Ten Years of Shanghai Pride: What Happened by Accident, What Got Blocked, What Caught On, and What Stopped Short

Also a decade in which LGBT organizing in China grew fast enough to watch.

Shanghai Pride has reached its tenth year.

The first people to do it were foreigners living in Shanghai, who took the form of Gay Pride Month, held every June in Europe and the United States, and made a local version of it. Today this modest import has become the longest-surviving gay festival in China — even though the internet, in spreading the word "Pride," has left people who never understood the community more puzzled than ever by the word itself.

Charlene, who wears her salt-and-pepper hair in a crisp short cut, is one of the founders and, ten years on, the only one still around. She has no grand ambitions. At 45 she has never thought of herself as an "activist"; at least, when people ask, she explains: "At first our goals were very small — we didn't even have goals. We weren't trying to fight anything. We just wanted people to see who we are."

The whole Pride team is volunteers, Charlene included; there are no full-time staff. She came to Shanghai just after breaking up with her girlfriend, and works in the semiconductor industry. One change at Shanghai Pride is obvious, she says: the team is no longer run mainly by foreigners, and eight in ten members are now Chinese. The people who come are also getting younger.

At bottom, Pride is sexual minorities (LGBTQ) pushing back against the stigma and discrimination they have long met in society, and against the guilt and shame they feel about themselves. Pride, in this sense, is mostly a way of encouraging yourself.

It is also an answer to the unfairness and indifference that runs through campuses, workplaces and family life. Holding Pride in the open is a refusal to make the problems of sexual minorities private — and so fall silent in public speech. As Richard Mohr, a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a gay activist, put it: "Compulsory personal privacy is the closet that confines gay people."

The first Shanghai Pride happened entirely by accident. Many people in the Yahoo group "Shanghai LGBT," which Charlene belonged to, were leaving the city, and friends decided to throw a farewell party; someone suggested making it a Pride festival instead. Lemay, one of the founders, described that first year's preparations in a 2016 interview with US-China Press: "The main job wasn't designing the program. It was contacting and negotiating with the local government, finding out what we could do and what we couldn't."

1.

Shanghai Pride began in 2009. The timing was good.

The Beijing Olympics closed in 2008, showing foreigners a more open China, and the Shanghai World Expo followed in 2010, bringing large numbers of foreign residents to the city. That year Peng Zhizheng, who goes by Raymond, arrived from Malaysia to study. He knew no one in Shanghai. "Google still worked then. I remember searching 'Gay event Shanghai' in July — the first result was a bar, the second was Shanghai Pride."

"At first everyone kept in touch through a Yahoo Group, a mailing list. The people with more internet awareness back then were foreigners or the more middle-class ones, and everything was in English — parties, barbecues, film screenings."

Perhaps by coincidence, around 2009 gay grassroots organizations of various kinds began appearing across China, many of them defining themselves as "outward-facing" and working with educators, psychologists, the media and LGBTQ people themselves. PFLAG China and the Beijing LGBT Center were founded in 2008; Shenyang Pride and the Weibo account @Gay Voice followed in 2009.

"Any single organization — PFLAG China, Shanghai Pride, the Beijing LGBT Center — may have come out of some chance factor. But the fact that they all appeared in a cluster after 2006 is the result of a larger trend: the diversification of the gay movement's agenda," Wei Wei, an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at East China Normal University who has long studied China's gay movement, told QDaily.

2005 was not so lucky. That year Cui Zien, the first professor on the mainland to come out publicly, organized the First Mainland Gay Culture Festival in Beijing; the police shut it down and the event ended. An associate professor in the Film Theory Research Office at the Beijing Film Academy, Cui had spoken openly in class about being gay in 1991, and the school stripped him of his lecturer's qualification and kept him from teaching for the next ten years. Back at the lectern, he helped the Peking University Film Association put on the First China Gay Film Festival in 2001, which had a wide impact.

The first Shanghai Pride did not go smoothly either. Police broke up rehearsals of The Death of Matthew Shepard (《马修之死》), a play about an American college student murdered by anti-gay attackers; several booked venues pulled out at short notice; and three months of preparation ended up squeezed into a single week. They wore pink for a picnic in Shanghai's Zhongshan Park, and held the opening party at a bar that night.

The second Pride ran into the World Expo, when no public events could be held anywhere in the city, and moved from June to November.

The same thing still happens. Shortly before this year's festival opened, Raymond — who coordinates the program and selects the films — received cancellation notices from several venues saying they could no longer help. Something else made the organizers nervous: two months earlier, Weibo had announced a "clean-up" of gay content. The run of incidents made Raymond wonder whether to use the word "homosexual" as little as possible in Weibo and WeChat posts.

By the time the festival began, he had dropped the idea. Nine years of organizing told him to stick to the plan. "We never announce our venues anyway… If they really want to step in and shut it down, better early — at least we'd still have a backup."

When Raymond first joined Shanghai Pride he was not a core member, just greeting people at the door of the barbecue party. He remembers it was held at the Paulaner brewhouse at the Expo site, beside Binjiang Avenue in Pudong, with an outdoor garden big enough for several hundred people. Pride has never had a large outdoor party like it since. "It's hard to find a place like that now — mainly it's hard to find a restaurant that big," he said.

Over the decade, a large share of Shanghai Pride's events really have been held in bars.

"We pick different bars on purpose, because we want to widen the community, and we don't deliberately choose gay bars — those are our back garden. When another event can't find a venue or gets stuck, that's where it goes," Raymond said.

Over the same decade, places built for spending money — bars, gyms, clubs — multiplied fast across China, and they happened to give gay people somewhere to meet, which helped the community grow.

With these places to lean on, gay life no longer sits, as it did before the 1990s, only in the dim corners of parks or in stigmatizing coverage of AIDS and bad news. It is now part of ordinary daily life.

But there is little room for optimism. Lucca 390, a gay bar on Shanghai's Panyu Road, has taken in three events this year that were cancelled elsewhere at short notice. Chen Dajun, the bar's brand operations director, told QDaily: "We can't be sure we can hold them, actually. All we can say is that tomorrow we still can. We're willing to take the events on, but if you ask why we're able to — there is no why. Everyone is under pressure."

2.

For something called Shanghai Pride, none of it is loud. By the tenth year, attendance had grown only from 3,000 to 6,500. Most events are held indoors: bars, restaurants, business hotels, consulate premises.

The one "public" event is the Pride Run, which started in 2013.

Sports at earlier festivals were mostly indoor — badminton, volleyball — but renting venues was a problem, so the team looked for something easier. A volunteer suggested running to Charlene: "Anyone can run, and it's free."

"Why did we choose running? Because we can't have that many people walking together — that would look like a parade, wouldn't it?" said Luo, an organizer from Taiwan, in an earlier interview with US-China Press.

Even so, the Pride Run drew attention. The day before the June 2014 run, Charlene got word from the hotel that the police wanted someone to come over for a meeting at once.

"We didn't want any friend with a Chinese passport to go, because we had no idea what would happen — better to send someone with a foreign passport." Charlene worked out in Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, far from the center, so Raymond went.

Nearly ten officers talked with him at the hotel. What exactly would the event involve? Would there be decorations on site? How many people would gather? "I was scared out of my wits. I'd already given my boyfriend my bank account and password, and photographed everything," Raymond said.

Charlene read the meeting as a signal. "They know whatever we do. And we're not hiding anything either. For us safety comes first — we understand the run can't have too many people."

At 9 a.m. on June 9, 2018, nearly 100 people gathered outside the Nike flagship store on Huaihai Middle Road in Shanghai — though half of them were there for the release of a special-edition Jordan jersey, and only the other half were Pride Run runners. This was one of the tenth Shanghai Pride's six routes, and the only one with media present. The other five, of varying lengths, started at Ferguson Lane, Jing'an Park, the Long Museum, the Shanghai Swimming Center and the Bund, all ending at the Andaz hotel in Xintiandi. Six routes split up the crowd, and matched the six colors of the LGBT rainbow flag.

Nike began sponsoring the Pride Run three years ago with people and supplies: coaches and pacers on the ground, and T-shirts printed "Betrue For Equality" for the runners.

Every runner who reached the Andaz received a bag of souvenirs from the organizers and a medal stamped Shanghai Pride 10. Then, in the half-open space outside the hotel's ground floor, they ate a buffet "pink brunch" while a DJ played.

"One hour forty, starting from the Bund." Luo Yao, a student at Donghua University in Shanghai, pulled the timing phone off his arm; the 15-kilometer route he picked was the longest. "I did the rainbow bike ride earlier too, I'm going to tonight's party, and I'll go to the choral festival as well," he told QDaily.

Evie Wu, who handles brand communications for Shanghai Pride, said about 70 brands and businesses sponsored the festival this year, with Nike the sponsor closest to mass consumers.

Under a brand's banner, the run looks more like a routine event. It also gets misread. Among the people queuing outside the Nike store that morning, some assumed it was a corporate team-building outing, or a Color Run put on by Nike.

Another event that is not quite public but still draws large numbers is PFLAG China, founded in Guangzhou in 2008 by A Qiang, who comes from Anhui. Unlike Shanghai Pride, PFLAG China is more local, and A Qiang has quit his job to run it full-time.

After the run on June 9, PFLAG China's tenth-anniversary gathering was about to begin in the conference hall on the Andaz's third floor. The barrier PFLAG China set out to break is the parents. The mutual-aid group now reaches 56 cities and 3,000 volunteers, more than 1,500 of them registered under their real names.

At 2 p.m. the atrium outside the room was packed. Delegates from chapters around the country hawked souvenirs with gusto; a strip of carpet ran across the floor like a red carpet, except in the rainbow of gay pride. A group of mothers in qipao filed in first. Then the delegations came one by one along the rainbow carpet, each introduced, interviewed and ushered in by the host. Some men were dressed as women; some wore pink cheerleading outfits and rabbit ears; some waved flags and shouted.

But almost everyone on this crowded, noisy floor was already one of their own. They weren't really there to raise money; they came for the bustle. It was the largest indoor event PFLAG China has held.

Six hundred people filled every seat. When the lights went down and the mothers in qipao walked the stage to show their support for the community, a father who looked about 50 stood at the very back of the hall and quietly cried.

3.

Other Chinese cities have had Pride-like events, but they rarely last this long and are hard to see. Shenyang Pride, founded the same year as Shanghai's, leaves almost no trace online. Some groups hold similar public events under other names: Love Aid, in the Northeast, has run a Northeast Gay Culture Festival since 2012, with its own run of talks and performances on gay themes.

These events are scattered around the country, and in the past they had few close ties, largely because each group's purpose is different. Even so, they all run into the same problems locally: venues, people, money.

In June and September 2014, Chengdu and Chongqing each held a conference called SpeakOut, then one of the larger LGBTQ events in central and western China — two or three hundred in the audience some times, four or five hundred at others, in a format borrowed from TED. Its founder, Matthew, was still at university. Before the conference opened, they met a blow no gay organization finds unfamiliar: the venue broke the contract at the last minute, and no other venue would rent to them.

Liu'er, a core member of the SpeakOut team, told the media: "The venue wouldn't say why either — only that the hotel sat in a specially administered zone, and their own meetings came first." Whatever the reason given, the venues were trying to signal to the team, sideways, that breaking the contract was not their own wish.

In 2015 Xiao Xin, also a university student at the time, joined a Beijing queer youth leadership training run jointly by a number of gay organizations. That, he says, is when he began taking part in offline gay-rights work. What he noticed was that many events were either shrinking or being cancelled.

The subtitling group he had joined first, QAF Chinese Site, never ran into trouble by comparison. (QAF is short for the British and American series Queer as Folk (《同志亦凡人》); the group, set up in 2005, began as a fan forum for the show.) Because gay films are barred from import and so have no rights holder in China, that gray zone became the subtitlers' room to live in. At QAF Chinese Site, Xiao Xin mainly built the new-media accounts and handled outside cooperation. When he took over the Weibo account it had 150,000 followers; now it has more than 500,000.

The first Shanghai Pride had 30 volunteers; last year there were 300. "This year we found a problem: Pride has grown too big for volunteers alone to carry. It's as if we were running a company — which of course we're not," Raymond said. "If I threw myself into the LGBT movement completely, it wouldn't just be a job, it would have to become a life plan. With the resources we have, that's very hard."

4.

Another year that matters to China's LGBT community is 2014. For the first time, positive media coverage of LGBT topics outnumbered negative coverage.

Media monitoring by the Rainbow Media Awards shows that before 2011, Chinese coverage of gay topics ran along two lines: AIDS, and bad news. Weibo then opened space for more people to speak. In 2011 a homophobic remark by Lü Liping brought a wave of protest from gay users on Weibo, and public figures joined in — the well-known sexologist Li Yinhe, and the stars Song Dandan, Kevin Tsai and Chapman To.

In December 2014, Li Yinhe published a blog post on Weibo, "A Response to the So-Called Exposure of My Lesbian Identity" (《对所谓拉拉身份曝光的回应》), describing the 17 years she has spent with a transgender partner. Within 24 hours it had been reposted more than 50,000 times, drawn over 20,000 comments and more than 30,000 likes.

At the end of that year, another case caught fire on Weibo: A Zhen, who had been through "gay conversion therapy" at a body called the Chongqing Xinyu Piaoxiang Psychological Counseling Center, took it to court — and won.

Weibo has always been the movement's base online. "When Sina Weibo was first pushing to grow, it went hard after Hong Kong and Taiwan stars. In those years Kangsi Coming mattered a lot to gay people, and one of the accounts Kevin Tsai followed was @Gay Voice," said Hua Zile, born in the 1990s, who decided in 2009 to open the account @Gay Voice and carry gay news from around the internet.

Sina Weibo's February 2013 results put revenue at about US$66 million and registered users past 500 million. A few months before that report, Weibo, three years after launch, had dropped the "Beta" label and become a full version — one that let users set a "sexual orientation" in their profile. Choose an orientation matching your gender, and your profile would say you are "homosexual."

An anonymous platform gave gay people who had not come out somewhere to speak freely. In the words of the Yale historian George Chauncey, an influential scholar of the modern city and gay history: "Privacy could only be had in public."

That freedom has its limits, of course. People still worry about all sorts of things — even about liking a single Weibo post on a gay topic.

The run of trending topics on Weibo did show, up to a point, that the public was accepting gay subjects and thinking more openly. The temperature peaked in 2015, when same-sex marriage became legal across the United States.

The ruling turned gay rights into a mainstream topic online, and many gay people took it as a victory for their rights.

Hua Zile still remembers that after the United States legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, "the whole internet went into a carnival. A lot of businesses hopped onto rainbow marketing — you saw merchant after merchant riding the wave." @Gay Voice reposted the news too; by his recollection the post was shared more than 13,000 times and read more than 10 million.

Recently, when he went looking for that post again, he found it had been deleted.

The optimism of 2015 disappeared quickly.

On February 12, 2015, major websites pulled director Fan Popo's documentary Mama Rainbow (《彩虹伴我心》).

On February 22, 2016, the gay web drama Addicted (《上瘾》) was pulled from the entire internet.

On March 2, 2016, the General Rules for Television Drama Content Production took effect. The rules bar dramas from "playing up obscenity and pornography," a category that includes "showing and displaying abnormal sexual relations and behavior, such as incest, homosexuality, sexual perversion, sexual assault, sexual abuse and sexual violence."

In June 2017, the China Netcasting Services Association, a body under the broadcasting regulator SAPPRFT, adopted the General Rules for Reviewing Online Audiovisual Program Content, which classed homosexuality as "obscene, pornographic and vulgar in taste" and restricted it online.

On September 30, 2017, the "Walking Together" board on Tianya — China's best-known gay forum — stopped running, after 18 years, 730,000 posts and 21.1 million replies.

Rainbow Media Awards monitoring shows that mainstream Chinese coverage of LGBT topics peaked in 2015 at 867 items; by 2017 it had fallen by half, to 447 — back to the level of 2013.

In 2013 Peng Yanhui founded LGBT Rights Advocacy China, which works to use the law against discriminatory treatment of gay people. Nothing like it, built on legal claims, had existed in China before. Watching media coverage shrink, he sensed that civil society was changing. He still has an anti-discrimination suit going over the regulator's rules on reviewing online audiovisual content, but he thinks this is a stage of drift: "They do feel they need to adjust their strategy next. Exactly how, nobody really knows."

Wei Wei, for his part, argues that China's gay movement has to adjust its tactics to find room to survive, and points to PFLAG China as a good opening: "To make the case now, you need language the government can accept. PFLAG's strong card is the family. Family is the core issue for gay people in Asia — not religious discrimination. However strong the Chinese government is, it still has to account for how much people value the family."

This year PFLAG China's public fundraising brought in 2 million yuan, held under a national special fund called Rainbow Partners. It "will be spent on improving gay people's lives and promoting family harmony," said Cheng Lin, convener of PFLAG China's Beijing chapter; the specific plans have not been announced.

5.

On the evening of June 9, most of the people who had spent the day at Pride events gathered for the opening party at 471 Zhapu Road. The building, put up in 1931, is one of Hongkou District's landmarks; it was a Buddhist temple once, and now houses a bar called The Pearl, which usually puts on drag shows.

That night's party was far bigger than The Pearl's usual events. At 11:30 the last drag show began, and the performers came straight down into the crowd to perform "This Is Me," the song in praise of misfits from The Greatest Showman (《马戏之王》). Afterward more and more people went to the floor to dance with strangers.

At the film festival's opening screening we met Xiao Kang and Alevin, who had brought him. On the screen was this year's best film, Pink Pill (《粉色药丸》). "There's plenty of stuff online," Xiao Kang said, "but I still want a physical space where people can discuss gay films together, where you can take part in something proper like this."

Shanghai Pride runs into early July, but the thick of it — the closing party, the end of the film festival — finishes on June 17. Elsewhere in the world, Pride parades are under way, with feathers, rainbow confetti and rainbow flags filling the main avenues. Their celebrations are wider, and they last longer.

Cover image and in-story photos courtesy of Shanghai Pride and QDaily