For 14 years, St. Paul, Minn. was home to the world’s only Hmong LGBTQ organization, Shades of Yellow (SOY). Founded in 2003, SOY had a mission “to cultivate a community of empowered Hmong LGBTQ [people] to challenge what we’ve known and ignite positive cultural and social change.” It originally began as a social group where Hmong community members would meet at bars, cafes, and online to support each other through the stress of coming out and navigating conservative family values.

St. Paul and the Twin Cities more broadly, were a perfect hub for serving this intersection of the LGBTQ and Asian Pacific Islander community. Thousands of Hmong people fled to Minnesota as refugees following the war in Vietnam and the withdrawal of the US military during the culmination of the Laotian Civil War in 1975. Immigration continued throughout the 1980s and resulted in the Twin Cities becoming home to the largest Hmong metropolitan community to date.

SOY made a national impact by creating a welcoming home in the Twin Cities of LGBTQ Hmong people. In fact, SOY’s Executive Director, Keving Xiong, moved to the Twin Cities to become a member of SOY in 2006. Xiong had read an article about SOY in the Hmong Times and decided to move to Minnesota to join the organization at the age of 25.

After recognizing both the need for queer Hmong community and the strength of the early social support group, Xiong led SOY to be incorporated as a non-profit in 2006, formalizing its work in the Twin Cities and the Upper Midwest more broadly.

At the core of the organization’s work was creating social spaces for Hmong and other Asian Pacific Islander LGBTQ people to meet and build community. One of their flagship events was “SOY Stories,” an opportunity for community members to come together to share and listen to coming out stories. They also held overnight retreats, hosted a formal Hmong Asian Pacific Islander LGBTQ Support Group for youth ages 18-24, and regularly participated in Pride festivities and political actions throughout the Twin Cities.

Their annual event, the SOY New Year celebrated each March was started in a garage according to their now defunct website. “SOY New Year started out as a group of cis, gay Hmong men gathering together to celebrate their marginalized identities in a garage. Now, it is one of the largest events Shades of Yellow hosts to celebrate all LGBTQ Hmong, Asian and/or Pacific Islander (HAPI) identities.

Over 400 LGBTQ HAPI folks and allies from across the nation come to celebrate SOY’s queer version of the Hmong New Year.” The Twin Cities served as a connection point for Hmong LGBTQ people to gather from around the country and SOY New Year is a primary to understand the impact of local-level organizing within a broader national context.

Although the organization shuttered in 2017, it is crucial to celebrate the history of organizations that have made a broad impact on creating a more inclusive LGBTQ community in the Upper Midwest and nationally.

From the Queer Archives is a monthly post dedicated to LGBTQ history by culling queer and trans history from archival materials across the United States. Reckon focuses especially in the Midwest, a region where the experiences, contributions, and struggles of queer people and communities have been overlooked in historical narratives.

This series is critical in our current political and cultural moment where LGBTQ history, books, and representation are being removed from schools and public libraries. It is through historical visibility that LGBTQ people can understand this moment and themselves as part of a long legacy of queer and trans community-building.

Aiden M. Bettine is a trans archivist and historian. He is the Curator of the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota Libraries, the co-founder of Late Night Copies Press, a Minneapolis-based micropress that prints on photocopiers, and founder of the LGBTQ Iowa Archives & Library, a volunteer-led community archives & lending library in Iowa City. He specializes in researching and writing about queer and trans history throughout the Midwest.