MCLC: 7 Chinese couples wed in W. Hollywood

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MCLC LIST
7 Chinese couples wed in W. Hollywood
From: Kevin Lawrence kglnyc at gmail.com
Source: Frontiers Media (6/10/15)
7 Chinese Couples Wed in West Hollywood
When love, LGBT history and the world intersect to create once unimaginable joy.
BY KAREN OCAMB
You don’t need a translator for this. Li Tao sheds tears of joy as Duan Rongfeng places a ring on his finger and West Hollywood Mayor Lindsey Horvath pronounces the Chinese couple spouses for life.
Li Tao, 30, and Duan Rongfeng, 38, are one of seven same-sex Chinese couples married in an emotional ceremony June 9 at the West Hollywood Library. The weddings were witnessed by family, friends, members of the public and lots of media.
But perhaps the most important observer was a camera crew from Blued, China’s largest gay social app, which is documenting the couples’ all-expenses-paid trip from landing in L.A. to getting their marriage licenses at the Beverly Hills Courthouse, to shopping at the Beverly Center, to hair & make up before the wedding to a reception at the L.A. LGBT Center and a mini-honeymoon in WeHo.
The film will be posted online at China’s top video platforms, including Youku and Tudou, for all of China to see. Though homosexuality was decriminalized in 1997, it is believed that up to 80% of gay men will marry women to avoid stigma and shame for their families.
So posing with those marriage licenses with the mayor of West Hollywood—as Liu Ying Jie and Cai Zhi Guo are doing above— is not merely a photo marking LGBT history—it is a symbol that marriage equality and same-sex love is acceptable and full of joy. And practically, if any of the couples returns to the U.S., they can list each other as spouses on legal forms as they enter and travel throughout the country.
For Geng Le, chief executive of Blued, China’s largest gay dating app with 15 million users and one of the corporate sponsors of the online “We Do” contest that created the dream wedding, the entire endeavor is personal.
“As I’m gay myself, I’m hoping to one day be able to marry my partner,” Geng told the L.A. Times.  “For me personally, I’d like to help the wider LGBT community find happiness.”
The seven couples are winners out of 400 entries in an online contest hosted by Alibaba, a huge Chinese e-commerce company based Hangzhou, Zhejiang, with collaboration from Alibaba’s online shopping market, Taobao— where the “We Do” contest was first posted last Valentine’s Day—as well as Blued, the Beijing LGBT Center, PFLAG China, China Luxury Advisors, Bliss, a Chinese bedding brand, the L.A. LGBT Center and the City of West Hollywood. Ten couples were originally selected but visa issues held back three of them.
“West Hollywood has long been at the center of the marriage equality movement,” said Horvath. “In addition to fighting for full equality under the law, our City officials performed special wedding ceremonies at West Hollywood Park in 2008, and at West Hollywood City Hall as soon as Proposition 8 was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. We hope that this wedding will send a strong message, especially to LGBT people across the globe, that the City of West Hollywood celebrates your right to marry and welcomes your destination wedding as a symbol of our commitment to equality for all.”
But for the couples, the trip was not so much about history or politics but about love. Beijing artist Xue Meng Yao (right, above) was volunteering at the Beijing LGBT Center when she spotted Xu Na, also an artist, in the middle of a crowded room.
“First sight,” Xue told The Times, recalling when she knew she first loved Xu. “First sight.”
Photos of the wedding by Joshua Barash, courtesy of the City of West Hollywood. (See LA Times video here). 
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 12, 2015
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