Shawn Kumagai: A gay man with a foot in two cultures

By SIMHA HADDAD

Former Dublin City Council member Shawn Kumagai has championed providing transit-oriented affordable housing for seniors and low-income residents and was instrumental in assisting the city’s small businesses weather the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The gay first-generation, U.S.-born Asian American Pacific Islander, a third-generation military veteran, and 2022 state assembly candidate, saw his adept management of Dublin’s municipal budget earning the city the highest possible credit rating.

Prior to politics, Kumagai entered the Navy under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and worked his way up the ranks reaching E-9, a Navy Master Chief, in a career that between active duty and the active Naval Reserve has spanned 21 years. He was the only AAPI candidate in his 2022 State Assembly race, and was Dublin’s only openly Out council member.

Kumagai, 45, started his early childhood in the San Francisco Bay area. Kumagai and his siblings were raised primarily by their mother in Phoenix, Ariz., after his parents’ divorce when he was 10.

“I was being raised by a single mom,” Kumagai recounted. “My grandfather would come over every day to help us out and to bring groceries and make us lunch and get us after school while my mom went back to school and worked full time to get her career on track. She ended up joining the army as a nurse and then had a great career that she started later in life, finishing up as a psych nurse at the veterans at the VA facility in San Francisco.”

Kumagai feels inspired by his mother’s resilience and what she was able to accomplish through her tireless hard work. He also knows that government aid was essential to her being able to achieve her goals and provide for her family.

“We lived on government assistance,” said Kumagai. “We had food stamps and welfare payments. It was through that help, that kind of hand-up, that my mom was able to be successful. So that also informed my thinking about the role of government in people’s lives.”

“If it had not been for that educational assistance that she had with her tuition being offset by her service in the military, and if she had not had those food stamps, and if she had not had the welfare, I don’t think we would have had the opportunities that we had in life. This is true for both my siblings and me, but especially for my mom. So the role of government can really be a force for positive change and provide access to opportunity.”

Kumagai’s experience growing up as bi-racial also played an important role in making him the Councilman he is today.

“Growing up as a person of mixed identities shaped me. I mean this, of course, with my sexual orientation and also with my racial identity. Because I am half Japanese, growing up, it felt like having one foot in two cultures. That makes for an interesting experience.”

“My dad is a first-generation immigrant from Japan, and during that time in the 80s, I think it was similar to what we are seeing now today with anti-AAPI sentiment. It was a time when the American economy was not doing well, but the Japanese economy was doing really well. The global economy was in turmoil, and a lot of people I felt during my childhood blamed

Japan and Japanese people. I felt that stigma associated with coming from a Japanese family.”

“Also, on the flip side, being half-white comes with challenges. I was a part of the Japanese culture, but I was not fully part of the Japanese culture, so I have always had that understanding of what it’s like to be ‘othered.’”

While Kumagai is proudly out now, he did not always feel comfortable being overt in his sexuality.

“I grew up part of my childhood in San Francisco during the 80s. Mom did have gay friends, but even then, I didn’t feel comfortable coming out to my family even though I knew inside of me that I was probably gay and even though I knew that my mom probably would have accepted me. It was a really interesting and unique time because there was a lot of stigma around the AIDS crisis. That stigma created this shaming of the gay community, particularly gay men, and there was this whole pullback in society blaming gay men for this pandemic and accusing them and their sexual practices for what was happening. As a young gay man, I felt that shame.”

When asked about his coming out journey and why he has chosen to be an openly out politician, Kumagai responded that this was a very important question as he associates his coming out directly with his ability to lead.

“When I look back on my trajectory, coming out and having that support system allowing me to be true to who I was, really flipped the switch in me from allowing me to truly excel and being able to do good work and me holding back and not being able to do that.”

“At a young age, I started to come out to my closest friends. I feel extremely privileged that I had the support that I did. When I eventually told my mom, I think I was 17 at the time, a junior in high school. She said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner? You had all these gay uncles, and you could have had such great role models for you to talk to.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t know. But I one hundred percent knew that I just wasn’t ready.’ But she was very supportive, and so was my father. As a Japanese man, as I think happens in many Asian cultures, it tends to be a little bit more conservative, but he was completely excepting. I had my support at home, but then I joined the military.”

“Service,” Kumagai told journalist Karen Ocamb last Fall, “is in my DNA. My grandfather served in World War Two in the Army Air Corps. My mom was in the Army Nurse Corps for ten years. And her brother, my uncle was an Air Force Academy grad and flew fighter jets. And I went off and joined the Navy.”

Witch hunts in the Navy

“I was already a 100% out gay man,” says Kumagai of himself back in 2001 when he decided to join the military.

2001 was the height of a military policy called “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” a largely anti-LGBTQ policy presented under the guise of helping the queer community escape prejudice. As Kumagai quickly discovered, the policy did the exact opposite of its claimed intention.

“I was working at a bar slash cabaret in Phoenix, Arizona as a bartender and a cocktail waiter. They had weekly drag shows, and it was a very well-known LGBTQ restaurant. Back in the 90s, there weren’t too many places like that for people to go, but that was my life when I joined the military.”

“I talked to my mom, who was serving in the army at the time, and I said, ‘You know, maybe I want to go into the military. Tell me about this, ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” She said, ‘Well, they can’t ask you if you are gay, and as long as you don’t tell them, you are OK.”

“The ironic thing is, at the time, I viewed that as protection,” explained Kumagai, “Because I knew individuals who served prior to the implementation of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,’ and it was really bad back then. You always had to be careful because there were these witch hunts where the military police would go into gay establishments to seek out people who looked like they were in the military. They would then demand to see their IDs, drag them back to base, and then promptly process them for discharge. So, when I heard those horror stories from the 70s and early on, I thought that ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell sounded much better than that. I thought I could just be quiet and do my service. I was going to go ahead and serve my time and get little benefits and go back to college. That was my plan.”

“But what I didn’t realize was when I joined in 2001, I was going in at the height of discharges under ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,’ because even though they weren’t supposed to ask, a lot of people were voluntarily telling because they couldn’t stand serving in silence. Also, there was still a lot of witch hunting and targeting of particular individuals. That didn’t stop.”

“A lot of times, people’s sexualities would come out through second or third-hand information. A lot of times, people were even guilty by association.”

“I served with one person in particular who found out he was gay because they found chat logs and with another individual who was being investigated for another matter when it kind of came out incidentally. A lot of people I served alongside, particularly in language training at the language institute, were gay and processed out for being lesbian or gay back in 2001, 2002.”

This constant and often clandestine prosecuting of members of the LGBTQ+ community under “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” made Kumagai fear for his own place in the military.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 06