LETTER FROM THE EDITOR - VOL. 25
KCCNYC Monthly - June 2026
By Eun Byoul Oh
Seoul Queer Culture Festival will be held throughout month of June. Seoul Queer Parade will be held on June 13, 2026.
Happy Pride month for everyone! We are always happy and honored to celebrate Pride month in our community.
The cross-section of Korean culture and Pride month can be interesting as Korea is currently striving to make progress in gay rights, and it is often a struggle to move forward. We want to uplift the community through our Pride Edition of our KCCNYC Monthly.
In this year’s Pride edition of KCCNYC Monthly, we are excited and honored to share the story of Bryan, who is a Korean-American. He shares with us his journey as a member of LGBTQIA+ community. I am particularly grateful that he was open to share such an important story for us to read. 감사합니다. Bryan has been an important member of the KCCNYC community, and I hope he continues to have fun and exciting moments with our community.
As announced earlier, we are hosting our Pride Month Book Club with internationally acclaimed author Park Sang Young, who is most famously known for his novel Love in the Big City. The book has been adapted into a movie and a drama series of the same title. We are thrilled to have Park Sang Young with us to discuss his book. The RSVP link for the book club is here, and we will answer pre-submitted questions during the session. Please fill out this form so that we can select the questions for the author beforehand.
Thank you for joining us at the from Kimchi to Sauerkraut with 14th Street Y! Photo Credit: Ben Asen. We were honored to partner with 14th St. Y and Lunar Collective to present the event.
Our social media team is also preparing for Pride month contents for our Instagram page, so please stay tuned! We had so much fun in May, and I have to say thank you to everyone who came to our AAPI celebrations. 다음에도 또 만나요!
In June, KCCNYC will support the efforts of Seoul Disability Film Festival and Seoul Queer Culture Festival. The Seoul Disability Film Festival will be held on June 11th in New York City. Last year Priscilla and I were able to attend their last year’s Disability Film Festival to show our support for their cause. Seoul Disability Film Festival has been leaving film records of daily lives of disabled people in Korea and their journey to advocate for disability rights in Korea. Please see our community page for the details. Seoul Queer Culture Festival will be held in Korea on June 13th this year. If you are in Korea, you can join this fun rainbow celebration in the middle of Seoul! KCCNYC documented the festival in 2024 as part of our ongoing documentary project Keurida.
Separated families of South Korea and North Korea reunited for 67 hours 37 minutes on August 15, 2000. The reunification program slowly came to halt after South and North Korea’s relationship froze after 2008. The last reunification was in 2014.
On a different note, I want to highlight the fact that June is also a month of remembrance for Korea. We commemorate the fallen soldiers on June 6th every year. June is an important month for Korean history as the Korean War started on June 25th, 1950. As we often talk about in our classes, the war did not end, and it still influences aspects of the politics and personal lives of Koreans. The government policies and the political landscape of South Korea are still deeply impacted by the fact that the war has never finished, in addition to the fact that South Korea is physically adjacent to its main enemy country, North Korea, as the 국방백서 White Paper of National Defense of Korea states. On a personal level, I think about those whose relatives were born in North Korea who never got to return to their homes.
While wars in the world seem to be getting more normalized every single day, I think of what wars can do to a country and its people. War has no glory, but irrecoverable losses that people never come back from. The ideological and arm races involve policies and monumental political thinking on the surface, but they just bring disasters that are irreconcilable. In June, we think about the displaced people who lost their homes in North Korea due to the Korean War, and the separated families who never got to meet each other again, despite longing for each other through a lifetime. Perhaps, the generation who truly remembers the Korean War is almost gone, but the haunting memories of the war will live on through their stories and memories that are passed down to future generations.
Policy makers and the leaders of the world would have had to put the pains of their people before their own excuses of starting a war. The leaders of the Korean peninsula and those who were involved in the decision making during the Korean War in Russia and the U.S. may have not seen the final consequences of the ideological race and power grab, but it is indisputable that their decisions were the beginning of a tide that changed the course of Korean history. Had they seen the future of Korea would it have been any different?
Lastly, Korea’s local government election was held on June 3, and the election results were, in fact, very confusing as the People’s Party took some important seats, including Seoul Mayor’s office, despite being the party responsible for Yoon’s declaration of martial law. While I was very baffled at the result, I thought that Korea’s election really does show the power of a single vote, as I heard that literally one vote in the Nonsan Provincial Assembly Member election decided the race result. Voting may be the most important instrument in democracy to delegate our political rights to the correct leaders who will represent the constituents’ voices. Korea, unfortunately, learned this lesson through the shedding of so much blood – from the Korean War through the June Uprising, which brought the end to the dictatorship.
June is certainly a month of remembrance and resilience in Korea. KCCNYC will remember the fallen soldiers in the Korean War and those who sacrificed their lives for the democracy of Korea, and we remember and stand by those who are struggling to fight for the advocacy of labor rights, disability rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and human rights in Korea.
With solidarity, and unwavering resilience,
Eun Byoul Oh
