Rethinking the coming home alternative: hybridization and coming out politics in Hong Kong's anti-homophobia parades

In calling for the need to think about sexuality globally, scholars have given increasing attention to the historical specificities of local contexts. The return to the local, however, may not always be fruitful when the local and the global or the Western and the non-Western are seen as binary opposites rather than permeable constructs. This paper examines the coming home/coming out controversy and calls into question the understanding of coming home as local resistance against global queering. It instead suggests the possibilities of cultural hybridity and blending of coming out and coming home. Using the First and the Second International Day Against Homophobia Hong Kong Parades as an example, this paper elucidates the complexity of cultural production in the interactions of the West and Non-West, with attention on the effect of transnational mobility of political rhetoric and tactics.