[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.”
Police shutdown of Mr Gay China pageant shows government ambivalence [contd.]
Ryan Dutcher, a US expatriate who had been helping Zhang organize the event, told reporters, “Police said we didn’t have the proper license.” Dutcher said he and Zhang had tried to negotiate with police late on Friday to let the event proceed.
“I’m very disappointed but I can't say I’m very surprised,” Dutcher said.
While contestants primped backstage prior to the shutdown, about 200 people showed up at a swanky Beijing nightclub for the scheduled pageant. Among the crowd were dozens of reporters from both Chinese and international media, including Associated Press , Reuters, AFP (Agence France Press), BBC, CNN, and other media from Spain, Swiss, Poland.
The reporters gathered around the eight contestants as they prepared for their big night. The reporters were eager to hear their stories about being gay in China.
Pageant contestant Jay Jia, 29, told Sky News China correspondent Peter Sharp that he had lived in Ireland for seven years before returning to China.
“When I left in 2002 you couldn’t even find a gay bar,” Jia said. “That’s all changed now, at least in the big cities. But I still haven’t come out and I definitely haven’t told my employers or my workmates.” He said that his parents “are always trying to find girls for me to take out.”
Times of London reporter Jane Macartney writes that Jia was dressed in a form-fitting white shirt, hip-hugging black trousers, and sharply pointed black shoes, and with an earring in his left ear. He shyly told Macartney that he believed he had a chance of winning. “I think my figure is my greatest asset,” he said.
Another contestant, 29-year-old contestant Justin Jiang (Jiang Bo) of Sichuan province, echoed Jia’s excitement about the changes the contest seemed to signal.
“I think what we are doing is a big, huge progress,” he told ABC News (US) reporters Clarrisa Ward and Beth Loyd. “Ten years ago, you could never imagine that gay people would be able to get together like this and have a pageant.”
After the event was shut down, Jiang told AFP’s Marianne Barriaux, “It’s a disaster. I’m full of disappointment. I thought the government was becoming more and more tolerant.
“They were making a big step,” Jiang said of pageant organizers and his fellow contestants. “The whole world was thinking China was doing a very good thing. But now I think everybody will be disappointed.”
In a comment published today by the Guardian (London), Beijing resident David Bartram writes that the cancellation of Friday’s show is yet another example of “a peculiarly Chinese way of dealing with things, the last-minute cancellation.”
It also reflects the clear ambivalence within the government about the China’s increasingly open LGBT community, Bartram writes:
But Friday’s cancellation of China’s first official gay pageant, hours before it was due to begin in Beijing, will sting more than most government interventions. This was supposed to mark a new dawn for China's LGBT population. Instead, after a decade of mixed signals, China's gay community just wants the government to talk straight for once.
The last minute cancellation demonstrates, Bartram says, that “there is a strong enough reactionary presence within the party to clamp down on what it sees as politically sensitive.”
Sky News’s Sharp wrote:
Before the ban, the sound of closet doors opening could be heard across Beijing as China’s gay community took a bold step out of the shadows to come together to participate….
It was to be a big step forward in a country where homosexuality was classed as a mental illness only nine years ago and represented a growing confidence among China’s gay community.
Bartram writes that the closet doors had been slowly opening for over a year:
In April, the state-run China Daily, the country's largest English-language newspaper, splashed a picture of a gay couple marrying close to Tiananmen Square on its front page. Although the marriage was primarily ceremonial and not legally binding, it was state-approved. The paper ran a similar front page story last week, days before the cancellation of the gay pageant.
And there were more signs that senior officials were keen to, if not promote, at least educate Chinese people about gay rights. I was asked by an editor at one of China's most popular state-run youth newspapers to write an article last year detailing how “being gay is OK now”. It seemed a strange request at the time, but was just one of a series of articles featured in the newspaper that made an effort to talk more openly about sexuality.
On Thursday, before the police shut-down of the pageant, a professor is quoted by China Daily as saying the event would be beneficial for the society as a whole.
Zhang Beichuan, a professor at Qingdao University who is described as “an expert on homosexuality and HIV/AIDS prevention”, said, “Living in a discrimination-free society, gays would contribute more to the nation’s development, thus benefiting everyone, regardless of straight or homosexual.”
Bartram notes that part of that benefit to society could be financial—always an important consideration in China:
When the owner of a bar announced to me a few months ago that he was rebranding his establishment as a gay club, it was not a political but a financial statement. But it was also a sign that going gay can bring financial incentives in the city’s hyper-competitive bar and club scene. As ever in China, it could be economic growth that precedes social change.
But The Australian’s China correspondent Michael Sainsbury describes the strong cultural pressure that remains to keep LGBT closet doors shut in China:
As in many traditional societies as well as in much of the West, acknowledging homosexuality can cause deep, sometimes permanent rifts in families.
In an environment where there is a one-child policy, there is extreme pressure on children to get married and produce grandchildren to help look after their elders in a society that has a thin and in many cases non-existent social security net or subsidized health system.
It is common in China for gay men to marry and produce a child and then move to another city, returning home only occasionally while leading a double life.
The Australian has learned that a number of Mr Gay China contestants hoped the pageant would not get too much publicity, because they didn’t want their parents finding out.
When the government does allow its LGBT more openness, it’s often because health officials advise them that it’s a necessary step in tackling an increasing rate of HIV infections among closeted gay men. The health department of a city in southern China last month contributed funds to help open a gay club that was intended partly as a place where information about safe-sex practices could be distributed.
Sainsbury reports in the Australian:
“The HIV-AIDS epidemic has yet to be brought under effective control,” Wu Zunyou, director of the national AIDS center, said last August.
In the past five years, the number of new cases each year has exceeded 40,000.
Yet Chinese statistics often understate any situation that may cast the country in a bad light. UNAIDS, the UN's anti-AIDS agency, estimates that the actual number of HIV-AIDS cases could be more than 700,000, with nearly 57 per cent of new cases originating from unprotected sex.
A study among 18,000 gay people in 61 Chinese cities found the rate of HIV infection was 4.9 per cent, much higher than the nation's average 0.05 per cent.
Health officials have recognized that it’s virtually impossible to reach a group who are forced to remain in the shadows.
Xiao Gang, who operates a website funded by the Ford Foundation called Queer Comrades, explained to Sharp of Sky News that sites like his offer one of the few outlets for Chinese LGBT people to recognize that they are not alone.
“There are no legal gay magazines in China, no gay actors or films, there are no gays in the media and no gay role models,” said Xiao, who had planned to help judge Friday night’s Mr Gay China pageant.
Source: China's gay rights revolution | Guardian
All made up but nowhere to go – gay contest axed for failing to conform | Times (London)
Party line wavers on China's gay culture | Australian
Beijing police cancel China's first gay pageant | AFP
Chinese Gay Pageant Is Shut Down | New York Times
Police Bring End To China's First Gay Pageant | Sky News
Police Stop First-Ever Mr. Gay China Pageant | ABC News (US)
Inaugural gay pageant ordered to shut down | China Daily
First Mr Gay China "coming out" in Beijing | Xinhua
Gay pageant contestants want acceptance, not hype | People’s Daily