Filmmaker Andrew Ahn Connects Queerness to Korean-American Identity

From popular rom-com Fire Island to the moodier drama Spa Nights, film director and writer Andrew Ahn explores the intersection of queerness and Korean-American identity in his work.

“I’m trying to find stories that feel inherently both, because they don’t always sit together nicely,” he says.

Despite growing up in Los Angeles, a city often at the forefront of community acceptance, Ahn felt that his Koran-American and queer identities were at odds with each other.

“Koreatown is a tight-knit, ethnic enclave, and the values within it don’t always reflect the greater city [of Los Angeles],” he says. “I do think that — especially because the Korean-American community is very religious, specifically Christian — it’s more conservative and the subject of queerness is not always very welcome.”

Koreatown, with its bustling scene of restaurants and nightlife, lacks gay bars even today.

So, from Ahn’s view, it’s important to reconcile these two communities to “create culture” that feels authentically and organically both. That’s why he loves spaces for the queer, Asian community to gather. And, more personally, that’s why he became a filmmaker.

“My coming-of-age as a filmmaker happened at the same time as I was coming into my own as a gay man,” he says.

He was in film school at the time, at Cal Arts in Valencia, where he was fully, openly out of the closet from the start, and simultaneously learning how to make movies.

“Because of that, my artistic-self and my queer-self have always felt very interlocked,” he goes on to say.

Being his queer-self around his parents, on the other hand, took some time. When Ahn came out to them, they thought they did something wrong raising him. His dad suggested there were “no gay people in Korea”.

Looking back, Ahn believes they were “uniformed”. The years ensued and he educated them. He continued to include them in his life. And the film was a great way to open their minds. When Spa Night premiered at Sundance, they drove to Utah for the screening.

“Seeing them see a room full of people applaud and cheer for my gay, Korean film, meant something to them,” Ahn says. “They could see that I wasn’t going to be [outcast], that actually my queerness is a strength.”

Since he decided he wanted to make films, he’s let that mission guide him.

“I think it’s really difficult at the beginning of your career. You really have to start from scratch,” he says. “I was pretty stubborn about protecting my artistic expression. I didn’t want how I was making a living, paying the bills, to be artistic work that might dilute what I was passionate about.”

He didn’t take commercial work or editing gigs. He never played assistant to a creative executive. He resisted picking up set-hours as a PA. He avoided creative burnout like the plague. Instead, he worked as an admissions counselor, as a tutor, and learned how to live within his means.

Because, meanwhile, he was working on his first feature. It took him five years.

“It wasn’t a comfortable existence, but I really loved my friends, and I knew if I really wanted to focus on being a filmmaker, I had to save money, I had to keep my expenses low, so that I didn’t have to take a higher payer job that might take more time,” he goes on to say.

And, eventually, his patience and dedication paid off. In the last three years, with three feature films in his portfolio, Ahn has never felt more stable in the industry as a filmmaker. He’s also never been hungrier for more opportunities to continue telling stories that serve his creative ambition.

“There are still so many pockets of society that don’t accept queer people. I find that sh*t. [So, I] want to continue making film to help change that societal perception.” Ahn says. “But, if we do reach that point where queerness is normalized completely, I think I would still be really excited to tell queer stories.”

Ahn’s feature films are all available for streaming. You can watch Fire Island on Hulu, and Spa Night and Driveways on Prime Video. Also, don’t miss his exclusive interview on LATV’s The Q Agenda in September!