MCLC: Cooper's coming out rattles China's closet

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <annemh at alumni.upenn.edu>
Subject: Cooper's coming out rattles China's closet
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (7/5/12):
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/anderson-coopers-coming-out-
rattles-chinas-closet/?ref=world

Anderson Cooper’s Coming Out Rattles China’s Closet
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

BEIJING — When Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, recently announced that he
was gay, he apparently inspired a Chinese microblogger using the name Sun
Yelin-Xiao Hei. On Thursday, Mr. Sun posted a call on Sina’s Weibo, or
microblogging, site for Chinese homosexuals to come out en masse on Dec.
12, 2012 — a day apparently picked for its neat number. If you read
Chinese, you can read his exhortation here
<http://weibo.com//1718757754/yr154vRuQ>.

Mr. Cooper is fairly well-known among China’s more Westernized, educated
elite, with Sina’s microblog site, the country’s biggest, recording over
38,000 posts mentioning him. Comments since his coming out have been
overwhelmingly positive, if occasionally a little nonplussed.

In China, very few homosexuals are “out,” or “chugui” (this translates as
“come out closet.”) Familial and cultural pressures to be heterosexual,
marry and produce an heir are simply too great.

So Mr. Sun seemed to be inviting the world to dream: “If on 2012.12.12 all
the homosexuals in China ‘chugui,’ ” he wrote enthusiastically, “what
would life be like?”

There’s little chance of finding out.

If anything, the recent wave of casual, “I’m gay, so what” announcements
by prominent Americans is underscoring a fast-widening gap in social
attitudes between the United States and many other countries, including
China.

Zhang Beichuan, a leading researcher on homosexuality and a medical
professor at Qingdao University, says China faces an epidemic of problems
related to the nonacceptance of homosexuality, including AIDS transmission
from gay men to their wives and unhappy marriages in which one partner is
secretly gay.

“I really want to say something,” he confided in a telephone interview
from Qingdao. “China really needs help and encouragement from the
progressive sectors of international society to solve these problems.”

One particular area of concern, Mr. Zhang said, is the large number of
Chinese women unwittingly married to gay men. (Due to traditional
patriarchal attitudes that value a son’s offspring more than a daughter’s,
it is somewhat easier for a woman to dodge marriage and reproduction. A
gay woman may be less likely to marry against her will.)

Mr. Zhang estimates that more than 90 percent of China’s gay men bow to
pressure and marry women — without revealing their homosexuality.

“There are over 10 million women married to homosexual men, perhaps 16
million,” he said.

(Mr. Zhang’s estimate is based on the number of Chinese marriages, surveys
of gay men’s life plans and a gay male population of 3.5 percent. There is
no universally accepted statistic for gay populations, of course, but the
most common global estimates are 2 to 5 percent.)

“We have so many women in unhappy, loveless marriages in China,” he said.
“Inside this story, there are so many tears, so much pain.”

Giving men the freedom to come out of the closet would solve the problem,
said Mr. Zhang.

In fact, the topic is widely debated here, but in unofficial media and in
private. Sina’s Weibo records more than 4.5 million posts for “chugui.”

Yet, in his role as counselor as well as researcher, Mr. Zhang said, “We
don’t lightly recommend to people that they come out. It can have a
tremendously damaging impact on their lives.” He cited examples in which
parents threatened suicide or fell seriously ill, or the children were
forced to flee home.

Until recently, women married to gay men had a champion: Yao Lifen, a
woman in the western city of Xi’an, who ran a Web site offering emotional,
practical and legal support for women married to homosexuals, China Daily
reported 
<http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-02/03/content_14528879.htm>.

“Tongqi jiayuan,” the Chinese name of her Web site, roughly translates as
“A Home for the Wives of Homosexuals.”

Married for years to a gay man who, she told China Daily, beat her (Mr.
Zhang says domestic violence is common in these marriages, the result of
deep frustrations and poor communication), Ms. Yao set out to help other
women.

Yet her Web site, www.tongqijiayuan.com <http://www.tongqijiayuan.com/>,
is currently shut down, after complaints to the police from clients that
they were charged money for services that never materialized, according to
a report <http://news.sohu.com/20120704/n347239252.shtml> in Nanfang
Daily. In an email to Rendezvous, Ms. Yao said she was innocent of the
charges and that she had been deceived by her boyfriend, who worked on the
project with her.

She said she learned only in May that her boyfriend “went behind my back
to collect money from some women married to gay men. I am extremely angry
and hurt.” She said he changed information on the Web site without her
knowledge to cheat people.

Her boyfriend’s whereabouts were unclear and he could not be reached for
comment.

Mr. Zhang called the shuttering of Ms. Yao’s Web site “a disaster” for
these wives, for many of whom it was the only source of support.

Many Chinese women married to homosexual men never realize their spouses
are gay due to ignorance about homosexuality, Mr. Zhang said.

“The level of information available to Chinese and to American women is
very different,” he said.

Chinese women married to gay men “blame themselves,” he said. “They think
it’s because they aren’t good enough.”

“I blame the government because it is so powerful but the information it
offers is totally inadequate,” he said.

“Education has got to include homosexuality. What we need is not
traditional education that ignores the issue, but a much more humane
education that addresses it,” he said.

Just a dozen people have so far responded to Sun Yelin-Xiao Hei’s
online call for a mass coming out.

“Very cool! There’s strength in numbers!” posted one person using the name
Yuecai Diancai wo dou ai.