Gaysia (16 page)

‘Ah, the third couple,' Doock said now, bowing his head.
‘One meeting determines a lifetime.'

Lesbian Couple #3 lived in Tianjin, China's third biggest metropolis behind Shanghai and Beijing. Eric had already been scheduled to go to Tianjin for work, so Doock booked tickets to come along for the ride.

The Baos met the lesbian (I'll call her Linda) and her girlfriend in a hotel lobby. Like the organisers of any decent crime, everyone thought it would be best to chat in a public place. Doock showed me a picture of Linda on his Nokia mobile phone. She was a handsome, bespectacled, broad-faced woman with a square jaw and a sensible haircut, dressed in a fuschia blouse.

‘She looks nice,' I said, passing the phone back to Doock.

‘Very butch,' Doock said, nodding.

Doock, Eric, Linda and her girlfriend broke the ice by talking about their hobbies, backgrounds and jobs, before moving on to their relationships. Linda and her partner, whom I'll call Susan, had been together for a decade and were childhood sweet hearts. Susan had already fake-married a gay guy in Beijing; now Linda's parents were pressuring her to get married too. Though Doock and Linda barely knew each other, it was obvious that their needs matched up perfectly. That's all it took. The marriage was on.

From there it was all amateur theatre, complete with wedding costumes and fudged lines. Doock explained Chinese parents didn't care how couples had first met, but he and Linda concocted a story anyway, something about having a mutual friend. ‘If I forgot my lines,' Doock said, ‘I'd look to Linda for help and she'd cover for me.' It helped that Doock bore an uncanny resemblance to Linda's late father. His future mother-in-law took an immediate shine to him.

There would be two weddings: one for Linda's mother and
another for Doock's parents, since they lived so far from one another. The in-laws would never meet. For both weddings, neither Linda nor Susan invited anyone who knew they were lesbians. To be safe, Doock and Eric didn't invite any of their gay friends either. The only people who knew the true identities of the couples were the celebrants, who were actually actors the couples knew. No one could risk anything. None of this was about fun.

At the Tianjin wedding for Linda's mother, Linda's relatives gave Doock
hóng-bau
, traditional red paper packets stuffed with money that are given at Chinese weddings instead of gifts. Doock refrained from drinking, mainly because he didn't want to get drunk, but also because he needed to drive. It made for a long evening. After the wedding was over, Doock drove his new mother-in-law back home, then drove with Linda to the entrance of Tianjin's superhighway. Eric and Susan were waiting for them by the side of the road. The couples exchanged partners and Doock took all the
hóng-bau
money out of his trousers.

‘Here,' he said to Linda and Susan. ‘This isn't mine.'

Together, they drove to Doock's home province of Henan and hired two hotel rooms: one for Doock and Linda; the other for Eric and Susan. In the middle of the night, under cover of darkness, the couples opened their doors, crept down the corridor and, giggling like high schoolers on camp, exchanged partners again.

‘We really didn't have any other options,' Doock said. ‘It's hard to say whether we have chosen the best course, because it was the only one available. But since then, the people around us – the parents, the relatives – they feel satisfied. They're pleased with the marriage. In the end, we think it was worthwhile taking
the trouble.'

‘You don't feel any guilt?' I asked. ‘Towards your parents, I mean.'

Doock looked into the middle distance, thinking. ‘A little.'

Nowadays, the official story was that because Doock worked in Beijing and Linda worked in Tianjin, they were a ‘weekend couple', an increasingly common phenomenon for young couples in China who worked in different cities. They told their parents they lived in Doock's Beijing apartment whenever they could. There had only been one occasion when Linda's mother announced that she wanted to visit Beijing to see where Doock and Linda lived. They put up photos of Doock and Linda and removed the ones of Doock and Eric. They removed Eric's clothes from the shared wardrobe and replaced them with Linda's outfits. Eric left the house, effectively forced out of his own home.

‘It's just for one day,' Eric said, shrugging. ‘She's only made one visit in three years, so that's no big deal. There was some tension, but only because we were afraid we'd blow it.'

Doock and Eric knew at least twenty other gay couples who'd found lesbians to fake-marry. Sometimes they'd all get together and laugh over shared war stories – the partner-swapping, the botched logistics, the close calls and the sham ceremonies – but they acknowledged it was less of a romp and more of a grim necessity.

‘Fake marriage is not so good,' Eric said. ‘We are lucky to have suitable girls to play along with us. But I would prefer a gay marriage if possible.'

Since then, Doock had heard that Lesbian Couple #1 had undergone a dramatic breakup. Lesbian Couple #2 had ended up finding a gay man to marry, but they didn't have children
together in the end. And now, even though they had made it clear that they didn't want children, both Doock's and Linda's parents were pestering them about the possibility. Doock told everyone he was too busy. Linda told everyone she wasn't physically strong enough.

Recently, Doock had taken Linda back to Henan to visit his parents. It was one thing real marriages and fake marriages had in common: the mutual obligation of visiting each other's parents when you really couldn't be bothered. On the train ride there, Doock and Linda talked about the conundrum of children.

‘Maybe you should still give me a kid,' Doock said to Linda. ‘I'll pay 15,000 yuan.'

Linda thought about it – the sum was close to 2400 US dollars – then raised an eyebrow. ‘Make it 16,000,' she said. Then, after a moment of terse silence, they burst into laughter, neither of them quite sure where the joke began and where it ended.

Most gay men in China were married: either in sham marriages like Doock's, or in marriages where the wife was unaware of the husband's preference for guys. If such men needed a quick fix, a lot of them went online to search for anonymous fuck-buddies, while others cruised in parks for fervent sex in the shadows. In Beijing, the best place to find other men for quick sex was Mudanyuan Park. At a glance, you couldn't tell it was the city's hotspot for man-on-man action. In the day, it was one of Beijing's loveliest family outdoor areas, a tidy public garden with a narrow canal running through it like a cement artery. This waterway was lined with boxy shrubs that led to lush
lawns, while a giant spindly transmission tower loomed in the distance. Old men and women came here with their grandkids to fly kites so high that they trailed out of sight and all you saw were taut cords being pulled into the atmosphere.

If you ventured away from the families, walked from the canal up the park's sloping hill, you'd find an open-air section thick with bushes, which operated as a kind of sex terrace for horny men. Trees were planted at arm's length from each other, and between these trees were large wooden benches in clearings where people – mainly men – could gather and chat. On the day I went exploring, one clearing was occupied by a fierce-looking drag queen who was performing a feisty monologue in front of skinny, mincing gay men. Some lay down and rested their heads on their lovers' laps, trying not to move in the heat. One stretched out on a ratty tarpaulin on the ground, wearing a singlet artfully shredded to reveal his nipples. Older men quietly did embroidery, murmuring to each other in low gossipy tones. It was an outdoor queer stitch and bitch where men could happily gossip the day away.

Further back, the shrubs grew thicker and well-worn human tracks snaked their way between dense six-foot bushes. Some of these bushes had been hollowed out, as though dwarves had hacked their way through the branches to create discreet spaces specifically for men to fuck inside. Inside the hollows was debris: disposable tissue wrappers, single-use lube packets, crumpled cigarette boxes, mint wrappers, decaying wads of toilet paper and layers of dried-out condoms from long-forgotten sex. Lawn mowers had recently charged through the park, shredding the toilet paper and strewing snowy white dandruff over the grass. As I wandered through the bushes, young urban professionals in starched work shirts made intense eye contact with me. A lot
of them wore wedding bands.

After a while, I was less interested in the men. Instead, I started to wonder about their wives.

He Xiaopei was an academic who specialised in Chinese wives stuck in marriages to gay men. There was even a name for them:
tongqi
, or ‘homowives'. Xiaopei was in her mid fifties, looked like an old-school dyke – shaved head, thin-rimmed glasses – and ran a women's organisation called Pink Space. In late 2007, Xiaopei went to a conference of gay Chinese men discussing how they could make use of the law to protect themselves. Men got up and presented their stories, with testimonies about being harassed by police and bullied by their family members. Out of the blue, a woman raised her hand and asked if she could share her story. He Xiaopei and the men turned around in their chairs to face her. They had seen this woman on the way in, but no one knew who she was. She had arrived at the conference alone.

‘I'm not sure if I should speak,' she said. ‘I'm just a standard heterosexual woman.'

Xiaopei and the others laughed to themselves. What was a ‘standard heterosexual', anyway? And if such a thing existed, what was she doing here in a room full of non-standard homosexuals?

The woman's eyes darted around nervously, but she persevered. ‘After I was married to my husband,' she said, ‘he would beat me. And after our child was conceived, there was a year and a half without any sex whatsoever. Afterwards, my husband wouldn't even touch me. He didn't even look at me in the eyes! So when I discovered he is gay, of course it made sense …'

The woman kept talking, about how her husband would fuck men, about how when she complained, he would beat her.
One of the key speakers at the conference – a female sexologist who was relatively famous in China, but whom Xiaopei declined to name – interjected from the stage.

‘I'm sorry,' the sexologist said, ‘but I've done a lot of studies into gay men and what you're saying just isn't
represented
in the research. It's not in the literature. There have been no such stories of domestic violence.'

Emboldened, a male gay activist joined in. ‘And this is a
gay
meeting,' he told the woman. ‘This is not an appropriate place to tell this kind of story!'

‘I'm sorry,' the woman said, ‘I didn't mean to –'

Other men called out, joining in the chorus, telling the woman to be quiet and sit down. Stunned, the woman took her seat. Xiaopei felt sorry for her. And, although she didn't say this to anyone at the time, she strongly disagreed with the sexologist.

‘Obviously, it's “represented”,' she told me. ‘No matter whether straight or heterosexual, domestic violence happens in one-third of all families in China. Why not gay men? Gay men have
more
reason to beat up their wives: they don't like them! I felt like this woman was being told she didn't exist.'

During the interval, the conference organiser approached Xiaopei, worried about what had happened. ‘Was it a mistake, allowing that woman to come to the conference?' he asked quietly.

‘Of course not,' Xiaopei said.

When the meeting was over, Xiaopei introduced herself to the woman and asked whether she could interview her. Xiaopei travelled to her hometown, met her child and spent hours talking about her case. It was the first time Xiaopei had heard anything like this, but she suspected there were other cases.

Xiaopei decided she would start a
tongqi
phone hotline that
would operate every Wednesday. Advertising something like this was a little awkward. Xiaopei placed advertisements in gay newspapers, hoping married gay men would pass the details on to their wives.
Marie Claire
's Chinese edition rang a story on
tongqi
with all the details for the hotline, but because only middle-class, rich or expatriate women in China tended to read the magazine, Xiaopei knew it would not reach women in regional China. Still, women somehow kept discovering the hotline. When the calls came, they lasted for hours, and the women were prepared to pay. It wasn't a cheap service, since all calls were handled over a standard mobile phone line, which was incredibly expensive by Chinese standards.