Joshua Wickerham

coming out: Shanghai’s gay population struggles for acceptance

by Joshua Wickerham

[note: this is an article published in the February 2006 issue of that’s Shanghai]

Not long ago, I accompanied some of the volunteers who pay weekly visits to the city’s gay venues to distribute safe sex material. Our party included a gay policeman from Harbin and our guide, Wang Yutian, an outreach coordinator with the Hong Kong-based Chi Heng Foundation. On the way to the city’s only traditional gay dance hall, Wang spoke with the cab driver about homosexuals, or tongzhimen (comrades), as they are commonly referred to on the Chinese mainland.

“Do you know any gay men?”

“No.”

“We’re gay. Does that bother you?”

“I don’t really care.”

“Are you disgusted by the thought of two men having sex?”

“If I were disgusted by gay sex, I’d have to be disgusted by straight sex too.”

“Do you think it’s right for a gay man to marry a woman just to make his parents happy?”

“Probably not.”

For Wang, this sort of exchange is common. He often conducts informal surveys in an effort to gauge the public’s attitude toward gays. And, he hopes, teach them something in the process.

Wang’s organization is just one of many such groups in China that liaise with the international community, the Chinese government, various health organizations, and, of course, China’s gay population. Given that many people still harbor stereotypes and prejudice towards the gay community, Wang’s work, and that of others like him, is key to reaching a new understanding of and tolerance for gay issues. That said, his efforts are not always welcome.

As our cab pulls up to the club, our fellow passenger, the policeman, looks decidedly uneasy. Terrified, in fact. Nevertheless, he pulls himself together and turns to Wang as we approach the door.

“Could you please not do that again?”

“What?”

“You know what you did.”

Once inside, he takes a seat, still looking very uncomfortable. He refuses to talk to anyone and stares at the floor. Though he’s thousands of kilometers from home and virtually anonymous, he still appears frightened that someone will discover him at a club catering to homosexuals. Indeed, the very sight of several hundred gay men seems to petrify him.

His fear is not unfounded. Before leaving Chi Heng’s office, he spoke of the pressure he faces because of his sexual preference.

“I’m 25 right now. If I don’t get married by the time I’m thirty, I’m out of a job. Everyone on the force is married. It’s an unwritten rule, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. Either I get married or I find a new job.”

The policeman’s concerns are far from unique. Dr. Tong Chuanliang, outgoing director of Shanghai Sexual Minorities Homoheart, a hotline operated by the China Welfare Institute, says that about ten per cent of callers ask about marriage. However, a further twelve per cent ask how they can “cure” their homosexuality. “We tell people it can’t be done,” says Tong. “Studies prove this. When considering marriage, we tell callers to be very careful.”

Which is not to imply that most callers are marriage obsessed. Indeed, a large number, 25 per cent, are simply seeking a sympathetic voice. “Callers often assumed until they came across our number that there was no one like them,” says Crystal Chin, former secretary-general at Homoheart, who recently left the organization after a management reshuffle.

Most gays in China are still reluctant to reveal their sexual preference to anyone but their closest friends. Fewer still tell their family or colleagues, and almost none has the courage to speak out against discrimination. After all, it was only in 2001 that the Chinese Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. And until 1997, the Nationalist-era Anti-Hooliganism statute–stating that homosexuality was a crime subject to arrest–was still in force.

Hence the need for groups like Chi Heng, which has set up a program to educate the police about gay-specific crimes, such as discrimination and blackmail. Steven Gu, director of outreach for MSM (Men who have Sex with Men) at Chi Heng, hopes that once the program is completed later this year, gays will be able to access a group of gay-friendly police officers with whom they can consult about law enforcement issues.

Zhou Dan, a Shanghainese lawyer and self-described “activist scholar,” says there are still many legal challenges for gays in China. What’s more, he says most people overstate the significance of revoking the hooliganism law. Unlike the US Supreme Court case in 2003 that struck down Texas sodomy laws as unconstitutional, Zhou says Chinese lawmakers “never intentionally decriminalized homosexuality.”

In 2004, Zhou lectured graduate students on “Homosexuality and the Law” at Fudan University’s medical school. The course was part of “Homosexuality and Health”, the first course ever offered at a Chinese University on this sensitive topic. Initially, just one student enrolled, though more than one hundred visitors attended most classes.

Unlike their Western counterparts, Chinese gays keep a low profile, and as such, are far less confrontational. If they venture out of the closet at all, it is to enter into a dialogue with mainstream society, what Zhou calls a “strategy of engagement”.

“For example, some people have proposed having a gay festival in China,” Zhou says, akin to the Pride festivals common in the West. “From a cultural perspective, that’s great, but from a legal perspective, that carnival could turn into a disaster.” Indeed, last December, Beijing police shut down the country’s first gay and lesbian cultural festival which had attracted more than 400 participants, including students, intellectuals and gay rights activists.

While such gatherings are accepted practice in the West, China’s gay community is still struggling for acceptance. “Some gays and lesbians on the Chinese mainland think I’m a bit too radical,” says Zhou. “I have come out to government officials at international conferences in Shanghai,” he says chuckling. “But by Western standards, I’m just a moderate, conservative even.”

Fudan University associate professor Sun Zhongxing says stopping prejudice against gays will require changes at many levels, including academia, government, and society as a whole. It is her belief that change can only come about through education. In the fall of 2005, she began teaching an undergraduate course titled “Homosexual Research” to a standing room only crowd. She sees nothing unusual in this, even though the lectures have attracted considerable attention from the media. Rather, she views this event as a natural step in China’s development. “I can’t see what the big deal is,” she says. “This just shows the interest in and importance of gay studies in China.”

Sun’s course, which is co-organized by the Chi Heng Foundation, covers a range of subjects, including gay and lesbian sex, “money boys”, marriage and one of the most pressing issues in the gay community, AIDS prevention. According to government and academic sources, the current HIV infection rate among China’s under-forty urban gay population male is between one and three per cent. For MSMs forty or older, the rate jumps to twelve per cent, more according to some sources. A study produced by the Chinese Centers for Disease Control in 2004, states that 80 per cent of Chinese MSMs are “totally ignorant” about the risk of contracting HIV.

This is one reason why education is crucial. “We don’t know if less (formally) educated people are more at risk for HIV,” says Steven Gu, “so we try to educate everybody.”

This outreach work includes setting up hotlines, offering legal and psychological counseling and distributing free condoms at various gay venues. At the latter, Chi Heng’s volunteers often stage popular mini-dramas, where a member of the crowd is asked to fit a condom on a phallic device. Whoever places the condom on correctly, wins a free tube of sexual lubricant. Losers get a lesson on how to keep themselves safe.

Beijing is getting in on the fun, too. In the fall of 2005, the central government bought 300 million condoms for distribution in hospitals, and in clubs and bars–indeed, anywhere people might think of having sex. The Shanghai CDC has plans too. “Last year we organized a few hundred volunteers to target xiaojie, (prostitutes),” says Zhuang Minghua, Deputy Director of AIDS and STDs at the Shanghai Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC). “This year,” he adds, “we’ll target the MSM population.”

However, Professor Gu Xueqi of the Shanghai Health Center, whose pioneering survey of the gay Shanghainese community in the early nineties spurred considerable interest, is skeptical. “They’ve been saying they’ll target homosexuals ‘next year’ for the past five years.”

Qingdao University’s Professor Zhang Beichuan, along with most sociologists, estimate that the gay population on the Chinese mainland numbers about 30 million. The question is: how long will they be relegated to the shadows? Aside from a few gay-themed bars and clubs, bath houses, saunas and cruising parks, the gay community is all but invisible.

True, the Chi Heng Foundation organized a small group of volunteers to participate in Shanghai’s International Marathon in December, and Homoheart has hosted small group discussions. But not in the public eye. In fact, the city has no gay professional organizations and no businesses that cater specifically to the gay population.

Nevertheless, Professor Sun is optimistic. Speaking on the topic of gay visibility she said: “What has taken Western countries forty years to accomplish, I think China can do in ten.”