Gays in China Step Out, With One Foot in Closet: Gone are the days when gays in China's cities lived completely closeted lives, and the Galaxy Club — whose large glass doors open unapologetically onto the lobby of a government office building — is a giddy, liberated kind of place. [...] But when the doors close at 2 or 3 a.m., he will cross the border to the other world also inhabited by the vast majority of China's gay men, that of husband and father, as he returns to the apartment he shares with his wife and school-age child. "In China there is a very strong tradition that to be a man you must get married and have a child, so I did," explained Mr. Wu, who refused to give his full name. "We also respect and obey our parents' wishes, so I did it for them, too."
I absolutely can't imagine living that life. It must be incredibly difficult to try to balance things, to make sure that people don't find out , that you behave so that questions aren't asked.
And, as the article notes, the issue of AIDS is hanging over everything. Given that behavior pattern, it's likely that it's going to become the sort of epidemic that they have elsewhere in Asia and in Africa, where there's no real distinction between heterosexual and homosexual disease rates because there's no real distinction between heterosexual and homosexual.
Posted by iain at April 12, 2002 01:31 PMComments
