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In 2019, Kaitlin Chan quit her full-time job as a curator in Hong Kong to plunge headfirst into an artist fellowship in Taipei, Taiwan's capital city, well-known as a safe haven for queer people in the region. Alone in a new country and finally embracing and making sense of her own queer identity, Chan began to seek out the community she had left conservative Hong Kong and came to Taipei for.
As she tried to make new friends—through mutual friends, the zine community, and, of course, Instagram—the conversations all began with a single question: "When did you know you are queer?" It could've been a lot more awkward, but to her relief, her new friends poured their hearts out about their queer journeys. Meandering through the leafy Taipei streets and sharing stories over plates of street food, what Chan discovered in these exchanges was a new language of writing queer stories, one that encompassed all their funny, emotional, quotidian, complex, and illuminating turns.
The result of Chan's year of transformative conversations is Homecoming, a graphic memoir about coming out as a queer millennial at the dawn of a new era of LGBTQIA+ rights in Asia. It threads Chan's own coming out journey with eight wildly diverging stories from the extraordinary individuals she met that year in Taipei. From a culture frequently stereotyped, Chan shares how she redefined herself as a queer woman of color: who she could love, what her future should be, traditional family structures, gender roles, exploring the idea of collective responsibilities over individual development, creating art, and everything in between.
With the inquisitiveness of Mira Jacobs, the prickly tenderness of Jillian Tamaki, and the emotional range of Jenny Zhang, Homecoming fills an essential gap in queer narratives at a historic juncture.
