535: Being Brown and Gay in LA – Anthony Christian Ocampo

Being gay is hard enough. Imagine being gay in the margins where immigration, race, and LGBTQ issues clash with your sexual identity, and the conservative values, expectations, and fears of your hard working migrant parents make you feel less than the perfect son. Author, Anthony Christian Ocampo, PH.D. explores these types of stories in his new book Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons, and he shares his insights, challenges and guidance on the podcast today.

About Anthony

Anthony Christian Ocampo, Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author of Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons and The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race, which has been featured on NPR, NBC News, Literary Hub, and in the Los Angeles Times. He is an Academic Director of the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity and the co-host of the podcast Professor-ing. His writing has appeared in GQ, Catapult, BuzzFeed, Los Angeles Review of Books, Colorlines, Gravy, Life & Thyme, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Tin House, and the VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation. He was recently featured in the Netflix documentary “White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,” as he was one of the employees involved in suing the company for racial discriminatory hiring practices. Raised in Northeast Los Angeles, he earned his BA in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford University and his MA and PhD in sociology from UCLA.

In his free time, he loves reading memoirs and essay collections, watching figure skating and gymnastics clips on YouTube, playing with his rescue dog Schmidt, binging queer content on Netflix and HBO Max, and being chaotic with his multigenerational Filipino American family.

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