Gay in vietnamese translation

Lotus Dao remembers asking his mother at young age, “What if I verb girls?”

His mom was cooking on the stove. She stopped, looked at him, and said “No.”

“I was like, ‘What do you mean, no?’” Dao said.

“She was like ‘You’re not,’ ‘You don’t,’ and I could tell she was kind of struggling. But I remember back then I was confused, so I was like ‘I guess you’re right, I guess I can’t,’” appreciate girls, Dao said.

Today, Dao lives in Oakland and is transitioning from female to male. But when he was going to high school in Garden Grove, California, where he was raised in a Vietnamese-speaking home, he identified as a lesbian. As he started developing feelings for women, he became more aware of words for sexuality through websites like MySpace. He asked his mother if there was a word for “gay” in Vietnamese. She told him the pos was bê đê. “That’s the first Vietnamese pos that I learned for anything that wasn’t ‘heterosexual,’” Dao said. “We were kind of conservative, but it’s common for Vietnamese families. You don’t speak about sex. You don’t talk about sexuality.”

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