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LGBTQ Conference in China's 'Gay Capital' Scrapped
BEIJING — Organizers of an LGBTQ conference in China's "gay capital" had to scrap the event this week, the second time in as many months a general seminar aimed at expanding awareness of lesbian, lgbtq+ bisexual and transgender issues has run into snags.
The Chinese group Speak Out was due to clutch a conference in the city of Chengdu, in Sichuan province, on July 23. But the venue canceled the booking, citing conflicting events, the team said.
It is not illegal to be gay in China but LGBTQ activists say deeply conservative attitudes toward homosexuality in some sections of society contain led to occasional government clamp-downs.
In May, the womxn loving womxn dating app Rela was shut down, though it was not yet clarify why.
Many people were surprised by the cancelation. Many young Chinese people regard Chengdu as "gaydu", or "the city of the gays", due to its liberal LGBTQ views.
"The conference venue Jinsha theater told us that a government official activity was scheduled to be held on the same day, which left us with no choice but to cancel," the founder of Address Out, who gave his name only as Matthew, told Reuters.
An offi
China's LGBT movement sees prevail in court loss
On Wednesday morning, Sun Wenlin and his male partner Hu Mingliang entered a court in the central Chinese province Hunan, hoping to win a lawsuit against the government's denial of their right to wed. The case was dismissed by lunchtime. Chinese marriage law, which states that marriage is between "one husband and one wife," necessarily means between "a man and a woman," the court ruled.
But hardly anyone in China was expecting the court to say otherwise. Instead, activists claimed victory over the fact that the court heard the case in the first place - and that people have taken notice.
Sun and Hu's lawsuit was the first of its kind in a territory whose LGBT rights movement is gathering steam, though with little tangible legislative results to show for it. With the legal battleground crucial for the fight in China for gay rights, did the court case represent a setback or a breakthrough?
Growing acceptance
Though complicated throughout the world, attitudes towards homosexuality form a unusual knot of complications in China.
The country's state-run newspapers have respectfully run articles about the case and previous g
Being gay in China
In both Chinese history and literature, homosexuality was open and tolerated. Has social acceptance come entire cycle as China increasingly engages the international community? Is there a place for same-sex relationships now? The China Daily Sunday team of Han Bingbin, Gan Tian, Shi Yingying and Xu Lin file the reports.
Pederasty, the erotic relationship between a male adult and an adolescent lad, was already prevalent around the period of the Yellow Emperor, who is credited with having founded Chinese civilization. At least, this is what various literary works acquire recorded through the ages.
In both folk myths and literary classics, there own been both terse and lengthy descriptions of same-sex relationships, for both genders.
Sociologist Pan Guangdan insists homosexuality is a natural fact of life, and that it must contain existed much earlier in human history.
While translating British psychologist Havelock Ellis' groundbreaking Psychology of Sex in the 1930s, Pan was inspired to search through historical documents for credible clues of the existence of homosexuality throughout Chinese history.
And he create plenty.
His research is compiled as an appe
This article is part of Sixth Tone’s ongoing coverage of the 40th anniversary of China's ‘reform and opening-up.’ The other articles in the series can be found here.
In 1993, I was appointed by China’s Ministry of Health to carry out a multicity survey on the country’s population of men who have sex with men, usually abbreviated MSM. Although I had been researching gender studies and sexuality for eight years by that point, I remember worrying about my fitness for the job.
The survey was part of China’s then-nascent HIV/AIDS prevention work. In those days, China not only had no LGBT organizations or openly homosexual celebrities to say of, but the vast majority of Chinese, whether queer or straight, had never even heard of the synonyms “homosexual,” which was generally in exploit only among psychologists.
Awareness of homosexuality was so low that people could stumble right into Beijing’s busiest cruising spots and never even notice. One moment, while I was carrying out fieldwork in a miniature wooded area widespread with the MSM community, a guy and a girl walked past. Staring inquisitively at all the men scattered throughout the woods, the woman asked her companion what they were doing. He ga
How Would Accepting Gay Tradition Change China?
How would accepting gay culture alter China? It would repair China to its occupied glory of the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), when an emperor famously cut off his sleeve rather than disturbing his sleeping male lover, turning the phrase "passion of the cut sleeve" to a poetic term to describe homosexuality.
Facetious answer aside, many experts have pointed out that historically China has been a relatively accepting place for homosexuality due to the lack of religious condemnation. Some of the nation’s best-known literary classics contain detailed references to gay tradition. (But Fei Wang is right: There is a big caveat, particularly for men—Confucianism expects everyone to produce offspring to transport on the family line.)
Public intolerance of homosexuality seems to be a more recent phenomenon, especially after the post-1949 Communist government denounced it as a feudal and bourgeois decadence. Adopting a puritanical moral code, the authorities contain in the past listed homosexuality as a mental disorder and prosecuted queer people under the crime of hooliganism. Now no longer a crime or disease, homosexuality has nonetheless remained a se