Elina Sarakayeva, Irena Lebedeva
Astrakhan State University, Russia
Aliens
in their own home: gay communities in China[1]
Homosexuality has been documented in China since
ancient times. Most famous records speak of a
Duke’s favourite MiZixia who once shared a peach with his royal lover (hence
homosexual relations were poetically referred to as "the leftover peach”) and the Emperor’s male concubine Dong Xian,
who once was sleeping with his head on the monarch’s sleeve, so the Emperor cut
the sleeve to not disturb his slumber (hence one more image for same-sex love –duànxiù
- “the cut sleeve”). Some Chinese scholars argue that nearly every emperor
of China had one or more male sex
partners [5]. It is believed homosexuality was popular in the Song, Ming and Qing dynasties.
Chinesefine arts, especially painting, have some
samples depicting males making love – these are mostly hand scrolls and paintings
on silk found in private collections. There is also a tradition of erotic literature,
chief among these is the anthology "BianerZhai" (A Lady's Pin under a Man's Cap),
a series of four short stories in five chapters each, of passion and seduction.
The first short story, Chronicle
of a Loyal Love, involves a twenty-year-old academician chasing a
fifteen-year-old scholar and two adolescent valets. In another, "Qing Xia
Ji" (Record of the
Passionate Hero), the protagonist, Zhang, a valiant soldier with two
warrior wives, is seduced by his younger friend Zhong, an unusual arrangement
as it is usually the older man who takes the initiative with a boy. The work
appeared in a single edition some time between 1630 and 1640 and is not
translated into the modern language nor published, but is circulating fee in
the Chinese Internet.
Medieval Chinese literature
depicts occasional same-sex liaisons, e.g. in the novel “Mat Made of Flash” by
the famous author Li Yu the protagonist, a young libertine scholar, though
obsessed with beautiful women, he also makes sex with his adolescent male
attendants. In the famous novel "Dream of the Red Chamber" by Cao Xueqin
the protagonist JiaBaoyu has a casual homosexual relation with a young scholar
JiangYuhan.
In the erotic novel "Jin Ping Mei' (The
Plum Blossom in the Golden Vase), the protagonist Ximen Qin is a paragon of
debauchery: he not only makes love with his several female concubines and maid
servants but even seduces wives of his neighbors. He too has sex with a male
attendant in a whim of desire. The matter is treated more seriously in the
story by the same Li Yu “A Male Mencius’s Mother”, where a young man is so
devoted to his lover that he willingly castrates himself in order to preserve
his fidelity. Accepting the woman’s gender role, he later brings up his lover’s
orphaned son and wins universal praise as a “model mother”.
A more recent name is Ding Ling, an
author of the 1920s in China, a prominent and controversial feminist author, who
has lesbian overtones in her writings. Her most famous piece is "Miss
Sophia's Diary", voicing women's sexuality and sexual desire. A contemporary
author, Huang Biyun writes from the lesbian perspective in her story
"She's a Young Woman and So Am I".For
contemporary Chinese literature, the most famous homosexual writer is Kenneth
Pai from Taiwan. His famous novel “Crystal Boys” is circulating in Mainland and was
translated into English and French. It has also been twice made into
movie.
Chinese homosexuals did not experience
persecution compared to homosexuals in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages, as same sex love was
not regarded as a sin, but rather as a wanton habit of the rich ones, the thing
of a spendthrift luxury. Most
homosexual behavior with a male courtesan or "singing boy" was
associated with the luxurious and decadent behavior of the highest elite among
the gentry, scholar officials and
merchants. Notably, these members of the elite very often
were not homosexual, but bisexual, pursuing at the same time female maids and
female courtesans since some of them pursued their female maids as often as
they did their serving boys. But homosexuality wasn’t, as we believe, as
welcomed and ordinary in China as some Western scholars imagine [3]. All major
philosophical schools and religions in ancient China have some sort of codex
against exclusive homosexuality, as it interferes with continuation of the
family lineage. The Confucians insisted that both man
and woman should behave according to traditional gender roles. To sire
children, especially sons, was a very important duty for a man in traditional
Chinese society. So a person who has only same-sex lovers fails to do his duty
and is thus an un-filial son. Taoism emphasizes maintaining
the balance between yin and yang. A man-man relation is thought to be a yang-yang relation and so is imbalanced
and destructive. On the other hand, Chinese philosophies never treated
homosexuality to be a grave sin. Provided that a person does his duty to State
and Family and sires children he is free to have occasional same-sex affairs,
if only they do not harm his health and family welfare. Taoism, too, treats the
matter more or less leniently:although each man is regarded as yang (masculine), every man also has some yin (feminine) in him, and some may have
more yin than others. In this view,
homosexuality can even be regarded as something within the norm, according to
the natural balance of yin and yang.
After formation of People's Republic
of China homosexuals had to go underground, persecuted by the Communist regime,
especially during the Cultural Revolution, when many
of them were punished with long prison terms. Since the policy of Reform and Opening Up in 1979, the
government has been loosening control over this kind of behavior, but still it
is something looked upon as filthy, not to be spoken about in public. A notable
change occurred during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when sodomy was
decriminalized in 1997, and the new Chinese
Classification and Diagnostic Criteria of Mental Disorders removed homosexuality from its list of
mental illnesses on April 20, 2001[3]. The situation has continued to evolve.An Internet survey in
2000 showed that Chinese people are becoming more tolerant towards
homosexuality: among the 10,792 surveyed, 48.15% were in favor, 30.9%
disapproved, 14.46% were uncertain, and 7.26% were indifferent[1].
Although
there is no explicit law against homosexuality or same-sex acts between
consenting adults, neither are there laws protecting gays from discrimination,
nor are there any gay rights organizations in China. It is believed that the
Chinese policy towards the gay issue remains the "Three Nos": no
approval, no disapproval, and no promotion. A 2008 survey by sexologist Li Yinhe shows
a mixed picture of public attitudes towards gays and lesbians in China. 91% of
respondents said they agreed with homosexuals having equal employment rights,
while over 80% of respondents agreed that heterosexuals and homosexuals were
"equal individuals". On the other hand, a slight majority disagreed
with the proposition that an openly-gay person should be a school teacher, and
40% of respondents said that homosexuality was "completely wrong"[4,
429-444].
What
does it mean, to be a gay in contemporary China? The story told by one of them,
under the pseudonym Han Yue, throws some light on the question. In his lifetime
Han Yue has been arrested twice for “unhealthy behavior” (which in fact was
socializing with other homosexuals in public). Once the police beat him and
then informed his boss, costing him a promising job as a clerk at the Ministry
of Culture.His first homosexual encounter at 16 was snatched in the dark during
a violent earthquake in 1976 that knocked out Beijing's electricity
supply.Subsequent encounters took place in parks, toilets and once at the
so-called ``Democracy Wall'' in Beijing which, he says, was a favored meeting
point for homosexuals during the brief democracy movement in 1979.Han Yue is
unsure of how many sexual partners he has had, but he knows the figure is high.
He knows he has never used a condom and he knows, but does not care, about
AIDS: “Most of us think, 'The sooner I get it, the sooner I'll be dead,''' he
said. ``We wouldn't think like that if we hadn't been hurt so badly.'' [1]
In
secret, he attends ``Men's World,'' China's first support group for gay men set
up in late 1992. But he is skeptical of recent official attempts to publicize
the existence of homosexuality in China.
He says: “The newspapers talk about how hard it is abroad, about
how gays in America and Europe are mistreated, but they never talk about how
hard it is for Chinese homosexuals,'' he said. ``We don't live like human
beings. We live the life of ghosts.''
“The
Forest of Ghosts”' is the title for a book Han Yue has written recalling his
own experience and that of his gay friends. Stories of arrest and beatings at
the hands of the police that, he says, happen every day.The book includes a
particularly disturbing passage describing the arrest and rape of one of his
gay companions by members of the People's Militia, the volunteer civilian force
that often patrols homosexual haunts. “It broke him,'' Han Yue recalls. ``He
wanted to commit suicide.'' [1]
“The
Forest of Ghosts'' has attracted the interest of a state-run publishing firm in
south China's freewheeling Hainan Province, but so far the company's managers
say the book is too sensitive to put on the market.To Han Yue, their decision
comes as little surprise. “This is still China,'' he said. ``I really love my
country like I love my mother, but she's not perfect and in some respects I
hate her with all my heart.''
Like
most Chinese homosexuals, Han Yue strives to keep his secret from all but a
close circle of gay friends. Like others, his biggest fear is that someone,
someday, might find out he is gay. “I've lived with this deep fear of discovery for years, and it knocks all
the self-confidence out of you,'' he says, looking much older than his 32
years. “Now I just feel inferior”.
Now
he shares a cramped Beijing flat with his mother. But he leaves every Lunar New
Year - China's equivalent of Christmas when families come together -- because
his elder brother a few years back stumbled across a private diary recording
his homosexual encounters. “If I'm there at New Year my brother will eat, then he'll drink, then he
could start talking about me and I would be finished”, he says.
Han
Yue story highlights one of the most acute problems of Chinese homosexuals:
relationships within the family. Recognition of alternative sexuality of a
family member is a painful process in many countries, but in China for all the
shared experiences of gays a specific problem is added: the need to enter into
heterosexual marriage at all costs. Traditional Chinese folk beliefs and
natural philosophy requires that all people without exception, men and women
are responsible for reproduction, for continuation of their family lineage.
Previously this requirement was motivated by the need to sacrifice to
ancestors: a man who doesn’t beget children, breaks the chain of sacrifices, and
after his death his spirit and the spirits of his parents will starve all
eternity, no one will feed them in the afterlife. Today this view latently
exists if not in the minds than in the sub-consciousness of many a Chinese. The
requirement to be married and have children is rationalized by:
-First,
the need to financially support their elderly parents.
-Second,
the duty to "be like everyone else", not to draw suspicions and
unwanted rumors on themselves and their family.
As
a result, young gays are under heavy pressure. Society rejects their otherness,
trying to level, to unify all of its members. But even in their own family they
keenly feel like strangers. The family usually never accepts their sexuality
and insists that they as soon as possible should recover from what Chinese
society still considers a morbid disease. Parents
expect their sons and daughters to produce heirs, an obligation that has become
even more intense in a society where single-child families are the standard. According
to the memoirs of some gay people, under the pressure from family members, they
really went to see a doctor with a request to cure them - with the predictable
"zero" result [4, 189].
The
biggest fear of many gays is being found out by their parents or revealing
themselves to them. One gay man told the Washington Post, “Now the most
difficult people to deal with are not the police, as long as you don’t break
the law. It’s our parents. I finished my master’s degree at 26 and was urged to
get married. At first, I wanted to escape by going abroad, but I didn’t have so
much money”.
The
bold ones who dare to challenge tradition and come out of the closet can face
the reaction described by a homosexual pair Zeng and Pan who arranged a wedding
for themselves: “No
family members showed up toour wedding or gave their approval to the union. All
the capital in my company has been frozen by my younger brother. My sister
warned me she would never call me her brother unless I break up with Pan; and
I’ve answered hundreds of phone calls from friends and relatives who say they
feel ashamed of me”[2].
Huang
Jiankunrecalled the pain his coming out brought to his parents. His father, a
retired army officer, wept uncontrollably. His mother made him promise that he
would stay away from men. Visits home during the Chinese New Year have become
unbearable, especially when relatives pepper him with questions about why he is
still unmarried at 30. “I can handle the pressure, but I can’t stand to see the
pain on my parents’ faces, said Huang, who works in public relations. Even parents who know their children
are gay want them to get married. One gay woman told the The Guardian she
thinks her parents know she is a lesbian. ‘But my mum told me I must have
experience of marriage, no matter how long it lasts. I don't think she hopes to
change my sexuality, she just thinks my life will be more stable,’ said the
media professional.
“After
the age of 30, more than 90 percent of gays get married - because social
pressure makes them believe they have no choice. But they continue to look for
gay partners in the streets and have unprotected sex," said Wan Yanhai,
the campaigner for gay rights. His view is backed up by the results of several surveys: of 400 gay men found that 85 percent
were married. Another survey found that 28 percent have sex with both men and
women. Among urban gays about half get married and maintain multiple sex
partners. They ideal situation for many gays is to live in the city without
their family and enjoy gay life there and return to their hometowns from time
to time to be with their family. Many gays who live under these circumstances
admit they are living a lie and say their sex life with their wife is less than
passionate but they enjoy having children. Entering into a heterosexual
marriage is a climax of many stories told by respondents to the researcher Li
Yinhe, the author of a challenging book “Tongxinglianyawenhua” (Homosexual culture) based entirely on
interviews with gay people. None of these stories are happy. The interviewees
admit to be drawn into heterosexual marriage by the pressure of parents or
society, some of them didn’t even dare to declare their sexual orientation and
marry to avoid questioning. Some stories tell of a dramatic parting with a
same-sex lover when the time for him to enter into marriage has come. While
foreign boyfriends feel deceived and deeply hurt if their Chinese partners
decide to enter into a heterosexual marriage, the Chinese take it as something
inevitable though deeply grievous.
The author of the book explains the discrepancy: “The majority of Western
people can’t even imagine how hard the pressure of Chinese society is” [4,
226]. Li Yinhe herself is not
homosexual, and though she treats her respondents with sympathy, she still
defines homosexuality as pathology. But the pressure on young people to get
married is very obvious for her, she takes it for granted and doesn’t need to
be explained what it is and why it is so.
With
so many negative factors preventing gays from nurturing a stable relationship,
many instead resort to sordid, "unsafe" encounters in public toilets.
Afterwards, they return home to their wives and resume pretence of a
heterosexual life. Not that their family life is happy. As one of the gays
remarked “none is so unhappy as a wife of a homosexual. Her husband can’t
satisfy her and she feels frustrated”. Thus gay men live a double life, pretending they are
straight in public and with their families, engaging in gay life when they can
and having sex with both men and women. One such man told the New York Times,
“In China there is a very strong tradition that to be a man you must get
married and have a child, so I did. We also respect and obey our parents’
wishes, so I did it for them too”.
Another man told the New York Times, “How does it feel to be married?
I’m fooling my wife. I’m fooling my child. I’m fooling my parents. Some people
avoid it by going overseas. But if you stay in China, there’s no choice
really.” [2]
ZengAnquan,
a 45-year-old architect, told the China Daily, he deliberately took a job far
from his home after his marriage and came back just once or twice a month. He
told the China Daily he felt sorry for his wife who he described as ‘dedicated
and loyal.’ When his daughter grew up and got a job he revealed his sexual orientation
to his wife, ‘She was shocked and cried for several days,’ he said. ‘Finally,
she agreed to set me free.’ They were divorced in 2009.
Unlike Zeng, some
men go through their entire lives without revealing their sexual preference to
their wives. Men in their 50s and 60s fill the Lai Lai, a gritty ballroom in an
one of Shanghai’s little known neighborhoods. Jacobs wrote: ‘Three nights a
week, the men slip away from their wives to dance with one another to the music
of a warble-voiced singer. As he led his clumsy partner across the dance floor,
Zhou Aiwen, a 73-year-old retired cadre, spoke of a lifetime of unrequited
desire but also of his commitment to Chinese tradition. ‘My son has a kid now,
so I don’t have to worry about anything,’ he said with satisfaction.
Often
the problem is not so much the parents themselves but what their friends will
think. A 37-year-old gay software engineer told the Washington Post, “The key
point is the people around them. They live in the countryside. If you’re a man
who they think has problems they will think I’m not doing what a man does. It’s
just the way it is, from the time of our ancestors.” Some parents are so
worried about the shame they face they have threatened suicide.
A
32-year-old gay woman who had come out of the closet with her girlfriend a year
earlier told the China Daily that parents of gays are the ones that need help
most: “In modern society we’ve almost been accepted by the public except for
the approval of our parents” who are “in a helpless situation because they
can’t go to friends or relatives and they refuse help from us, but they need psychological
support.”
It
is becoming increasingly common for gay men and lesbians to marry one another
for appearance. Such marriages are called “marriages of convenience”. A gay
employee at an airline company told the China Daily, “For most gay men and
lesbians in China, one of their biggest obstacles is parental pressure to get
married...We’ll appear to be husband and wife to the outside world. In fact we
are close friends. It’s just a white lie to comfort our parents and other
social groups. We don’t want to show our true identities.”[2]
Li
Yinhe, one of China's premier sexologists, estimates that 16 million Chinese
men marry in order to please their family; she calls their spouses homowives. In a survey of 300
homosexuals by the popular Chinese website douban.com, 86 percent said they
were considering fake marriages. One man told Radio 86: “Some gay guys marry
some lesbian girl and they have some fake marriage, start having a family
together because in China they don't want to lose face. I don't think that has
been very successful for most people because, even though it's marriage, it's
fake, it doesn't mean anything. I know people who have babies already, like this
lesbian girl and gay guy. They just leave the baby at his mum's home, so she's
happy and can tell people, “My son is married, he's normal!”
Some
younger gays feel that marriages of convenience are a set back for gay rights.
One 23-year-old recent college graduate told the China Daily, “The whole idea
of a fake marriage delays the protection of Chinese gay and lesbian rights for
at least 10 years...Marrying a lesbian might make a gay feel better, ethically,
compared with marrying a straight woman, but in essence it’s all the same. Why
should gays always have to compromise. We have to create a bigger environment
that accepts homosexuals and fake marriages are certainly not the solution.”[2]
Thus
we see that the Chinese have a long tradition of dealing with homosexuality, it
has its literary depictions and philosophic appreciation. Nowadays, after a
relatively short period of legal persecution, the policies towards same-sex
relationships have liberalized again. So in the contemporary Chinese society
the main means of estranging the gays is not through legal repression, but
through societal pressure. The same tradition that tells the Chinese that
occasional same-sex affairs are nothing too serious, dictates them that they
can’t be gay for life, they have to marry, to give birth to children and to
shape their individual lives after the universal pattern. The old public urge
to keep the face at all costs is still the most powerful tool of modeling
people’s social practices and leveling their personalities. The one who does
not care to keep the face becomes the real “Other” in the Chinese society and
an unwelcomed stranger in his family.
3. Hinsch, Bret. Passions of the Cut Sleeve. University of California Press.1992.
4. Li Yinhe. Tongxinglianyawenhua.
-Neimangudaxuechubanshe, 2009 (Li Yinhe. Homosexual Culture. – Inner Mongolia
university Press, 2009)
5. Shi Ye. Zhongguogudaiwenxuezhong de
tongxinglianshuyuyanjiu. – Shanghai renminchubanshe, 2008 (Shi Ye. The Research
on Homosexual Love in Chinese Classical Literature. – Shanghai People’s
Publishing House, 2008)
[1]This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for the
Humanities, the project 11-33-00395à2 «The Other in the family”