A series of eight new Asian language posters from the Family Acceptance Project (FAP) at San Francisco State University offers Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) parents a research-backed, proven resource to help their LGBTQ children thrive.
The posters include new language versions of FAP’s Healthy Futures posters and poster guidance, which show how family members’ accepting and rejecting behaviors impact the risk and well-being of LGBTQ young people. They include critical information from FAP’s peer-reviewed studies and family support work to help prevent suicide and other serious health risks and promote well-being for AAPI LGBTQ children and youth. The posters are newly available in Chinese (traditional and simplified), Hindi, Korean, Japanese, Punjabi, Tagalog, and Vietnamese, and have already been available available in English and Spanish. Other versions in Arabic and African languages and for American Indian families are forthcoming.
I’ve written about FAP’s work for over a decade, starting with their work on how parents’ rejecting or accepting reactions to their LGBTQ children can have long-term effects on their children’s health and well being. This work also showed how LGBTQ youth can often best be served in the context of their families, involving the parents and showing them how their acceptance can have a significant positive impact on their children’s lives—and conversely, how their rejection can harm them. A more recent FAP study showed the key, damaging, role parents play in “conversion therapy” efforts to change their LGBT children’s sexual orientation, and how this exacerbates health and adjustment problems for their children even into young adulthood. FAP also puts its findings into action, with educational materials, trainings, and consultations around its evidence-based family model of wellness, prevention and care.
To create the posters, FAP partnered with Dr. Lance Chen-Hayes, a national AAPI advocate for LGBTQ people and their families who is affiliated with API Rainbow Parents of PFLAG NYC. Dr. Chen-Hayes, collaborating with other community leaders during the pandemic, coordinated a volunteer group of 40 Asian native language speakers to translate FAP’s posters for distribution across the U.S. and other countries. Volunteers included AAPI parents with LGBTQ children, allies, and LGBTQ adults who helped ensure that the posters are relevant for family members and others in their first languages. This is especially important for AAPI communities since nearly three-quarters of Asian adults in the U.S. were born in other countries.
Dr. Chen-Hayes said in a press statement, “In my work with API LGBTQ people and their families in the U.S. and around the world, I am always looking for culturally and linguistically accessible and effective educational materials. Very few exist and the Family Acceptance Project’s Healthy Futures posters are an extraordinary contribution to our community and our families. When pandemic travel restrictions created an opportunity for U.S. based AAPI PFLAG community leaders to collaborate online, I was able to reach more families around the globe and proposed this multilingual translation project. It was met with so much enthusiasm and will increase family acceptance of LGBTQ people in AAPI communities worldwide.”
Marsha Aizumi, co-founder of PFLAG’s first API chapter, added, “These posters are a tremendous resource for API families who don’t often have the words and actions to support their LGBTQ children in their native language. If I had resources like these when my transgender child first came out over ten years ago, I would have struggled less and supported more intentionally. Fortunately, we gave our son the message that he would always have a place to belong, which we learned from FAP’s research. This was critical for Aiden to believe he is worthy of being loved and finding the happiness and success he lives today.”
Dr. Caitlin Ryan, FAP’s founder and director, said, “Our work to increase family acceptance for LGBTQ youth is grounded in the family’s culture and values. We need to educate and guide parents and families on how to support LGBTQ young people using their first language that expresses core values. Expanding the language base for FAP’s multilingual family educational materials will help us reach across cultures to strengthen family connections, reduce risk and build healthy futures for LGBTQ children and youth. This is urgently needed during the pandemic when LGBTQ youth have been separated from peers and other key sources of support.”
FAP’s Healthy Futures poster series and poster guidance are available to download for free in four sizes in camera-ready versions in 10 languages from FAP’s website. The posters will be disseminated as part of a communications campaign to decrease family rejection and health risks and to increase acceptance and well-being for LGBTQ children and youth. The campaign includes other evidence-based educational resources for families, youth, providers, and religious leaders to promote family acceptance and increase access to mental health and support services.
Grants from the Oregon Health Authority and the Upswing Fund for Adolescent Mental Health, a collaborative fund powered by Panorama, have enabled FAP to increase the breadth of resources for culturally and linguistically diverse families with LGBTQ children.