Many lament loss after Chinese magazine for gay, AIDS-affected communities closes
by Xinhua writer Yang Dingdu
BEIJING, July 20 (Xinhua) — A retired colonel in China’s armed police force and a gay, Zhang Guowei was delighted to find an extra-thick copy of “Friend Exchange” had arrived one morning after returning from his morning exercises.
He had been a subscriber to the magazine for the homosexual and AIDS-affected communities since 2001.
But on opening the package tears welled in Zhang’s eyes. The words “Final Issue” were printed on the magazine cover.
“It was like my best friend suddenly bid me farewell.” [ The only Chinese magazine providing mental support and AIDS prevention advice to the gay community, “Friend Exchange” has published its final issue after its main sponsor, the Ford Foundation, ended its financial support of the bimonthly.
When Joan Kaufman, reproductive health program officer of Ford Foundation China Office first came to China in the 1996, she found homosexuality was highly stigmatized and not acknowledged by the society, and there were no obvious support groups to engage in the effort.
Then in 1998 Kaufman heard about Zhang Beichuan and “Friend Exchange”, a small magazine passed hand to hand, and decided to offer financial support. Ford Foundation has decided to switch its assistance to other countries in Southeast Asia and Africa because it regards China already too wealthy for such aids.
Copies of the last issue of “Friend Exchange” have been sent to its readers – members of the MSM community (men who have sex with men), AIDS sufferers, experts, journalists, officials and social activists, said the magazine’s publisher and editor Zhang Beichuan, a renowned expert on homosexual studies.
Each print run of 15,000 copies had cost about 500,000 yuan (73,800 U.S. dollars). The magazine was publicly praised by several senior Chinese officials, including former vice minister of health Wang Longde and Wu Zunyou, head of the AIDS prevention department at China’s CDC.
“It is hard to imagine China’s AIDS response and the MSM community without the magazine and the respected and neutral role it played in an often fractious environment,” Kaufman, also a scholar with Harvard Medical School, said.
In China, the government is the almost exclusive provider of public services and since 2002 the China CDC has done an admirable job in tackling many sensitive AIDS-related issues, Kaufman said.
However, the government’s effort, while necessary, are unfortunately insufficient to prevent HIV infections among MSM and other marginalized and stigmatized groups, she said.
MSM HIV infections account for 32.5 percent of all HIV cases and MSM is one of the highest incidence cohorts in China’s still expanding AIDS epidemic, according to Ministry of Health statistics.
China had 740,000 HIV-positive people at the end of 2009. New infections declined from 70,000 in 2005 to 48,000 last year on government prevention measures.
Friend Exchange has successfully fulfilled its mission, promoting knowledge, encouraging gay men and other stigmatized people and helping the society to understand the community, said Pan Suiming, head of the Institute for Research of Sexology and Gender at Renmin University.
In today’s China, gay men have become much more recognized by the society and government. In most cities, the gay community has come out of the underground world, said Tong Ge, president of China’s Gay Health Forum.
But Qiu Renzong, a renowned ethics scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences believes the closure of ‘Friend Exchange’ is untimely. “In fact, we need more publications like ‘Friend Exchange’ to fight the discrimination and stigmatization of AIDS sufferers and other marginalized risky groups.”
“I felt sad when I received the last issue. For years, I have been learning from the magazine, quoting its stories to comfort fellow sufferers,” said AIDS activist Murong Feng, who is gay and HIV positive.
Birte Seffert, a scholar at Free University of Berlin medical school Charite, has been sharing the stories from “Friend Exchange” with her students and friends at a NGO group in Berlin.
“Through ‘Friend Exchange,’ we saw progress in Chinese society and we continued to learn about the MSM community and AIDS-prevention work in China,” she said.
Gay, lesbian community’s pride of place
By Todd Balazovic and William Axford (China Daily)
Drag queens dotted the sidewalks of Solana on Saturday as members of the gay and straight community descended on Langtung Thai Bar to celebrate their “Jing Pride”.
Organized by volunteers from Beijing’s gay community, Jing Pride is one of the first gay pride charity events to take place in Beijing, said Maggie Lo, one of the event’s three organizers.
“This event shows that more people are accepting us and that Beijing is actually opening up to the community,” she said. “It’s something to be happy about.”
Drag queens, performances by gay and lesbian singers and the raffling of risqu prizes attracted a colorful crowd of people wanting to show their support.
The event was sponsored by more than 15 Beijing businesses. Money from donations and raffle ticket sales were donated to the Chi Heng foundation, an NGO supporting HIV/AIDS impacted orphans, and the Beijing LGBT Center, Beijing’s gay and lesbian support center.
Lo said they had hoped to raise more than 10,000 yuan.
Though several of the participants at Jing Pride were LGBT, the event was not targeted specifically toward LGBT people, said Lo.
“It’s not just for the gay and lesbian community, but for the people in the straight community who have gay friends as well,” she said.
Bradley Chowles, a south Africa-native, was one of several men at the event dressed in drag and selling raffle tickets. He had just heard of the event the night before and, though he is not gay, had to back such a good cause, he said.
“If it was a cause that I didn’t think had much value, I wouldn’t be here to begin with,” he said.
He said he also wanted a chance to try something new, which, in this case, was to shave his legs and dress like a woman.
“People say you don’t see a person’s true colors until you give them a mask – this is something like that,” he said, adding that he was also a guitarist for the “death metal” band Concrete Nothing.
The Chaoyang Center for Disease Control and Prevention also attended the event, handing out condoms and offering onsite five-minute HIV/AIDS tests to the event-goers.
Kevin Yao, a clerk for the Chaoyang CDC, said they were using the opportunity to get in touch with Beijing’s gay community.
“Everyone is at risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, but this was a chance for us to target specifically LGBT people,” Yao said.
The event took one month to plan, but had been on the organizers’ minds for more than a year.
“We wanted to do something this year because Shanghai had a Shanghai Pride Event last year and it was about time for Beijing to do the same,” Grace Su, another of the event’s organizers, said.
Lo said they were cautious about advertising the event too much for fear that it might be shut down, referencing an instance last January where a gay beauty pageant was shut down by police claiming they didn’t have proper licensing, minutes before the show started.
“We didn’t get much media involved and we didn’t do much advertising,” she said. “Mainly, it was just word of mouth.”
Agu Anumumu, a member of Beijing’s gay community, said the event was a perfect display of how Beijing is moving forward in its attitude toward homosexuality.
“Just the fact Beijing is holding events shows that they’re progressive,” said Anumumu.
Chinese gays are chasing the elusive rainbow
By Linda Gibson (China Daily)
Watching gay men and lesbians in China struggle for basic rights and dignity is like hurtling through a time warp to the past.
Job discrimination. Social ostracism. Broken-hearted parents. Lives of deception, denial and depression. Police oppression. Brutality from vicious straight men or teenage hoodlums looking for easy targets.
And those are just the visible hurdles of being gay in a straight society.
They’re the consequences of the invisible assumptions, the unenlightened attitudes that feed poisonous outcomes.
Because of cultural differences, the fight for gay rights here is bound to take on Chinese characteristics, whatever those might be. So the paths to gay rights taken in Western countries probably diverge from those that will be available here.
Nonetheless, here’s a description of what gay life can be when people stop hiding, win their rights and live with pride, a look through the time warp into the possible future.
This month, cities all over the United States will be hosting their annual Gay Pride parades. These have evolved from a few dozen people marching with paper bags over their heads to hide their identities into massive celebrations that attract tens of thousands of families, politicians and sponsors.
The best-known is in San Francisco, home to one of the country’s biggest gay populations.
From a single afternoon featuring a parade, this event now spans several days. Its activities range from picnics in the park for families to a gigantic carnival featuring booths selling food, souvenirs, arts and crafts, clothing, jewelry and services.
Some of the items are blatantly sexual. But some of America’s biggest businesses also set up booths to show their eagerness to cater to this sizable, well-organized and generally well-heeled population. These include resorts, luxury housing developments, airlines and banks.
Even The Walt Disney Co sets aside a week in June every year to hold Gay Days at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. and Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. Minnie and Mickey don’t mind.
The parade in San Francisco a couple of years ago was led by a large contingent of lesbian bikers, clad in black leather and riding big, noisy, powerful motorcycles. People in the audience, as well as parade participants, dressed (or undressed) in amazing costumes of lingerie, lace, leather, feathers, jewelry, body paint, boots, masks and lots of attitude.
Even dogs were dressed up or dyed in the colors of the gay-rights symbol, the rainbow.
In every city, state and local politicians march or ride in the parades or come to mingle with the gay voters. The biggest parades, such as those in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, attract national celebrities from sports, politics and entertainment.
All large American cities have gay enclaves. These tend to be among the trendiest and more expensive neighborhoods, with some of the best restaurants, hottest clubs and chicest boutiques. As a population, gays and lesbians tend to be highly educated and financially comfortable.
In fact, when gays and lesbians start moving into a run-down fringe neighborhood, you can bet that property values there will rise through the roof. First, they’ll renovate the housing. Then upscale cafes and bars will appear. Finally, straight people who appreciate good restaurants and can afford high-quality housing begin moving in, too.
Gays and lesbians buy houses together, open businesses, get married, have children and in general conduct their lives in the same ways as the straight population. Schools have learned to accommodate children, without fuss, who have two mommies or two daddies.
None of this came easily. It took more than 40 years of struggle, individually and as a group, to win the political and social rights supposedly guaranteed by law to all.
But it can be done, and the rewards made it worth the struggle.
Gay group finds a public place to call home
Center promotes understanding on a shoestring budget supply
In apartment 2108, there’s a small second-hand book market. It seems nothing special but the dozens of rainbow-colored signs decorating the room offer some clues to the uniqueness of the event.
This is a gay-themed sale in the unit, which functions as the Beijing LGBT Center, for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
More than 70 books and hundreds of magazines and DVDs were donated by people from the LGBT community, with about half the titles dealing in homosexual subjects.
“The book market is a new channel of fundraising,” said Yang Ziguang, manager of Beijing LGBT Center. “But what matters more is that it’s another opportunity to build up the sense of a big family, and bond together.”
Founded on Feb 14, 2008, the center is a public, nonprofit organization which aims to raise the awareness of self-identity of the LGBT community, and promote the gay movement and multicultural development, according to the organization’s mission statement.
The center has invited celebrities such as the openly gay mayor of West Hollywood, John Duran, and Taiwan movie director Zhou Meiling, a lesbian, to give speeches to the LGBT community in Beijing. It also provides other activities such as movie screenings, chorus training, an English corner and travel opportunities.
The second-hand book market coincides with a “Queer Literature Forum” launched on May 15 to celebrate June – the “Month of Gay Pride” – a festival created by the LGBT community nationwide.
“Our organization is trying to provide a safe, equal and tolerant space for the LGBT community,” said Yang.
The 24-year-old is the only full-time staff member of the center. He also lives in the center.
“Our center cannot afford renting another accommodation for me,” said Yang, sitting on a mattress on the floor. Next to him, his boyfriend Yuan Ye played a Bach etude on an electronic keyboard.
The center’s five founders provide most of the funding for the center, which derives some support from the sales of self-designed T-shirts, cups, notebooks and postcards. The income is barely enough to cover the 5,200-yuan monthly rent and salaries, Yang said.
“But we have more than 100 registered volunteers to support us.”
Sun Xiaowei, who once sought medical treatment when he realized he was gay in college, now is a center volunteer.
“I love the sentence ‘I am what I am’. Everyone’s individuality and choice should be respected,” said Sun, 25, who helps run the book and DVD sale, movie screenings and other activities organized by the center.
Another volunteer Wan Xiaoya, who has worked at the center since last year, introduced the center’s various activities to newcomers. As one of few heterosexuals at the center, she said she doesn’t feel uncomfortable at all.
“I’ve made a lot of gay friends here,” said the 21-year-old. “Being with them enables me to be more sympathetic toward unfamiliar things, and be more willing to fight against unfair conduct.”
Wu Jin, 27, visiting the center for the first time with his boyfriend, said the atmosphere is quite comfortable.
“I like the book market and the place. I’m glad to know more gay friends here,” said Wu, who hasn’t told his parents of his homosexuality.
Near the entrance of the center is a table topped with publicity materials, free condoms, volunteer application forms and handouts on various activities. A cardboard box is set out for donations of at least one yuan per participant for each event.
“The amount of this donation is too small to cover the electricity fee, but it doesn’t matter,” Yang said. “By doing this, we symbolize one’s participation, support, action and change, to pass on the voice of the LGBT community.”
Yang also said the recent one-day book market only yielded about 300 yuan, but center is planning more activities such as an art forum to better serve the LGBT community.
China Daily
My wife, your husband
By Mei Jia (China Daily)
Lesbian partners are tying the knot with gay couples to satisfy their parents, but find the deception exhausting. Mei Jia reports
Zhang Nana (not her real name), a 32-year-old working for a Beijing-based magazine, and her 58-year-old parents are caught in a crisis that threatens to tear apart the family.
But it was only in October 2006 that her parents attended the banquet that gathered together more than 100 relatives and friends, to celebrate their daughter’s marriage to a good-looking, 31-year-old university lecturer surnamed Wang.
Three years later, the couple divorced. The reason that Zhang gave her parents has plunged a home filled with warmth and laughter into distress and agony. She finally told them: She is a homosexual.
“Why are you failing me?” questions her mother.
“Can you not try and change?” they ask, worn out by their crying, disbelief and disappointment.
Although China removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 2001, people like Zhang’s parents continue to see it as an abnormity that can be corrected.
“How can I?” counters Zhang.
“I haven’t told them that I’ve been living with my female partner since 2004.
“They believe I’ve ‘degenerated’ into same-sex love because of troubles in the marriage. But Wang, too, is gay.
“Our marriage was a cover from the very beginning,” she adds.
Zhang shares a loving relationship with Shenlan (not her real name), 29, who was a bridesmaid at her wedding.
They discovered one another while co-renting an apartment in the capital’s Wangjing area. Knowing that their parents would never be able to understand or accept their love, their kept their relationship secret.
“My parents are a happy couple with traditional ideas, who expect me complete this picture of bliss with a grandchild,” Zhang says.
As her love for Shenlan deepened, she began to think of the future. “I realized that sooner or later, I would have to react to my parents’ expectations.”
It was while trawling the online lesbian-community forums and reading of the personal experiences of other homosexuals, that Zhang and her partner decided to look for a gay couple “so we could help one another”.
Guo Xiaofei, law school lecturer at China University of Political Science and Law, and author of Homosexuality in the Prospective of Chinese Law, says that in a country where same-sex marriage/partnership is not legal, a sham marriage is the gay community’s creative response to the pressure to conform.
A lack of understanding of homosexuality and traditional mores are forcing more gay men to marry, and even beget children, saying leading sociologist and sexologist Li Yinhe of the China Academy of Social Sciences.
A 2005 survey of 200 gay men, by the Guangdong Center for Diseases Control and Prevention, shows that 30 percent of them were married.
In a 2006 interview with Guangzhou Daily, Li said 90 percent of the country’s homosexuals, with an estimated population of 39-52 million, are trapped in marriages with straight partners.
Though the ratio of gay-lesbian marriages is hard to tell, “they are a reaction to the social pressures,” say university lecturer Guo.
Zhang Nana and Shenlan began their search for a gay couples in 2005, setting two conditions for their prospective “husbands”: no body contact and no children.
“We thought a gay couple could help all four of us keep our long-term relationship” Zhang says. “But we were wrong.”
In early 2006, Zhang and Shenlan met Wang and Lian (They would not give their full names). Based on favorable first impressions, and the intense pressure for marriage by both Zhang’s and Wang’s parents, the two registered their marriage in May.
Former law students, they made sure they had a clear understanding on the sharing of money, property etc.
“We didn’t want to trigger extra problems,” Zhang says.
They shared the expenses for the wedding banquet and lived separately.
At first, everything went smoothly. Months after the wedding, one friend of Zhang’s mother’s asked to visit the daughter’s “wedding house”.
Zhang called Lian immediately for the apartment he had bought was supposed to be the marital home. Wang and Shenlan rushed to bring buy all sorts of things to make it look like a woman had been living there. And they managed to get out just minutes before Zhang and her guests arrived.
“I showed them around pretending to be the hostess,” Zhang recalls.
But gradually she felt Wang was not playing his part as a supportive “husband”, or a dutiful son-in-law.
“While I went to see Wang’s family 3-4 times a year, he seldom did the same,” she says.
Their collaboration ended and Zhang saw a chance to come clean with her parents.
“I was sick of lying to them,” she says.
Meanwhile, in 2007, her partner Shenlan married Lian, a 36-year-old employee in a foreign company, at the constant pushing from Lian’s parents.
“My life has become an endless round of deceptions. I’m exhausted with all the lying. I have even had to abandon some of my cherished friendships,” Shenlan says.
While she is still waiting for an occasion to tell everything to her “open-minded mom”, Zhang is sure her parents will come around, eventually.
“Once my cousin mentioned the increasing number of lesbian relationships in her university in a casual chat with my mother. I observed my mom’s facial expressions stealthily and found her to be quite calm. This encouraged me to go ahead and tell her the truth.”
University lecturer Guo says Zhang’s decision also reflects the growing economic and social status of Chinese women, and the increasing confidence with which homosexuals are approaching their sexual identity.
“But their social recognition still lags behind,” he says.
“They are forced into sham marriages as only then does the social pressures ease, even if divorce is the ultimate outcome.”
Agreeing, Lian says he feels more relaxed after his fake marriage. “It (the pressure to marry) was my second biggest challenge after my self-identification as a gay.”
Zhang is still waiting to reconcile with her family.
“I would love to invite my mom and dad to our place to see how I’m living and how I get along with Shenlan,” she says. “But so far, I have made little progress.”
International gay day in Beijing
An event celebrating an “International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia” (IDAHO) was held last night at Beijing’s Café Copy in the Today Art Gallery, and was organized by the British Em-bassy and Queer Comrades, a Beijing-based LGBT awareness group.
“We are delighted that the embassy could support this evening’s event,” said Chris Wood, deputy British ambassador to China. “Human rights apply to all people, regardless of sexual orientation.”
The deputy ambassador went on to explain that IDAHO events separate themselves from other LGBT events by focusing on issues of discrimination, rather than focusing on individuals being able to find happiness with who they really are.
Held annually in more than 50 countries worldwide, IDAHO seeks to promote an “ideal of a world without homophobia or transphobia,” according to a notice on the organization’s official website.
Last night’s event also saw the debut of a short documentary produced by Queer Comrades, The Story of Mr Gay China, which provided an in-depth look at the events leading up to the cancellation of China’s first gay beauty pageant.
Speaking at the conclusion of the film, Xiao Geng, one of the film’s producers and co-founder of Queer Comrades, told attendees that the documentary was made to bring awareness to issues facing China’s LGBT community.
“We really need your help and support in forwarding our cause,” said Geng. “The Inter-net is still a gray area and the laws governing it are still not clear. But our website is careful and employs a lot of self censorship to make sure we don’t push the envelope too far.”
Ryan Dutcher, an organizer for Mr Gay China, said that coverage of the event in Chinese media had been very positive in the days leading up to its abrupt cancelation. But once it had been shut down, he said, the reporting went negative.
“Chinese media suddenly started saying that [the organizers] had disappeared and run off with all the money, which wasn’t true,” Dutcher told reporters.
This year’s worldwide IDAHO theme was chosen as “Homophobia in Sports,” but organizers in Beijing chose to focus on “Representations of LGBT people in Chinese Media.”
“This year’s IDAHO is about sports,” an embassy insider told the Global Times, “but that’s not what the organizers were really interested in covering.”
“The British embassy has been using international days as a means of getting their message about human rights out to people,” the insider added.
Beijing’s IDAHO event drew a crowd of more than 80 individuals and representatives of various international and China-based organizations.
By By Andrew Tait , www.globaltimes.cn
Getting behind the camera: Fan Popo
Chinese film maker, Fan Popo speaks with Fridae.com’s Hong Kong correspondent, Nigel Collett about having his first “gay experience” when he was just three and how he found his calling as a filmmaker.
Valentine’s Day 2010; China Daily’s picture of a lesbian couple from the Beijing Tongzhi Group dressed in wedding dresses on the streets of Beijing is flashed around the world, the headline ‘Gay Rights in China: ROAD TO RESPECT’. What is not shown is the film crew which had filmed the couple in Qianmen Street on the previous year’s Valentine’s Day or its director, Fan Popo. China Daily’s stills were taken during filming of Fan’s second gay Chinese film, New Beijing, New Marriage.
Fan Popo, 25, studied film research for four years at the prestigious
Beijing Film Academy before he found his calling as a filmmaker.
All photos courtesy of Fan Popo.
Aged only 25, Fan has already three films on LGBT subjects under his belt. These, plus the road show he and friends put together two years ago to bring LGBT film to China’s major cities, brought him an invitation to attend the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s week-long Gender and Sexuality Festival this March. Over a day, Fan showed the festival audiences six films in Putonghua (four of them documentaries, one a cartoon and one a “docudrama”) and talked to them about the LGBT situation in China, concentrating particularly on cultural aspects. In between sessions, he came down to Central to meet me at the Foreign Correspondents Club to tell me about his work on film and on the road.
His career has had a meteoric trajectory. “My first ‘gay experience’ was when I was aged 3,” he told me. “I remember sitting on my mother’s lap watching TV and seeing a handsome guy. I was attracted to boys all the way through school; I had very strong emotions and told many of them I loved them!” He was usually rebuffed, but not always, and apart from being made continual fun of he wasn’t bullied for his honesty.
Home was in a country district of Jiangsu where no one understood homosexuality and few do now (though his parents do, as he has told them about it). Later, as a student, he was exposed to the more sophisticated ways of the capital, where he studied film research for four years at the prestigious Beijing Film Academy.
Whilst studying, Fan collected a very large number of queer movies, which he was always recommending to his classmates. He found that some of them who had been homophobic began to understand LGBT people through watching the films and this opened his eyes to the power of film, not, of course, to change people’s sexuality, but to alter opinions about sexual minorities. Fan began to write papers about queer movies in his classes (one of them won an LGBT prize from the Chi Heng Foundation). There were then no books about queer film in mainland China, so when he had written a lot of articles on this topic, he collected them in a book and set out to find a publisher. He had great encouragement from Professor Cui Zi’en, the leading light in China’s LGBT film world, who had earlier been sacked from the Academy after he had come out as gay and now works as an independent film maker. With help from Cui, the book was published in Chinese in 2007, two months before Fan graduated. It is entitled Chunguang Zhaxie: Baibu Tongzhi Dianying Quanjilu, or Happy Together: 100 Queer Films All Included.
Whilst doing all this, Fan was also writing TV shows and by the end of his course had saved enough money to buy a digital video (DV) camera. After graduating, he tried his hand at writing screenplays (which he found dull), wrote newspaper pieces about film then turned to making films himself. With support from Aizhixing (the Beijing HIV NGO), Fan Popo went to Taiwan in 2007 to work with the Taipei LGBT Civil Rights Movement (which is the name for the annual LGBT festival there, rather than a movement), and showcased this in a short film called Taipei: City of Rainbow. This was shown at the fourth Beijing Queer Film Festival (of which Cui Zi’en was an organiser) in June 2009. Fan is a Committee Member of the Festival, too.
“The Central Government has total control over what is shown in cinemas,” Fan tells me, “and films with gay subjects are forbidden. The Beijing Queer Film Festival has been troubled by the police several times. So we wanted a safe way to show films and to speak out to the community.” So, with actress Shitou (a lesbian who starred in what was billed as China’s first mainstream lesbian film, Fish and Elephant, in 2001) and Bin Xu, (an LGBT activist in China since 1995 and Director of Common Language, a support and rights group for lesbian, bisexual women and transgender people in China), Fan founded China Queer Independent Films.
In February 2008, they launched the China Queer Film Festival Tour, which has already shown over seventy screenings of LGBT films in eighteen cities around China. “We show films in many different venues,” Fan adds, “gay and lesbian clubs, LGBT cultural centres, straight film salons and even universities. We used to have to beg for places to take our shows; now they are asking us to come. We hold talks after the films about LGBT subjects and try to educate our audiences, many of whom are heterosexual.”
Everything is self-funded, and the costs of the endless train and bus travel and the cheap accommodation are covered only in part by the minimal ticket charges (usually set at RMB 20/US$3, or RMB 30 a head). They sell books, DVDs and postcards and take local donations as they travel to make it all work. They’ve also had help from gay magazine Gay Spot and from Les Plus, the lesbian journal, as well as from the Beijing Queer Film Festival, the Beijing LGBT Centre and webcast Queer Comrades, all of which have shared resources to help make the tours possible. I ask Fan whether the Government had ever tried to stop their work. “No, not at all,” he answers. “We kept our project low profile at first but are more open now. We’ve been mentioned by China Daily and on the LGBT website aibai.com. When we’re on tour, a lot of people are very shy of having much to do with us at first,” he adds.
Actress Tilda Swinton in a “We want to watch homosexual movies!” tshirt
at the first Scottish Film Festival in China in March 2009.
“When we reach a tour destination, many will not walk with me, but after a few days they are asking to wear one of our t shirts,” one of which this reporter is very proud to possess and which states boldly in Chinese “We want to watch homosexual movies!” Tilda Swinton wore one at the first Scottish Film Festival in China in March 2009.
Chinese gay film makers often concentrate on coming out stories, and Fan is no exception. Whilst on tour, he interviewed many gay men and lesbians who had come out to their parents, putting their experiences together in his film The Chinese Closet, which was released in 2009. “Coming out is still a very big issue in China,” says Fan. “One day, it’ll be a forgotten thing, but now we need to educate closeted LGBT people and help them come out.”
Fan at the ‘Only Love’ club in Nanning, the capital of
Guangxi autonomous region in southern China.
His next film, Only Love, takes a different theme, this time looking at the experience of transgender people in Nanning, in the south of China. It’s under production now. You’ll be very lucky to see any of his films, regrettably, as they aren’t published outside China and as far as Fan is aware are not on the net yet. This was indeed one of the assumptions of many of the films’ participants, who were often prepared to be featured on films that would be shown to small and discreet audiences but did not give permission for their interviews to go on general release, where they might be spotted by people who knew them.
LGBT film making is still fraught with difficulty in China as cultural censorship works to keep LGBT subjects out of mainstream films and to prevent their showing in public cinemas. Gay film makers who want to make films about the gay experience can’t get funding, though there’s more chance of finance for a film about HIV and in a very few cases some foreign film foundations can be found to help out. This is not only an issue of party political doctrine or control, thinks Fan, more the traditional moral conservatism ensconced in the administration. Confucius and the primacy of the family have lost little of their power.
Despite his youth, Fan has suffered for the last six years from lumbar disc protrusion, a complaint that runs in his family, and which recently kept him in bed for a full two months. “I will not give up holding the camera”, he says, “it’s something I love. Even though my camera is very heavy, when I was ill in bed I had to hold it.” Symptomatic, I think, of the bravery with which he conceived and implemented his project.
Mr. Gay China: The Movie
I was present at January’s Mr. Gay China Pageant the night it was suddenly cancelled just an hour before it was set to start. Following the numerous LGBT events that had not been cancelled in 2009, the Mr. Gay China pageant felt like another step toward the community’s “coming out,” making its cancellation all the more devastating. I think Ryan Dutcher of Gayographic, the gay PR firm that had organized the event, said it best in a statement to the press when asked whether the cancellation was a major setback for China. Dutcher replied: “It’s hard to say. It’s something that’s happened before. Not a step back, but definitely not a step forward.”
Now the Queer Film Night at CNEX is presenting a screening of the documentary Comrades, You’ve Worked Hard, which aims to tell the full story of the Mr. Gay China Pageant and its cancellation.
The documentary is directed by Wei Xiaogang, founder of Queer Comrades, which provides an online forum to discuss LGBT issues in the form of webisodes and blogs. Wei was present at the Mr. Gay China Pageant and was set to judge the contest prior to its cancellation.
“Queer Comrades have been following with them since the beginning,” says Wei during our phone interview. “We just naturally followed and documented the whole thing. So we had the footage to make a full documentary film. But how to tell the story is always the hardest part.”
The film chronicles the pageant from its beginning to premature end. With organizers and contestants present at the screening, the CNEX event offers anyone who wants to learn more about the reality of gay rights in China an excellent opportunity.
For those who can’t make it, Wei says he’ll put a shorter version of Comrades, You’ve Worked Hard on the Queer Comrades site later in May.
Comrades, You’ve Worked Hard; 8.30pm, Friday April 16; CNEX Salon Cafe. RMB 50 (includes one drink).
by Christine Laskowski, www.thebeijinger.com
Shanghai: No More Gay Bars!
Down the cement stairs to the underground dungeon of Shanghai Studio, the long hallway leads to several roomfuls of men drinking under dim pink, blue and green lights. I squeeze past and my eyes quickly scan every man on my radar: he’s cute, he’s hot, he’s gross, he’s a dork. I feel everyone else’s eyes on me, sharp, intimidated, lustful and judgmental.
“Oh, there you are!” I find my friends and take in a deep breath.
Surrounded by perfectly groomed men and awfully loud music played by the pot-bellied DJ, I realize why I never come here, or any other gay clubs: there is too much sexual tension in the air and that makes me uncomfortable.
After speaking with several guys, I find out I’m not the only one who isn’t so fond of gay clubs. “At gay clubs it’s like everyone is looking for something,” says 25-year-old Michael from Shanghai. Bu Ke, 23, thinks gay bars are filled with the smell of cigarettes, perfume and meat. “It’s a meat market,” he says. “I much prefer other clubs where I can actually enjoy myself.”
Some find gay clubs unappealing for other reasons. Twenty-six-year-old Bai Gaodun says he doesn’t like the atmosphere because “strange drag queens are always there. I’d have much more fun at other clubs.” Nemo, 25, agrees, saying: “The guys at gay clubs are too C (Chinese slang for ‘camp’).”
However, some guys love going to gay clubs. Matteo, a 30-year-old Italian guy, is a Shanghai Studio veteran. “If I’m in the hunting mood, I’d go to Studio,” he says. “You feel the sexual tension there only if you are looking for someone, otherwise you can just dance and have fun.” Matteo feels more free to express himself at gay clubs. “You can meet gay guys at non-gay places too, but they always put on a front, whereas at gay clubs people act much more gay,” he laughs.
Benjamin, 26, from Hefei, is a huge fan of Club D2. Young and stylish, he is the typical D2 type. “I love dancing at D2 and flirting with guys I meet there,” he says. “I don’t particularly want to go home with anyone I meet, but I just enjoy the thrill of chatting someone up.”
According to Wikipedia, gay bars once served as one of the few places people with same sex orientations could openly socialize. However, in today’s Shanghai, gay people can openly socialize at almost any bar without raising eyebrows, so what role do gay bars now play in Shanghai?
To me, they are no longer d e s i g n e d as places for free self-expression and more for pleasure, excitement and thrills. Gay bars are filled with the smell of cigarettes and meat.
By Xing Zhao , www.cityweekend.com.cn
Amid family pressures, gays in China turn to marriages of convenience
In China, where homosexuality remains taboo, many gays enter marriages of convenience to satisfy family pressure to wed and have children. While they act like a couple in front of their families, many don’t live together.
A couple presents wedding dress during the Wedding Expo in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, April 9. In China, where homosexuality remains taboo, many gays enter marriages of convenience to satisfy family pressure to wed.
Wang Song / Newscom
By Zhang Yajun, Contributor / April 13, 2010 www.csmonitor.com
Xiaojian isn’t even looking for love. As a gay man, he only wants to form a xingshi marriage, or marriage of convenience, to ease the pressure from his family to settle down.
China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997, and in 2001 removed it from the official list of mental disorders. But the social stigma against gays remains deep, and in a society where family plays an important role, it is intensely reinforced by parents pressuring their children to get married and carry on the family line.
Zhang Beichuan, a professor at Qingdao University who has studied homosexuality in China since the 1980s, estimates that the country has about 30 million gay men and women between the ages of 15 and 60.
Of them, 80 to 90 percent “eventually get married,” he says.
In China, parents often play a big part in the life decisions of their children well into adulthood. Disobeying parents – for example, by refusing to get married and so continue the family line – is considered deeply unfilial.
Many gay people, then, are turning to the xingshi marriage: A gay man and a lesbian (or, sometimes, a heterosexual woman) will marry one another to deflect the nagging from their parents and relatives. They meet through friends or over the Internet. After marrying, they won’t necessarily live with one another, and many maintain their own same-gender partners. But in front of their families they act like real couples.
Parental pressure
For Xiaojian, at 28 years is just past the ideal marriage age here, it seemed like a perfect solution.
“My parents asked me to get married, so I have to. I cannot make them upset,” he says. “Even though I don’t agree with them, I cannot challenge them. ”
His decision comes after years of family strife and personal angst. Xiaojian’s aunt, a surgeon in a prestigious Beijing hospital, once questioned his sexual orientation and dragged him to a mental hospital to take a test to make sure he was not “abnormal.”
One night, during the Spring Festival in February, he banged his head into a wall in a dramatic protest against his parents’ pressure to marry. His extreme reaction won him a brief respite, but they soon resumed their nagging about his bachelorhood.
Coming out of the closet is, as might be expected, not an option for Xiaojian, who asked that his full name not be used. “Either my father or my mother would die,” he says. “They cannot accept the fact that their son is the only freak in the village.”
The pressure to marry is greater in rural areas, such as in Xiaojian’s home village on the outskirts of Beijing, where his relatives and neighbors keep close watch. Stay single too long, and gossip begins to spread about possible physical or mental disabilities. Constant questioning ensues. For some jobs, such as in the military and civil service, marriage is a requirement for promotion.
Adding to the pressure to obey, many young adults rely on their parents for financial support. The average Beijing salary of 3,700 yuan (about $550) is barely enough to live on in the increasingly expensive capital.
That is the problem facing Ling Yu, a project officer for homosexuality at the Aizhixing Institute, an AIDS prevention and awareness grassroots nongovernmental organization based in Beijing. Though he has helped many other gay men and women protect their rights, he acknowledges that he may end up in a xingshi marriage. He earns 3,000 yuan ($440) a month.
“People in China don’t have any security. If I lose my job, I cannot survive,” he explains. “If that happened, I would have to rely on my parents to support me, forget about buying an apartment. So it is not practical to challenge my parents.”
Marriage of convenience – not so easy
At first glance, a marriage of convenience seems to be a good compromise between finding personal freedom and satisfying the parents.
But, as Xiaojian has found, finding a partner is not so easy. Even without the need to click emotionally, let alone fall in love, meeting the resume requirements of a spouse can be just as difficult. Dates become a series of business negotiations, often hard-nosed.
“It is so hard,” says Xiaojian, who has been trying to find the right partner over the past two years.
Gay men often find they have weaker bargaining power. Because in China, men are responsible for carrying on the family line, they are pushed harder by parents to marry and have children. As a result, there are many more gay men seeking a marriage of convenience than there are potential female partners.
The women, being in a buyer’s market, can set high standards.
Even though many of the couples won’t live together after marrying, women still require that their gay “husbands” be good-looking and have a stable job, sufficient savings, and – in real estate-crazed China – their own apartment.
Xiaojian’s last blind date, who prefers to be called her by her English name, Zoe, only checked him out for three seconds before deciding his height was a deal-breaker.
“I am doing a marriage of convenience for my parents,” says Zoe, who is gay. “They definitely won’t be happy with his height. Since I am doing it, I want to make them satisfied.”
Oftentimes, property is the “biggest concern” for most of the “couples,” says Liu Wei, a legal consultant for Aizhixing.
They also have to negotiate over whether to have children and how to take care of each other’s parents in the future, she says.
Prenuptial agreements can protect either party’s wealth, but “something like whether the couple is going to have children is not something that can be legally contracted,” she explains.
A better solution?
Despite the complications, Professor Zhang, at Qingdao University, believes that such unions have merits – as long as both sides know the terms of the deal.
According to him, China has at least 16 million tongqi, or the straight wives of gay men – many of whom get married without the awareness of their husbands’ sexual orientation. In more than 20 years of research, Zhang has heard many tragic stories from tongqi: how they were ashamed of their husband’s behavior and grew depressed in their loveless marriage. Men in these relationships would expose their spouses to the risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, he says.
Many activists oppose xingshi marriages, even when both parties understand the terms. Instead of conforming, they say, gay people should work to transform Chinese views of homosexuality.
“Marriage of convenience is a compromise and a retreat,” says Aqiang, the online name of a well-known gay rights activist based in Guangdong. “If each gay doesn’t even have the courage to communicate with their parents, their closest family, and tell the truth, how can we expect the society to change their attitude?”
A growing number of activists and organizations are fighting for gay rights. Li Yinhe, a prominent sociologist who studies sexual practices in China, has submitted a proposal to the government to legalize gay marriage. Some in the gay community say they would settle for laws that prohibit discrimination against homosexuals.
While low-key events promoting gay rights can be held, the government has cracked down on major gatherings, such as a gay pride week planned in Shanghai last June.
Psychological and physical support is increasingly available for gay people, especially in cities. About 300 NGOs in China work on homosexual issues, providing information on AIDS prevention and legal consultation. Online forums for gay people give them a space to communicate. Hotlines offer psychological consultation.
Aqiang argues that when gay rights are respected and when the public – including parents – better understands homosexuality, then the pressure to marry will dissipate.
For the time being, though, Xiaojian feels he has no other choice. He says he will keep going on dates.
Marriage of convenience is a lie,” he sighs. “But I will spend my entire life to make this lie work.”
