Chingusai 30th Anniversary Activity Report

Chingusai Growing Together with Members of the Gay Community

We present the activity report marking the 30th anniversary of Chingusai.

For the past 30 years, Chingusai has grown together with members of the gay community. Since 1994, a total of 23 members have been elected to serve as representatives. Alongside them, numerous members of the gay community—including full-time activists, general members, and smallhobby group participants—have taken part by organizing departments and teams and sustaining the organization’s activities.

Chingusai has supported and celebrated coming out, and worked to expand opportunities for social coming out through a wide range of activities. It has continuously carried out programs such as Charming School, Gay Culture School, public education initiatives, and smallhobby group activities, all aimed at fostering collective growth within the community. To ensure organizational sustainability, Chingusai has pursued ongoing changes, including operating a CMS system, revising organizational bylaws, and building a work–life balance–based foundation for activism.

The organization has also engaged in solidarity work to build connections with broader social movements, including human rights movements, while reflecting on the life challenges and vulnerabilities faced by members of the gay community. In preparing for what Chingusai must do to grow and live together, the organization has reached its 30th year through the leadership of 23 representatives and the support and solidarity of countless members who stood with them.

Why Community?

As long as there exists a strong desire “to meet one another under the sign of being gay,” the gay community will continue to show dynamic vitality. Chingusai itself began as a collective born from that desire, and the longing for spaces where intimacy and care can be shared as gay/queer people seems certain to continue.

Within that space, we want to ask questions and seek alternatives. These include positionalities that can easily drift toward competition and male-centered conservatism; non-masculine gender expressions that sometimes become grounds for exclusion; cultures in which physical attractiveness alone becomes the criterion for forming relationships; and vulnerabilities that force people to suffer exclusion from institutions, discrimination, and hatred. From these desires and critical perspectives, Chingusai is working to create social change.

Gay Community Members Growing Through Activities with Others

As we move between desire and critical reflection through our activities, we come to realize that we are growing not only through our own stories, but within relationships with others. Through ongoing small-group activities that bring gay/queer stories to the surface—sometimes directly inviting members of other social movements, and at other times participating in spaces to which we are invited—we spend time learning each other’s specificities. In moments when we become entangled with others, we confirm that our own existence, too, can shine.

The LGBTQ+ Suicide Prevention “Mind Connection Team,” which handles over 120–130 board-based and phone counseling sessions annually, has come to deeply understand the life concerns and particularities faced by transgender, genderqueer, and nonbinary participants, who make up nearly half of all counseling cases. Recognizing the need for spaces where Chingusai’s initiatives and activities can meet queer people in everyday contexts, the organization launched a project that embodies these concerns: the ongoing “Queer Walking Group.”

Currently, 22 queer participants take part in the walking group, with members living not only in Seoul but also in Busan, Jeonju, Iksan, and other regions across the country. Through weekly walks, participants share their everyday lives. Below is a short excerpt written by an MTF transgender participant:

“Yes, Mom, I’m walking too. Even if I lose my way or turn back because I’m blocked, if I’m waving my hand, you’ll look this way and follow. I’ll walk well, eat well, and live well. (Mom,) please follow along safely.”

The Open Table program, launched in 2019, began in much the same way. Members of the gay community gather to talk about HIV/AIDS, and to meet others through the theme of the body. Held once a month since 2019 for a total of 48 sessions, the program has expanded to Busan as of last year. A total of 263 participants—Chingusai members, members of various hobby and religious groups within the gay community, and users active on platforms such as Ivan City and the gay dating app Jack’d—have taken part. Structured as a form of group counseling, Open Table provides a space where participants confront their unfiltered thoughts on HIV/AIDS and share their own bodily wounds. Rather than seeking dramatic change, the gathering poses questions about how we approach one another and how we might begin to think differently.

We also meet across generations, regions, and identities—what we call a “feast of conversation.” Since 2021, group counseling programs have been held four to five times each year for groups including LGBTQ+ people in their 20s and 30s, gay men in their 40s and 50s, transgender people, people living with HIV/AIDS, and LGBTQ+ people in the Busan region. Through these sites of relationship-building with others, participants learn to love their own existence and feel the necessity of solidarity.

To meet more, and to share pain, we ask you to lend your strength to Chingusai.

In addition, there are many opportunities to connect with members and gay community participants through programs such as Getting to Know Chingusai, the Chin-Chin program, Come Visit Chingusai, the play-reading group “Unni’s Dressing Room,” and Chingusai’s street campaign “Having Fun Well Is a Human Rights Movement.”

On June 5, together with Unni Network, we hosted the joint 50th anniversary celebration party, “Queer Grand Chaos Party.” It was a long-awaited gathering where members of the queer community came together in vibrant diversity. Many asked for more events like this. Chingusai believes that such spaces are only possible when ongoing time and space are created to continually meet not only the gay community but the broader queer community, to share life’s concerns and to recognize one another’s pain.

We ask for your support—through planning, preparation, and participation—to share the everyday lives and pain of queer people, and through one-time donations or regular sponsorships to help open these spaces. We will continue to face, with greater responsibility, the weight and accountability of the past 30 years of activity.

We sometimes put forward the slogan, “Having fun well is a human rights movement.” We seek to become Chingusai: a collective that grows amid the weight of our own lives and those of others, alongside people who discover joy and diverse forms of attraction in the process of expanding the desire for coexistence and solidarity in the pursuit of rights. Thank you.

We ask for your support—through planning, preparation, and participation—to share the everyday lives and pain of queer people, and through one-time donations or regular sponsorships to help open these spaces. We will continue to face, with greater responsibility, the weight and accountability of the past 30 years of activity.

We sometimes put forward the slogan, “Having fun well is a human rights movement.” We seek to become Chingusai: a collective that grows amid the weight of our own lives and those of others, alongside people who discover joy and diverse forms of attraction in the process of expanding the desire for coexistence and solidarity in the pursuit of rights. Thank you.

Secretary-General, Chingusai / Jong-geol (종걸)