Goodness Gayness:
Pieces to the Chinese Comrade Research Puzzle--Freely Distributed!

After work today I went to the Shanghai Public Health Education Center. The sky was blue. The wind from the typhoon off the east coast brought gusts of clean, cool air. For the first time in several months, I wasn't dripping with sweat and breathing exhaust fumes.

I was in the Jingan District looking for Mr. Gu Wenqi, a professor of public health at the Center. With the help of the security guard, I found "Young Gu," which turned out to be "wrong Gu," because the man I was looking for was in his early 70s--"Old Gu."

I found him in an office with windows facing a quaint street. I told him I was reasearching China's HIV prevention efforts and gay culture in general. He said his job never had anything to do with HIV or gays. So why had a contact suggested I go there? Was there more to him than waving jet black hair, smiles and his patient Mandarin?

Ten years earlier, he says, a Shanghainese gay was killed. Turns out, killed by another gay. Gu noticed that a lot of queers came out of the woodwork to support each other, even though they had no relationship to the killer or the victim. Hmm..the perfect chance to survey the gay population. What Mr. Gu found surprised him.

Not only was this group much larger than he thought, he even found himself having sympathy with these people! From the over 100 men and dozen or so women he surveyed, he learned about their relationships, sexual practices, and difficulties in everyday society. People who were too afraid to talk to him wrote him letters and told him even more heart-wrenching tales.

A freelancer friend of his put all of this information into an article and that article caught the attention of some of China's top sexologists. The most prominent researchers in Shanghai and Beijing turned their attention to him. They realized they had been ignoring a large portion of the Chinese population. But who never called him? Journalists and leaders. And they still don't.

Some of the people mentioned in the artilce got visitors too. Even though they used nicknames, some of the circumstances gave them away. One of the men was a singer at a hotel. Police did not have legal authority to use his homosexuality against him. All they could do was drag him to jail on trumped up tax evasion charges.

In 2000, the Chinese Psychiatric Association declared that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. There are no laws against homosexuality. Just millenia of Confucian thought. Many Chinese think being queer is just a foreign thing. It doesn't help that most queers are too afraid to come out. As my oral Chinese teacher said last semester, "Oh, I don't know any people like that. I don't think China has any homosexuals."

With 40 million more men than women, China not only has homosexuals. It is, in the words of my best friend, home to "the inevitably gay Chinaman."

From your narrator's perspective, that's more than a breath of fresh air.