In China, Who Offers LGBT People Support and a Sense of Belonging? Who Listens to Their Stories?

For these groups who move about outside the mainstream, being recognized by an "organization" means something special

Editor's note: This is the third year running that QDaily has published a special series for June's LGBTQI Pride Month. Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that same-sex marriage was legal nationwide. At the same time, more and more people began putting money into the pink economy, betting on this market — and showing off their own political correctness by voicing support for the community. But this June, a gay bar in Orlando became the site of the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. For the LGBTQI community, things are neither as bad nor as good as you might imagine. This year we have tried to widen the frame of our LGBTQI Pride Month coverage. We will keep following this community, and we will also look at gender in the broader sense — which is usually what shapes sexual orientation in the end, and what produces an LGBTQI community at all. Over Pride Month we are running five articles. This is the last of them: Organizations.

Toni is 42 this year. Ask her to look back on her twenties and she says: "Back then I thought I was the only one [gay person] in the world."

Later she realized she was probably not the only one, and she started looking for people like her. In 2004, the Beijing Lesbian Center was founded — the city's first nonprofit organization set up to serve gay people. Toni was one of its first volunteers.

A few days after the shooting at the gay bar in Orlando, the Beijing Lesbian Center and more than 200 other nonprofits put out a joint statement. Sexual minorities, they said together, have the same human rights as everyone else, and nothing should be taken from them because of their gender expression or sexual orientation.

Behind these organizations stand roughly 70 million LGBT people in China. (In 2011, the gender scholar Li Yinhe put the gay share of the population at 3%-4% — in China's case, 39 million to 40 million. A 2016 article in the British Financial Times raised the figure to between 40 million and 70 million. Seventy million is the number that turns up most often now in talk about the "pink economy.")

LGBT people live at the edges of society, with a sexual orientation and emotional needs unlike those of the people around them, and most of the time they can only hide who they really are. They seem to need a group more than most people do.

Inside a group, they can shake off the outside world's pressure for a while and hold on to their own doubts about their identity; they can talk with other people and be understood, or find a band of "comrades-in-arms" to take on inequality directly.

For many of them, LGBT organizations have helped a great deal. At the very least, they are no longer alone.

Finding Them

Mukou chose to come out to his closest friend right after the college entrance exam. He had noticed his unusual attraction to other men, and his physical desire for them, back in puberty. "In the education I got, this was a sickness, a problem," he says. For a while the belief left him badly repressed. He saw a psychologist and went through so-called conversion therapy; back then the "doctor" told him to jab himself with sharp things — knives, needles, stones — or snap a rubber band against his skin, using the pain to put down his desire.

Against the doctor's frightening advice, "my friend's reaction at the time was really positive. He told me there was nothing wrong with [my orientation], and even explained some of the basics to me," Mukou says.

After he got to Sun Yat-sen University, Mukou noticed a female classmate in a general elective course with a rainbow flag sticker on her backpack. A few conversations later he joined the "student club" he had heard about but had never once seen recruiting on campus: the Sun Yat-sen University Rainbow Group.

The Rainbow Group grew out of a "queer culture studies" group set up in 2006 by Ai Xiaoming, a professor in the Chinese department and a gender scholar. A general elective course, "Society, Culture and Gender Diversity," followed on campus. The Rainbow Group has always kept a curriculum team, which works more or less as the course's teaching assistants.

"It used to be a vicious circle. Without a decent sense of who you are, you rarely go looking for this kind of knowledge, so you stay shut in," Mukou says. After he joined the Rainbow Group, it got easier. The discussions the group holds often sped up the process of figuring himself out, and support from other members made him feel safe. "Here you can make good friends and get support from the community, and then you have more confidence to talk to straight people," he says.

Mukou and his friends count as lucky. Ten years ago, most LGBT organizations looked nothing like this. They were more like an exit from reality, and they existed in secret.

Toni and the center's founder, Anke, needed only two months to get the Beijing Lesbian Center going: an advice line, publicity on Weibo, a rented space for events. "We didn't think about it too much. We just wanted to use the salon format to bring the lalas — lesbians — together, so they could be at ease with each other."

Back then "at ease with each other" was close to a luxury. The women who came to the salon were mostly lesbians between 20 and 50, most of them married and under heavy emotional strain. One point of comparison is the share of gay men who married women in those years. Not until 2009 did Li Yinhe start talking often about "tongqi" — the wives of gay men in heterosexual marriages — warning that 16 million women in China held that status.

Before that, marriage was all but the only option for most gay people, who never revealed who they were in any setting — until organizations like the Beijing Lesbian Center appeared.

Next to today's louder LGBT groups, the Beijing Lesbian Center never had anything like a banner or a slogan. Day to day it looked like a group of women getting together on a weekend afternoon, moving between bars and rented flats around Beijing as the rent dictated.

"If you looked closely you could work out what we were doing. But most people wouldn't say anything — the Chinese habit is to stay out of what doesn't concern you," Toni says.

Or they simply acted as if the women weren't there.

Blank

In 2008, Aqiang and Wu Youjian — the "most beautiful mother," who had been on the cover of Southern People Weekly for publicly standing up for her gay son — founded PFLAG China in Guangzhou. Next to the rest of the country, this Pearl River Delta city, with its large migrant population, looked a little more open.

Aqiang had come to Guangzhou from Anhui years earlier for business. After nearly two years of hesitating, he went from businessman to full-time staff member and head of PFLAG China. He runs free events with one hand and raises money with the other; he treats PFLAG China, he says, as his life's work rather than a job.

PFLAG China now works in more than 50 cities, and on an average weekend holds three or four events: "heart-to-heart meetings for gay people and their families," which draw 200 to 300 people, and smaller family gatherings of about 150.

"But in China, apart from HIV/AIDS groups, most nonprofits working on gender can't get a proper license," Aqiang says. Nobody is sure which government department is in charge, and some of them stall or block on purpose. Either way, gender organizations in China are left in an awkward spot.

The same thing happens at school. The Rainbow Group is still not a registered student club at Sun Yat-sen University. It cannot appear at the joint recruitment fairs, so it promotes itself online and hands out flyers instead — guerrilla warfare.

Its relationship with the university is contradictory too. On one hand the group is independent of the school and, by that logic, not under its control; on the other, whenever it actually tries to hold an event, there is resistance, on the grounds that most members are students and the school will lean on them. "To keep the group running you also have to spend a lot of energy dodging sensitive words. It's a constant test of wits," Mukou says.

Even so, some people are willing to do work that looks as though it pays off so little. Mukou says the group's event money comes from graduated members who chip in. On the Zhuhai campus, one batch of Rainbow Group members went to a blood center specifically to give blood for nucleic-acid reagent testing, then pooled the 30 yuan each of them got in government subsidy to pay for later events.

Life on campus is still relatively simple and safe. Mukou says they don't want much — only an LGBT-friendly campus. Once you step out into the working world, everything changes.

Many Rainbow Group members, after they graduate, will not be open about being gay at work, and will not mention the volunteer work they did as students. "In the school's records and our own, we're a blank," Mukou says.

Bi Xinle cannot accept that blank. After 10 years of living in China and taking part in every kind of event in the community, he founded Tongzhi Shangwu — "LGBT Business" — in 2014, a nonprofit platform for talking and working with companies on equal treatment of LGBT people at work.

The original idea behind Tongzhi Shangwu was a platform where LGBT employees and companies could find each other. That sounds somewhat like labeling people, but to Bi Xinle it is a necessary step for this stage — a way to level the starting line and keep LGBT people from being too weak a party, too easily stigmatized.

"Business is a neutral force. All it weighs is its own interest. When there's something in it for both sides, companies will speak up for their LGBT employees," Bi Xinle says. But in China, both sides need a push.

Take the companies. Fortune 500 firms have been the main engine of the LGBT movement in the West over the past decade, but these same multinationals run two entirely separate playbooks in Europe and America and in Asia. "Google China's gay employee group was only set up this year, by volunteers from Tongzhi Shangwu," Bi Xinle says.

Fortunately, companies are also pushed along by competing with each other — which fits the question he is asked most often when he invites them: "Who else is coming to the job fair?" This year 34 companies took part, among them Starbucks, Nielsen, Citigroup, BlueFocus and Didi; for the first time, domestic private firms appeared alongside the foreign ones.

The harder job, Bi Xinle thinks, is getting LGBT employees to be open and confident. "Once we've weighed the risks and where their income comes from, we encourage gay employees to be themselves honestly and sincerely, and to come out with courage." At Tongzhi Shangwu's events, Bi Xinle does not pixelate or blur participants' faces before posting the photos to the organization's WeChat account. "We're not criminals. Why shouldn't we show up with confidence?" he says.

Predictably, not many people are willing to come out at the company where they spend a third of their day. There are too many risks and too much they cannot foresee. Bi Xinle, who came out at 16, wants to use every chance he gets to talk LGBT people round: "Even if a company wants to pay attention to LGBT employees, it won't move if none of its own staff are out. If we don't care about ourselves, no company is going to care about you more than you do."

The People Outside

Since the beginning of June, Charlene, who is Malaysian, has reposted five or six articles almost every day on WeChat Moments, most of them write-ups of events at Shanghai Pride, held from June 17 to 26.

In 2009, Charlene, five other foreigners and two Chinese friends threw a big party to send off a friend who was leaving Shanghai. That was the first form of Pride. After that, more playful, more entertaining events — film screenings, art projects, a pride run, a barbecue — became part of the festival as a matter of course.

This year Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf and came out years ago, was at the Shanghai Film Festival and wore a Pride-designed T-shirt, a generous show of support. But even with dozens of brand sponsors and backing from various consulates, Shanghai Pride still looks more like a party inside the LGBT community, and the community it reaches is a middle class that is more open to new things and visibly better off.

Talk Sex, Talk Love, a sexual and reproductive health platform run by RNW Media, was one of this year's Pride partners. It came to China in 2013 from the Netherlands, a country well ahead on gender research, aiming to spread knowledge about sexual health and gender among 18- to 30-year-olds in the big coastal cities.

Chen Jieyu, who runs it, says she has never met obvious gender discrimination herself and is not a sexual minority; it was studying and working in the Netherlands that later put her on the line between LGBT people and everyone outside. "My own circle is fairly friendly toward gay people — that being gay isn't a disease is something we all agree on. Widen the circle a little and that stops being true," she says.

Under the LGBT articles Talk Sex, Talk Love has published, Chen Jieyu often sees negative comments. Some people say all they ever do is talk about gay people, that it gets tiresome. Besides holding off that pressure and going on with the teaching, Chen Jieyu and her colleagues also have to guard against a different kind of unfairness toward the LGBT community: accepting gay people only if they are good-looking or rich. "That goes against the whole point of equal rights," she says.

Once, chatting with her parents, she brought up LGBT people. "The older generation's reaction was 'that's not really all right,' and then they changed the subject fast," Chen Jieyu says. She understands that the subject overturns the rules her parents have lived by.

For LGBT people, who take the moral pressure directly, parents are the people they know best and dare least to really approach. They are often afraid of becoming the ones who let their parents down, or of failing them.

Aqiang still regrets that he never got the chance to come out to his mother. While he kept putting her off, promising he would bring a girlfriend home by the time he was 30, she died of cancer.

That is how it goes. At PFLAG China's events he has met parents who curse the organization and say it turned their child gay; parents who sit there and cry; and parents who ask him straight out, "Why don't you straighten my child out, instead of encouraging them to come out and asking us to accept them?" Each one looks like a family coming apart. But to Aqiang, at least they still have a chance to understand one another.

"Of the parents who come to our events, mothers are probably more than 70%," Aqiang says. Behind that number sits the Chinese tradition that family shame stays inside the family, along with the extra weight of face that fathers carry in a Chinese household.

Opening up these middle-aged parents is not as hard as you might think, Aqiang believes, because most of them are still at the blind stage of their homophobia. "Sometimes we've already won the parents over during the introductions in the first part of the meeting. They'll say, 'Oh, gay people get PhDs too,' 'there are gay people teaching at universities.' Just like that, they throw off the demonizing they'd been carrying around," Aqiang says.

Most of these outsiders related to LGBT people by blood will not actually throw their children out of the house. They are only afraid of questions like "Being gay is such a hard road — what becomes of my child?" and "My child will never find a partner, will they?"

That is why Aqiang prefers to call PFLAG China "a place that widens parents' horizons." What they are really doing is using other people's cases to tell these parents: your child is different, but not alone.

There are still parents who are very hard to change, of course. In the areas west of Gansu, for instance, the tradition of carrying on the family line is joined by the influence of Islam. Even inside the local LGBT community, anyone who says they want to come out is taken for a madman. "But however conservative and however hard those places are, someone still has to throw a stone into the lake," Aqiang says.

The Future

"In three more years, when the organization turns 10, we want to be in at least 100 cities. Less prejudice and discrimination, equal legislation." Aqiang has a clear plan. They will adapt to different regions too — recruiting more volunteers in the northwest, for instance — hoping to change the mood and the surroundings there point by point.

While he smooths out relations between children and parents, Aqiang has also noticed people who, after a heart-to-heart meeting, called off weddings for which "the invitations had gone out and the betrothal gifts had been paid." "I've taken part in the turning points of a lot of lives, even in their futures," he says.

A few months ago, Toni and a few lala friends opened Mate Space, a salon venue, on Dongsishitiao. Near middle age and on firmer financial footing, they finally do not have to keep moving around, and they have a counselor on site. They have also started thinking about growing old.

For this group, most of whom have left their marriages and have no children, that is an urgent and very personal problem, and quite different from the fight for equal rights that pushes for LGBT people's standing in society.

From the start, in fact, what Toni wanted to do was serve the community, not the sort of thing that looks likely to bring sweeping change. "We're still doing the research. The simplest way might be for a few of us to open a retirement home together," Toni says.

When the Rainbow Group was founded, Mukou says, the phones at the relevant university office rang off the hook: "They complained that the school had turned their child gay." Ten years on, society has changed somewhat. Gender is no longer so hard a subject to raise, and Rainbow Group members no longer bother hiding their Moments posts from family. "If someone really asks, you can say you just take an interest in the subject. You don't have to come out."

The course, though, was stopped this year. Mukou said he was sorry about it but felt there was nothing more he could do. "I know a lot of people were moved by that course to look at who they are. It helped their lives enormously."

About the space that keeps being squeezed, Bi Xinle's attitude has always been direct and forward-leaning, sometimes to the point of seeming obsessive. "In the U.S., over these 30 years, more and more people have come to know LGBT people. If 50% of people know an LGBT person, 40% support them. If 80% know one, 70% support them. Whether we're 30 years or 100 years behind the U.S. mainly depends on the state we're in ourselves," Bi Xinle says.

To him, coming out as a company employee and being yourself honestly and sincerely is the most hopeful future LGBT people can see.

"But it shouldn't be done on impulse," he adds. If LGBT people's lives really differ from most people's, it is that they have to start making hard choices much earlier.

Cover image from Edward Hopper