World Wide Wave

7 May 2013

China: Self-censorship in a ghost-like community

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:36 — 33.5MB)

“They don’t have homophobia as we know it. They have this complete silence. This sort of ghost-like aspect….You don’t even necessarily have a name for your feelings,” Benjamin Law, author of Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East told W3JOY.

Homosexuality has been legal since 1997 in China, where the –rather neutral- policy is “No approval, no disapproval, no promotion.”

And, because you cannot protest very much in China, the chief support organisation, the Beijing LGBT Centre, relies on “soft diplomacy” rather than political protests.

Benjamin tells W3JOY that many people are living a closeted life:

“This has been happening in China so much, that there is a term for them. The actual literally translation is ‘homo wives’,” Benjamin said.

And mutual fake marriages are common:

“These people are getting married and they’ve got their same-sex partners at the wedding ceremony (often posing as a couple themselves). At the end of the night covertly in the hotel hallways, they swap their parters covertly.”

These closeted marriages are common due to high levels of family pressure. “You’re the only child, so you’re expected to have children and get married,” Benjamin explained, “You represent a pension policy. So the idea that you don’t get married and have children yourself, that buys into the idea that you will not take care of your parents.”

There’s an idea in China that cutting off family is akin to cutting off a limb. And so the silence continues.

Benjamin–despite his comic take on China–leaves us with a sobering thought:

“It must be such a crippling thing to feel something and not even have a way to describe something in your head and your heart.”

Listen to the podcast and read more on W3JOY.org’s China webpage.