by Benjamin Law
So rather than waiting to be taken offline, Jeff did what all Chinese webmasters did: he self-censored vigorously. Internet commentators often argued most of China’s censorship didn’t come from the central government agency, but from the web moderators themselves, fearful of being shut down. As Suan and Allen passed a large bottle of Sprite to share around the table, Jeff showed me how he moderated Feizan remotely from his iPhone.
‘I’m like the government,’ he said, laughing. He scrolled through the website’s back-end and showed me how it worked. Every time users uploaded new photos, Jeff manually scanned through them to see whether they violated Feizan’s user policies and China’s anti-pornography laws. Naked photos were an obvious no-no. Jeff tapped and flicked through some photos until he found something that made him chuckle. It was a photo someone had tried to add to his Feizan profile. When Jeff passed over his phone, I barely registered what I was seeing before the pixels came together –
(‘Oh, Christ.’)
– to form an extreme close-up of a young man bent over in a red jockstrap, pulling his arse cheeks apart to reveal a tightly knotted purple anus. It was one angry-looking arsehole. For a microsecond, my female translator caught a glimpse of the photo, then darted her face back to me with big bug eyes, suppressing a shocked laugh. It’s difficult to get an eyeful of a stranger’s anus at the best of times, but it was worse when you were trying to eat.
‘What would happen if you didn’t take these photos down?’ I asked.
‘Well, there are two kinds of trouble. First, if I don’t self-censor, then maybe it will break the Chinese wall,’ he said, referring to China’s censorship firewall. ‘Second is that it might become something I don’t want. I want the site to not be like that.’
‘But you already have 5000 users and the website’s only getting bigger. How will you keep monitoring this stuff?’
‘Actually,’ Jeff said, grinning as he showed the jockstrap photo to Allen and Suan, ‘people who do this are not very common to see on Feizan.’
The bloated man in the singlet next to us tried to sneak a look at Jeff’s iPhone too, but before he could, Jeff fished it back from Allen and Suan and removed the picture with a single tap. For the time being, Feizan had slipped under the radar. It hadn’t crossed any lines, as far as Jeff could tell. But in its five months of existence, it had already managed to stir up some controversy, at least among its users. In its early days, it had asked intensely personal questions during the registration process, stuff you’d expect from gay dating and cruising websites but not a social site like Facebook: ‘Are you circumcised? Are you a top or a bottom?’ Both of those questions were gone now.
‘We didn’t want to send the users a message that Feizan was only for people to find boyfriends. But for a while, we had some questions that weren’t quite … right. For example, when you registered, you were asked whether you were more like a “guy”, or more like a “girl”, but it’s the wrong question. We’re gay. You cannot look at gay people from a straight person’s perspective.’
Still, the most howlingly controversial question remained on Feizan’s registration page: ‘Do you plan to get married?’ And Jeff didn’t mean married to someone of the same sex. That wasn’t legal in China. Rather, the question was asking you: As a gay man, do you plan to get married to a woman?
‘Why did you put that question up there?’ I asked.
‘It’s a fun and, well, provocative question,’ Jeff said. ‘I think most gay people in China feel they have to get married and have no other choice. People around me – my gay friends – are either already married to women or are concerned with the issue of getting married.’
It took me a moment to process what Jeff was saying.
‘Wait: so out of Feizan’s 5000 users now, what option are they choosing with the marriage question?’
‘Well, I’ve ticked “No,”’ Jeff said. ‘Most people will choose not sure.’
There was also an option you could check called ‘fake marriage’, which meant finding a lesbian for a sham marriage, an increasingly popular practice. On paper, it made sense. Gays and lesbians needed exactly the same thing: the freedom to pursue relationships with same-sex partners while proving to their parents they were fulfilling their filial duties.
Allen, the youngest of the group and still in his early twenties, stared down at the table when I asked him what he’d ticked. ‘I prefer not to marry, but I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I’m young and not at the age to consider this question. But I think, maybe not? Now, I think about it: no. But I don’t know whether I’ll change my mind in the future.’
‘I chose “No,”’ Suan said. ‘No, I will not get married.’ But then there came a pause as he thought about it more. His bravado slipped a little. ‘Maybe I will do the fake marriage thing later,’ he added, trailing off.
For a moment, everyone stopped eating. Only moments ago, we had been giggling at the photo of a stranger’s butthole and now we were strangely solemn. Nearby, the fat eavesdropping guy in the singlet had grown bored of our conversation and turned his attention to the restaurant’s television. For the first moment that evening we were all quiet, thinking about what each other’s futures held, which boxes we would check in the end.
Say you’re a gay man in China looking for a lesbian to marry. What you’ll need is an account with a website like Tianya.cn or an LGBT group on QQ that specialises in these kinds of homo seeks lezzo classifieds. Imagine a Chinese Craigslist for homosexuals, where everyone’s after a fake wedding. One afternoon, a gay male couple showed me these websites on my laptop and explained the process.
‘It’s like renting an apartment,’ they said. ‘You have to have both parties satisfied on the terms.’
‘And what were your terms?’ I asked.
‘As simple as possible. Just a wedding. No marriage certificate. No kids. No shared properties.’
‘Some of them want kids?’ I asked.
I’d met the Baos through my friend and translator Silvano, who had told me about this monogamous gay couple who’d been together for eight years. One of them had recently married a lesbian to calm down his parents. Doock was thirty-five years old and looked like a former athlete. He had cropped hair, a high hairline and the tanned face of someone who enjoys the outdoors. Dressed in a white North Face t-shirt and exercise shorts, Doock was the more rugged-looking but quieter of the pair. Eric was the same age as Doock, but had a completely different build. He was short and bookish-looking with spectacles on his friendly, doughy face, and had a dry, ironic laugh that showcased rabbity teeth.
Both of the Baos were big on the outdoors, and Eric showed me photos on his mobile phone of their camping expeditions together. Throughout the conversation, Doock slapped Eric’s thigh gently and massaged it without even thinking, the kind of things couples do when they’ve been together for nearly a decade.
‘Our story has not that much drama,’ Doock said. He said this out of humility, in case I’d find them both boring. Not much drama. Here was a couple who’d constructed an elaborate set of lies, cast a lesbian as Doock’s fictitious bride, and got married in front of her mother, before staging another wedding for his parents. If this wasn’t drama – or, at least, a pitch for a B-grade sitcom pilot – I didn’t know what was.
Doock had only started questioning his sexuality after an incident with his best friend from high school, whom I’ll call Lee. After school, Doock and Lee were both accepted into colleges, but their institutions were at opposite ends of the country. On a break during their second year of college, they reunited back home and got, as Doock puts it, ‘physically intimate’. In their minds, Doock and Lee weren’t homosexual or what Chinese people called tongzhi. At that stage, they didn’t even have a vocabulary for what they were doing or feeling.
The next morning, neither Doock nor Lee mentioned what had happened the night before. For Doock, what happened became almost a philosophical question: If you experienced something with another person, but neit
her of you ever spoke of it again, could you be sure it had ever happened?
After returning to their colleges, Doock and Lee kept writing letters, heartfelt messages that would take four days to reach the other. Neither of them mentioned what had happened on semester break. Whenever Doock sent a letter off, he’d wait around, pacing with nerves, finding it difficult to concentrate because all he could think of was how Lee would reply.
Then one day, Lee’s letter came back with big news. He was getting married. To a woman.
‘I didn’t realise my feelings for him were beyond friendship,’ Doock said. ‘But when he said he was getting married, I felt very sad and I wondered why. I thought, If he’s a friend, I should be happy for him. So this was a sadness I couldn’t articulate.’
Doock wrote Lee an epic letter – about eight pages long – finally outlining his true feelings, saying he felt caught in an emotional trap. He sent it so that Lee would receive it just before the wedding in their hometown. Doock hadn’t been invited.
Doock never got a response. He never saw or heard from Lee again. By this stage, Doock was twenty-five and had never been in a relationship with anyone. By Chinese standards, he was getting old. Nearly all his friends were either married or engaged, and Doock started wondering whether he should do the same. At night, lying in bed, he asked himself to be honest: had he ever liked girls? He tried to imagine what it’d be like dating one, holding one, having sex with one, spending the rest of his life with one. If he was really honest, the answer to his question was ‘No’. He liked other guys. So he went on the internet.
Finding men online was both heartening and painful. Before this, Doock said, he hadn’t had to consider the possibility of living ‘a life beyond norms’. Still, it didn’t take long to find someone Doock clicked with, and they quickly became boyfriends. Doock also registered with a chirpy-sounding website called SunHomo, which connected gay guys in China who had similar interests like badminton, swimming, volleyball and singing. It was all very wholesome, and it was how Doock met Eric. Eric immediately found Doock attractive, but knew Doock already had a boyfriend.
(‘But I wanted him to become my boyfriend,’ Eric mock-whined now.)
If Doock and Eric’s love story was ever novelised, it would be less Love in the Time of Cholera and more Love in the Time of the 2003 SARS Outbreak. Doock’s then boyfriend lived in a separate city when the descending epidemic forced people to stay indoors, rushing out to the grocery stores with disposable medical masks strapped onto their faces only when supplies ran low. Hospitals swelled with wheezing, frightened patients, who knew they were infected with something mysterious and deathly. Families quarantined themselves in their apartments, glued to the TV news as they watched the death toll climb.
For several months, it was impossible for Doock and his boyfriend to visit one another. Maybe it was the distance or all the time he had to himself, but Doock soon realised he didn’t have much in common with his boyfriend at all. He called the relationship off. Eric saw his opportunity and made his move. And that was that. After a few months, when they were both twenty-seven, Eric and Doock moved in together.
Although he wasn’t physically imposing or conventionally handsome, Eric had the winning confidence that came with being very self-assured from an early age. He had been dimly aware of being gay since he was a kid and had started having sex with other guys during college. (‘I’m precocious,’ he said, laughing.) It took him years before he came out to his parents, though. After he moved in with Doock, he formulated a plan whereby he’d slowly drip-feed his parents information about gay culture and drop strong hints about himself. He’d erode their expectations over time, rather than coming down on them with a revelation like an anvil.
Part of Eric’s plan involved having his parents live with them for a year. I was appalled.
‘They lived with you for a year?’
‘We had two bedrooms,’ Eric said. ‘My parents had one; we had one. Every night, we’d lock the door before going to bed. My mother was very curious. “Why do you do that?” she asked. I said it was Doock’s preference, that he was a child raised without a sense of security.’
We all laughed, because the story was lame on so many levels. Still, Eric’s parents weren’t totally dumb.
One day, while eyeing off Doock, Eric’s mother leaned over and said to Eric: ‘Don’t be too close to him.’
Eric’s brother and cousin already knew he was gay, but they’d each warned him that his mother would commit suicide if she ever found out the truth. But Eric went ahead anyway, sitting his mother down one evening while Doock was in another room. His mother was crying so much that it was difficult for her to say anything.
‘My gay identity cannot be changed,’ Eric told her. ‘Research has proved that. And I’ve been with Doock for so many years. I’m not going to separate from him, and it’s not something you can choose. The only option is to accept our relationship, because that’s what makes us happy.’
The next morning, everyone pretended that nothing had happened: the traditional Chinese approach. Eric’s mum had filled in his father about the situation. Her eyes were swollen from crying. Before she left, Eric said to her, ‘You have to convince yourself of our happiness.’
Eric’s relationship with his parents wasn’t perfect, but he could stand it.
At that point in the story, Doock stretched and casually changed the subject.
‘As for my parents?’ he said, looking quite pleased with himself. ‘Well, I’m married to a lesbian.’
I laughed. His declaration had come out of nowhere. I suspected Doock had rehearsed that line in English just to impress people, because he repeated it when he saw my reaction.
‘I’m married to a lesbian!’ he said in English again, slapping his thighs. He looked up at the ceiling, like someone who could barely believe what he’d got away with.
Doock came from Henan province. Because of timing and geography, his parents weren’t subject to the one-child policy, so Doock had a little brother, whom I’ll call Leung. When Leung announced he was getting married, Doock’s parents were horrified, since it was traditional for the eldest sibling to marry first. To them, siblings getting married in the wrong order was shameful. It would have been enough to scandalise the entire village. When Doock’s mother heard that Leung was engaged to marry, she cried every day down the phone line, begging Doock to marry someone first. It was pretty intense. Doock’s main concern was his little brother. He didn’t want to make Leung wait forever, so he turned to his gay friends for advice.
‘What you need to do,’ they told him, ‘is marry a lesbian.’
Doock stared at them.
‘Well, what are your options?’ they said. ‘You can postpone it, but your younger brother’s already engaged. You don’t want to make him wait, so the only option is to just get married. Find a lesbian who wants the same arrangement as you. Everything will be fine.’
Doock and Eric were wary. They’d both heard bad stories – and even seen firsthand – how these sham weddings could get out of hand. At one, the gay groom had made the mistake of inviting his gay friends. They’d gotten completely smashed on booze and treated the whole thing like a joke. One of them had climbed onto the lazy Susan and asked another guy to spin him around and around, cackling and hooting while every one looked on in horror.
In the end, though, Doock and Eric agreed with their friends. There wasn’t another option. They set up an account with Tianya.cn and started searching for lesbians.
As it turned out, finding lesbians for a fake wedding was a little like going on a game show to see who’s behind the mystery door. First up: Lesbian Couple #1! And what did these lesbians want? An official marriage certificate, shared property and a relatively wealthy husband! Looking back, Doock and Eric felt Lesbian Couple #1 were too aggressive in their demands. ‘The requirements were more strict than if you were choosing a real husband,’ Doock said. Lesbian Couple #1 were quickly ruled out.
Les
bian Couple #2 weren’t interested in shared property, but did want a legally binding marriage certificate and children. For Eric and Doock, both of those things were out of the question, especially the kids. It was a shame, because Lesbian Couple #2 and the Baos got along really well and shared the same dry sense of humour. Lesbian Couple #2 wished the Baos the best and referred them on to Lesbian Couple #3.
‘Ah, the third couple,’ Doock said now, bowing his head. ‘One meeting determines a lifetime.’
Lesbian Couple #3 lived in Tianjin, China’s third biggest metropolis behind Shanghai and Beijing. Eric had already been scheduled to go to Tianjin for work, so Doock booked tickets to come along for the ride.
The Baos met the lesbian (I’ll call her Linda) and her girlfriend in a hotel lobby. Like the organisers of any decent crime, everyone thought it would be best to chat in a public place. Doock showed me a picture of Linda on his Nokia mobile phone. She was a handsome, bespectacled, broad-faced woman with a square jaw and a sensible haircut, dressed in a fuschia blouse.
‘She looks nice,’ I said, passing the phone back to Doock.
‘Very butch,’ Doock said, nodding.
Doock, Eric, Linda and her girlfriend broke the ice by talking about their hobbies, backgrounds and jobs, before moving on to their relationships. Linda and her partner, whom I’ll call Susan, had been together for a decade and were childhood sweet hearts. Susan had already fake-married a gay guy in Beijing; now Linda’s parents were pressuring her to get married too. Though Doock and Linda barely knew each other, it was obvious that their needs matched up perfectly. That’s all it took. The marriage was on.
From there it was all amateur theatre, complete with wedding costumes and fudged lines. Doock explained Chinese parents didn’t care how couples had first met, but he and Linda concocted a story anyway, something about having a mutual friend. ‘If I forgot my lines,’ Doock said, ‘I’d look to Linda for help and she’d cover for me.’ It helped that Doock bore an uncanny resemblance to Linda’s late father. His future mother-in-law took an immediate shine to him.
