreel, 2020. 17 minutes.

Unsettled is a full-length documentary that follows the lives of two gay refugees and an asylum-seeking lesbian couple as they flee their homelands and resettle in the San Francisco Bay Area during the end of the Barack Obama Presidential administration and the rise of the Donald Trump Presidential administration, the former linked to an increase in LGBTQ+ asylum claims and the latter curtailing refugee migration to a “record low” (77:39). The film opens with Junior, a Congolese refugee who comes to the United States after experiencing communal violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and state violence in Cape Town, South Africa. Next appears Subhi, a Syrian refugee who fled to Turkey after an Al-Qaeda branch formed in his hometown, killing several gay men, and then he fled Turkey after receiving death threats from an old friend affiliated with ISIS. Mari and Cheyenne, an Angolan couple who experienced constant harassment, the murder of their dog, death threats, and a familial poison attempt, appear last. Whereas Junior and Subhi are officially registered refugees with the United Nations and can permanently resettle in the United States, Mari and Cheyenne arrive under temporary student visas, which results in the latter pair navigating the precarious year-plus asylum application process. Junior struggles to secure stable housing and employment, moving ten times within his first year in the city, due in part to anti-Black prejudice and his alcohol consumption. Subhi is thrust into the spotlight as a spokesperson for LGBTQ+ Middle Eastern refugees, which grants him stable housing and a period of professionalized employment; however, he also battles feelings of loneliness and risks being so publicly out.

Undeniably, Junior, Subhi, Mari, and Cheyenne are safer in the United States. To justify their presence here, though, they must highlight the exceptionally horrific homophobia they endured in their home countries. However, as scholars of queer migration (see, e.g., Luibhéid and Cantú 2005) and critics of homonationalism—the convergence of US liberalism and mainstream, normative LGBTQ+ politics—such as Jasbir Puar (2007) and Ronak Kapadia (2019) have illumined, the irony of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments and actions in the United States cannot be overlooked. Still, students in gender and sexuality studies, globalization, and migration courses will benefit from a more expansive frame of LGBTQ+ life and refugee resettlement by viewing the film in its entirety.

Unspoken is a short documentary that features six individuals of Asian descent in their twenties and thirties who share their experiences of coming out as gay, queer, or trans* to their parents or, in the case of one, to their aunt and uncle through the mode of letter writing and reading. The film opens with Emi Grate (she/her), a Burmese immigrant drag queen who establishes one of the film’s key themes: that queerness (and trans*ness) is not oppositional to Asian cultural identity. Kevin (he/him), the gay son of Catholic Vietnamese parents, next appears alongside his sister Steph (she/her), who the film tags as his “moral support” (:45). His voice-over and on-screen actions introduce the film’s letter-writing activity as an attempt to bridge the unspoken intergenerational and geographic divides concerning gender and sexual identity. Sen (she/her), a femme transwoman of East Asian descent, shares her close yet ambivalent relationship with her mom. Patrick (he/they), the film’s director and group convener, who is of Korean descent, explains that his letter to his parents “say[s] gay as many times as possible” to normalize the term, highlighting the power of words to effect change (1:16). Julie (she/her), who is not officially out as queer to her Korean parents, talks about the need to take risks; otherwise, “the story won’t get told and the conversations won’t happen” (1:37). Finally, Rathini (he/him), who identifies as transgender and hails from a Tamil Sri Lankan community in California, expresses the significance of coming out not as an act for those on the receiving end but rather as a pathway to personal happiness.

On the one hand, Unspoken may reinforce the notion that immigrant families are homophobic and transphobic; however, the film gestures toward queer diasporic Asian American community with the letter-writing participants. Their diverse representation in terms of ethnicity and gender features the heterogeneity of Asian American identity, countering racist discourses that figure Asians as all the same. Instructors in gender and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and ethnic literary and film studies might screen the section when participants read their letters or when participants dialogue as a group and pair it with selections from the anthologies Q & A: Queer in Asian America (Eng and Hom 1998) and Q & A: Voices from Queer Asian North America (Manalansan, Hom, and Fajardo 2021). Though, as a short film, instructors could screen it in its entirety during class.

Overall, Unsettled and Unspoken are powerful films that expand LGBTQ+ experience transnationally and underscore the intersectional nature of LGBTQ+ identity, unsettling the notion that queerness and trans*ness are Western phenomena and giving voice to marginalized LGBTQ+ folx.

Thomas Xavier Sarmiento (they & he) is an award-winning associate professor of English and affiliated faculty of gender, women, and sexuality studies at Kansas State University. Tom specializes in diasporic Filipinx American literature and media cultures, queer-feminist theories, and cultural representations of the US Midwest. Their research appears in the journals Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies; Amerasia Journal; American Studies; Asian American Literature: Discourse & Pedagogies; MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States; and Women, Gender, and Families of Color and in the edited collections Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics, Curricular Innovations: LGBTQ Literatures and the New English Studies, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and Q & A: Voices from Queer Asian North America.