For Duy Nguyen-Amigo, an emerging Vietnamese-American musician from Garden Grove, coming out as gay began with a life-changing instant that unfurled into a years-long odyssey to find acceptance from his family and community.
His journey mirrors California’s own story of evolving attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community since the state legalized same-sex marriage 12 years ago — around the time Nguyen-Amigo came out to his parents.
“Over the last 12 years, we’ve seen a real cultural shift within Orange County,” OC Pride co-President Manny Muro said as rainbow flags fly around the county and events are held during this Pride Month. “Even in places that once felt unwelcoming, there has been growing openness to LGBTQ+ families.”
“It’s not perfect,” he added. “There’s still a lot of work to be done, and we’re living in a moment where LGBTQ+ people are under political attack.”
“Pride is not just about being celebratory,” Muro said. “It’s about being loud and confident and visible. That’s why Pride matters. That’s why coming out matters. The more visible we are, the harder it is to deny our humanity.”
Nguyen-Amigo distinctly remembers the moment he disclosed his sexuality to his parents, a recent high school graduate weeping between his mom and dad in their bed.
“It was Valentine’s Day, 2014. I remember it vividly,” he said. “Like it was yesterday.”
Nguyen-Amigo didn’t necessarily mean to tell his parents the truth right then and there. But a tidal wave of emotions pushed the words buried deep in his chest to the shores of his lips.
“Duy, you’re our son,” his father said, wrapping him in a warm embrace. “You can tell us anything.”
Except, it turned out, the forbidden words he was about to speak.
“Mom, Dad. I’m gay,” he said in Vietnamese between hyperventilating gasps.
At first, his parents said nothing as they quickly withdrew their hug.
“We were in shock,” his mom, Thuy Nguyen, recalled.
“Are you joking? What did I do wrong as a parent?” his dad, Hung Nguyen, remembers thinking to himself.
“The silence was deafening,” Nguyen-Amigo said. “I’m sure there was only about 10 seconds’ worth of silence, but it felt like an eternity.”
“I could see the look in their faces shifting from shock to confusion to anger,” he added. “I knew they would react that way, and that was the saddest part.”
Feelings of liberation and despondency clashed in Nguyen-Amigo’s chest like a head-on collision.
“I felt like a huge weight had lifted off my shoulders,” he said. “For the first time in 18 years, I could finally be free.”
“But, immediately, I had another burden to carry — my family’s reaction.”
Looking back, Nguyen described the moment like a “whirlwind,” a word the musician recently borrowed for the title of what he calls his “most vulnerable” single.
That emotional “whirlwind” is all too familiar to many LGBTQ+ Vietnamese Americans and their families, said Uyen Hoang, executive director of Viet Rainbow Orange County. The grassroots group based in Little Saigon supports LGBTQ+ Vietnamese Americans and their loved ones through research, education and advocacy.
“We kind of assume certain attitudes are held by the older generation, but you’d be surprised how many are open and want to learn,” Hoang said.
For the Nguyens, the learning process about Duy’s identity took more than a decade, including a complete break in communication with their son. In time, they reconciled their love for him with acceptance of his authentic self.
Now, Thuy and Hung Nguyen are at peace with Duy as a gay man.
“It’s normal being gay,” his dad said recently after taking photos with his son wrapped in a Pride flag. “If he’s happy, we’re happy.”
“You are who you are,” added his mom. “We love him for who he is.”
Both parents said it took research — scanning the internet, reading the news, talking privately with extended family — to come to terms with Duy’s identity.
Mostly, they said, it took time.
“The coming-out process was not just for me, but also for them, too,” Nguyen-Amigo said. “It’s a learning experience that took some time. They slowly but surely came around.”
Still, his parents say their son’s identity is not something they bring up with their Vietnamese friends and family.
“We are very proud of him,” his mom said. “But it’s still not something we talk about in the community, even with other parents of gay children.”
Fighting for visibility
Gina Masequesmay, a sociologist at Cal State Northridge, traces the “emergence of queer Vietnamese America” back to the late 1990s.
“You could say the organizations, such as Ô-Môi and the Gay Viet Alliance, were started super underground,” Hoang said.
In her research, Masequesmay says that support for queer Vietnamese Americans differed from the support for LGBTQ+ people in the “American mainstream.”
It often lagged behind, Hoang agreed.
That divide came into sharp relief in 2013. As California legalized gay marriage, private organizers of the Tết Parade — the largest Vietnamese cultural gathering outside Vietnam — barred a gay rights group from marching.
Hoang refers to the event as “The Exclusion.”
The move drew backlash and led to the founding of Viet Rainbow.
The fledgling nonprofit, in one of the first open displays of LGBTQ+ support in Little Saigon, gathered 250 community members on the parade’s sidelines dressed in rainbows and wielding Pride flags.
But a year later, organizers of the 2014 Tết Parade doubled down, once again voting overwhelmingly to exclude LGBTQ+ participants.
“They had an opportunity to make what’s wrong right, and they chose the same path as last year, which is to exclude us from a cultural event that we are a part of. We are part of the Vietnamese community,” Hieu Nguyen, then co-chair of Viet Rainbow, said at the time.
By then, after a year of organizing, Viet Rainbow had momentum on its side.
“Folks came together to strategize,” Hoang said. “We went on media, ethnic media, to share our stories. We went to deliver public comments at Westminster City Council meetings.”
“We also went to the big companies funding the parade and told them that funding a discriminatory parade could violate their company’s nondiscrimination clause,” she said.
Ultimately, Viet Rainbow convinced sponsors of the parade to pull about $80,000 in funding, which she said forced the organizers’ hands.
“Money talks,” she said. “We’ve been able to march ever since.”
Viet Rainbow’s inclusion in the 2014 Tết Parade marked a public softening of attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community in Little Saigon.
“Pride Month reminds us every year that visibility is not only a celebration, but it’s a testament to survival,” Muro said.
Getting By
Within weeks of the 2014 Tết Parade, Nguyen-Amigo came out to his parents.
His relationship with his dad immediately calcified, and he ran away from home.
His Filipino boyfriend faced a similar fate from his parents, leaving the pair of 18-year-olds to navigate life pretty much on their own.
“In each other, we found the only other person who ever truly accepted our entire identity,” Nguyen-Amigo said.
So, they married.
But their love story did not end happily ever after.
They were two 18-year-olds, without college degrees or vocational training, trying to make ends meet in Orange County.
Their stress, their youth, their romantic inexperience — each other’s first boyfriends for mere months before they married — all took an exorbitant toll on their bond.
“We couldn’t catch a break,” Nguyen-Amigo said.
He dropped out of Cal State Fullerton to take a low-paying fast-food job.
He re-enrolled. He dropped out again.
He had been a promising student, he said, but “life happened.”
“If we stopped working, we feared that we would end up reverting back to where we were at the beginning, back to square one, and we didn’t want that for ourselves,” Nguyen-Amigo said. “We had no safety net. We felt, at the time, that we were each other’s safety net. It was us against the world.”
A decade ago, there were few resources to support the Vietnamese queer community with long-term financial or emotional distress, Hoang said.
Nguyen-Amigo thanks his godfather for lifesaving emotional support. He also saw a therapist, but not one who was Vietnamese or understood the nuances of his family and cultural dynamics, he said.
Even today, Viet Rainbow, with its six staff members, is the only organization in Orange County exclusively dedicated to educating the families of LGBTQ+ Vietnamese Americans and advocating for Viet LGBTQ+ rights, Hoang said.
“There continue to be many places in Little Saigon that still feel too dangerous to go to as an openly queer person,” Hoang said.
“If you’re just standing in the corner of, say, a boba shop trying to blend in, it maybe isn’t as dangerous,” she said. “But it feels like you have to try to be stealthy.”
One place where Nguyen-Amigo said he began to feel safe as his full self was Garden Grove High, taking an AP psychology class.
“In that classroom, in that academic setting, I heard for the first time someone talk about being gay in a non-judgmental way,” he said. “I remember stepping outside of that classroom and breathing a sigh of relief. I guess I’m not weird. I guess I’m not crazy after all.”
His teacher ended up at his wedding.
More than a decade later, Nguyen-Amigo said he’s worried the Trump administration’s crackdown on DEI, including the president’s threat to withdraw federal funding from schools with diversity initiatives, could eliminate safe public spaces for LGBTQ+ students in a similar position to his.
“It’s not like we talked about the LGBTQ+ movement in math class or science class,” he said. “Looking back, I think I signed up for psych because I knew that topic would be brought up and I wanted to learn more about who I was.”
Hoang says the political climate for LGBTQ+ rights is “fraught everywhere right now,” but especially at the federal level, which can have a big impact locally by reducing the safe spaces for young people.
“There are certain walls that are not worth climbing with the energy that we have,” Hoang said of her six-member team. “We can’t change everyone’s attitudes. But we can focus our attention on local, county and statewide issues that are important for us.”
In recent years, for instance, Viet Rainbow pushed back against parental notification policies in local districts.
Gov. Gavin Newsom later signed into law a bill making it illegal to disclose students’ gender identities without consent.
Now, the Trump administration is investigating that law and threatening to pull funding from the state over it.
“We’re still seeing dangerous surges in hate,” Muro said. “There are always laws targeting LGBTQ+ people and attempts to roll back our rights.”
“June will always be Pride Month, not because it was granted by any administration, but because it was claimed by generations of LGBTQ+ people who refuse to be erased,” he said. “Pride is not a holiday that was handed down by politicians. It was born from protest. The White House’s attempt to reframe that is a distraction and a dangerous one.”
(Photo by Karen Tapia, Contributing Photographer)
‘My way’
While Nguyen-Amigo sees a tempest brewing on the horizon for LGBTQ+ rights, in his personal life, at least, the soon-to-be-30-year-old is sailing on calmer waters.
After divorcing his ex-husband several years ago, the eddies of his relational whirlwinds have slowed, and the currents of his music career have gathered pace.
Today, the trials and tribulations of Nguyen-Amigo’s teen marriage live on not only in his hyphenated name but in the lyrics of his music.
“Whirlwind — but, I know I’m stronger than this,” he sings in the track named for the storm that followed his coming out. “This is a battle I must win, though it feels I’m hanging by a thread.”
His authenticity has garnered him attention in the Southern California avant-garde, both as a solo artist and as part of his band, Neon Pacific (formerly known as New Tradition).
His career reached new heights earlier this year when Neon Pacific performed for a month in Disney California Adventure’s Lunar New Year festival.
Nguyen-Amigo stood in the Happiest Place on Earth as the frontman of his band and his heritage.
“I still get choked up thinking back on it,” he said. “There are certain things in my culture that I don’t necessarily agree with, but I choose to focus on the aspects of Vietnamese culture that strongly resonate with me.”
“For the most part, I love my culture,” he said. “It’s my culture. It’s such a beautiful culture. I’m so proud to be Vietnamese and to give back to my community through music.”
Music is also how he reunited with his parents, who own the Mon Amour banquet hall in Anaheim.
Occasionally, Nguyen-Amigo sings there, his lyrics activating his parents’ empathy in ways his spoken words never did.
“In his songs, you can hear his suffering. You can hear the obstacles he’s had to overcome,” his mom said. “But you can also hear his happiness. His inner peace.”
“I couldn’t be prouder of him,” his dad said.
For a long time, Nguyen-Amigo said he struggled to serenade the crowds at Mon Amour.
“I felt that, if anything, whenever I performed in front of a Vietnamese audience, I had to remove so much of myself,” he said. “And that didn’t make sense to me. Music is supposed to do the opposite of that, right? It’s supposed to complete me.”
His catharsis arrived recently when he decided to perform a bilingual rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”
“I sang the majority of the song in Vietnamese, and the last chorus, which is probably the most impactful chorus, I sang it in English, in front of a predominantly conservative crowd,” he said.
As he gazed at the dancing couples, he made peace with himself.
“The message just hit me so hard,” he said. “I will live my life my way.”