Gayographic | 大城小同 | Gay Event Management | Beijing Gay Party | 北京同志派对 |同志聚会 | 同志活动组织策划

In what could be called a gay pride parade in its own right, flight after flight took off from Beijing Capital Airport headed to Shanghai filled with the queerest of Beijing’s queers. The reason being the first gay pride in China, an event that most of us here in the Capital couldn’t miss. Beijing already held a coming out party last year for the Olympics and now Shanghai wanted to come out too, but only to scream “we’re queer!” not “Beijing Huan Ying Ni!”

As expected, most of us only went down for the parties, completely missing the cultural aspects of Pride Week. Once we landed, we jumped headfirst into the parties starting with an all-you-can-drink event at Shanghai Studio. The claustrophobic underground bomb-shelteresque bar was overflowing with homos. If the Soviet menace were to suddenly reappear with the bomb being dropped on Shanghai, the only ones to survive would be 200 inebriated homos in feather boas and sequined gowns. Unfortunately, we would be the wrong people for repopulation.

Ryan and I were interviewed by www.globalpost.com the second day we arrived in Shanghai last weekend, and unsurprisingly, totally hungover. Here’s the part we were quoted. It is not true though that it says I organized 20 people to the PRIDE. My apologies to those who aren’t happy with it. I simply said “we have almost 20 people coming down from Beijing.”

“Ben Zhang, co-founder of Gayographic, an irreverent gay culture blog, is similarly content to take it to the web, not the street. A Tianjin native, Zhang grew up watching state television and he associates parades with propaganda, not progress. He’s inspired by online activism and optimistic about gains made toward gay rights. “It’s time to celebrate,” he said.