Tongzhi. The word is written in bold, rainbow-colored letters on Guo Ziyang’s T-shirt. He translates it for me, written in simplified Chinese: “Basically, that means I’m gay and I’m proud. It’s kind of gay slang. But tongzhi has another meaning, taken from the People’s Army’s vocabulary. For Communists, it means ‘comrade’ in a fraternal way.” In the 1990s, homosexuals appropriated the word tongzhi in Taiwan and Hong Kong before the term spread through mainland China. “Tongzhi is still a bit coded, a sort of wink. And rather than using derogatory words or words with medical connotations, like tóngxìngìian, ‘homosexual,’ we prefer the more positive and fluid term. It is used for gay men, lesbians, transpeople.” Guo Ziyang is twenty-five years old. He is proud of his T-shirt, and he promises to get me one. The American flag adorns his thick-soled sneakers.
I am on the twentieth floor of a grimy building in the Chaoyang district, near the Third Ring Road, north of Beijing, at the headquarters of the organization Aibai. It manages a web portal of the same name, one of the main Chinese gay sites.
At its inception in 1998, Aibai was headquartered in the United States for greater security, and a Chinese American man in Los Angeles hosted it. Later the site was transferred to mainland China. “We are tolerated because we have an educational purpose. We don’t criticize the regime, and we don’t post any pornographic images. The Chinese government does not censor homosexuality: it censors proselytizing, pornography, human rights. Why should we be forbidden?” asks Jiang Hui, director of Aibai, in a falsely naïve way—but then says more precisely and watching his words, “Political lobbying toward the government is not part of our core work objectives. First, we want to influence the general public.” In the room where I am, there are a dozen small desks used in training sessions. On each of them there is a roll of adhesive tape, some glue, a stapler, scissors, and a calculator. Everything here is very educational.
A few activists, including Guo Ziyang, join us. Ziyang: “We are in gray area: neither prohibited nor permitted. Suspect but tolerated. Communist China vis-a-vis homosexuality adopted the rule of the three nos: no approval, no disapproval, no promotion. Contrary to what is often believed in the West, today homosexuality has been decriminalized in China, and here is no official antigay law. Homosexuality is no more prohibited than it is authorized: for the regime, it doesn’t exist. And neither do we. For the government, we don’t exist. But in China, you’ll see, gays exist. They’re everywhere!”
“Destination” is the name of a nightclub in the Guand Cai district of Beijing that Guo Hui and Jiang Ziyang take me to the next evening. The place is huge: a renovated factory right in the center of Beijing. On the ground floor: four huge bars with different atmospheres, including a room reserved for “bears” and decorated with hundreds of small teddy bears. On the second floor are another dozen bars with a more offbeat atmosphere. The third and fourth floors are for contemporary gay art exhibits and HIV/AIDS screenings in small anterooms. Every weekend between 500 and 700 people invade this place. “The police never come here. They don’t care about us. We are kind. The Chinese people are a kind people. The police leave us alone. As long as we don’t demonstrate, they don’t make us their business. As long as we’re not antigovernment, everything is OK,” says Ray Zhang, the manager of Destination. (The place has nevertheless had serious problems with the authorities, in particular during a police raid in March 2008.)
On one wall there is a small sign showing a stylized policeman warning customers in Mandarin: “Drugs prohibited; prostitution prohibited; gambling prohibited.” Later, I see a statue of Lei Feng, a soldier of the People’s Army, a Communist icon par excellence—“a bitch,” declares one of my companions. The whole small group I am with cracks up laughing.
During the Olympics in 2008, some official brochures of the Chinese Communist Party pointed to the existence of Destination. “For Beijing 2008, the government did our advertising for us. It made us known. It showcased us,” says Ray Zhang. A Potemkin village for propaganda purposes? Perhaps. An isolated and unique location? Not only. The reality is that China is slowly, inexorably waking up—and the tongzhis with it.
Liu Ye is a young, emerging actor in an emerging country. I meet him at the Beijing Ritz-Carlton. He is a Chinese television superstar (young girls stop him in the street as we leave the hotel) who performs with Meryl Streep in Hollywood; he seems shy and petite, wrapped in a beautiful leather jacket and scowling in a large leatherette armchair. Liu Ye is hardly more than thirty years old. “I was born under Mao, and I grew up in the emerging China,” says the young man, a little surprised to be a sex symbol now, despite himself. A film actor, mixing genres from kung fu to arthouse, he has already acted for the greatest Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, John Woo). Yet he makes his living acting in a television series, in which he plays the part of a gay character. “We’re much freer in television,” the young actor explains.
“We can talk about the Cultural Revolution, have affairs, play the part of a homosexual, all things that the censors don’t allow in the movies.” Listening to him, I realize how strange this political censorship is. It controls movie content strictly in a country where people still don’t go to the movies very often, but it is looser in regards to a television series that millions of people watch on nearly 2,000 Chinese channels.
The film that introduced Liu Ye internationally was "Lan Yu," Chinese Boy. It’s a love story between men, with Liu performing the main part, that of a sensitive and generous gay man. Garnering awards in Taiwan, acclaimed in Hong Kong, and applauded in the United States, the film toured the gay film festival world, but it was censored in China because it has a scene on the Tiananmen Square events. Yet the film is easily available on DVD on the black market (I’ve also seen it in stores in Shanghai and Shenzhen). It is also broadcast on Hong Kong’s and Taiwan’s pan-Asian channels, which are fairly widely accessible, albeit illegally, in mainland China. “Contrary to what is often believed, the Chinese cultural system is not fixed. Everything moves. Everything is forbidden, and everything is possible. The game is actually quite open. It’s not a mature market,” Liu Ye says philosophically. The actor tells me he has never had problems with the police for having been the main protagonist of one of the most famous films about homosexuality in China. And he’s still acting, even embodying Mao Zedong in a popular, uncensored film.
“Be proud, don’t hide.” In June 2012, I happen to be in Shanghai at the Gay Pride launch party. “Our slogan is simple and effective: be proud, don’t hide,” repeats Charlene Liu, a Malaysian lesbian activist who co-organizes Shanghai’s Pride.
I am at the Rico Rico café south of the Bund, the west bank of the Huangpu River and one of Shanghai’s more upscale neighborhoods. In front of me, across the river, the skyline is breathtaking. In the distance among the skyscrapers of Pudong, lit up in many colors like a rainbow flag, is the Pearl of the Orient. In one decade, the Chinese have built a new city that rivals Manhattan.
At the Rico Rico café, the atmosphere is festive. Gay flags flutter on the Bund, and fifty-two sponsors participate in this Chinese Gay Pride for the fourth year. More than 300 people gather for the event, a modest crowd for a country of 1.3 billion people. “It’s a good start,” Charlene Liu decides; she knows from experience what such daring can cost. Then she adds: “Gay Pride has to remain like a private party, and this is why we have installed gates. But in Shanghai, it’s still easier to organize than in Beijing.”
“The farther we are from the capital, the more satellite dishes there are on homes, the less political pressure weighs on us, and the more gays are visible,” says Dylan Chen, a young marketing agent who is Charlene’s Gay Pride co-organizer. He makes it clear, however, that this is not about a “gay parade” or a public “march” but just about a week of gay culture: evening events in cafés, exhibits, sports competitions, some film series, and a “Pink Picnic,” among twenty other scheduled events. Dylan Chen: “There are codes you have to respect, and you have to integrate them in order to be able to function. You have to not embarrass the government. For example, we don’t say ‘Gay Pride’ but ‘Gay Pride festival’; we don’t talk about ‘gay rights’ but about ‘gay culture.’ And, if possible, we’d rather communicate in English than in Mandarin, which frightens officials less. Of course, the police come every time to check that ‘everything’s OK,’ but for now, as you can see tonight, the police are leaving us alone.”
Suddenly I sense some restlessness. The police? A small crowd gathers. The crowd draws closer together. On the makeshift stage, Blush, a famous pan-Asian girl band that made the trip for the event, begins to sing. “They volunteered to come support the parade even though they’re so well known and acclaimed everywhere, in Korea and in Japan,” says Dylan Chen, clearly amazed.
Around midnight, the party starts to fade. Still, the revelry continues a few hundred yards away, at the “Angel” party downstairs at the Indigo Hotel nearby on the Bund. I go there with Li Gang, a journalist and a gay activist who is in charge of the internet site aibai.com in Shanghai. I am immediately surprised by the crowd: nearly a thousand gay men, wearing
Converse sneakers and Hush Puppies and sporting Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts, all with extravagant hairstyles reminiscent of South Korean idols and boy bands, are dancing to strictly American music. The nightclub is ultramodern, worthy of the finest New York nightclubs. On stage, two DJs are mixing using the latest MacBook Pros. On a giant screen, slogans appear in simplified Chinese and English: “Respect,” “Inclusive,” “Diversity.” Also displayed is the address of the Angel gay party website where I am, with links to Chinese social networks as well as to Facebook and Twitter (the mere mention of the latter two is significant: although both US networks are officially banned in China, they are nonetheless accessible by means of circumventing software that Chinese people in-the-know use).
The atmosphere is relaxed, and the clientele is young and almost exclusively Chinese (this is far from Shanghai’s locales for expats, such as Bar Rouge, M on the Bund, Char, and Glamour Bar). There is, I am told, a real social mix, though not much as far as age is concerned. At the end of the evening, the club charters buses back to the working-class neighborhoods that are the farthest from Shanghai’s center to help young gay men avoid taking very expensive taxis.
What strikes me the most as the night goes on is that most of these Chinese young men, whether at the bar or on the dance floor, spend their time tapping away on their smart phones. Even as they dance, they are inventing a new Chinese gay life, that of websites and social networks. And as I am getting ready to leave Angel, that image, in the heart of the night, of all these cell phones glowing seems to be a good harbinger of the emergence of Chinese gays. Finally, I ask Li Gang, my journalist companion, if he has ever considered exile. He replies: “Flee China? Why? In Shanghai, gay life is better now than in Paris or New York. You are the one who should settle down here.”
Shares