An article appeared in
China Daily for December 27 on the future of gay China entitled
"Quiet pink revolution in dark before dawn?" (You've got to love China Daily's headlines.) It is well worth reading in its entirety.
Little over four years ago, homosexuality was still officially classified as a mental disorder in China. On December 16, 2005, China's gays and lesbians celebrated their first national festival.
In fact, the festival was
disrupted by the government before it began. But never mind. The China Daily article continues:
In 1997, the word "hooligan" was deleted from China's criminal code in reference to gays arrested for soliciting in public places.
The move is considered by many as the de facto decriminalization of homosexual acts and was followed in April 2001 by the deletion of homosexuality from the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders.
Chinese bear
There follows a lengthy, if dry, discussion of the gay scene in China and interviews with two young gay men. In the discusson of lifestyles, the subject of gay marriage comes up.
Sociologist and gay novelist Tong Ge's impassioned call for "comrades to melt the frozen land with our body heat"
(Impassioned? Sounds to me like someone hasn't been getting any lately.) galvanized Chinese professionals into lobbying the government for the approval of same-sex marriage, regardless of the very real obstacles lying ahead.
Zhang Beichuan, China's leading scholar in the field of homosexual study and winner of 2000 Barry & Martin Prize awarded to individuals making outstanding contributions to the AIDS awareness campaign, estimates there are 40 million homosexuals on the Chinese mainland, far more than the official figure of between 5 and 10 million released by the Ministry of Health in December 2004. This huge number, equal to the population of Spain, can no longer be ignored by society
..........
Currently, there are more than 10 bars catering to gays and lesbians across urban Beijing, according to An {owner of a lesbian bar}. Moreover, hundreds of websites are devoted to the gay scene in China, with almost every city having a dedicated site.
Anyone smell an investment opportunity here? A little crowding can be a good thing in a bar, but if the population of Beijing is 15 million, it would seem that the gay community there is sorely underserved.
Li Yinhe is described as the country's leading sexologist. (There is an interesting interview with her here.) She is backing same-sex marriage as population policy:
Li, who submitted the same-sex marriage proposal to China's top legislature twice, in 2000 and in 2004, said from historical data and cross-culture study, countries that are burdened with a fast-growing population normally adopt a relatively tolerant policy toward homosexuals; while countries with small populations are strict with same-sex marriage, because the homosexual population will directly influence the whole population of a country.
"Statistics show that homosexuals account for 3 to 4 percent of the total population. In China, the homosexual population is between 39 million and 52 million. As there is no law permitting same-sex marriage, those people will finally form a family with a heterosexual and bear children. If they can form a family with a homosexual, then it will be conducive to the population control of our country," said Li who has suggested an amendment to the Marriage Law that "changes the wife and husband expression into spouse and the enactment of a new same-sex marriage law. Although her proposals have not met with success, she remains optimistic about the future of the same-sex marriage.
..........
"It is a legislative trend across the world," said Li Yinhe. "China will definitely catch up with this trend, in spite of obstacles we are confronted with now."
Two things fascinate me here. One is the promotion of homosexuality as a means of population control. This has long made sense to me but it is seldom mentioned outside of science fiction.
The other is the very real possibility that China will recognize same-sex marriage before the US.
