China has more to
gain from embracing gay rights than any other country
in the world—for the sake of sheer practicality
Things had been
difficult from the start for the organizers of the
Beijing Gay and Lesbian Culture Festival. Having originally
planned to hold the Chinese capital’s
first-ever public celebration of gay and lesbian art,
theater, film, and academia on December 16 at an artists
colony in Beijing’s Dashanzi District, their first
setback had come two days earlier, when the
city’s Municipal Public Security Bureau revoked
its permission to use the building.
Undeterred, the
festival crew quickly contacted participants and arranged
a replacement venue in another part of the city. As a
private establishment the On/Off Bar should have been
immune to the whims of Chinese officialdom, but as 3
P.M. came and the start of the festival approached,
the doors flew open and around 20 plainclothes and uniformed
police officers burst into the building.
Shutting down the
festival, the police tore banners and posters from the
walls while filming frightened attendees with camcorders as
they tried to flee. This move by local authorities was
particularly disappointing, as it was a significant
step backward for a country slowly but surely changing
its official position on gay rights.
Despite still
being classed as a “foreign disease” in the
early 1990s, homosexuality is now a topic open for
discussion in communist China, and state repression
has been on a slow decline for almost a decade, though
gay Web sites are still shut down by authorities.
The Utopia Guide to China now lists 45 major
cities across the country and in its territories that have
gay scenes large enough to warrant mention. Also,
Fudan University in Shanghai has been offering a
postgraduate course on gay health issues since 2003; a
new undergraduate course on homosexuality and gay culture
launched at the same faculty last year was swamped
with so many applicants that hundreds had to be turned
away.
So why all this
official fuss about a gay festival small enough to fit
into a Beijing bar? It seems that while the Chinese
Communist Party is prepared to allow small changes to
occur at a pace of its own choosing, it’s a
completely different thing for gay and lesbian Chinese to
come together and consider change themselves, no
matter how unthreatening the forum might be.
It’s
disappointing, because in doing so, the Chinese government
is missing out on a golden opportunity: Out of all the
countries in the world, it is China that has the most
to gain from embracing gay rights, not out of altruism
but for the sake of sheer practicality. And
ironically, it is heterosexual Chinese who will benefit the
most.
After decades of
repressive population controls owing to the
“one-child policy,” combined with a
cultural preference for male children, Chinese men are
beginning to significantly outnumber women. According to
China's latest census, 116.9 Chinese boys were
born for every 100 girls in 2000. By 2020, a large
number of mainland Chinese males may have no
hope of even dating a woman, let alone actually marrying
one. Add to this limited aged-care services in the country
(resulting in Chinese wives being expected to look
after their husband’s parents in old age) and
Chinese men find themselves with enormous family pressure to
get married.
Put simply,
embracing gay rights and promoting social acceptance of gay
and bisexual men in China would greatly improve the odds of
success for those exclusively heterosexual Chinese men
seeking partners—by taking closeted gay and
bisexual men out of the competition.
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