Alice Y. Hom’s Work Connects Queer Asian American History and Community Power

Alice Y. Hom’s career brings together scholarship, LGBTQ activism, philanthropy, and cultural preservation, with important ties to Los Angeles. An Asian American LGBTQ community activist and author, Hom has focused much of her work on the ways queer people of color build community and create lasting institutions.

Hom earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale before completing a master’s degree in Asian American Studies at UCLA. She later received a doctorate in history from Claremont Graduate University. Her dissertation examined lesbian-of-color community building in Los Angeles and New York during the 1970s and 1980s, placing the experiences of queer women of color at the center of an important period in LGBTQ history.

That research focus has connected with Hom’s professional and community work. Since 2010, she has directed the Queer Justice Fund at Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy. The fund’s focus places LGBTQ concerns within broader Asian American and Pacific Islander philanthropic and organizing networks. The research identifies Hom as the current director of equity and social justice for Northern California GrantMakers as well.

Her work has also included education, museums, archives, and the arts. Hom was the founding director of the Intercultural Community Center at Occidental College and held positions at the Getty Information Institute and the Getty Research Institute. Those roles reflect an ongoing interest in how communities preserve knowledge and make their histories accessible.

Hom has served on the boards of several organizations connected to LGBTQ justice, Asian American communities, visual media, and cultural organizing. Among them are the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Visual Communications, Great Leap, the June Mazer Lesbian Archives, and APAIT. The range of those affiliations links direct community support with archival, artistic, and public-history work.

She was also an editor of “Q&A: Queer in Asian America,” an anthology that brings together essays, personal accounts, fiction, and art about LGBTQ life in Asian American communities. The collection’s format reflects the breadth of the experiences Hom has helped amplify: political and personal, historical and creative.

Hom is additionally identified as a host of the Historically Queer Podcast. Through her scholarship, editing, organizational leadership, and media work, she has contributed to a fuller record of LGBTQ life—particularly the histories and perspectives of Asian American and other queer communities of color. For Los Angeles, her academic work is especially significant because it documents local lesbian-of-color organizing within a wider national history.

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Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://www.linkedin.com/pub/alice-y-hom/2/271/426 - https://viaf.org/viaf/261131009 - https://www.gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=18139 - https://www.idref.fr/059371668 - https://web.archive.org/web/20150905163901/http://gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=18139 - https://isni.org/isni/0000000033273620 Image rights Original illustrative artwork created from story keywords. It is illustrative, not a documentary photograph.