Our hxstory: As an artist collective, we've been holdin' it down for queer and trans Việt art, healing, and culture in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost the last seven years! We are queer, trans, and gender-expansive artists, healers, dancers, poets, filmmakers, photographers, writers, gamers, coders, cooks, gardeners, organizers, educators, cultural organizers, and so so so so much more of the Việt diaspora who're interested in a homeland trip to Việt Nam together :) We live out our daily lives in active resistance to conforming to the enforced violence of heteropatriarchal gender binaries, and by exercising our right to fully be in our bodies and spirits and live in the cross-sections of intersectionality, fluidity, diversity, and transformation, we can all collectively survive and thrive! In our beginnings, we developed locally and organized events to bring together diasporic QTViệt folx for our Lunar New Year Intergenerational Feasts of Resistance, food workshops, QTViệt by Night showcases, and more.

Our Vision: Connecting with our kin: Today, we are hoping to bridge together the QTViệt artists community not just in the Bay Area, but across the diaspora. We’re calling it, Xe Đò Queer: QTViệt Caravan on the Road! This is our queer riff on the Việt cultural phenomenon of the intercity bus system popular in California. This is the culmination of our shared vision to heal, connect, and grow with QTViệts everywhere. To start, this year, we are fundraising to bring our work to our ancestral homeland. With a goal of $50,000 to go to Việt Nam this fall, we aspire to center QTViệt experiences and grow our community across the diaspora and in the homeland.

We're raising funds to build our programming, collaborate with locals, and give directly to QTViệt people. Our goal is to bring at least 10 of us to Việt Nam this October to meet with other queer and trans Việts locally, better understand the issues facing our queer and trans kin there and create sanctuary art spaces for us to showcase each other’s work and heal together.

Our inspirations: This project is inspired by our desire to be more connected with our homeland, meet other QTViệts, and Ms. Phụng, a Việt trans woman who fought for queer and trans liberation by leading performance troupes throughout Việt Nam. We connect with Ms. Phụng’s resilience in the face of bigotry. We are the lineage of Ms. Phụng and all our Việt queer transancestors, doing the same work of art and performance as means of healing in our community.

In the spirit of Ms. Phụng, we seek to travel beyond the Bay Area to connect with other diasporic queer and trans Việts within Turtle Island and in Việt Nam. We seek to unify our queer and trans community, deepen our artistic practices, and stake our presence as displaced and marginalized people. We honor the legacy of Ms. Phụng through carrying her work, healing as a community and fighting for recognition.

Our hopes & aspirations: Our collective journey has been beautiful and trying with peaks and valleys. It has created circles of protection and beacons of light for us to feel resourced, nourished, and live the ways that we want to, the ways that we need to. QTViệts on the Road is an extension of the grace and growth we have been cultivating within our space - with queer trans Việt people all across the world in mind.

While visiting collaborative partners, we want to workshop our art disciplines through skillshares, sharing cultural knowledge, and exchanging our QTViệt magikal medicine with one another. We want to practice modalities of art & healing to be as fluid & wide of a spectrum as our genders, sexual expressions & identities. We hope that this project will have deep artistic, communal, social, political, and cultural impacts. By creating spaces that center dialogue and art that shift the narratives of queer & trans Việts, we gain a greater sense of connection with our blood family members when oftentimes we feel estranged from. We hope that by going to Việt Nam, we find inspiration, motivation, and passion, and our circle and healing grows.

Thank you to everyone who's supported since Day 1 and all of those who've helped along the way to get to where we are now!

We hope to share updates here and on our social media. If you feel called to support by donating to our trip, you can make a tax-deductible online donation here. Please select "QTViet Cafe Collective" in the "ARU Program Designation" and Write "Viet Nam" in the Comments.

We're also accepting donations via Zelle (DM us on IG or contact us) and Venmo @qtvietcafe (Please write "VN" in the "What's this for?" box. The logo is a multi-colored turtle with a lotus flower on its shell.)

Big love to Sunkissed Productions for collaborating and producing our fundraising video and the PRISM Foundation for helping fund it.