Kit Hung Shifts His Focus To New Haven

Photo courtesy of the artist. 

For filmmaker Kit Hung, coming out as a gay man to his family felt like a kind of confession.

Hung hails from Hong Kong, where same-sex marriage is not legally recognized. For decades, he has been propelled by LGBTQ+ movements around the world to make his own queerness more visible, even though he wasn’t immediately accepted for his sexuality. That same desire to increase queer visibility is what drove his latest project, Forever 17, and what is driving his new work in New Haven this year.

Forever 17, which was screened at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven earlier this year, is a short film that follows the life of a gay couple in Hong Kong who get married and grow old together. This spring and summer, Hung’s work will continue in New Haven through his time as a Yale-China Fellow, through which he is associated with both the Yale-China Association and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. 

The film, which stars Jun Leung Chun Lung, Sam Ho Hing, Clifford Tsang Man Wai, and Ko Hon Man, was Hung’s six-year-long PhD thesis project “Feeling Kinship” for Goldsmiths University of London. Hung hoped that the film would portray a possible queer future, which continues to be left out of the queer imagination.

“I can see how the young people [in Hong Kong] can live their queer life under sunlight and be very outgoing about it,” Hung said. “But the queer media right now is still very much about young people, beautiful bodies or even middle-class life. So if you're queer and you're older, you're almost invisible as well.”

In the room next to where the film was projected were several objects and stills from the project. Two letters, one written by Hung’s mother to him in Cantonese, and the second translated by him into English, hung on one wall next to a photograph of Hung with his parents, and a photograph of Hung with his now-husband’s parents. To the right of these letters were photographs of a pair of gold wedding rings and a pair of engraved chopsticks.

These objects are featured in the film as symbols of familial acceptance, but they also bear meaning in Hung’s personal life.

Hung described how at a family dinner, he had announced to his parents that he would be getting married to his husband. The dinner conversation fell into silence, he recalled, which he understood as his parents’ refusal to acknowledge his marriage. Two weeks later, however, as he was about to fly back to Switzerland for his wedding, his parents showed up at the airport with a small bag.

Inside the bag were the same three items that hung on the walls of ECoCA: the rings, the chopsticks, and the family letter. His parents had bought the chopsticks and rings for him when he was very young—a pair of golden rings stands for eternal love, while the chopsticks, which were engraved with his name, were meant to symbolize the hope for a grandson.

As his mother passed him the objects, she said she was giving the gifts to him now, rather than at the wedding, because he was not entering a marriage that she expected.

The letter, Hung said, was a letter of “disapproval.” His mother had written it on his birthday, and expressed her regret and apology for having either passed him "same-sex loving DNA," or raised him to be attracted to men. Still, at the end, she wrote that she respected his decision to marry a man if that is what he wants: “I love you,” the letter ended. 

“There’s a lot of emotion and meaning inside,” Hung said, recalling how he would cry before ever getting to the end of the letter each time that he read it. “For queer people, all these normal objects and normal photos could actually carry a lot of different stories that need to be discovered.”

That letter was what first inspired his PhD thesis.

“After my wedding, every time I see any kind of Hollywood [film], even like a crappy comedy with the family celebrating the wedding, I'll just break into tears,” Hung said. 

He realized that the absence of his parents and of Chinese customs from his wedding was something that he missed, and wished he could have had. In Forever 17, he made a point of including the protagonist’s parents at their wedding, and melding Western and Chinese rituals, so that the queer community in Hong Kong could imagine a similar future for themselves. 

“If you Google LGBT marriage or queer marriage, you see things settled in the Western context,” he said. “We can hardly imagine how our Chinese wedding costume can be queer, so this is one of the first imagination and scenarios where the queer couple can actually also perform the Chinese ritual as well.”

His parents, especially his mother, remain a significant part of what motivates him in his art. While the film is largely for a queer audience, it was also a way for Hung to show his parents a positive future for queer couples. Part of his mother’s worries, he said, stems from the lack of a social welfare system in Hong Kong, which means that culturally most Chinese parents rely on their children to take care of them when they get old. 

“Me knowing that I will not have children, they are very worried about it, so I created another scenario to tell my parents, we [as a couple] can take care of each other,” Hung said. “I want to tell my mom I'll be okay, but in a form of art.”

Hung’s parents haven’t seen the film yet, but his sister, who lives in Hong Kong, tells them often how brilliant she finds the work.

In the film, the protagonist Ricky is diagnosed with HIV, and prepares himself for the worst. It is only after his husband, Roger, is diagnosed with a different disease, that Ricky realizes how much harder it can be to lose your partner than it is to lose yourself. 

“Before I came out, I felt I might be alone for the rest of my life,” Ricky says in the film. “After being with you, I had constant doubts, I asked myself why we should stay together. And why you? I thought about how we could build a life together. Now I wonder how to treasure our remaining days together.”

Hung said that having Ricky take care of and outlive Roger, despite being HIV positive, was an intentional subversion of misconceptions about HIV carriers. He recalled how when the producer first read the script, her first question was, “this person has HIV, why is this character still living much longer than the other one?” 

Hung wanted to break down these “barriers” and misunderstandings and again portray an alternative future to what is typically imagined for queer men who are HIV-positive.

Another point of subversion came during a scene of infidelity. Just a few scenes before their wedding, Ricky walks in on Roger cheating on him. Hung chose to include this moment of betrayal to show how the couple grappled with it but ultimately chose to stay together. 

“Persistence, it’s a kind of insistence, a commitment to the other person that kept us together,” Ricky says in the film. “This persistence can be blind, even unrealistic, but allowed us to keep the relationship alive until now.” Hung foregrounded respect, including in his own relationship with his husband, as the most critical foundation for any relationship.

Hung has been with his husband, who is Swiss, for 22 years, and it is this length of time that gives Hung his perspective on love. They’ve been through ups and downs together, including the death of his in-laws and career troubles in Hung's life.

“Imagine if you're going to be with this man for the coming 40 years,” Hung said. “Things that happened last week could be such a tiny thing in this 50 years.” 

With Hong Kong as the setting for his film, politics and protest became inextricable from Hung’s portrayal of queerness, underscoring the fact that queerness itself began and continues to be a political movement. Initially when Hung was writing the script for the film, he did not include scenes of the Umbrella Movement, a sociopolitical movement that emerged during the 2014 democracy protests in Hong Kong, in which demonstrators used yellow umbrellas as passive tools of resistance against the Hong Kong Police Force. 

The protests called for transparency during elections, following the announcement of a “pre-screening” of candidates for the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2017 by the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China.

But in the film, the protests are part of the story. Two events shaped Hung’s decision to include the political context of Hong Kong. First, in 2018, his friend and a singer from the Hong Kong-based all-female band at17, Ellen Joyce Loo, committed suicide (the band’s name later served as the inspiration for the film’s title). A few years prior, she had announced on stage that she was a lesbian and in a loving relationship with a woman. 

Her death pushed Hung to want to show everyone that “Ellen’s result is not necessarily everybody’s result” while imagining an alternative future for people like Ellen. Then, when Hung had begun shooting the film, “the whole city just blacked out.” A second wave of the Umbrella Movement came in 2019, when the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement prompted a series of demonstrations. It was against this backdrop that Hung felt like the “utopian world” he had created in his film didn’t match up with existing life in Hong Kong.

In the final version of the film, scenes of demonstrators are spliced between shots of the wedding—a joint wedding between two men and two women that is meant to be the first same-sex marriage following its imagined legalization in Hong Kong. Hung explained that “bad things and good things actually happen together:” a queer future does not happen outside of our current reality, but is instead grounded in existing sociopolitical movements that are pushing for change.

Despite the sense of hope for the future that the film conveys, Hung described several challenges to shooting in Hong Kong. He recalled how difficult it was to find a church that would allow the crew to shoot a gay wedding scene. Several would agree to having a student film shot there, but when they learned what the film was about, they would suddenly say that the location was no longer available or raise the cost of renting it.

He also found it difficult to find older male actors who were willing to take on the role of a gay man. “One of the older men who's a very good actor would tell me that, 'Oh, sorry, I just turned Christian, I got baptized last week, I cannot play a homosexual role.' But what about your Jesus is different than mine?”

Ultimately, the two older actors involved in the production (Clifford Tsang Man Wai and Ko Hon Man, who are both straight in real life), were pivotal to forming Hung’s idea of what desire and intimacy between two older men can look like. “They create their own intimacy,” Hung said. “I feel like they actually performed the future in front of me as well when I'm rehearsing with them.”

Hung’s own wedding followed Western tradition and took place in a church; he found that his own idea of same-sex marriage continued to be very influenced by Western ideology, so he made it a point in his film to reimagine it within a Chinese context. Hung also met a pastor in Hong Kong who translated marriage rites into Cantonese and showed Hung how they could be performed in connection with Chinese ritual.

Despite his public inclusion of queerness in his art and openness with his identity, Hung’s life doesn’t entirely match up with the coming out movies he always loved and that made him envision coming out as the route to gaining freedom and respect. When he came out to his parents, which he described as a “confessional” moment, it felt like he was saying “take it or leave it.” 

But Chinese culture, he said, prioritizes collective harmony over individual desire, which has meant that even after he came out to his family, he continues to be in a “family closet.” Each time his relatives ask about his relationship status, his family and people he is close to then are either in the closet or forced to come out on his behalf too.

“When you tell your parents that you're gay, the first thing in China is that it's okay, we know, but don't tell others,” Hung said. “When I tell you that I’m gay, you need to keep a secret for me, so we are all under pressure.”

“I couldn't tell my grandmother as well, she had no idea,” Hung said. “There's no such word homosexuality in her generation. When I first come out, when I first run away from home, my mom will actually ask my grandma to call me every day. And then my grandmother said, your mom tells me that you're not going to get married, why?” 

When his late grandmother eventually visited him in his home where he lived with his boyfriend and a female roommate, he had to pretend that he and his boyfriend were not romantically together.

His next project, a virtual reality exhibition, aims to center intersectional queer identities in New Haven through virtual objects on the New Haven Green that tell their stories. Earlier this year, he met the New Haven queen and artist Bubblicious (Tia Lynn Waters, affectionately known as Bubbles). The two commiserated and shared common feelings despite differences in race and age, he said. 

The work will be presented at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, which takes place from June 10 to June 25.