March 9, 2001
Chinese gays
slowly come out into the open
By Steve Friess
Special for USA TODAY
BEIJING - A Ricky Martin-caliber pop star is
stabbed, allegedly by an ex-lover, forcing every newspaper in
the nation to grapple with the prospect that a top male heartthrob
is not straight.
A popular Oprah-style TV show, "Talk It Easy,"
airs a discussion of homosexuality in which a film professor
and a painter become the first gay people in the country to
ever come out so publicly.
Thugs romp through a crowded gay nightclub,
stabbing the owner and breaking furniture, prompting local police
to promise vigilant protection of the establishment whenever
it reopens.
And now the nation's psychological association
is poised in coming weeks to remove homosexuality from the official
list of mental illnesses in its latest published materials,
revolutionizing how health professionals view the orientation.
Red China awash in pink triangles? Hardly. No
Beijing Pride Parade will wind past Tian'anmen Square and no
Shanghai Gay and Lesbian Center will host a star-studded grand
opening gala any time soon. This remains a nation where gays
and lesbians aren't so much in closets as concrete bunkers.
But social progress, while slow, is an inevitable
companion force to a breathtaking economic expansion that has
given China's growing middle class a chance to ponder their
identities and explore them unrestrained on the Internet.
For the $4 price of a Tiger beer at the gay
bar Asia Blue in Shanghai, for example, a gay Chinese man can
chat with his visiting counterpart from San Francisco or Chicago,
hearing unfathomable tales of societies where entire families
gather for same-sex weddings and mayors march in gay-rights
demonstrations.
The only available estimate on the number of
gay Chinese comes from a study published early in the 1990s
by China's version of Alfred Kinsey, sociologist Liu Da Lin,
who found 2.3 percent of the 20,000 people surveyed indicated
some same-sex attractions. Of those, Liu said, only 5.1 percent
believed being homosexual was "good or beneficial" and 54.9
percent didn't want to be gay.
A more recent study of 2,000 gay men by Chinese
researcher Zhang Beichuan shows only 26 percent have come out
to anybody and fewer still told their families. More than 65
percent want children with women even though more than half
of those wo are married live apart from their wives.
Still, in a country where Westerners are surprised
to even find a gay bar or a lesbian publication, an embriotic
gay community is showing viability. That 2.3 percent figure
may sound small, but even at that level it would represent about
30 million Chinese, the combined populations of Texas and Pennsylvania.
Such a huge population segment is bound to make
some noise as their rapidly modernizing nation blitzes through
the West's century-long Industrial Revolution in just a couple
of decades. Since the Communist regime began its opening-up
policy in the late-1970s, cities have become metropolises, meccas
for Western businesses, higher paying jobs and less traditional
lifestyles.
"People can afford to go to gays bars now,"
said Edmund, a Beijing man who works for a large USA accounting
firm. "And more people are open-minded in the cities, whereas
people in the villages have never even heard of gays. We need
to have more exposure so the general public can get used to
hearing about gay people."
Clearly, they aren't yet. The apparent outing
of stabbed singer Mao Ning in November marked the first time
the mass media dealt with the homosexuality of a celebrity,
but it also sent the once-wildly popular star into hiding. His
CDs disappeared from shop shelves and a raging debate on Chinese
websites largely sided with the notion that Mao is "exin," or
disgusting.
The talk show on gay issues that aired on Dec.
20 on the Hunan Satellite TV network was groundbreaking, but
the network failed to rerun it five days later as is usually
the policy and hasn't returned to the subject.
And while the Feb. 10 attack on the Beijing
bar, Drag-On, was not a gay-bashing incident, police on Feb.
22 arrested the owners of a competing gay bar on charges of
orchestrating it. That twist may reflect a strange fissure within
a gay Chinese world that doesn't quite view itself as a cohesiv
e community.
But the decision by the 8,000-member Chinese
Psychological Association not to regard homosexuality as an
illness could be a watershed decision, as a similar ruling in
1973 by the American Psychological Association was for the gay
movement in the USA.
"All of these things are part of a process,"
said Feng Wang, a gay artist who lives in Shanghai. "You can
think of Mao as our Rock Hudson. He didn't want to be out, but
his being out helps Chinese people see that there are gays and
they can be beautiful. And now that the TV program has broken
the barrier, the next one won't be so shocking."
Religion is banned in China, so religious condemnations
do not fuel anti-gay sentiment as they do in the West. Instead,
the discomfort arises from a Communist sensibility in which
people itch to be similiar combined with a Confucionist conviction
that values the traditional family structure.
For most straight Chinese people, the concept
of homosexuality simply resides beyond the realm of possibility.
Even much of the intelligensia consider gay people to be somewhere
between criminal and sick, Liu said.
China itself has no national laws forbidding
- or even involving - homosexuality, or tong xing lian. Instead,
from time to time the police have shuttered gay businesses or
arrest and punished gay people under hooliganism statutes that
grant wide latitude to define what constitutes a public disturbance
or public health issue. As recently as 1999, the authorities
used that ambiguous policy to force gay bars in Shanghai to
close for a time when President Clinton and brought a more intense
international media spotlight.
"Gays and lesbians are indeed punished by the
Chinese state, but we do not know the true extent because there
is no national law which directly prohibits homosexuality, and
there are no comprehensive central government campaigns directly
targeting gays and lesbians," said Steve Lewis, senior researcher
for the Transnational China Project at Rice University's Baker
Institute for Public Policy in Houston. "In many parts of China,
especially the developing, interior regions - where human rights
abuses are more likely in general - gays and lesbians are targeted
for punishment by the state."
In the big cities, though, most gay life proceeds
without incident, if quietly. Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and
Guangzhou all boast at least a couple of gay bars.
A phone hotline for gays has existed for about
three years, operated by a group of gay men in Beijing who pass
around a beeper and call back anyone who pages them. The service
received its only nationwide publicity through a 1998 edition
of a popular women's magazine that ran a special issue on homoseuxality,
but the operators say they still receive calls from people in
the far reaches of China as a result of those articles.
A rudimentary gay press is developing, complete
with a lesbian magazine called Tian Kong, or "Empty Sky," which
features headlines like "Is it right for a lesbian to get married
to a gay man?"
The more cerebral bimonthly journal, Peng Yu
or "Friend," is published by a sociologist in central China
who mails about 50 copies to allies in each major city. They,
in turn, read the articles, which range from discussions of
AIDS prevention to first-person stories like "A man waiting
for love," and pass it on to their friends.
Enter an Internet era where Chinese people can
circumvent the State-owned media to read gay magazines from
the USA like The Advocate and meet without fear of discovery
in the chatrooms of websites like sina.com and sohu.com. Gay
books like the steamy romance novel "Beijing Story" can't get
published in print but enjoy enormous followings online, where
the anonymous author posted it.
"It is impossible for the government to control
the Internet," said self-employed stocktrader Zhen Li, 39, a
gay pioneer in Beijing. "It is a great tool for people to find
the gay world in a secret way."
And in secret is the only way all but a handful
of gays and lesbians will live here. The Western concept of
being "out" is largely inconceivable, and even the publishers
of Empty Sky, the lesbian magazine, declined to comment.
"If I told my mother, I think she would say
that she just wants me to be happy," said Beijing tour operator
Edward Li, 26. "But she is very sick, so I don't think she could
handle it."
While many gay people fear the authorities,
Mi Ke, the owner of the attacked bar, said his relationship
with the police is solid. He openly told officers that this
was a gay club when they came in on a routine visit last year
and noticed portraits of shirtless men in cozy poses on the
walls.
"It is not as hard as people think," said the
bar owner, better known by his English moniker, Tommy. "But
there are many places where it would be a problem to be gay."
Sociologist Liu predicted that Chinese society
would catch up to the West's level of acceptance of homosexuality
within 20 years. Some think that's ambitious, but Zhen Li doesn't.
An upside of Communist rule, Zhen noted, is that views can change
rapidly at the whim of the leaders.
"The U.S. has a long history of Christianity
and your Bible tells you that gay is something evil, but in
China, nobody educated young people on whether gay is correct,"
he said. "This is a dictatorship country. If the government
said tomorrow that gay is OK, people would accept it just like
that."
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