Jin Cao & Xinlei Lu. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society. Volume 39, Issue 4. Summer 2014.
In traditional Chinese society, homosexuality engendered little concern. But in the 1920s, the Western medicalized notion of homosexuality was imported into China and became the dominant interpretive framework. Homosexuality was no longer simply a kind of behavior. It was also an identity, stamped with a pathological label. A series of events in the 1980s heralded another era of transition. In the new contexts provided by the social transition ignited by market-oriented economic reform, as well as the AIDS crisis, the gay and lesbian movement has developed steadily in China. This development has coincided with the expansion of new information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, which have come to play a crucial role in contributing to self-identification among gays and lesbians, extending the public spaces available to gay people, and promoting the online visibility of homosexuality among mainstream society. While the gay movement in China has benefited greatly from the expansion of the Internet and from other new information and communication technologies, it must find its own way while borrowing ideas and drawing lessons from China’s Occidental counterparts.
The modern gay movement in mainland China began in the 1990s, when the social transition set in motion by the market-oriented economic reforms assumed increasing momentum. In this article, we first delve into the historical legacy of Chinese tradition regarding homosexuality and then explore the transition of this issue in modern China, especially the forces that have served as the context as well as the focus of the gay movement since the 1980s. Finally, we discuss the significant role played, as well as the new opportunities created, by the Internet and other new information and communication technologies.
Due to limits on length, our discussion focuses on mainland China rather than greater China, and on the gay movement. Most of the material presented here on gay issues since the 1980s (especially gay uses of the Internet) is based on our original field research carried out over the past few years.
Legacy
Although traditionally both Western Christian culture and Chinese Confucian culture have held homosexuality to be morally repugnant, compared with the Bible’s vehement condemnation, the Confucian classics display a less stringent attitude. While Christianity radically disavows homosexuality, Confucianism’s deprecation is rooted in the assumption that gay sexual practices will stand in the way of achieving the ideal Confucian personality. From this essentially male perspective, there are no fundamental differences between the condemnation of homosexuality and the condemnation of an erotic addiction to women. In the light of these differences, Western society appears to have historically pursued a much more severe persecution of homosexuals than China. It was not until the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) that sodomy became a crime under the law. And even then the punishment was relatively light, and the prosecution for daily practices of sodomy was quite slack. The relative tolerance for homosexuality in the Chinese tradition derives from the primacy accorded to reproduction. Homosexuality was not seen as contravening the Confucian commandments, providing that its practitioners also accomplished the task of carrying on the family line. Since in traditional Chinese society nearly everyone got married, homosexuality engendered little concern. Ancient China was not, however, a space of equality for homosexuals. On the contrary, homosexual practice was inextricably bound up with structures of social power. Homosexual relations between emperors and ministers, masters and servants, teachers and students, and scholar-bureaucrats and opera players were articulated within the sharp discrepancies of social rank. Compared to receptive practices, the dominant insertive mode was a reassertion of power and masculinity. The asymmetric relationships between emperors and ministers, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives in the three cardinal guides of Confucianism were reproduced via the active and the passive as well as the insertive and receptive positions in the sexual intercourse of gay men.
Although traditional Chinese society regarded homosexuality as a behavior rather than an essential identity, the practice of allocating a certain identity label to homosexual behavior was by no means rare in Chinese tradition. But the target was mainly those taking the passive position. Customs that associate gay men with the passive or receptive position in sexual intercourse as well as with an effeminate manner or style can be found not only in China but in many other regions, including Latin American and Arabian countries (Epps). Arguably, the common underlying logic is that men who possess a biologically male body but relinquish the standardized masculine role are seen as profaning the law of nature and thus deserve moral condemnation. Although depictions of homosexual behavior were not infrequent in classical Chinese literature and especially in novels, in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, homosexuality in general was a relatively insignificant issue to mainstream society. There was moral criticism, but it was not very severe, and homosexual behavior was a daily practice in many people’s lives.
Transition
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, homosexuality has been pathologized in Western society, as religious and moral condemnation has been replaced by physiological and psychological models of deviance or perversion. This medicalized notion of homosexuality was imported into China in the 1920s and became the dominant interpretive framework. Homosexuality was no longer a kind of behavior; it was also an identity stamped with a pathological label. In the name of modern medicine (science), this negative interpretation still lingers today. In the three decades from the 1950s to the early 1980s terms denoting “gay” and “lesbian” generally did not appear in popular discourse, but during the narrower period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a period when asceticism prevailed nationwide, excessive sex, along with a wide range of other things that did not conform with mainstream Maoist values, was considered a baleful influence from capitalism. In this context, homosexual behavior was seen as a severe political fault—a sign of capitalist tendencies—that merited severe punishment. Even in the 1990s, many Chinese people, including some with higher education, regarded homosexuality as a capitalist contamination that had been imported from Western society after China launched its policies of opening and reform.
The 1980s were a decade of transition. On the one hand, many homosexuals who had consensual sexual intercourse were sentenced to prison in the name of “the crime of hooliganism.” On the other hand, for the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic, homosexuality was discussed publicly in some professional magazines and academic studies. By the 1990s, mainstream opinion still deemed it to be a pathological phenomenon calling for medical intervention, but with China’s opening to the outside world, two different but related forces sparked and contributed to the development of the gay movement in China.
The first force was the general transition in Chinese society. Since the 1980s, as exchanges between China and the international society increased, the recent understanding of homosexuality in Western society and the influence of the Western gay emancipation movement, which has developed since the 1960s, were introduced into China. As Dennis Altman has pointed out, the globalization of Western modernity has contributed to the formation of a universal gay identity and a general consciousness on a global level. The word tongzhi (comrade), a hybrid combining the global gay identity and consciousness with Chinese local sociohistorical reality, was first coined in Hong Kong in the 1990s and spread to all Chinese gay communities, rapidly becoming a popular appellation that contributed to self-identification. Alongside such intellectual and cultural imports there were also material inflows. The funding provided by overseas foundations and international organizations, for example, has been crucial to the development of many Chinese nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and has played an important role in developing the gay emancipation movement in China.
Ironically, the second transformative force raising the visibility of gay issues has been AIDS. After the first HIV infection surfaced in mainland China in the mid-1980s, the homophobic practice of equating the gay community with AIDS spread rapidly among ordinary people. Condemnatory phrases such as “AIDS is the curse on homosexuals” and “Cherish your life and stay away from homosexuals” achieved widespread popular currency, contributing to the stigmatization of the gay community within mainstream society. Since, as Gayle Rubin notes, “disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity”, the gay community was placed in the position of being a scapegoat and the primary focus and outlet for the public’s fear of AIDS. As a result, homosexuals were allocated a doubly negative label, of social pathology and AIDS. In public government documents, men who have sex with men, together with drug addicts and people offering commercial sex services, were consistently foregrounded as the three groups with the highest risk of HIV infection.
At the same time, the spread of AIDS also brought unexpected opportunities for the gay emancipation movement. Homosexuality came into the purview of the mainstream media and onto government agendas due to the need to develop AIDS prevention strategies. Though the agendas and reports produced by government and media were usually fraught with intentional or unintentional prejudice, academic studies of homosexuality, conducted in the name of AIDS prevention, made it easier for the gay community to get funding from the government and to obtain support from society (Liu and Lu). Furthermore, since the Chinese government encountered difficulties in getting in touch with gay communities, which were anonymous in society, it was obliged to cooperate with gay NGOs in its daily practice in order to implement its AIDS prevention strategies. As a consequence, gay or LGBT organizations, and alternative media outlets, gained a certain level of legitimacy, or at least were seen by the Chinese government as necessary partners in projects developed for HIV/AIDS prevention. The AIDS crisis also provided Chinese gay communities with opportunities to enhance both their solidarity with similar communities around the world and their autonomy and specificity, as well as to foster a new wave of gay activists able to work creatively with domestic and international NGOs.
New Media
In the new contexts provided by social transition and AIDS prevention, the gay emancipation movement has developed steadily in China. This development in turn has coincided with the expansion of new information and communication technologies, especially the Internet, which have come to play a crucial role in contributing to self-identification among gays and lesbians, extending the public spaces available to gay people, and promoting the online visibility of homosexuality within mainstream society.
The self-identification of gay people comes with the emergence of group consciousness. When an individual Chinese gay man or lesbian discovers that there are other people who prefer same-sex partners just like him- or herself, the feeling of loneliness and isolation will be considerably alleviated. Gay telephone hotlines and alternative media founded in the 1990s have enabled gay people in China to tell their own stories and thereby challenge the monopoly over identity construction and media representation previously enjoyed by the mainstream mass media. Gay people and their supporters employ their own hotlines and alternative media to combat the stigmatization and discrimination inflicted by others, as well as to fulfill their own psychological and social needs. The popularization of Internet usage has given birth to online alternative media that have benefited from the exponential increase in the number of individuals connected as well as the enhanced opportunities for usage, due to the Internet’s characteristic convenience, anonymity, interaction, and multimedia capabilities. Gay alternative media based on the platform of online portals and forums, and other new Internet communication forms such as blogs, microblogs, and social network services, not only facilitate communication among gay people and expand their social circles but also offer a fertile matrix for the development of a gay subculture. As Larry Gross has pointed out, the “potential for friendship and group formation provided by the Internet is particularly valuable for members of self-identified minorities who are scattered and often besieged in their home surroundings.” This observation applies with particular force to Chinese gay communities. In China, gay people have been neglected by or suffered prejudice from the mainstream media for a long time. Consequently, mainstream society has been largely closed off as a source of self-knowledge or a forum for discussion and debate. There is no real equivalent in China to the niche markets represented by the “pink press” and media that have emerged in Western societies to capitalize on the advertising value of the gay community’s consumer spending. In addition, in mainland China there is no possibility for Chinese gay communities to launch a public campaign against stigma and for gay rights with a parade or a public demonstration. These closures explain why the earliest gay movement in mainland China was initiated in the 1990s, in the form of special telephone hotlines offering psychological help to gays and lesbians. Hence, developing alternative media such as telephone hotlines and self-produced gay or lesbian magazines and then, if possible, gradually and carefully extending the movement to some outreach or off-media activities (e.g., picnics and family gatherings) has been the only feasible way for Chinese gay people to build an emancipation movement. This process has been expedited and expanded by the popularization of the Internet, which is currently the most significant venue for the gay movement in mainland China.
The Internet enables individual lesbians and gay men to obtain relevant information and knowledge easily and to access specialized services. Most significantly, it brings two crucial changes for the gay community in China. One is to create online virtual public spaces where people can find everything necessary for a gay community, from social network services, semipornography, and sexual partners to discussions of the issues that concern them or opportunities to turn to someone for help. These online public spaces, which dramatically extend traditional queer public spaces such as parks, public bathhouses, teahouses, and pubs—all of which are restricted by geographic limits—not only become the new virtual homestead for many gay and lesbian people but also enable gay rights activists and organizations to recruit many more volunteers and participants and thereby enhance the solidarity of the whole community. The other change is the proliferation of online queer-focused discourse among online mainstream media and straight people in recent years. The increased visibility of gay issues among online news media, personal blogs, weibos (the Chinese version of tweets), and video websites heralds the advent of a new era in which homosexuality is gradually becoming an issue that is no longer unspoken in mainstream society. Although stereotypes about lesbian and gay people spread in proportion with this proliferation, and we have to distinguish visibility from publicness (Bronski), this visibility offers new opportunities and lays the foundations for a future movement. It is arguable that without the Internet and other new media the gay movement in mainland China would not have gathered so much momentum, and that gay communities would have been far less mature. However, it is dangerous to be overly optimistic about the role the Internet has played. In addition to providing a sphere of potential freedom and openness, it is also a space where homosexual alternative online media is increasingly self-censored and commercialized, which may lead to misrepresentation of same-sex identity (Ho). The self-censorship, mainly forced by government surveillance, is not limited to gay websites but is a must for all websites and Internet network operators in China. The commercialization of gay websites in China is not great by comparison with their counterparts in Western countries or even with other local websites. But through the increase of gay visibility in movies, cartoons, and news coverage—the producers of which often use gay characters as a novelty to attract attention—commercial forces often promote the visibility of gay people at the expense of reinforcing stereotypes and misrepresenting same-sex identities in mainstream society. Both state and capital forces are double-edged swords for the current gay movement in China, spaces—like the Internet itself—of freedom and control. In China, the gay emancipation movement, which has benefited greatly from the expansion of the Internet and other new information and communication technologies, must find its own way while borrowing ideas and drawing lessons from its Occidental counterparts. Compared with gay communities in Western societies, China’s lesbians and gays suffer more from the lack of basic political and civil rights, the still-very-strong social pressures imposed on gay people to marry people of the opposite sex, and the subsequent problems after such marriages. However, as we note above, the absence of the strong moral condemnation rooted in the Christian tradition and the more relaxed attitude toward homosexual practices embedded in the classical Chinese worldview suggest that prejudice in China may be easier to combat. At the same time, because the conditions for the advance of a radical gay movement along Western lines are not present in China’s political and social soil, Chinese gay communities will need to develop more pragmatic ways to emancipate themselves by building group consciousness and self-identification, alleviating the daily anguish that is linked to gay identity, and finding ways to present themselves collectively to the mainstream once they reach a fuller self-understanding. With the help of the Internet, this collective strategy may even partly mitigate the contradiction between the ideal of visibility and the right to privacy that the US gay rights movement encountered in its early days (Bronski). One should never underestimate the potential for reaction and reversal, but as we have argued here, the advantageous historical tradition inherited from classical Chinese thought, coupled with the popularization of the Internet and other new information and communication technologies, is more likely than not to smooth the way for the emancipation of Chinese gay communities in the medium term, if not the immediate future.