Gaysia (13 page)

CHINA

In which we discover a parallel universe version of the internet and a parallel universe version of marriage where gay men marry lesbians or unwitting straight women (who become understandably upset). Key quote: ‘In China, homosexuals don't have any kind of publicity, apart from websites. So when you say “homosexuals”, it's like a ghost. Something that doesn't even exist.'

I
T DIDN'T TAKE LONG
to get used to the pollution in Beijing. On good days, it was barely noticeable. On bad days, I'd ride my bike from Peking University past Google's Beijing headquarters, cutting through fumes that hung in the air like a white cataract of fog. The effect was like looking at the world after too many hours in an over-chlorinated pool. After a while, you just lived with it. The snot I blew out of my nose at the end of the day wasn't
always
black.

On a good day like this one, I could head to Liufang subway station, walk a block and look up through clear skies to see a permanent rainbow. It was formed by the curtains of Beijing's LGBT centre, thick vertical blocks of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple that – when pulled right across – formed a pride flag. You'd think a giant gay rainbow would be conspicuous in a grey cement city like Beijing, but rainbows were only a
beacon if you were looking for one, and most Chinese people weren't aware a local pride movement existed, not knowing that rainbows were used to represent it.

Beijing's LGBT centre sat on the twenty-first floor of XianTianDi Plaza. Like a lot of apartment blocks in the area, the building's corridors didn't let much sunlight in. The floors were sticky. Apartment 2108 stood out from the others only because of four coloured paper squares discreetly stuck onto the door. One was a rainbow, another was a blue square saying ‘No Smoking' in Chinese and English, and a third square said, ‘Free Wi-Fi.' The last simply said, ‘One Coin, One Join.' I checked my jeans pocket to make sure I had coins, then knocked on the door.

Inside, it was less like the headquarters of an underground gay resistance I'd been expecting, and more like a bachelor pad styled by IKEA – bathed in light with blond wooden panels and shiny new appliances. A choir of young gay men was warming up, singing
doo-baah, doo-baah, doo-baah, doo-baah
in an ascending scale. Other young men lounged on the sofa reading novels while women typed energetically on laptops in the kitchen. They looked up briefly to smile at me. It was like walking in on a friendly sharehouse where no one knew you, but no one minded you being around. If you pulled aside the rainbow curtains, the 21st-floor view was impressive: you could see the scalps of Beijing's buildings and a rooftop basketball court where teenage guys had stripped out of their tops to shoot hoops. If you were a young gay dude in this city, I could see a few reasons why you'd want to spend time here.

A woman with a no-nonsense haircut, thin-rimmed glasses, a big smile and a large black t-shirt that said ‘San Francisco' came out of a meeting to greet me.

‘You must be Xian,' I said, extending my hand.

‘And you must be Benjamin.'

Xian was in her late thirties, one of the city's most prominent lesbian activists and coordinators, and among the first people in China to have gone online. She was also possibly the first Chinese woman to have made contact with other lesbians using the internet.

Xian and I went out for lunch and talked over a meal of steamed river fish that was full of bones. She worked full-time for Common Language, a lesbian group she'd co-founded, which ran summer camps and a phone hotline, conducted research and lobbied for legal changes. Like most queer groups in China, almost all of Common Language's funding came from overseas organisations, as Chinese government grants weren't available for sexual minority groups. In its five-year history, Common Language had scored only one grant from inside China: a domestic violence initiative, where the funding was used to address violence against lesbian and bisexual women, mainly inflicted by their parents.

‘Wait, these women get assaulted by their
parents
?'

Xian nodded. It was a pretty common thing. ‘The highest rate of violence towards gay women is from their parents. In China, parents punishing children is a common practice. If your parents think you're doing something bad, they think it's totally reasonable for them to punish you. On gay issues, sometimes the punishment can be really absurd. Parents will use extreme ways trying to stop their daughter from being bad.'

‘How extreme?' I asked.

Xian remembered one woman in her late twenties, whom I'll call Lucy, who lived in Beijing and worked in a professional job. Like most Chinese adults who'd moved to the city for work, Lucy would wire money back to her family. In Beijing, Lucy had
a live-in girlfriend, but she was closeted to her parents, who were pressuring her more and more to marry. On the phone, her parents' questions intensified. So did the nagging. In the Spring Festival, when people from all over China travel back home to their families, Lucy dropped two conversational bombs on her folks. First: she never wanted to get married. Second: she already had a partner – a female
lover
, she took pains to emphasise. Her parents were aghast. Who had ever heard of such a thing?

Lucy's conversations with her parents alternated between awkward questions and heated arguments, tear-streaked pleading and hostile silence. On Chinese New Year, Lucy returned to Beijing, shaken. She had no idea that her parents were following behind her. When her parents arrived in Beijing, they moved into her apartment. Together they drove Lucy's lover out and, after they'd dusted off their hands from that task, sat Lucy down and laid down the new rules. Number one: Lucy was to cut off all communication with her girlfriend. Number two: Lucy had to meet boys – with the intention to marry within a year.

Lucy contacted Common Language, distraught. What Xian and her team of phone counsellors could offer was pretty limited. They gave her legal advice, like calling the police to protect her and her girlfriend.

‘Also,' the counsellors said, ‘if the apartment was paid for by you and your girlfriend, your parents have no right to drive your girlfriend away. Parents can't
force
their daughter into certain behaviours.'

They also emphasised communication. In Western countries, Xian said, it might be an option to sever all ties with your family or even bring your case to court. In China, your identity was completely bound up with your family. And when you were
an only child – like most young Chinese people born under the one-child policy – your parents were the only family you had. In Chinese culture, it wasn't possible to turn your back and run.

‘In the West, when children become financially independent, they don't really have to care about the parents. If the parents don't like the lifestyle, they can just go separate ways,' Xian said. ‘That rarely happens in China. Mentally, for the children, they will feel strange. They can't cut off that relationship. There are social traditions. So it remains a very challenging issue for us.'

Eventually, Common Language lost all contact with Lucy. Xian had no idea what had happened to her. Common Language still ran its phone counselling service, but it kept encountering a fundamental conundrum: people rang the hotline to discuss their options, but Common Language often had to concede that there weren't any.

It was even harder when Xian was a young woman. She sought out books about lesbianism before the arrival of the internet, but found that such titles scarcely existed in China. In college, she'd found a few books in the library but they were pretty obscure. One was an oral history book on lesbian nuns in the United States. She also found literature reviews of feminist writers and a copy of
The Well of Loneliness,
an infamously bleak and suicide-inducing 1928 lesbian novel by Radclyffe Hall, in which lesbians dressed as men and led miserable lives that ended in either solitude or death.

Then in the late '90s, towards the end of Xian's college degree, the internet arrived in China. Modems were a rarity, even in universities, but her campus's computer lab had managed to score the latest gear. The internet Xian logged onto was unrecognisable by today's standards, a still-developing slug of a thing called the Gopher protocol: a text-oriented system of
cascading information where people could contribute to common-interest newsgroups.

‘The worldwide web – the three Ws technique – was still under development or something,' Xian said. ‘So I joined a newsgroup, and a newsgroup could also search. “Search” is such a powerful tool.' For me, trying to imagine the internet before its “search” function existed was as difficult as trying to imagine the boundaries of the universe. It felt as if my brain would melt from the effort.

Xian would stare into her university's small, bottle-thick glass monitor, and it didn't take long to find a newsgroup for lesbians. Her heart beat faster. Without even thinking, she posted an English message, shooting out a single bleating request into the abyss:

I'm in China and I'm looking for LGBT information. It's so isolated here.

She had no idea whether anyone would respond. ‘I wasn't really asking for help,' she said, ‘but communication.' To her surprise, people from around the world started replying. One American publishing house specialising in queer titles posted her books, which Xian devoured. But on reading those American titles, she found a disconnect between Western perspectives on lesbianism and her life in China. How could something like the Stonewall Riots happen in China, where there were no gay bars to shut down? How could a vocal queer rights movement start here, when no one even spoke about gays or knew what they were? It's one thing to be actively persecuted, another to feel that you don't even exist.

So Xian started looking for real people in her country. Through Gopher newsgroups, expatriate Chinese lesbians and gays gave Xian contacts for people back home who were probably
as lonely as her. Nervous and giddy, Xian phoned them, wrote to them and arranged to meet in Beijing's bars. For most, it was the first time they'd met other people who were gay and lesbian. And here they were, having lived in the same city all along. For Xian, it was mind-blowing.

At that stage, the Chinese government hadn't yet started to censor the internet, presumably because it didn't know there was anything
to
censor. Then, around 2000, the internet took off throughout the country, and with it, gay and lesbian websites and message boards. People found quiet corners in internet cafés, logged on and started finding each other, answering and posting personal ads for romance and hooking up for casual sex. They listened to each other's stories and formed support groups.

‘The real turning point in my life,' Xian said, ‘was the internet.'

It was the last thing I expected to hear: that in a country renowned for its draconian web-monitoring regime, it was the internet that had given birth to modern gay consciousness.

In 2008, China quietly leapfrogged the United States to become the world's biggest internet-user population. At last count, 420 million people were regularly online in China, about a third of the entire population. By the time you read this, that figure will be well out of date: China's growth in internet use is far too rapid to pin down in something as static as a book.

With that many people online, monitoring and censoring the internet – in its sprawling, multi-tentacled mutant glory – required the resources of fourteen government ministries and
an estimated 30,000 state employees to keep watch around the clock. Workers were charged with different tasks, from creating automated software that scanned blacklisted search terms to logging into chatrooms and posing as regular citizens to steer online conversations back to government-approved lines. It was a blend of the high-tech and the comically primitive, or what the
New York Times
once bitchily described as ‘part George Orwell, part Rube Goldberg'.