This 29-Year-Old Has Been Pushing to Legalize Same-Sex Marriage, Because It's His Own Life

Three years ago, Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang walked hand in hand into the civil affairs bureau to register their marriage and were turned away. Ever since, pushing to legalize same-sex marriage has been part of their lives.

Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang — anyone who follows the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage in China probably knows these two names.

Earlier this year, a host at Lizhi FM said he felt nervous and excited before interviewing Sun Wenlin. He said, "To me, he is our hero — the gay community's hero."

Sun Wenlin is 29 this year, and the word "hero" sits heavy and ill-fitting on him. It doesn't need to.

"While the lawsuit was going on, people started calling me a hero and things like that. But I don't really have political passion, and I don't have big ambitions either — it's just that being poor makes me look like a hero. Everything I've done for same-sex marriage has really been about making my own life better. It's a rather mercenary, small-person way of thinking, because this is simply my daily life," Sun Wenlin said.

1.

On June 23, 2015, the first anniversary of their relationship, Sun Wenlin and his partner Hu Mingliang went to the civil affairs bureau in Furong District, Changsha, Hunan Province, to register their marriage. Because they were both men, the bureau turned them down. They then sued the Furong District civil affairs bureau, alleging "administrative inaction."

The following January, they lost the case, and from then on they carried a resounding title: "China's first same-sex marriage rights case."

On May 17, 2016 — the International Day Against Homophobia — Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang held a wedding at Liuyang River Wedding Park in Changsha. This "unusual" same-sex wedding drew more than a hundred members of the public and more than a dozen media outlets.

Sun Wenlin had not expected such a scene. Before he sued the civil affairs bureau, two gay couples in Beijing had already gone to their local bureaus to register, in 2012 and 2013, and neither drew much attention. Sun assumed he would get roughly the same "treatment."

In fact, what set his case apart — besides his decision to defend his rights in court — was timing.

Monitoring data from the China Rainbow Media Awards, a media prize that has long followed LGBT issues, shows that in 2014 coverage of homosexuality by Chinese mainstream media began to turn positive, and the volume rose sharply. In 2015, mainstream coverage hit the highest point on record: 867 news items in all.

"When the lawsuit was over, some journalist friends suggested we ride the wave of attention. That made sense to me, so we held the wedding on the International Day Against Homophobia. That day was really more like a press conference. Everything I said at the wedding was about same-sex marriage — words meant to persuade people, not what I personally felt," Sun Wenlin added. "Afterward I still wanted to hold another wedding, one with no political color, purely about our feelings."

Sun Wenlin's mother, Yu Haiyang (a pseudonym), and Hu Mingliang's father both came. Yu gave the couple a toy "marriage certificate," hoping they would soon hold a real one. That day Sun and Hu exchanged rings, kissed, and said their vows in front of their guests — just like at any other wedding.

Looking back on it, Hu Mingliang said it was the happiest day he had had in years. "He (Sun) wasn't very nervous that day. I was the nervous one, because sometimes my words come out all jumbled. But however I looked, I knew I was happy."

2.

October 28, 2017 was the day of Taiwan's 15th LGBT pride parade, more than five months after Taiwan's Judicial Yuan ruled that the existing law's refusal to allow same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.

Sun Wenlin posted a photo of himself with another man on WeChat Moments, captioned: "I hope they live to see the day same-sex marriage becomes law on the mainland." The man beside him was Chi Chia-wei, the plaintiff in "Taiwan's first same-sex marriage rights case" and known as the first man in Taiwan to come out publicly.

As always, Chi wore a rainbow headband and a rainbow flag over his shoulders. For 40 years, dressed like that, he had walked the streets across Taiwan, one man out in front of the gay rights movement. Then, on the day of the Judicial Yuan's ruling, he was suddenly in the spotlight.

Across the world, the road to marriage equality always gives the "first case" a symbolic weight, and Sun Wenlin was no exception. He and Hu Mingliang drew more and more media attention.

It was usually Sun who spoke to reporters. He had long been active on social networks. On the Baidu forum platform Tieba alone, he served for seven years as moderator of the "Coming Out" and "Homosexuality" forums, posting nearly 58,000 times, most of it information about homosexuality. He also founded "Equal Family Network", a site focused on China's marriage and family law.

Sun is neither a lawyer nor a scholar, but whenever same-sex marriage comes up he will patiently walk people through what his own research has found, and through the biggest myths in the existing literature.

Peng Yanhui, head of the LGBT Equal Rights Promotion Association, has worked with Sun several times through Changsha's local gay organizations. He describes Sun in one word: persistent. "He's done a huge amount of homework on this topic. He knows what he wants and he knows what is happening at this stage. But the people around him may not know as much, so how you persuade others matters a great deal. He can't create change alone; he needs to draw more people in. And I think he is willing to do that work."

Whether he is being interviewed or answering attacks online, Sun's manner barely changes. His words carry little emotional swing, even when the subject is the fights with his family after he came out, the abuse online, an unhappy adolescence, a failed business, or his relationship with Hu Mingliang. He answers all of it the same way: "Ask me anything and I'll tell you. There's nothing in my story I can't talk about."

In one interview, Sun said what made him decide to sue the civil affairs bureau was the staff's attitude. "When we went to register, they were awful. I told them not to be so bureaucratic, and the man said, 'I am bureaucratic — go ahead and report me,' and then had the security guards chase us out."

After losing the case, Sun went back to the bureau several more times because media outlets wanted footage. "Later I really didn't want to go anymore. Every time I turned up, the staff looked terrified and immediately called the director over, and the director looked annoyed at me, as if I had come just to make trouble. It felt terrible, as if I were some kind of monster." Getting married should be a happy occasion, Sun believes, but the staff's fear and irritation spoiled it every time.

Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang have, in effect, come out completely in public.

"Once we stood up, other people could see us. We didn't have to hide in the dark anymore," said Hu Mingliang, who believes the lawsuit changed at least something for the better.

Sun's WeChat signature currently reads: "On legalizing same-sex marriage, and on taking marriage and family out of the law altogether — my position is that I support both."

His Moments feed has no flowers and no romance. Almost all of it concerns gay rights. Besides sharing his own campaign to legalize same-sex marriage, he documents other gay couples' weddings. Two years ago he launched a project to record the weddings of 100 gay couples.

Hu Mingliang said that in recent years, when Sun is home he is usually going through materials for the same-sex marriage campaign, while Hu passes the time beside him scrolling his phone or watching TV. "Now and then I do wish Sun would pay a bit more attention to the rest of life."

3.

Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang are both Hunan natives, born and raised.

Hu Mingliang, 39 this year, is ten years older than Sun. The two rent a two-bedroom apartment in Changsha, Hunan, where they keep a British Shorthair cat named Teresa (テレサ) and live what they call a small, plain life. In the living room hangs the wedding portrait they took before the ceremony.

On June 23, 2014, Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang met through a QQ group for gay men.

Sun said Hu's looks caught him from the first moment — he thought Hu looked good in his security guard's uniform. They slept together that first day and soon moved in together. "There was one boyfriend before him (Hu). I wanted to marry him because we'd been together more than six months before we confirmed we were a couple. I'd never lived with anyone for more than six months. And now I'm the partner he's been with the longest, too."

They have lived together for more than four years. They are renovating a house left by Sun's maternal grandmother; once it is finished, Sun, his mother Yu Haiyang and Hu Mingliang will move in and live as a household of three.

Hu Mingliang said the move will cut one to two thousand yuan a month in rent.

Hu Mingliang works in the security team of a property management company. Sun, apart from some part-time work, spends most of his time helping with the renovation and pushing for same-sex marriage. He quit his full-time job as a website editor the day the lawsuit began and threw himself into gay rights work. "You can't keep taking time off forever," he said.

Before that, Sun had opened a teahouse in Changsha as a gathering place for the gay community, but closed it after a year. "That was my one attempt at starting a business. It failed."

Sun is now thinking about going back to work: "Once the renovation is done, I plan to look for a full-time job — the kind with the standard social insurance and housing fund."

Hu Mingliang said he has never pushed Sun to find a job. "My salary isn't high either, and all his time goes to gay rights work, so he has no other income. It really is hard to get by. But all I ever say is, if you want to find a job, go find one."

"He's very gentle. When we first got together my temper was terrible. Over the years I don't even know why I turned into this kind of person, someone who speaks so rudely to the people around him," Sun said.

Sun said that after he graduated from college he went through a very "angry youth" phase: "Back then I kept seeing bad news about society and I was very unhappy about public affairs, so I'd post my opinions on Weibo and Tieba all the time. At one point I was so angry I thought of myself as justice incarnate — a keyboard warrior. Later I read about things like new moralism and realized what an ugly face that version of me had."

4.

Compared with most people, Sun realized his sexual orientation early.

He said he first felt drawn to boys at five. At 12, he saw photos online of a naked man and a naked woman and found he was more interested in the male body. At 13 he began actively seeking out gay men online, entering a period of exploring desire.

"I learned I wasn't the only person in the world like this. During that time I actually started hooking up, and some of the older men I met would tell me to go study hard. I think those experiences shaped my view on lowering the marriage age (to 18). I've always felt society shouldn't be so protective," Sun said.

Adolescent hormones, plus the clash between his identity and mainstream expectations, pushed Sun into the fiercest period of conflict with his family.

Sun's parents divorced when he was young, and he spent most of his time living with his paternal grandparents. From them, Yu Haiyang learned that by middle school Sun did not like coming home and sometimes brought boys back with him. That was when she first sensed something was different. "I remember when he was about three, he loved wearing high heels and dresses, and once he played around with my lipstick. But I never went further and thought it might be about his sexual orientation. I thought he was just being naughty. All I'd say back then was, you can't wear that, boys don't wear dresses. After I scolded him a few times, he stopped."

As he grew older, the conflict with his family sharpened. In 2003, when Sun was 14, at his grandmother's 70th birthday banquet, a relative said offhandedly, "You can start bringing girlfriends home now." Sun answered straight out: "I like boys." The answer enraged his father, who beat him badly once they got home.

"The worst cold war I ever had with my dad was when we'd see each other in the courtyard and act like strangers — get in the elevator together, go into our rooms, come out again, the whole time behaving like people who'd never met," Sun said.

Even after Sun started dating Hu Mingliang, and even after the lawsuit, Sun's father would not speak to Hu for a long time. Hu Mingliang said that a few years ago, at Mid-Autumn Festival, Sun's father spoke to him for the first time: "Now that you're with Wenlin, live a good life. I think that's already good enough."

Right after he came out, Sun brought his mother a lot of material and films about homosexuality, hoping she could understand what being gay actually meant.

Yu Haiyang remembers taking a call from Sun at work in which he sobbed that living was meaningless. "I told him, you haven't done anything wrong. If anyone is at fault it's me, your mother — I'm the one who made you this way." She also remembers clearly that during one argument, Sun blurted out: "It's because you took medicine while you were pregnant with me that my genes mutated."

"But on Mother's Day the year Wenlin turned 17, he apologized to me. He said that after looking it up, he knew that what he'd said before — that the medicine I took made him gay — wasn't true at all. That's when I stopped feeling so guilty," Yu Haiyang recalled.

Yu Haiyang, 48 this year, has fully accepted Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang, and now volunteers with the gay community in Hunan. She says she just wants to help more people who have been through what she has: parents in pain, and children who want to kill themselves.

Yu Haiyang said she now strongly supports Sun in fighting for any right he can get. "Every time I think about it I feel sad — not because of who he is, but because I wonder what will happen to him when he's old. I very much want him to have a family. He's a citizen of this country too, and he needs the rights he's entitled to."

5.

At 5 p.m. on September 11, Sun Wenlin published A Practical Guide to Proposing Same-Sex Marriage Amendments to the Civil Code (hereafter, the "Guide") on his WeChat official account, which carries his own name, explaining to readers how to submit amendment proposals on the Civil Code's provisions through the National People's Congress website.

Sun listed 73 provisions he believes need amending, covering the sections on personal rights, marriage and family, and inheritance.

Within 24 hours the article had passed 100,000 views; the post shared on Weibo drew 84,000 reposts, 21,000 comments and 32,000 likes.

The article set out to teach readers how to submit their views through the National People's Congress website. Sun also gathered signatures for a joint petition on his own platform, Equal Family Network.

Like many viral pieces on gay issues, the "Guide" set off fierce argument online. Some readers voiced support, some challenged the provisions one by one, and some said the whole push was pointless.

To the doubters, Sun said the "Guide" had been worked out with three lawyers. "I think the key question right now isn't how the law gets amended, but keeping the discussion going and widening it. Even if people keep cursing me online, if it starts a discussion, that's a good thing," Sun said.

For Sun, the "Guide" works more as a tool for communication. Answering challenges to its rigor or professionalism is not his first task. What fills his head now is how to get more people to see that gay people need the law changed.

Peng Yanhui believes argument over the proposed amendments is unavoidable. Same-sex marriage has gone without public discussion for so long that on many parts of the issue it is not just a question of progress — even the basic knowledge has yet to be laid down.

In March 2017, before the Two Sessions, Sun met several lawyer friends to discuss the Marriage Law — the statute cited to reject his marriage registration in the first place.

Sun began lobbying National People's Congress delegates to submit a proposal, working through Hunan's delegation by phone, one after another. "I got hold of their phone directory and called them one by one. At the time I only had the directory for the Hunan delegation, so I just went down the list — 113 people in all."

Sun said most of the people who picked up hung up as soon as they heard "legalizing same-sex marriage"; he would quickly hear the dial tone. After being hung up on, he switched to text messages.

In the end, three people answered. One of them agreed to meet after Sun had sent texts every day for a month. "At the time it struck me as unbelievable — why should meeting a lawmaker in this country be this hard?" Sun said.

At the same time, Sun was calling for signatures on his own official account and on social platforms. He told QDaily that the petition has now gathered more than 30,876 signatures. (Note: this figure is not the number of people who have submitted amendment proposals through the NPC website.)

"The first person on the mainland to raise same-sex marriage and set off broad public discussion was Professor Li Yinhe. But the first time same-sex marriage was brought into the field of Chinese legal discussion was through my case with Old Hu. After that, six expert panels were set up while the Civil Code's separate sections were being drafted. The marriage and family panel alone had 31 scholars from around the country, and most of them thought same-sex partnerships should be protected at least on a cohabitation basis. But the version published on the NPC website is not the version they submitted to the NPC Legislative Affairs Commission," Sun said.

He already has a stable life with Old Hu. So why keep pushing to legalize same-sex marriage?

Sun said that two days before the "Guide" came out, Hu Mingliang had a gum infection so painful he nearly fainted at work, and then dropped out of contact for a while because his phone died. Remembering that day still unsettles him. Thoughts crowded in, he said: if something happened to Hu in the future and he had to be rushed to hospital, would Sun even qualify as the emergency contact, able to sign for Old Hu's emergency surgery?

"In the end I was sure of only one thing: if Old Hu weren't here, I don't think I'd push for same-sex marriage at all. The reason I've kept at it is that this is the life I'm living," Sun said.

Cover image from rawpixel on Unsplash