Stephanie Hsu won't forget a conversation she had with her father four years ago. She had already been living in New York for seven years after arriving in the city to attend university. Ms Hsu was in love and wanted her parents to meet her partner. The only problem was that the person she would bring back to her parents' home in Georgia was a woman.
'Some friends already knew,' said Ms Hsu. 'But I was having a hard time standing up for myself. I was saying to myself that my dad doesn't even accept me, how can I expect a stranger to accept me?'
So she called home. 'We both cried,' she said. 'His first reaction was that he felt sorry for me. He said it's already hard being an immigrant and being a young Asian person in this country and why make life harder for yourself?'
Born to a Taiwanese immigrant family, Ms Hsu considers herself lucky compared with many other Asian gays. She's studying for a PhD in English literature at New York University. Tolerance of diversity in academia makes her feel at ease. And even when she was working she was relatively lucky to spend three years at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, where the employees are more diverse than in most other community-based organisations in Chinatown.
But outside of the Asian community, Ms Hsu and her peers are struggling to establish support in US society. Their problems are illustrated in a survey of Asian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in the US released recently by the Washington, DC-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
The survey - the first of its kind - shows 89 per cent of respondents thought homophobia or transphobia (phobia about transgender people) are problems in the Asian community and 78 per cent think racism against Asians exists in the predominantly white mainstream LGBT community. Overall, 98 per cent of respondents said they had experienced discrimination or harassment based either on their sexual orientation or on their ethnicity.