A Neglected Queer Play Hidden in Plain Sight: Soon-Tek Oh’s Tondemonai—Never Happen! (1970)

Abstract: Soon-Tek Oh’s 1970 play, Tondemonai—Never Happen! (hereinafter Tondemonai) , is a strangely neglected cultural artifact. A production of East West Players, it was the first commercially-produced play to dramatize Japanese American incarceration; and yet, despite also featuring queer kinship, it remains archived and practically forgotten in the academy. Its performance at a discursive center of Asian American cultural production disrupts a homogenized narrative in Asian American cultural studies—that the era was beset with queerphobic cultural nationalism. The play presents an opportunity to grapple with Asian American queer cultural nationalism targeting both racial castration and proto-homonationalism. After analyzing the play, I proffer a framework regarding homonationalism’s long emergence in transpacific terms, and reinterpret Lonny Kaneko’s classic 1976 short story “The Shoyu Kid” as another example of Asian American queer cultural nationalist storytelling. This article features archival stage photography of Tondemonai , which gives an impression of Asian American cultural production of the era as queerer than often presumed.