THE OWNER of Lai Lai’s, Shanghai’s only dance venue for low-income gays, was screaming over the five-piece band. She accused our small contingent of safer sex outreach workers of attracting police scrutiny, telling us to get out of her dancehall and never come back. Dr. Tong Chengliang, sex education specialist and director of HomoHeart, the city’s first specifically gay hotline and outreach organization, told his volunteers to grab their bags of condoms and gay sex literature and leave. Even in relatively open Shanghai in the summer of 2005, police harassment in China was so commonplace that Tong just shrugged his shoulders and said, “We’ll try again next week.”
In December of that year, Tong mysteriously sent his staff and volunteers at the HomoHeart Hotline a message ordering them never to return to the office. From then on,
According to mandates from the Chinese Ministry of Health under the decisive hiv/aids prevention leadership of Vice Premier Wu Yi, HomoHeart was exactly the kind of program China needs to combat the spread of hiv/aids in the MSM population. The same year that HomoHeart stopped operations, the ministry of health began instructing all local centers for disease control to use such community organizations as bridges to at-risk and marginalized populations. In pure numbers, MSM living with hiv/aids in China are overshadowed by IV drug users and the many peasants who were infected through blood sold in the 1990’s. Still, MSM are the fastest-growing HIV-positive population, constituting about 7.3 percent of all HIV-positive cases. With China’s AIDS crisis escalating, how did HomoHeart—a program so seemingly successful, effective, and important to the government—get the axe?
Chinese law forbids gatherings of 300 or more people without prior approval. Public display of sexuality, regardless of numbers or orientation, is illegal as well, but enforcement is mixed. An event’s success ultimately depends on organizers’ connections and the government’s good graces. HomoHeart’s final outreach effort, organized at a just-opened bar called Cellar Disco in December 2005, was both huge and sexually charged. The police were in no mood to let that slip by. Volunteers from the Chi Heng Foundation, a Hong Kong charity dedicated to hiv/aids prevention and treatment on the mainland, had gone to observe at Cellar Disco that night. The rumor was that police and the bar owner had worked out a compromise. If HomoHeart volunteers refrained from performing elaborate outreach drag shows and otherwise promoting public sexuality, the police would let the hundreds of patrons dance in peace.
Dan Zhou, a gay Shanghainese lawyer and activist, says the atmosphere that month was already very politically charged. Firebrand activist Dr. Wan Yanhai had just been arrested again in Beijing for organizing the “Beijing Gay Cultural Festival.” Wan gained international attention in the late 1990’s after being arrested for “selling state secrets” about the government-approved blood-selling practices that had led to the bulk of China’s HIV infections. According to former HomoHeart volunteers and others attending Cellar Disco that night, crowds were over 300, but smaller than expected. Two dozen uniformed police officers watched patrons. Dr. Tong surveyed MSM in another room, only stopping when one man—who appeared to be a plainclothes officer—“seriously harassed” a dancing couple. As a result, crowds thinned and the police left.
Dr. Cheng Linan, former director of the International Peace, Maternity, and Child Health Hospital of the China Welfare Institute and now a professor and researcher there, got the idea for the HomoHeart Sexual Minorities Hotline while observing interactions between local governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Australia. She recruited Dr. Tong, a trusted associate at the hospital, because of his experience in sex education. Tong in turn called on his former medical school classmate, Wan Yanhai, who helped write grants and set up their first email group.
For the first few months, operations at HomoHeart progressed smoothly. Doctors Tong and Wan recruited volunteers and staff with international community organizing and social work experience. Even as Dr. Wan bounced in and out of government hands and the international press, almost no one from the wider health community or government-controlled media even noticed HomoHeart. “I was satisfied,” says Cheng.
But soon there were problems with volunteers using the hotline to find sex partners, according to Cheng. Former staff say they were forbidden to seek personal relationships through the hotline, and deny doing so. Instead, they were trained to provide callers with gay web addresses, explain the risks of engaging in sexual behavior, and free the line. Wan says hospital leaders had larger political concerns. Only a few months after the hotline opened, Wan and Tong sponsored HIV researchers in China on a U.S. grant. Orders came from above that the researchers would have to leave. No one knows how high the orders came from, but Wan says he got blamed. “Whatever [Wan Yanhai] is doing, he involves the government and politics,” was all Cheng would say. “That’s very bad. He created a lot of trouble for us. He took a lot of our good programs and brought misunderstandings to the outside.” This is common criticism of Wan in China.
Tong was eager to discuss HomoHeart’s operations with foreign journalists when I first met him in the spring of 2005. But when I called him on Christmas of that year, he claimed no knowledge of why the hotline closed or where the orders to shut the hotline down originated. The next time I called Tong, he refused to speak to me. The hospital’s new director, Dr. Chen Daning, told me that if I wanted to speak to anyone at her hospital, I would have to get approval from the Foreign Affairs Department of the Shanghai City Government—an impossible task.
This stonewalling has worked. The HomoHeart Sexual Minority Hotline, which was once one of the most progressive social experiments of any hospital in China, has all but disappeared from public memory. Though no one at the hospital publishes figures, it is safe to say that almost no one in the gay community calls this 24-hour hotline. True, homosexuality was removed from the Chinese Psychiatric Association’s list of mental illnesses in 2001, but most MSM still do not feel comfortable calling straight doctors about gay health issues. As Cheng implied, the hospital was in no position to promote gay rights.
“Our state is a lot more open and comfortable for [homosexuals]than before,” Cheng says. “If you say you’re a homosexual, it’s not a problem as long as you don’t break a law, as long as you are charitable toward society. But you ask me what I would do if my daughter said she wanted to marry a woman? I’d oppose it, of course. [But] this isn’t like twenty years ago when I could have locked her up in the house. Young people have resources. They can do what they want.” Cheng exemplifies China’s attitude toward homosexuality: abstract acceptance, personal distaste. She noted that China is not an open society, but is becoming generally more accepting of gays. “You shouldn’t go against the government,” she said. “What are homosexuals doing putting homosexuality, politics, and the government together?”
The notion that organizing huge parties to promote safer sex is an act of revolt goes a long way to explaining why the hotline was shut down. It’s no wonder police continue to follow orders that treat gays as a public security threat. Until attitudes at the local level change, China’s gay debate will continue to be dominated by a few, mostly straight medical professionals, not by those daring individuals who try to live average lives outside the closet.
Dr. Tong’s statistics from a 2005 survey by Dr. Zhang Beichuan indicate that only sixty percent of China’s MSM have ever used a condom during insertive anal intercourse and that seventy percent have had unprotected anal intercourse in the year before that survey are still some of the most accurate safer sex data available. Five years after the UN identified hiv/aids as “China’s Titanic Peril,” China’s MSM time bomb continues to tick. And that five piece band in the old dance hall plays on.
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Joshua Wickerham is a master’s degree candidate focusing on sustainable development in China at UC–San Diego.
