This contribution presents the struggles that Vietnamese LGBTQ activists experience in their activism and everyday life. It utilizes data from in-depth interviews with LGBTQ activists and from the author’s participation-observation at an activist training programme in Vietnam. The qualitative data reveals various risks and challenges that young Vietnamese LGBTQ activists need to navigate, including, but not limited to family problems, anti-LGBTQ violence, involuntary outing, and teamwork challenges. It also shows the different emotion work strategies that these activists engage with in order to cope with such challenges and to sustain their commitment to the movement.The findings demonstrate the significance of positive queer visibility in Vietnamese LGBTQ activism. A strategy to recruit potential newcomers and to inspire others, for these activists, is through constructing an optimist public image with positive emotions such as hope and joy. In the context of a high risk/cost movement, this frontstage performance creates a backstage demand on emotion work, which can lead to repercussions that push these activists out of the mission. The dissonance between the frontstage emotional performances and the backstage emotional experiences is, therefore, central to understand the internal struggles in Vietnamese LGBTQ activism. This presentation expands our understanding of LGBTQ scholarship in Southeast Asian contexts, as well as contributing to the study of emotions in social movements, particularly with an approach that shifts the lens beyond public mobilizations to focus on various emotional struggles in activists’ everyday life.