By Michael Gold
In tune with the classic melody “Swanee River”, more than 30 young Chinese gay men sing in delicate harmony with one another, huddled in a circle in a small recreation center in an office tower in western Beijing. After a few refrains, they break into laughter and rapturous applause, finally turning their attention on one of their members’ solo attempts at traditional Beijing Opera.
Displaced from their usual friends, family, peers and coworkers, they have come to the Beijing LGBT Center to sing to their hearts’ content, but also to find a sense of belonging, a place where they can be themselves amidst the frequent difficulties and confusion of trying to become part of a vibrant gay community in Beijing.
“Places that can hold regular, long-term activities for gay men are rare [in Beijing],” said a frequent visitor who gave his name only as Rui. Seated beneath a mural of swirling rainbows, impossibly-handsome anime characters and uplifting messages written in various languages on the wall behind him, Rui lamented the lack of cultural options for the Beijing gay community.
“Most of the funding related to gay issues goes toward HIV/AIDS, so there’s not much left for cultural development,” he said. “But places like the LGBT Center, and this singing group, there’s a lot of interest in institutions and activities like these.”
Give-and-take
In discussions with various notable figures in the Beijing gay community, a complex picture emerges of the delicate interplay between average gay Beijingers, the institutions that serve them, and the societal backdrop of modern China – and the modern world as a whole – upon which this give-and-take plays out.
Edmund Yang, the founder and co-owner of Destination, a popular gay nightclub in Beijing, claims that many nonprofit institutions that aim to serve the gay community propagate negative stereotypes of gays in order to draw funding, especially from Western countries, and often use the funding to enrich themselves rather than promote the rights of gay people.
“Many of these organizations simply don’t paint a true picture of what’s going on,” he said. “The message they pass to outsiders is that gays in China are roundly underprivileged and singled out, but I really don’t think we face more difficulties than in Singapore or Hong Kong, for example.”
Yang’s assertion is echoed by the founder of Promen, a gay meeting-and-greeting socializing group in Beijing, who provided his name for this article as Hank: “I believe that China will be the first country in Asia to legalize homosexual marriage,” he said. “Or perhaps the second, after Thailand.”
Indeed, as official recognition of homosexual rights gains some traction in China, many believe that change will come from the top down, through a mixture of global pressure, evolving cultural values, and the natural consequences of economic development and a more tolerant, educated society.
“The decriminalization of homosexuality [in 1997] was a huge watershed in allowing more homosexual people in China to live in freedom,” said Yang Ziguang, coordinator of the LGBT Center. “And that, I believe, was largely due to foreign and global pressure.”
The idea of Western influence is another factor that draws a mixed response from the leaders of Beijing’s gay community: Many equate China’s greater acceptance of homosexuality with greater exposure to the Western world via media and the Internet, while some are decidedly more guarded. “I try to move away from these black-and-white concepts of ‘Western’ and ‘Chinese’,” said Wei Xiaogang, the founder and coordinator of Queer Comrades, a Beijing-based online talk show focused on gay issues.
“In China we also haven’t historically had this concept of ‘gay’ and ’straight’ the same way they do in the West,” he said – a phenomenon which, according to Hank, the founder of Promen, results in “a stark divide between ‘for’ and ‘against’ gay people [in the West], whereas in China people are more neutral toward the issue.”
Though it is difficult not to appreciate the influence of Western nations like the United States in a day and age where a 150-year-old American melody can be heard emanating from the lips of a Chinese gay singing group, many agree that Beijing’s gay organizations still have a long way to go before they reach the level of cohesion and comprehensiveness found in cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles.
Queer Comrades
“Gay ‘business’ as a whole is still very new in Beijing,” said Ben Zhang, the founder and managing director of Gayographic, a gay-themed directory website and event-management company. “People want to do more, to get more involved in gay rights, but there aren’t the organizational structures there to help them.”
Zhang also bemoans the lack of cooperation between certain elements of the gay community, branding Destination a monopoly that considers Gayographic a competitor. “They [Destination] threatened to pull advertising from groups that were promoted by Gayographic,” Zhang said.
Wei, the Queer Comrades founder, also holds a dim view of gay nightclubs in general: “I think the gay bar is still just a big closet; it’s very easy to go to a gay bar and have no idea what’s happening in the greater gay community,” he said, indicating that frank discussion and debate about gay issues can help break down the shyness and unease many Chinese gay men still face.
“I saw a young man arrive at the Beijing Queer Film Festival totally covered up in a mask and hood, but afterward he was very open about wanting to learn more and ask questions.”
Others, however, hold little hope for this in the near future. “The Chinese don’t care about debate,” said Han Cheng, a local gay college student. “Chinese society is very hard to change – in a Confucian society, being different is wrong.”
Perhaps a more apt description for Beijing’s gay community is the more things change, the more they stay the same. While institutions like Destination have remained stalwarts of the Beijing gay landscape for years, many cite the vast lineup of gay clubs, organizations and groups constantly popping into existence, only to slide into bankruptcy or forced to cater to a wider clientele to make ends meet.
“When I first arrived in Beijing in 1998, we had Butterfly Bar and Drag-On – these places are all long gone,” mused Hank, while Zhang cited G9 Bar as a more recent example of a gay bar that failed to find an audience.
“There are tons of factors you have to take into account – from the local economy, to competition with Destination, to the fact that the gay crowd is very hard to please,” Zhang said.
As challenging as sustaining a successful gay bar in Beijing may be, it is only one aspect to the larger puzzle of Beijing’s gay male community in general, a community of people with interests, backgrounds and goals too broad and diverse to be pigeonholed into a one-size-fits-all mold.
For a number of gay men, the most fundamental aspect of their community is something far older and more basic than any bar, club or blog: “The best way for the community to pop and be proud of themselves,” declared Han, the college student, “is just to have sex – safely and openly and without shame.”
