Queer Chinatown Tour
We ran a Queer Chinatown Walking Tour in Chinatown in 2019 and 2023. The tour explored queer and trans speculative histories of the neighborhood, celebrating our queer and trans elders both known and unknown to us.
We released a zine reflecting on the tour in 2025, Maps and Altars.
Maps and Altars zine September 2025
In September 2025, we released the zine Maps and Altars: Queer and Trans Chinatown.
The zine features writing and visuals from contributors to our past Queer Chinatown walking tours, as well as reflections from other community members on their relationships with Chinatown as a queer and trans space. The zine also honors our beloved W.O.W. team member Em, who was a creator of the Queer Chinatown tour and who passed away in 2025.
Limited physical copies of the zine are available for purchase at the Wing on Wo and Co storefront.
PAST EVENTSQueer Chinatown Tour May 2019, August 2023
W.O.W.’s Queer Chinatown Walking Tour highlighted the hidden histories and contemporary happenings of the LGBTQ community in Chinatown. Inspired by place-keeping and critical mapping methods, the storytelling tour interactively engaged participants with different sites around the neighborhood that hold significance to queer and trans liberation. Based on community-based and archival engagement, the tour was created and led by queer Chinese American youth from the W.O.W. Project and neighborhood mapping collective, Chinatown Our Narratives Tours (CONTOURS). The tour was a final intern project created by two W.O.W. interns with collaborators Diane Wong, Alina Chen, and River Dandelion as part of W.O.W.’s spring 2019 Chinatown Movement event series.
We ran a smaller, revised version of the walking tour in 2023.
