Gaysia

by Benjamin Law

  There would be two weddings: one for Linda’s mother and another for Doock’s parents, since they lived so far from one another. The in-laws would never meet. For both weddings, neither Linda nor Susan invited anyone who knew they were lesbians. To be safe, Doock and Eric didn’t invite any of their gay friends either. The only people who knew the true identities of the couples were the celebrants, who were actually actors the couples knew. No one could risk anything. None of this was about fun.

  At the Tianjin wedding for Linda’s mother, Linda’s relatives gave Doock hóng-bau, traditional red paper packets stuffed with money that are given at Chinese weddings instead of gifts. Doock refrained from drinking, mainly because he didn’t want to get drunk, but also because he needed to drive. It made for a long evening. After the wedding was over, Doock drove his new mother-in-law back home, then drove with Linda to the entrance of Tianjin’s superhighway. Eric and Susan were waiting for them by the side of the road. The couples exchanged partners and Doock took all the hóng-bau money out of his trousers.

  ‘Here,’ he said to Linda and Susan. ‘This isn’t mine.’

  Together, they drove to Doock’s home province of Henan and hired two hotel rooms: one for Doock and Linda; the other for Eric and Susan. In the middle of the night, under cover of darkness, the couples opened their doors, crept down the corridor and, giggling like high schoolers on camp, exchanged partners again.

  ‘We really didn’t have any other options,’ Doock said. ‘It’s hard to say whether we have chosen the best course, because it was the only one available. But since then, the people around us – the parents, the relatives – they feel satisfied. They’re pleased with the marriage. In the end, we think it was worthwhile taking the trouble.’

  ‘You don’t feel any guilt?’ I asked. ‘Towards your parents, I mean.’

  Doock looked into the middle distance, thinking. ‘A little.’

  Nowadays, the official story was that because Doock worked in Beijing and Linda worked in Tianjin, they were a ‘weekend couple’, an increasingly common phenomenon for young couples in China who worked in different cities. They told their parents they lived in Doock’s Beijing apartment whenever they could. There had only been one occasion when Linda’s mother announced that she wanted to visit Beijing to see where Doock and Linda lived. They put up photos of Doock and Linda and removed the ones of Doock and Eric. They removed Eric’s clothes from the shared wardrobe and replaced them with Linda’s outfits. Eric left the house, effectively forced out of his own home.

  ‘It’s just for one day,’ Eric said, shrugging. ‘She’s only made one visit in three years, so that’s no big deal. There was some tension, but only because we were afraid we’d blow it.’

  Doock and Eric knew at least twenty other gay couples who’d found lesbians to fake-marry. Sometimes they’d all get together and laugh over shared war stories – the partner-swapping, the botched logistics, the close calls and the sham ceremonies – but they acknowledged it was less of a romp and more of a grim necessity.

  ‘Fake marriage is not so good,’ Eric said. ‘We are lucky to have suitable girls to play along with us. But I would prefer a gay marriage if possible.’

  Since then, Doock had heard that Lesbian Couple #1 had undergone a dramatic breakup. Lesbian Couple #2 had ended up finding a gay man to marry, but they didn’t have children together in the end. And now, even though they had made it clear that they didn’t want children, both Doock’s and Linda’s parents were pestering them about the possibility. Doock told everyone he was too busy. Linda told everyone she wasn’t physically strong enough.

  Recently, Doock had taken Linda back to Henan to visit his parents. It was one thing real marriages and fake marriages had in common: the mutual obligation of visiting each other’s parents when you really couldn’t be bothered. On the train ride there, Doock and Linda talked about the conundrum of children.

  ‘Maybe you should still give me a kid,’ Doock said to Linda. ‘I’ll pay 15,000 yuan.’

  Linda thought about it – the sum was close to 2400 US dollars – then raised an eyebrow. ‘Make it 16,000,’ she said. Then, after a moment of terse silence, they burst into laughter, neither of them quite sure where the joke began and where it ended.

  Most gay men in China were married: either in sham marriages like Doock’s, or in marriages where the wife was unaware of the husband’s preference for guys. If such men needed a quick fix, a lot of them went online to search for anonymous fuck-buddies, while others cruised in parks for fervent sex in the shadows. In Beijing, the best place to find other men for quick sex was Mudanyuan Park. At a glance, you couldn’t tell it was the city’s hotspot for man-on-man action. In the day, it was one of Beijing’s loveliest family outdoor areas, a tidy public garden with a narrow canal running through it like a cement artery. This waterway was lined with boxy shrubs that led to lush lawns, while a giant spindly transmission tower loomed in the distance. Old men and women came here with their grandkids to fly kites so high that they trailed out of sight and all you saw were taut cords being pulled into the atmosphere.

  If you ventured away from the families, walked from the canal up the park’s sloping hill, you’d find an open-air section thick with bushes, which operated as a kind of sex terrace for horny men. Trees were planted at arm’s length from each other, and between these trees were large wooden benches in clearings where people – mainly men – could gather and chat. On the day I went exploring, one clearing was occupied by a fierce-looking drag queen who was performing a feisty monologue in front of skinny, mincing gay men. Some lay down and rested their heads on their lovers’ laps, trying not to move in the heat. One stretched out on a ratty tarpaulin on the ground, wearing a singlet artfully shredded to reveal his nipples. Older men quietly did embroidery, murmuring to each other in low gossipy tones. It was an outdoor queer stitch and bitch where men could happily gossip the day away.

  Further back, the shrubs grew thicker and well-worn human tracks snaked their way between dense six-foot bushes. Some of these bushes had been hollowed out, as though dwarves had hacked their way through the branches to create discreet spaces specifically for men to fuck inside. Inside the hollows was debris: disposable tissue wrappers, single-use lube packets, crumpled cigarette boxes, mint wrappers, decaying wads of toilet paper and layers of dried-out condoms from long-forgotten sex. Lawn mowers had recently charged through the park, shredding the toilet paper and strewing snowy white dandruff over the grass. As I wandered through the bushes, young urban professionals in starched work shirts made intense eye contact with me. A lot of them wore wedding bands.

  After a while, I was less interested in the men. Instead, I started to wonder about their wives.

  He Xiaopei was an academic who specialised in Chinese wives stuck in marriages to gay men. There was even a name for them: tongqi, or ‘homowives’. Xiaopei was in her mid fifties, looked like an old-school dyke – shaved head, thin-rimmed glasses – and ran a women’s organisation called Pink Space. In late 2007, Xiaopei went to a conference of gay Chinese men discussing how they could make use of the law to protect themselves. Men got up and presented their stories, with testimonies about being harassed by police and bullied by their family members. Out of the blue, a woman raised her hand and asked if she could share her story. He Xiaopei and the men turned around in their chairs to face her. They had seen this woman on the way in, but no one knew who she was. She had arrived at the conference alone.

  ‘I’m not sure if I should speak,’ she said. ‘I’m just a standard heterosexual woman.’

  Xiaopei and the others laughed to themselves. What was a ‘standard heterosexual’, anyway? And if such a thing existed, what was she doing here in a room full of non-standard homosexuals?

  The woman’s eyes darted around nervously, but she persevered. ‘After I was married to my husband,’ she said, ‘he would beat me. And after our child was conceived, there was a year and a half without any sex whatsoever. Afterwards, my husband would
n’t even touch me. He didn’t even look at me in the eyes! So when I discovered he is gay, of course it made sense …’

  The woman kept talking, about how her husband would fuck men, about how when she complained, he would beat her. One of the key speakers at the conference – a female sexologist who was relatively famous in China, but whom Xiaopei declined to name – interjected from the stage.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the sexologist said, ‘but I’ve done a lot of studies into gay men and what you’re saying just isn’t represented in the research. It’s not in the literature. There have been no such stories of domestic violence.’

  Emboldened, a male gay activist joined in. ‘And this is a gay meeting,’ he told the woman. ‘This is not an appropriate place to tell this kind of story!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said, ‘I didn’t mean to –’

  Other men called out, joining in the chorus, telling the woman to be quiet and sit down. Stunned, the woman took her seat. Xiaopei felt sorry for her. And, although she didn’t say this to anyone at the time, she strongly disagreed with the sexologist.

  ‘Obviously, it’s “represented”,’ she told me. ‘No matter whether straight or heterosexual, domestic violence happens in one-third of all families in China. Why not gay men? Gay men have more reason to beat up their wives: they don’t like them! I felt like this woman was being told she didn’t exist.’

  During the interval, the conference organiser approached Xiaopei, worried about what had happened. ‘Was it a mistake, allowing that woman to come to the conference?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Of course not,’ Xiaopei said.

  When the meeting was over, Xiaopei introduced herself to the woman and asked whether she could interview her. Xiaopei travelled to her hometown, met her child and spent hours talking about her case. It was the first time Xiaopei had heard anything like this, but she suspected there were other cases.

  Xiaopei decided she would start a tongqi phone hotline that would operate every Wednesday. Advertising something like this was a little awkward. Xiaopei placed advertisements in gay newspapers, hoping married gay men would pass the details on to their wives. Marie Claire’s Chinese edition rang a story on tongqi with all the details for the hotline, but because only middle-class, rich or expatriate women in China tended to read the magazine, Xiaopei knew it would not reach women in regional China. Still, women somehow kept discovering the hotline. When the calls came, they lasted for hours, and the women were prepared to pay. It wasn’t a cheap service, since all calls were handled over a standard mobile phone line, which was incredibly expensive by Chinese standards.

  ‘When people call, they pay a lot,’ Xiaopei said. ‘Lots of people will call for two hours.’

  Because of the volume of calls, Xiaopei arranged a face-to-face meeting just for tongqi, the first of its kind in China. Some heard about it through the hotline; others found out about it through friends or the internet. They travelled by train and bus to get there, mainly solo, except for one married couple: a gay man who’d tried to commit suicide, and his wife. In total, there were ten people. It was going to be a full-day session, and when everyone arrived that morning, they were nervous. Some of them left their sunglasses on, trying to shield their identities.

  In the first few minutes of the meeting, nothing much happened. Someone started weeping, then it became contagious, with everyone in the room breaking down. One woman in her mid fifties couldn’t even speak, she was crying so much. She spent the first couple of hours releasing intense, heaving sobs, as though someone were tugging a deeply anchored rope out of her. Like any good lesbian organiser, Xiaopei eventually focused on workshopping everyone’s feelings. What emotions were being expressed? What were people’s needs? How did people feel? Everyone gathered around and brainstormed, writing on a large sheet of butcher’s paper. The main thing these women needed, Xiaopei discovered, was someone to talk to.

  All of them said the same thing: that after they discovered their husbands were having sex with other men, they couldn’t talk to their parents or friends about it. Xiaopei was curious.

  ‘What’s the difference?’ she asked the women. ‘Lots of husbands have affairs with women, so what’s the difference if your husband has an affair with a man?’

  ‘If your husband has an affair with a woman,’ one woman said, ‘you could talk to your friends and family. If your husband has an affair with a man, you can’t talk to anybody.’

  The group kept exchanging personal stories. When they got to the sole man – the one who’d brought his wife along – he talked endlessly. Sitting next to him, his wife remained resolutely silent. Patiently, listening to the man dissect the difficulties of being a gay man married to a woman, Xiaopei gently interrupted.

  ‘We’ve only heard from you so far,’ Xiaopei said to the man. ‘Can we hear from her now?’

  ‘She can’t talk,’ the husband said. ‘She has nothing to say.’

  ‘Maybe if you’re quiet,’ Xiaopei said, ‘and really don’t interrupt, she’ll talk. We want to hear from her.’

  The wife looked around at the other women, opened her mouth, then meekly started talking. After a stumbling start, she ended up talking non-stop too, barely taking a breath, like someone who had developed circular breathing. It was a monumental outpouring, an avalanche of bitterness, accusations, anger and hatred towards this husband of hers, rambling on and on until, finally – as though the idea had only just occurred to her – she turned on her husband, pointed an accusatory finger in his face and demanded a divorce. Xiaopei looked on, quietly thrilled.

  She couldn’t help but laugh when recounting the story now. But in China, she explained, divorce was rarely the best option for such women. If you were a married woman, you had the support of both your husband and your family. If you were divorced, the stigma meant your own family often wouldn’t associate with you. And then there was the financial shock of divorce, especially if you were a non-working woman, and especially if you had a kid. A lot of tongqi weighed things up and stayed in the marriage.

  Tongqi weren’t unique to China. All over the world, closeted gay men married women to fit in, repress their sexual desires, or because they didn’t have a choice. It was why Western people referred to these women as beards: they were something to hide behind. But in China, everything was compounded by an irrefutable expectation of marriage, a government-enforced one-child policy that placed pressure on young people to reproduce, and a lack of public knowledge.

  ‘Do you feel this is unique to China?’ I asked Xiaopei.

  ‘In a way,’ she said. ‘In China, homosexuals don’t have any kind of publicity, apart from on websites. In newspapers, television and books, homosexuals can’t appear. So when you say “homosexuals”, it’s like a ghost. Something that doesn’t even exist.’

  David was twenty-six years old but looked younger. He was short and lanky, and wore a combination of board shorts, screenprinted t-shirt and Converse sneakers, like a teenager in a boyswear catalogue. Around the eyes, though, David looked far older. He had a haunted look about him, and there was always a slight delay when he smiled. Afterwards, I concluded that this was probably what happened when psychologists tried to reverse your homosexuality with self-harming aversion therapies and an over-prescription of Prozac.

  David grew up in a small rural village called Shi Qiao in the north of Hubei province. Between his home and school was a large creek where local farmers bred freshwater fish. As a young teenager, David would pass the creek four times every day: to get to school, come home for lunch, head back to school, then finally come back home. David couldn’t swim himself, but in the summer boys his age would strip off and swim there naked. David would find himself hiding behind bushes, unable to take his eyes off their bodies. It was the first time he suspected he was different somehow.

  When David eventually went to university in Shenyang, he didn’t find any information about homosexuality in the library. Some of his classmates had shown him how to use the inter
net, but only students studying courses in technology and design were allowed access to university computers. For everyone else, there were public ‘computer bars’, or internet cafés.

  ‘I’ll be frank,’ David told me. ‘When I began to use the internet, the first thing I looked for wasn’t information about homosexuality or whether homosexuality was abnormal. It was to look at pictures of males. A lot of websites had very hot pictures, and it was all about that.’ Every time he visited the internet café, he would sit in the same strategically placed seat: pushed up against the corner with a wall directly behind his back for privacy.

  Horny and confused but unable to jerk off there, David would rush back to his college dorm. But, as in most Chinese universities, it was difficult to find any personal space. Communal shower blocks were entirely without walls and only open for set hours every day. Dorms housed triple-decker bunk beds against every available wall without any personal study areas. On rare occasions, though, David got back to find that all his roommates were out. Because it wasn’t possible to lock the room, he had to seize the opportunity to come quickly and furtively in his hand.

  Every time he went to the internet café, though, David felt more and more guilty, sensing he was doing something wrong. He didn’t talk to anyone about his feelings and suspected no one else was like him. In 2004, he started looking for help on the internet. In the Chinese search engine Baidu, he typed in the word for ‘homosexuality’ in Chinese (tong zhi lian) as well as ‘treatment’(yiliao).

  David found two sources of information. One of them was a website named Aibai, an online gay education resource with a question and answer service. He also found an advertisement for a university’s psychology department that said they were able to assist with disorders like depression. It seemed legitimate.