Western media has been full of reports lately about Shanghai’s first ever gay pride festival. While police canceled some events, others went forward without interruption. It’s really a victory for China’s growing LGBT movement – as we learned when we hosted Comrades: the Chinese LGBT film festival here in New York last year, police have often shut down similar events in the past.

All this raises the question…what’s it really like to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) in China these days? We’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this, and the reality seems to be — surprise! — pretty complex.

There’s no question that space for LGBT people in China has expanded radically in the past 10 years. In 2001, homosexuality was officially removed from China’s
national list of psychiatric disorders, and since then, China’s LGBT population has moved gradually into the public eye. Beijing, Shanghai and other cities now have gay bars and bathhouses. Websites allow gay men, lesbians and bisexuals to connect across the country. Around the country, there are dozens of new support groups, conferences, summer camps, hotlines and more.

But at the same time, this doesn’t change that fact that many LGBT men and women still face stigma and intolerance in mainstream Chinese society. While it’s now okay to be openly queer within the narrow confines of a handful of gay bars and cafes in Beijing or Shanghai, Chinese gay rights experts say that this scene is marginalized.

According to Professor Liang Qingling from Jilin University, discrimination is still widespread because traditional culture and morality still have deep roots in China. As a result, he writes, LGBT people who come out risk being fired from their jobs, evicted by their landlords, and shunned by their families and the wider society. A 2003 survey by Chinese social scientists of “men who have sex with men” (or MSM, a term that includes men who might not identify themselves as homosexual but who sometimes have relationships with other men) found that over 62% reported having experienced some form of discrimination based on their sexual orientation.

Zhou Dan, a leading Shanghai lawyer and LGBT rights advocate, told us that while he believes discrimination is widespread, it’s hard to document because there are currently “very few lawsuits” on sexual orientation-based discrimination. Most victims prefer to “keep their gay faces hidden; many gay men are afraid to talk about their sexuality in the workplace, because they assume that openness would bring unfair treatment from the employer.”

According to Zhou Dan, if a person is believed by neighbors, friends or coworkers to be queer, s/he’ll be avoided socially by neighbors and colleagues and become a “non-person.” 

As in many other cultures, the root of this stigma seems to stem from family pressures. China’s long-standing Confucian cultural traditions place a great deal of importance on marrying and producing male heirs who can continue the family line. Queer people who are outed to their families sometimes report being disowned by parents, or told by siblings that they are “ashamed of having a sibling who’s abnormal.”

What’s more, the family is at the center of a dense fabric of social relationships, which in turn is woven by the exchange of favors. Even as adults, many children rely on their parents’s social networks to help the child to obtain housing, jobs, and social contacts in the Communist Party or in the government that can help them to advance professionally. A person who is cut off from his family is therefore not only emotionally isolated; he or she loses the social capital needed to navigate the Chinese system.

As a result, China’s leading expert and advocate on LGBT rights issues, Prof. Zhang Beichuan, reports that most LGBT people arrange sham marriages in order to avoid social ostracism of themselves and their extended families. His March 2009 survey of gay men in nine cities found that 70-80% of those interviewed planned to marry women eventually.

Under these circumstances, the anonymity of the internet has made it a critical forum for China’s gay community. Websites such as Aibai have become popular around China, linking Chinese LGBT to one another and to an international community. Recently, the government’s announcement that all computers would be required to include “Green Dam” web-censorship software met with an outcry from Chinese netizens, including LGBT rights advocates like Zhou Dan, who pointed out that the software would block access to life-saving AIDS information. The outcry led officials to back down at the last minute and announce that the requirement would be “postponed” – but rights advocates note that it could be reinstated at any time.

Web censorship, and the periodic crackdowns on public LGBT events, create a climate of intense anxiety for people who might already be hesitant to risk coming out to their friends and families. That’s why historic events like the one in Shanghai are so important. By pushing at the limits of the possible, they help to create greater space for everyone, queer or straight. Hopefully, there will be many more similar events in the future.

Note: We welcome others to write in to info [at] asiacatalyst.org and share their views/experiences, especially LGBT people from China. We’ll post a digest of comments here in the future.