Taiwan's Road to Marriage Equality: What Did It Take to Get Here?

We interviewed people who were there, and tried to reconstruct the key moments and scenes along the way.

On May 24, the Grand Justices of Taiwan's Judicial Yuan ruled on whether banning same-sex marriage violated the local constitution, putting Chi Chia-wei, who had petitioned for the interpretation, back at the center of public attention. The ruling was a victory for him: it was unconstitutional for Taiwan's current Civil Code to bar same-sex marriage.

At the constitutional court hearing held before the ruling came down, Chi, then 59, said he had "waited 41 years, 6 months and 24 days for this day."

What did it take for Taiwan's road to marriage equality to reach this day? Which people and events should not be forgotten? QDaily interviewed four people who have given a great deal to the marriage equality movement — some for a little over a decade, one for more than 40 years: Chi Chia-wei (the petitioner in the constitutional interpretation case), Yu Mei-nu (a sitting legislator and the sponsor of the marriage equality bill), Lu Hsin-chieh (chief convener of the Marriage Equality Coalition) and Tsao Cheng-hsi (senior project manager at the Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association). We cannot review everything that happened, but through their accounts we try to reconstruct a few of the crucial moments and scenes along this road.

1958–1985: A kingdom where even the word "gay" wasn't well understood

"In our kingdom there is only night, never day. The moment the sky brightens, our kingdom turns invisible, because it is a thoroughly illegitimate country: we have no government, no constitution, no recognition, no respect. All we have is a rabble of citizens." That is a passage from Crystal Boys (《孽子》), the 1983 novel by Pai Hsien-yung, long counted among the classics of Taiwanese gay literature.

The "kingdom" Pai wrote about was Taipei's New Park (now renamed 228 Peace Memorial Park). In the 1970s, coming out could mean being driven out of your home and your school, and gay people had nowhere but New Park to look for their own kind. Not far from New Park stood Taipei Municipal Chien Kuo Senior High School, where Chi Chia-wei spent his high school years.

At 17, Chi came out in front of his classmates. Recalling it, he brings up two things: that in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness, and that he had just learned a new word in class — "homosexual."

After thinking his own orientation through, Chi says, "I decided to be gay." Then he adds: "Back then there wasn't even a word for gay."

It is easy to talk about now. At the time Taiwan was still under martial law and society was conservative; never mind announcing your orientation, even discussing gender or basic rights was not necessarily welcome. Yu Mei-nu, who has worked in the women's movement for more than 30 years, describes the mood: "In those days, if a boss found out an employee was gay, he'd fire them. If a gay person opened a restaurant, the police would post themselves outside until the place couldn't stay open. If they opened a bookstore, the police would raid it for offending public decency."

1986–1999: The first man in Taiwan to come out publicly

When people talk about the marriage equality movement, many name Chi Chia-wei first — not only because he was the party to the constitutional interpretation case, but because, looking back, he really did walk this road alone for a long time, and set a string of "firsts" along the way.

The first of them came in 1986.

That March he called a press conference, attended by the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and other foreign outlets, and read out an 8,000-character document, 《对社会大众及同性恋者的恳切声明及呼吁》 ("A Sincere Statement and Appeal to the Public and to Homosexuals"), becoming the first gay man in Taiwan to come out publicly. In August he brought a friend to court to request a marriage notarization (Chi later confirmed that he had found this person in order to challenge the system) and was turned down. He then petitioned the Legislative Yuan, which replied in an official document that "homosexuality is the perversion of a small minority; those who pursue it purely to satisfy lust violate public morals and decency."

Chi was not the first to apply for such a notarization. In 1958 a lesbian couple went to the Taipei District Court to apply for a notarized marriage and were refused. Because of the incident, Chi was locked up for five and a half months. "The first night I was inside was the first time — and the only time — I ever felt fear," he says.

Strictly speaking, the marriage equality movement did not erupt at a single moment, nor did it arrive as a fully formed idea. It sprouted in soil that the whole society was slowly making friendlier and more equal.

In 1987 Taiwan lifted martial law. Yu Mei-nu and her colleagues at the Awakening Foundation set about improving gender inequality at work. Back then the unwritten workplace rule was that a woman had to resign the moment she married or became pregnant, and no law governed that kind of discrimination. Yu says, "When we were fighting for women's equal rights, lesbians couldn't come out, so some of them joined our women's movement and fought for women's rights alongside us." Winning an environment of gender equality, she believes, helped the gay rights movement that followed.

The progress of the democracy movement and other social movements in the 1990s also indirectly prompted the founding of a number of gay organizations. The Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association (hereafter "the Hotline"), set up in 1998 by a handful of gay individuals, became a lasting organization; it ran a telephone line where gay people could get counseling and help with their problems.

2000: The Rose Boy and the "naturally equal" generation

A 2016 poll by Taiwan Thinktank found that 71.2% of people aged 20 to 29 supported the marriage equality bill, and that support fell by about 10 percentage points with each decade of age — the older the group, the more conservative. Asked about this in an earlier interview, Yu Mei-nu said these were young people who had been through gender equality education, a "naturally equal" generation shaped by equal values from birth.

The event that set gender equality education in motion was the "Yeh Yung-chih incident" of 2000.

In junior high, Yeh's feminine qualities made him a frequent target of bullying by classmates, who would even demand he pull down his trousers so they could verify his sex. That left him afraid to use the toilet during breaks; he only dared to run there just before class let out. He was finally found lying in a pool of blood, and was pronounced dead at the hospital. After the case broke, the public grasped a plain fact: Taiwan looked as though it were opening up, yet things had not actually gotten better.

Many people turned their attention to gender education in schools and pushed to change the proposed "Equality Between the Two Sexes in Education Act" into the "Gender Equity Education Act." The law that passed in 2004 says plainly: "No person shall be treated differently on account of biological sex, sexual orientation, gender traits or gender identity." From then on gender was not only male and female, but plural and transgender too.

Seventeen years later, the Yeh Yung-chih case is still brought up at gay events. Jolin Tsai, who has publicly backed marriage equality, paid tribute to him at her concert at the Taipei Arena on November 7, 2015. People gave Yeh a name that has stuck: the Rose Boy.

2003–2010: The first marriage equality bill, and nobody expected anything

In 2003 Taiwan held its first gay pride parade. Only a little over 1,000 people joined. Plenty of gay people knew about the parade and did not dare take part; Tsao Cheng-hsi was one of them. "Back then I was the typical gay guy with no resources, and I didn't dare come out," he says.

That reflected a harsh fact: gay people were, after all, a social minority, and had not yet become a mature community, so they wanted to find more of their own. "When I was 17 or 18 [around 2000], I really couldn't accept that I was gay. I was afraid and full of doubt, because society was full of stereotypes. That's when I wanted to meet more gay friends, to understand what other people's lives were like," Lu Hsin-chieh says.

In the end both Lu Hsin-chieh and Tsao Cheng-hsi joined the Hotline. Over the following years they not only found more people like themselves but also used the organization's resources to help more gay people solve their problems and build a community.

Beyond the Hotline, many organizations worked hard in various ways on a society that was not friendly to them — by making legal demands or through education, especially among people who took gender seriously.

In 2006 Hsiao Bi-khim, then a legislator, brought a draft 《同性婚姻法》 (Same-Sex Marriage Act) into the Legislative Yuan, the first time anyone had put forward a marriage equality bill. Yu Mei-nu describes what the process was like: "We tried to get it through I don't know how many thousands of times, and every time we raised it, every time it got blocked." In the end it never even reached the first stage, the first reading; the bill simply died in the Legislative Yuan.

Lu Hsin-chieh took part in the discussions around that bill, but she did not expect much. "I really had no expectations at the time. It was perfectly clear that nobody was going to help this bill along. It would just be a talking point, with no real change."

2011–2015: The bill moves again, and more voices join

In 2012 another gay couple, Chen Ching-hsueh and Kao Chih-wei, tried once more to win the right to marry. After their registration was rejected they filed an administrative suit with the Taipei High Administrative Court and planned to petition for a constitutional interpretation. Thirty-six years had passed since Chi Chia-wei first went to court. A good number of gay organizations gathered to support them, Yu Mei-nu, then a legislator, among them.

Yu says that withdrawing the suit in January 2013 came down to a calculation of what would actually work: "The Grand Justices back then were a very conservative bunch. If we asked for an interpretation and it was rejected, would that get in the way of legislation later on? So after weighing it, everyone felt it would be better to put legislation forward first — that's why I introduced a provision instead."

In October of that year the civic group Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (the Alliance) delivered its "Diverse Family Formation" draft legislation, two years in the drafting, to the Legislative Yuan. The draft had three parts, and the marriage equality section (which included same-sex marriage) made it through the Legislative Yuan's first reading.

Passing a first reading counted as progress the marriage equality movement had never seen, and it still failed to stir much public discussion. Looking back on it, Yu Mei-nu says, "That session was just nobody cares, and in that situation all it takes is one person [inside the Legislative Yuan] objecting and the bill lies there."

The progress made anti-gay religious groups anxious. They formed the Taiwan Religious Groups' Family Protection Coalition (the Family Guardian Coalition) and began to speak out; but because some of what they said rested on wrong information and shaded into discrimination, it drew still more pro-gay groups into the argument. The result was that in Taiwanese society the discussion of marriage equality got steadily louder.

"There were moments when I was genuinely grateful to the Family Guardian Coalition. They showed pure malice — the belief that gay people should not exist in this world — and some gay people who had been living inside a pink bubble started to feel threatened," Tsao Cheng-hsi says.

The attacks by the Family Guardian Coalition and other anti-gay groups in fact stirred up feeling among people in the middle. Lu Hsin-chieh adds: "Some of the people who stepped forward weren't necessarily desperate for gay people to be able to marry. Some wanted to defend the democratic system, and some just couldn't accept anti-intellectual talk."

"Once an issue is seen, it can be solved, so that's a kind of progress too," Yu Mei-nu says. Some local governments then moved first, letting gay couples go to household registration offices and register as same-sex partners. Encouraging as that was, the registrations carried no legal force.

2016: The death of Jacques Picoux

On October 16, 2016, Jacques Picoux, a professor in the French department at National Taiwan University, jumped to his death.

In 2015 Picoux's same-sex partner, Tseng Ching-chao, who had cancer, wanted to transfer his property to him before he died. Tseng died before the bequest paperwork was finished, and because the two men had no marital relationship in law, Picoux could not inherit what Tseng had left him. That is what led to the tragedy.

The Taiwanese lawyer Lee Yen-jung told the story in a Facebook post titled "After 35 Years Together, It Turns Out We Were Still Legal Strangers."

The following weekend happened to be the 14th gay pride parade. Many supporters of marriage equality took to the streets, and turnout hit a record high. "Professor Picoux's case reminded everyone that a tragedy like that could have been avoided — and we didn't avoid it," Lu Hsin-chieh says.

Pushed by that shift in public feeling, three parties each put forward a marriage equality bill: Yu Mei-nu, the KMT legislator Jason Hsu, and the New Power Party.

On November 17, while the bills were under review, the Family Guardian Coalition and other anti-gay groups called opponents out and set off fierce clashes. Inside the Legislative Yuan, Ker Chien-ming raised the option of a separate special law, which angered gay organizations further.

For gay organizations, the "special law" option was still different treatment — discrimination in another form.

On December 10, 2016, the Marriage Equality Coalition and Lu Hsin-chieh held a large event on Human Rights Day. They had estimated at most 100,000 people would come; 250,000 did. "Because of that event, I realized society had already reached this point," Lu says.

On May 24, 2017 — after the "41 years, 6 months and 24 days" Chi Chia-wei had waited — the Grand Justices of Taiwan's Judicial Yuan issued their interpretation: the current Civil Code's refusal to allow same-sex marriage was ruled unconstitutional. They said the legislature should amend the law in line with the spirit of the constitution within two years, and that if it did not, the Civil Code would take effect automatically after those two years.

Chi Chia-wei, Yu Mei-nu, Lu Hsin-chieh and Tsao Cheng-hsi, all of them years into this movement, were deeply relieved by the outcome, and a little surprised as well, above all that the Grand Justices had set a two-year limit. It brought a marriage equality bill that had been deadlocked back from the dead.

Three days later, on May 27, at Zaoqiu Coffee in Taipei, Chi Chia-wei was in the middle of an interview with QDaily when a lesbian woman came over to thank him. She handed him a small gift and said that she and her partner would hold their wedding banquet first and register within two years at the latest.

Chi took the gift happily and said: "These past few days, this has been happening to me every day."

Cover image from the Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association.