In Jinan, What Happened at a Gathering of More Than 300 Gay People and Their Parents?

And what happened in each of their lives?

For a kind-hearted outsider, offering support and sympathy once is easy. For Xiaowei's mom, it is a pile of worries that grows heavier the more she thinks about it. From time to time she thinks back to what a mother said at a sharing session in Xiamen: "I understand and support you, but if my own child were gay, I might kill him."

Eight questions sat on the table. Xiaowei, who is gay, may only have to think about three or four of them. For his parents, each of the eight is the sky falling: Should he come out, when, and how? How should parents face a child's coming out? Afterward, how do you meet the way the world looks at you? Can gay people have children of their own? What about old age? What if you're discriminated against at work? What if you're blackmailed or hurt because of your sexual orientation? If you die, how can your estate legally pass to your partner?

From 2 to 6 p.m. on April 14, at the Blue Eagle Hotel, No. 18 Qilishan West Road, Shizhong District, Jinan, a gathering of more than 300 gay people and their families turned on exactly these questions.

Aqiang has been doing this work for ten years.

Aqiang, 41, from Anhui, founded PFLAG China. In 1995, working in Jiangsu, he met his first crush, Awei, at a time when homosexuality was still classified as "hooliganism" under Chinese law. Four years later he fled farther from home, to Guangzhou, and spent more than 10,000 yuan on a computer to get online — that was how he learned he wasn't the only man in the world who liked men. From 2004 to 2008 he ran a Sina blog called "Husband and Husband Life," writing about daily life with Awei, and became a popular blogger.

His parents knew none of it. Asked about a partner or marriage, Aqiang always deflected with the same line: "I'll give you an answer when I turn 30." In 2006, a year short of 30, his mother died of illness.

In 2008, volunteering at a nonprofit writing reading materials, Aqiang met Wu Youjian, the mother of a gay son, who was working there as a proofreader. The two decided to start a parents-and-friends group. "The hardest part is with yourself and your parents. In society you wear many masks, and even with the people who matter most to you, you stay in a false state, because you're afraid that once the mask comes off it will shatter your parents' expectations. But living inside a lie only pulls you further from the truth."

Ten years on, PFLAG China has reached 56 cities and 3,000 volunteers. Young volunteers plan and promote offline events and keep the community running and growing. Another fifth are parent volunteers: they serve as public-service ambassadors, attend sharing sessions, answer the hotline, help young people who want to come out understand how their elders think, and help parents whose children have just come out get through the hardest stretch.

This year was tenser. The night before, the Weibo hashtag "#IAmGay" had become an issue. In the early hours of that morning, the Weibo account "Gay Voices," nearly 10 years old with 230,000 followers, announced it was suspending updates indefinitely (Note: at 12:25 p.m. on April 16, Sina Weibo's official community-management account "Weibo Administrator" posted an update saying "this round of cleanup targeting games and anime content no longer targets homosexual content"; at 2:31 p.m. the same day, "Gay Voices" announced it would "resume updating."). In June of last year, the China Netcasting Services Association, a body under the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, passed the "General Rules for the Content Review of Online Audiovisual Programs," which defined homosexuality as "filthy, pornographic, and vulgar" and restricted its circulation online. The year before, the web series Addicted (《上瘾》), about a same-sex romance, was pulled. In 2015, director Fan Popo's documentary Mama Rainbow (《彩虹伴我心》) was pulled.

Meanwhile, in 2014 the UN Human Rights Council voted through a new resolution protecting the human rights of gay people; in 2015 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage legal; in 2017 Taiwan became the first place in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, and Germany's marriage equality law took effect soon after.

"I thought everything was getting more normal, but now I feel more lost than ever," said one comment, since vanished, under the "#IAmGay" hashtag.

1

Xiaoyu, a volunteer with PFLAG China's Beijing chapter, did not look lost. At noon on April 14, two hours before the gathering was to begin, he stepped off the G7 high-speed train from Beijing South to Jinan West and caught the K157 bus straight to the Blue Eagle Hotel. He and a colleague had just drafted a letter on their WeChat official account, expressing "shock, sadness, and anger" at the Weibo announcement and setting out the scientific and legal grounds on homosexuality, and mailed it to Sina Weibo's headquarters in the name of "all PFLAG China volunteers."

The hall, on the 11th floor of the Blue Eagle Hotel, was done up in gold. A few people in black face masks sat scattered in the back rows — usually newcomers who hadn't come out and were at an offline event for the first time. To protect privacy, people scanning the QR code to check in could tick a box for "don't display nickname or avatar." At the reception table by the door stood four or five volunteers, with copies of the public-service handbook Understanding Gay People (《认识同志》), rainbow flags, rainbow pins and headscarves sold to raise funds, and flyers from the sponsor Chu'en Baby: "Help you realize the dream of a happy family!"

In a small room behind the reception table, more than a dozen mothers of gay children had changed into qipao and were getting ready for the runway show that would open the second half.

It was Meili Auntie's first gathering of this size — that's how parents address one another here, their child's name plus "Mom," "Dad," or "Auntie," as if they had all become one family. She had just joined PFLAG China's parents' performance troupe, led by Xiaowei's mom, from the top of this story. Besides bringing parents closer, the troupe exists to change the tearful mood of past gatherings and instead "show the happy state of families after coming out."

Meili Auntie remembers October 16, 2015 exactly. That day her nephew, studying to be an electrician in Singapore, called and came out to her. After the call she sat stunned for a while, then logged into a video site with the account and password he had written down for her in advance and watched her first movie in 20 years: Prayers for Bobby. At the scene where Bobby jumps off a bridge, her heart skipped several beats. She couldn't bear the thought that the nephew she had raised since he was 10 months old might one day do something rash and jump off some bridge in a foreign country. After that, their two daily video calls, fixed at 5 a.m. and 7 p.m., became voice calls — careful conversations in which each tested the other's boundaries.

A few conversations later, her nephew sent her a WeChat group: the parents' group for PFLAG China's Cangzhou sharing session. Meili Auntie joined but said nothing, silently agreeing or disagreeing with the messages in her head. A month later she took a 17-hour train to Cangzhou. Aqiang describes how she looked when they first met: "furious, like she'd come to fight someone." Seeing more than 160 parents and children in one room, Meili Auntie realized there were many people like her nephew, and that "they're all normal people."

On PFLAG China's 2018 work plan there are 135 sharing sessions the size of Cangzhou's, and 11 gatherings the size of Jinan's.

2

"The hardest part is getting people from online to offline," Aqiang told QDaily. "Online and offline, the trust between people is completely different. Online communities are often about dating or sex — in WeChat groups or on apps you can hide who you are, and a lot of gay people are avoidant, they don't want any overlap with other people at the level of daily life. Going offline means meeting people like yourself and exposing more about yourself. So offline ties are tighter and trust is higher. In terms of community culture, it has more power to create influence and radiate out into the wider gay world."

How China's gay community communicates has changed enormously in 20 years. Uncle Gary, 45 this year, remembers paying several thousand yuan for his first computer in 2001; the first word he typed into Yahoo's search box was "GAY." He was teaching English at a university in Changsha then, and both his parents were demobilized officers. In a second-tier city with relatively closed attitudes at the time, the only place a gay man could find a sense of belonging was online — QQ groups, chat rooms, the Tianya board "Walking Together," the gay BBS community Sun Homo.

Only after Uncle Gary moved to Beijing in 2010 did his social life move offline. Meeting spots earned their reputations by word of mouth inside the community, and were often near public bathhouses or restrooms, the places where gay men could most naturally run into one another — Dongdan Park near Beijing Railway Station, for instance. There was also the bar Destination, and the offline events run by the Beijing LGBT Center. Even after apps like Blued, Aloha, and Lespark arrived, Uncle Gary still put more faith in meeting in person.

"Only by seeing the different sexual minorities within LGBTQ in person can you truly complete your own self-acceptance," Uncle Gary said. In Beijing, at 30, Gary fell in love for the first time. At the Jinan gathering he carried a QR code printed on a sheet of A4 paper, inviting anyone interested to join the offline English corner he runs at the Beijing LGBT Center.

For Aqiang, who had just founded PFLAG China in Guangzhou in 2008, even finding parents willing to speak was hard. As soon as the subject turned to sharing their experience, most worried it would look like encouraging other people's children to come out. That is why, in its early years, PFLAG China put more weight on cultivating parent volunteers.

In 2012, Aqiang ran the first Synergy Camp to train core parent volunteers. Xiaowei's mom was in the third camp, and she and her husband now attend PFLAG China's national gathering every year. She told QDaily that the camp works by referral: each round, existing parent volunteers nominate several dozen people, and staff pick out a dozen or so family members with a high degree of self-acceptance, who then get several months of training. Afterward they take turns on the PFLAG hotline, answering questions about homosexuality from helpless parents, bringing them into groups, and inviting them to offline sharing sessions or gatherings.

Some of the most active parent volunteers today found PFLAG China themselves. Chunfeng mom is also a Synergy Camp graduate; now she often turns up at university lectures on homosexuality, or hands out facts about gay people at Shanghai's marriage market in People's Park. She and her husband first noticed signs of intimacy between their son and another man, and while searching online for information about homosexuality came across a report on "PFLAG China's Qingdao gathering." That was how they found the organization and joined a parents' group.

From 2015, though, Aqiang's thinking shifted. "Parents alone aren't enough. Chinese culture is a bit different — parents are better suited to being public-service ambassadors, while organizing, promotion and community-building still have to be done by young people." Since then PFLAG China has invested more in training young volunteers; this year, training takes up 60% of the time on its work plan.

He also wants to flatten the organization. Also starting in 2015, PFLAG China redrew its regions from provinces to cities, stressing local operations. At the end of last year it appointed a project manager for each of four regions — east, west, south and north — each managing more than a dozen cities, which frees up time and energy to open up new ones. From April 19 to 29, Aqiang planned to visit Xi'an, Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai himself, to find people interested in gay-rights nonprofit work and build chapters.

The publicity before an event is still the hardest part. Weiliang, the North China lead who organized this gathering, told QDaily that they start promoting 40 days out, by methods close to street-level marketing — joining a gay badminton group, say, and posting the event details — and often get kicked out. Many people still can't accept themselves, and don't want events like this spread around. For safety, he also sends participants the address only the night before.

Running an organization like this takes a lot of other calculation, funding among it. Before 2015, PFLAG China's main money came from foreign foundations; domestically, from 2008 to 2011 it came mostly from volunteer groups, and after 2011 from major individual donors. After the Law on the Administration of Activities of Overseas Nongovernmental Organizations within Mainland China was passed in April 2016, funding sources for domestic NGOs were restricted and PFLAG China's funding structure changed completely.

This year Aqiang began pushing monthly giving — small donations collected every month. In the March financial report, just made public, total revenue for the first three months of the year was 352,000 yuan: 96.41% from donations, 1.57% from merchandise sales, 2.02% from investment returns. Within donations, individuals accounted for 81%.

On top of that, every gay organization faces the problem that it cannot register with the civil affairs authorities. LGBT nonprofit work is a gray area; it falls into none of the eight categories of registrable social organization — industry and commerce, philanthropy, social welfare, social services, culture and entertainment, science and technology, sports, and ecology and environment. In Aqiang's words, only gay organizations working on HIV/AIDS prevention have much room; on other issues, little has changed in a decade.

Even so, PFLAG China keeps growing faster. Before 2015 its volunteers numbered only in the hundreds; last year the figure reached 3,000. In 2014 it had 12 chapters nationwide; by the end of last year, 52.

Haine, 25, is straight. In January, after seeing a recruitment post from her gay best friend on WeChat Moments, she joined PFLAG China's Shijiazhuang chapter as a volunteer. The question she answers most is whether to come out, and how to accept yourself. After the Weibo affair, a friend sent her a WeChat message asking whether the word "homosexual" would even be typeable from now on. Haine replied: "Keep an open mind and maybe you can ride out any storm." In her luggage she packed a copy of Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, to give to someone she hoped to meet at the training session after the gathering.

3

Zhang Kai is from Dezhou, 30 years old, and came out to his parents over Chinese New Year. He knew he liked boys by fifth or sixth grade, but didn't dare tell them until he was fully financially independent. Even though his parents said they accepted him, being around them is still awkward. This was his first gathering; he hoped to pick up from the stage some way of talking to them.

On stage and off, every mother's story sounded entirely different, but the process was much the same: shock, denial, confusion, understanding, and finally acceptance. The reason that convinced them in the end was almost always the same: "Our child's happiness is our happiness."

Xiaowei's mom lives in a compound for retired cadres in Chengdu. Her son, now 32, was a senior at university in Australia when he called and came out to her. She didn't cry, but she didn't know what to do with it either. She went to the psychiatry department at West China Hospital, where the doctor told her: "This isn't an illness, and there's no cure. Go home." After that she joined the PFLAG China parents' group her son recommended, but barely spoke; she just listened.

Two moments still make her cry. One is when her son brought his partner home from Australia. To make her son happy, Xiaowei's mom pretended to accept it, and they cooked together. His boyfriend from Auckland, wanting to show warmth, hugged her from behind, and she instinctively pulled away. She saw the disappointment on his face as she flinched, and she feels guilty about it to this day.

The other is when her son wanted to bring his boyfriend to his grandfather's house. She asked her younger sister's opinion, and her sister said: "Our nephew, fine. Him — no." In that moment she understood that her sister accepted her son but not homosexuality. She was so angry she didn't speak to her sister for a month.

Quanquan mom, by contrast, all but forced her son into a "violent coming out." The family lived in a power-plant compound in Anhui with more than 10,000 residents, where a man named Hu Guang had been called a pervert for liking men. In 2005, after she bought her son, then in eighth grade, a cell phone, she found flirtatious text messages between him and a male classmate. Thinking of that "pervert" in the compound, she took him to a psychiatrist in secret. The doctor said it could be treated with brain surgery, but only in Guangzhou, and it would cost 50,000 yuan. So she opened a tailor shop of her own, unlocking the door at 8 a.m. and closing at midnight, saving up to "cure" her son.

By the end of high school her son wanted to test into the Zhengzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Afraid that was too far away to keep watch, Quanquan mom made him study in Hefei instead, and had an aunt and uncle who taught at the school keep an eye on him — which is how she found out he was living with a boy who worked outside the school. Quanquan mom called him and said: "Out of those 10,000 people in the compound, go find a few more like you. Why be a pervert when you could be normal?" Her son threatened to jump off a building. Quanquan mom called the Hefei police emergency line long distance three times. The third time, the police told her: "We can't watch your kid for the rest of his life. And if we can't see him, then who are you going to fight with?" Only then did she give in. When her son brought his boyfriend home for dinner, Quanquan mom smiled and cooked for them, then hid and cried once they'd gone out. PFLAG China didn't exist yet, and with no one to turn to she went through more than a year of pain on her own before it eased.

Now Quanquan mom is one of the most active parent volunteers. She recently ran a gay-pride marathon in Wuxi, and she makes qipao for several of the mothers in the dance troupe. She showed us her neighbor's WeChat Moments post, a few photos of her running: "See? People can understand each other."

Of the mothers we talked to, Jiankang mom came around fastest. At 19 she went to work in a restaurant in Kunming, where a coworker tricked her into going to Lianyungang, Jiangsu, and in a daze she married a man more than a decade older than her — the coworker got 4,000 yuan out of the match. Figuring it would be hard for a man that age to find another wife if she left, she stayed, and had a son and a daughter. Her son, born in 1993, was always recommending Leslie Cheung songs to her; she liked them without knowing what they meant. Later he went to college in Changzhou, and when Jiankang mom visited, they had a huge fight about a girlfriend. In the end her daughter quietly stepped in: "My brother isn't going to find a girlfriend. My brother likes men."

Jiankang mom went home and told her husband, who said that if their son didn't "change back" within five years he'd cut the father-son tie. She answered: if you won't accept him, he can take my surname. After the show at the gathering that day, she sent her son a photo of herself in the qipao. He said it looked great, and she wrote back: "It's thanks to you that your mom gets to wear such a beautiful qipao."

Fathers were scarce among the parents at the gathering; Zhenpin dad was one. A demobilized officer, he sat ramrod straight, a rainbow pin on his chest, and recounted from the stage how his son entered a "cooperative marriage" at 25 and came out ten years later. A viewer on the Blued livestream asked him: "Fathers care a lot about face — how do you look at the question of face?"

The father answered in a Shandong accent: "How much is face worth? Next to my child's health and happiness, it's worth nothing."

4

Zhang Kai stuffed a Chu'en Baby flyer into his backpack too — because of what he heard Nana say.

Last year Nana married her girlfriend of nine years, and through IVF they had their first child, now seven months old. They love children, so they plan a second this year. Her mother had once assumed "being gay is like the boy band F4 — a fad, and it'll pass." Now that same mother is a PFLAG China volunteer, and answers doubters with lines like "the U.S. legalized homosexuality last year."

The audience had no questions about how to have children of their own. What worried them more was whether those children would grow up healthy, whether they would be sad to have no mother or no father, and whether the people around them would discriminate against them because of their parents.

"There's discrimination everywhere — fat, ugly, bad at school, too good at school, any of it can get you frozen out. What matters is having the right sense of yourself. Knowing, whatever the world says, what kind of person you are."

5

For Aqiang, the April 13 Weibo announcement about cleaning up "fujoshi content, yuri, boys' love, and doujinshi" was probably no surprise. Weibo's space for public argument is closing, and Aqiang had long felt the platform was less diverse than it used to be. Now he puts more weight on WeChat: PFLAG China's chapters around the country run more than 40 official accounts between them.

Aqiang thinks that for gay people, personal space and public space are moving in opposite directions. In private life, gay people and their partners in first-tier cities are doing better, not so differently from the U.S. or Europe, and more and more ordinary people no longer treat homosexuality as a disease. Companies offer more support for gay employees than they did. This year's national gathering in June, originally slated for cancellation over money, went back on the calendar after a hotel agreed to sponsor it.

"But from the standpoint of public space — legislation, room to speak — everything is tightening."

Public space came up twice at the Jinan gathering. In the Blued livestream chat, someone asked the lawyers: "With something like the Weibo announcement, what can we actually do?"

Lawyers Zhu Bao and Zhao Hu answered: "Legal means don't have to stop at China's borders. Sina is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, so we could also sue in the U.S. under NYSE rules on corporate discrimination based on sexual orientation. And don't forget that Sina's regulator is also SARFT — you can take your case to SARFT."

With the mothers of gay children, the audience asked more delicately: "When you speak your mind in public, how do you handle the restrictions or the voices against you?"

Chunfeng mom said: "Change is always pushed by a minority. Behind them a much larger, more uneven crowd follows along, or simply enjoys the benefits the change brings. Even that is enough."

6

At 6:15 p.m. the gathering neared its end. Huashi, a volunteer from the Jinan chapter, stood at the center of the stage and began to sing "Courage" (《勇气》). By the chorus, quiet singing had started up in every corner of the room. Some people held up their phones, flashlights on, waving them back and forth.

Volunteers from the Qingdao chapter, the Shijiazhuang chapter and the Kaleidoscope Rainbow Group at Shandong University came up on stage next. The music changed to "Good Days" (《好日子》), and rainbow flags began waving across the hall. The mothers came up too, still in their qipao, the fathers with long colored scarves around their necks. Everyone raised their hands in the air; it felt like Chinese New Year.

Meili Auntie was on stage as well. Four hours at a gathering may mean she now understands her nephew, far away in Singapore, a little better.

Meanwhile, after being reposted 240 million times on Weibo, the "#IAmGay" hashtag was deleted (Note: at 11:17 p.m. on April 16, Weibo restored the "#IAmGay" hashtag.)

For aunties like Meili, the new confusion is no longer only their children's marriages, children and old age. Now there is a little worry about political safety on top.

(*At their request, all interviewees in this article are referred to by pseudonyms.)

Cover images are stills from Prayers for Bobby and Call Me by Your Name; all other images, unless otherwise noted, are courtesy of PFLAG China.