[note: see source list at end of article]
This handout advertising a planned “Mr Gay China” pageant was quietly distributed prior to the event. Police shut it down, however, just an hour before it was scheduled to start Friday
image via ABC News“Through an entertaining and relaxed beauty pageant, we want to boost confidence among the gay community by coming out and helping raise public awareness on the issue,” the organizer of last Friday’s scheduled Mr Gay China contest told China Daily Thursday.
According to the English-language People’s Daily, a professor told China Daily that the scheduled event “reflects a more open and tolerant attitude of the country towards the gay community to host such an event.”
But the pageant organizer, Ben Zhang (Zhang Liang), also said on Thursday that he was worried about the media attention that the event had garnered. “I am afraid that too much media exposure, particularly before the pageant opening, would backfire and lead to unexpected results like an aborted event,” he said.
Zhang had alerted western media about the event, but had done little public promotion in Beijing, and had tried to avoid telling Chinese media about the planned pageant.
Andrew Jacobs reports for New York Times:
Ben Zhang, the mastermind behind the pageant, said he knew there was a risk in staging it without official permission. But he also knew that requesting government approval would doom the event. He avoided publicizing it in the Chinese news media and did almost no advertising.
But Xinhua and Global Times, two state-run news organizations, ran articles about the contest. Tickets quickly sold out. Mr. Zhang crossed his fingers.
The crossed fingers didn’t help. An hour before the drag-queen host of the event was scheduled to take the stage, a group of uniformed police marched into the club as contestants prepared backstage. Zhang said that the police told him there was nothing wrong with the gay theme of content, but said, “You did not do things according to procedures.”
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