“Deleted — Including Your Loves, Hatreds, Joys, Sorrows, Stories and Time”

The board’s founder hoped to gather everyone back together. What he faces instead is a scattered space for talk, and demands that no longer line up with his own.

No one expected it to end this way. Tianya had been fading for years. Its gay discussion board, “Walking Together,” once drew 86 million post views at its peak; now it draws fewer than 100, and has for a long time.

Happygay founded “Walking Together” on Tianya.

In 1999, Happygay — then in his “fifth year” at Tsinghua (through the 1980s and ’90s, most Tsinghua undergraduate programs ran five years) — looked over several popular forums, including NetEase’s Virtual Community, and settled on Tianya.

The year before, he had taken over from Grape, an older Tsinghua schoolmate, as moderator of the Xinglin Forum at Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences. Xinglin was the country’s earliest gay community online, and it drew students from campuses across China. You can still find its wreckage on the web today.

But Xinglin’s reach was small. The idealistic Happygay went on to open gay boards on Guangzhou’s Blue Sky forum and Shenzhen’s Yiwang Qingshen forum. Both shut down, one after the other, for lack of traffic.

Back then a lot of forums were nothing like today’s web pages. You had to log in through something called a “term” connection, and “a lot of people didn’t know how.” Tianya was already a proper website, with a way of interacting that ordinary users could handle.

Tianya also ran its servers in Hainan — far from Beijing, far from the mainland — so “the climate would be a bit more open.” Unlike the reputation it later earned among netizens as the site that “shatters your worldview,” Tianya then had gathered a large crowd of writers. It felt more like Douban would in its early years: young, free.

Happygay had one more idea he would not let go of: “A lot of gay people are mixed in among straight people, and a lot of people don’t even know it. I wanted to build a gay site inside a straight site. Wherever the straight people are, that’s where the gay people are. We could understand each other, and gay people could also come to accept themselves. Isn’t that a good thing?”

He wrote to Tianya’s webmaster, Zhuo Rui, listing his experience as a moderator and asking to try a board for gay users.

At the time no country in the world recognized same-sex marriage, and China still treated homosexuality as a mental illness.

Three days later, the request was approved.

Gay boards appeared on other forums around the same time as “Walking Together” — at Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences, on Xilu — along with gay-themed chat rooms. They all caused a stir, and they all died young, forced to close soon after they opened.

“Walking Together” not only had an easy birth; in its early days it got help from a whole set of straight administrators.

On April 19, 1999, the board “Between Same-Sex People” opened. The first post on it was Zhuo Rui’s message of congratulation:

“If it weren’t for happygay, it would never have occurred to me to open a column like this. People can’t help feeling awkward when homosexuality comes up, because it is far from most people’s lives and outside traditional morality. But we are putting it forward anyway, because we cannot ignore the fact that these people exist. Their thoughts, their morals and their behavior deserve to be known and understood by everyone else. I hope this column can help people work out some of the real problems they face, and help people talk to each other in a healthy way. —Excellence—Vigor—”

When Happygay spoke to QDaily, he read the passage aloud over the phone. That openness had been an enormous comfort to him.

“Walking Together” began life as “Between Same-Sex People.” Because the name was sensitive, the administrators received an order from the relevant authorities on March 4, 2004, to rename the board “Between Friends,” and the board’s stated purpose was rewritten as well. The vague new name drove some loyal members away in anger. Fifteen days later, “Between Friends” became “Walking Together.”

Carried by Tianya, it grew into the biggest and most popular gay forum in the country. Unlike today’s dating apps, which sort gay men and lesbians into separate products, “Walking Together” ran two sub-sections at once: “Left Bank” and “Right Bank.” Most posts were people telling their own stories, though there were also novels on gay themes and other kinds of discussion.

Dahuaidan, a user active from 2003 to 2008, still remembers the titles and the contents of several posts, and likes to talk about them. To him the place was full of pull and good company. “Walking Together” became almost the only board where he spent his time on Tianya. “I was on it every day. I never even closed the page,” he told QDaily.

Tianya’s rules gave users points for posting and for “flooding” — padding a thread with filler. Over his years on Left Bank he piled up more than 10,000 points by “chatting, shooting the breeze and goofing around.” A few of the gay friends he made there he still sees now and then, to play mahjong.

But no one could deny that “Walking Together,” and Tianya with it, was getting old.

One wave after another of new communities and social apps carried off the crowd that had made this place glorious.

“Forums feel like something from when I was a kid. Anyone still on Tianya is probably fairly old.” Jimmy, born in 1992, teaches at a private primary school in Hong Kong.

Until another gay friend sent him a screenshot, he had never heard of “Walking Together.” To Jimmy, forums were an ancient form of the internet to begin with, and the topics on them were too conservative, too dated.

Even longtime users had come to see that a narrow range of topics had become the board’s cage.

A user called Snowman’s Nose wrote in 2003 that “Walking Together” was “bound to wear on you if you stay long enough. The stifling mood, the monotonous topics — as if you were being told that, apart from the joy of loving someone and the grief of not being loved, and how to love and how to be loved, there was nothing else to say and nothing else to do. The rare post that dares to ‘argue’ something usually ends badly.”

In 2009, Dahuaidan, who had already left, registered a new account to see whether the people he used to know were still posting and hanging around. He found the posts had gone “watery” — the writing was poor, the content did not hold him, and, above all, the people had scattered and the old atmosphere had gone with them.

Early internet forums were seldom governed by rules handed down from above. Inside a board the conventions were unwritten, and only the moderator’s word counted. Even powers as small as deleting a post or marking one as required reading were treated, in that early form of the internet, as absolute authority. But building a community that was lively without going over the edge tested a moderator’s skill.

Full of idealism and enthusiasm, Happygay wrote the board’s purpose as “centered on writing, discussing love, friendship and family feeling between people of the same sex.” Unlike today’s social apps, which advertise themselves as places to meet people, he said plainly that the board offered no matchmaking service.

Early “Walking Together” carried the air of an elite club. There were not many people — at most 30-odd online at once, all familiar faces. Set against other gay communities, this board was unusually healthy and clear-eyed.

He told QDaily that although he was young then, he often felt an urge to protect, to keep these people safe. In practice that meant pressing users to get to know each other well before meeting in person, and to be careful when they did.

That laid the ground for “Walking Together” to become an “ideal place.” But Happygay’s fixed ideas gradually fell out of step with the times, and the board’s users grew unhappy.

To them he looked exactly like a lecturing older brother, vetting posts too strictly. His habit of referring to himself as the emperor, and of “sticking his nose into everything,” sent plenty of users to the deputy moderators to complain. It was why they later voted him out. “I was pretty young then, and not good at expressing myself. So I came across as very hard-line,” he said.

A little over two years into the job, Happygay left it.

“Walking Together” then entered its richest period. Talented writers arrived in numbers and membership shot up. As with many communities, it is hard to say whether the writers made the board popular or the board’s popularity drew the writers.

“Something to say, and the manners to say it; criticism that landed squarely, appeals that cut deep. I can still faintly remember how my heart moved reading Little Five (《小五》), and I remember, too, the unaccountable longing for an era that came over me after reading These People Are Vicious (《这些人很毒》).” A user going by Willing to Drink Arsenic Wine for You wrote that in a post in 2006.

Serialized novels and true stories from good writers, and the hunger to find self-acceptance in someone else’s words, turned the board into a place where large numbers of LGBT people came looking for comfort. One true story posted in 2012 — 《六年的等待，我们迎来了幸福！（纪实）》, “Six Years of Waiting, and Happiness Came at Last! (A True Story)” — has since been clicked more than 80 million times, and was still sitting at the top of the page when the board closed.

Happygay had sworn out of spite never to post again. Even after he got busy starting a company, he still logged in from time to time to see whether his old posts had been dug up, and now and then he replied. A few times he read from 10 at night until five or six the next morning.

We cannot make grand claims for the quality of the writing. But there is no denying that the combination of “literature” and “same-sex” subject matter was fresh and rare at the time, which is why it was so popular.

The board was also run more tidily. In the beginning most posts were by and about gay men, and everything was filed under a single default category. The four moderators who took over in 2002 — Peilan, Xiao Hongxiu, Xiaogu and one other — divided the work clearly, and categories began to take shape: “Left Bank” for gay men, “Right Bank” for lesbians, plus sections such as “Culture and Research” and “Affairs.”

The board’s name spread beyond Tianya, and Left Bank filled up with fujoshi — women who love reading gay fiction.

This was a stretch of years when gay culture was talked about more and more, and more openly. Around the world, after the Netherlands became the first country to recognize same-sex marriage in 2001, ten other countries in Europe and North America — Belgium, Spain and Canada among them — legalized it one after another in the first decade of the century, and Taiwan recognized same-sex marriage in 2017. The march that 30 people held in 1970 to mark the Stonewall uprising has grown into a celebration that draws millions. The idea of “LGBTQ” kept being accepted and widened too: since the neutral-sounding “LGBT” of the 1990s, the term has been stretched to take in groups that had been pushed to the margins.

Hiding in a corner and talking only about love may indeed have fallen behind. The gay men and women who once lived on the forum had lost touch with a younger generation of LGBTQ people.

It was not only that the space for talk had scattered. Young gay people’s demands and desires had also grown more unashamed.

Most of Jimmy’s gay friends now come from the apps on his phone. The gay apps Blued and Aloha have recently begun requiring users to verify their real names, but Grindr still keeps a loose standard for the photos and content users post. These apps are more of a service, and more direct: two people can screen each other on location and looks and be done with it.

To Happygay they are fast food. “It’s not that forums are too old,” he said. “It’s that people’s hearts aren’t what they used to be.”

He holds the same belief he held 18 years ago: two people should talk deeply before they get together. On the old forum, he says, readers and writers looked after each other’s hearts. People laid out everything — their birth, their first love, even death — and the lurkers, who never said a word, took all of it in, found some acceptance of themselves and some comfort. Douban groups today have gone flat and dull, good for finding a partner or subletting a room, and Baidu Tieba is mostly low quality.

A place this “slow” is hard to find now. And this one is gone.

On September 28 a notice went up on “Walking Together,” posted by the community administrator — that is, by Tianya itself. It read: “Due to force majeure, this board will cease operation from 0:00 on September 30, 2017. Please save your personal data yourselves. Thank you to all moderators and users for your years of hard work.”

At first the notice drew little attention. Then screenshots of it moved onto other public social platforms. A blogger going by Zhu Dingzhen posted a screenshot of the “Walking Together” notice on Weibo, where it was reposted more than 6,000 times and drew more than 1,000 comments. Like the two notices on Tianya itself, that Weibo post was blocked from further reposts and comments a few hours after it went up.

“I just feel scared,” Jimmy said. He could feel the policy tightening. He had never used “Walking Together,” but he worried that the ground where gay people talk to each other was being taken away, piece by piece.

Happygay is trying to be more “optimistic”: “You can’t really call it the times going backward.”

Looking only at the closing of “Walking Together,” he thinks the administrators and moderators carry some of the blame: they lacked “the wisdom to handle the moment — after all, there’s a policy from above and a countermeasure from below.” Instead they wiped everything out in the crudest, simplest way.

Word of the shutdown set off a small last surge of traffic across the board before it died. Between September 28 and 29, alongside the usual talk and sharing, “Walking Together” filled with goodbye posts. People wrote to say what the board had meant to them, passed around methods for archiving threads, put out calls for stories they had not saved in time. Some posted addresses for new gathering places, hoping to build a community like this one somewhere else. Happygay set up a QQ group called “Tianya Community: Walking Together”; by the time the board closed, 89 people had joined.

Three months earlier, the China Netcasting Services Association had approved the General Rules for the Content Review of Online Audiovisual Programs. Under the heading of content that plays up obscenity, pornography and vulgar, low taste, the second category was the depiction and display of “abnormal” sexual relations and behavior — incest, homosexuality, sexual perversion, sexual assault, sexual abuse and sexual violence, among others. Homosexuality was filed there. The rules said plainly that online audiovisual programs containing such content or plot must have it cut out before broadcast; where the problem was serious, the whole program must not be broadcast.

Everyone was nervous at the time. People pointed out that the association had no direct regulatory power. But everyone also knew the trouble would arrive sooner or later.

On September 30 the 89 people in the QQ group deliberately waited for midnight, took screenshots of the page in its last moments, then refreshed “Walking Together.” What came back was a 404.

730,000 original posts and 21.1 million replies went blank.

Earlier, at 4 p.m. on September 28, Xiao Hongxiu, one of the board’s moderators, had reposted the “Notice on Real-Name Registration for Tianya Community IDs and the Closure of the ‘Walking Together’ Board.” Underneath it he wrote:

“Whatever you’ve written — if it needs moving, move it now. If you want to keep something to remember it by, do it now. If you want a group photo, take it now. Now you don’t have to cry and beg the moderators to delete your posts. Because it’s all been deleted for you at once, including your loves, hatreds, joys, sorrows, stories and time.”

*Happygay, Jimmy, Dahuaidan and other people named in this piece are pseudonyms.