by Benjamin Law
But by the time David got there, he was so nervous that he couldn’t speak. The psychologist had to guess his problem for him.
‘Okay,’ the psychologist said. ‘You’re a man, so I think I know your question! A lot of people your age come to me for help. Your question or problem is about … love! Have you separated from your girlfriend recently? Maybe you don’t feel good? I’m here to help. I see many such examples, you know.’
‘No,’ David said shakily. ‘My problem isn’t about this.’
‘Then speak to me,’ the doctor said. ‘What is your problem?’
David started to stammer, but he was frozen with nerves. For him, homosexuality was almost impossible to talk about. It was a condition so embarrassing, so unheard of, he may as well have had another head growing out of his neck. Bemused, the doctor told David to come back after the holidays, before referring him on to another specialist.
This next guy set David at ease. He was an elderly psychologist who reminded David of an affable grandfather. He was good at making small talk and asked David questions about his studies and his hometown, getting him to speak. As soon as he asked David what was wrong, it all came spilling out of him.
‘I have this problem, I like boys, I don’t like girls, what’s happening to me – what’s wrong with me?’
The psychologist smiled and tried to calm David down.
‘Other people like you come here for this kind of problem,’ he said. ‘It’s very common and is something that can be changed. If you want to change, it can be changed.’
To prove his point, the psychologist told David about a couple of lesbians who had come to him for help some months before. They were romantically involved, but couldn’t stand feeling abnormal and guilty any longer. For David’s sake, the psychologist cut out the details of the treatment and skipped straight to the happy ending. After he treated them, he said, both women found boyfriends and lived very happily with their new partners.
David was pepped up by the idea, so he was given some homework. First, he would have to buy some sexy posters of women, stick them up on his dorm wall and think about them whenever he masturbated.
‘Look at the posters and learn to appreciate the beauty of females,’ the psychologist said.
And even though China’s medical standards weren’t as high as those in the United States – they didn’t have those fancy electric-shock machines for this kind of treatment just yet, the doctor explained – David could just as easily invest in some thick rubber bands to place on his wrists and thighs. Every time he thought of boys in a sexual way, he simply had to snap them. Hard. This would train and reshape his brain, the psychologist explained.
Finally, the psychologist wrote out a prescription.
‘Take this medicine,’ he said, tearing it off for David. ‘It will help you relax.’
It was for a drug called Prozac. David didn’t ask what its purpose was, and the psychologist didn’t really explain.
‘I just thought, I believe in this old specialist so much, I will follow everything he tells me,’ David said now. ‘I had no doubt about the medicine at all and spent the money.’
It wasn’t cheap. Four sheets of Prozac cost more than several hundred yuan, and David had to take money from his college scholarship to buy enough.
When his roommates were out of the dorm, David tried masturbating to the beautiful girls in the pin-ups to see whether he could make himself aroused. Pleasingly, he found he could do it. It was working! After a couple of weeks, David was buoyant. Things seemed to be getting better, just as the psychologist had said they would. Every two weeks he’d see the same shrink, and every time the psychologist told David he was doing well.
‘If you persist in this,’ he said, ‘you will be successful in changing yourself some day!’
After a few more weeks, though, David wasn’t sure. He still thought about guys all the time. His wrists were badly bruised from the rubber bands and seemed permanently purply-green. Every time he snapped the bands, they hurt more and more, because there was no time for the bruises to heal before the next round of self-flagellation.
For David’s next appointment, his friendly grandfather-like psychologist was missing, having gone to a conference. A younger male doctor was in his place. This shrink had read David’s files and discussed David’s case with the older doctor. He had a different perspective.
‘David,’ he said, ‘if I told you sexual orientation was something that cannot be changed, what would you do?’
David hadn’t considered this before. He took the question very seriously.
‘If I couldn’t change myself,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘I would kill myself.’
The doctor nodded slowly. He was careful with his words.
‘Maybe you can think about this from another perspective,’ he said. ‘Say sexual orientation is part of you? You could try to accept it.’
David thought this new shrink was trying to catch him out somehow. Maybe he knew less about David’s condition because he was younger and less educated. Sensing David wasn’t ready for a big change, the doctor advised him to keep following the same medical regimen as before.
In the meantime, David had started logging in to the gay resource website Aibai, the one he had originally found when he was looking for treatment options for his homosexuality. One of Aibai’s writers was a man named Damien, an agony aunt who ran the website’s Q&A section. After David emailed Damien, he got a response quickly that detailed how the older generation of Chinese psychologists, educated during the Cultural Revolution, were years behind the rest of the world. The World Health Organization, Damien told David, had held conferences about homosexuality that confirmed it wasn’t a disease at all. Even China hadn’t officially regarded homosexuality as a disease since 2001.
Upset with Damien’s response, David went back to the hospital and confronted the young psychologist with his newfound knowledge.
‘I know about the World Health Organization,’ he said. ‘And I know that in 2001, China eliminated homosexuality as a mental illness. Why did you keep giving me this kind of treatment?’
The psychologist looked at David evenly.
‘David,’ he said, ‘do you remember how I asked you a question? I asked, “If you couldn’t change yourself, what would you do?”’
David stared at the psychologist, remembering.
‘You told me that you would kill yourself. The reason I kept giving you the treatment was not because of homosexuality itself, but because you refused to accept that knowledge.’
David was stunned. Aibai’s Damien had been right.
Damien was a Chinese-American guy in his early fifties. He lived in Los Angeles, but had been the advice writer for Aibai for more than eleven years. In that time, he had personally answered around 60,000 questions from angst-ridden guys desperate for advice. Some were gay men living in heterosexual marriages; others wanted to come out to their parents but didn’t know where to start. Some days, Damien would receive only a few questions. On others, he’d get over thirty. To date, he had answered every single question, including David’s.
‘To be honest, David’s was one of the more benign cases,’ Damien said. ‘All the doctor recommended he do was use rubber bands. He did, incidentally, get bruised terribly around his wrists. But that’s the extent of it. I’ve encountered much more grievous cases.’
The worst was when Damien had travelled to Beijing for an Aibai meeting in 2004. A young guy in his mid twenties, whom I’ll call Perry, had travelled over 1300 kilometres from Hubei province to meet everyone and tell his story. When he was a teenager, Perry’s parents had found out he was gay and immediately taken him to a paediatrician for examination. The doctor prescribed Perry five psychotropic medications (like Prozac and Xanax) simultaneously – medications that, even taken individually, warranted close supervision, especially in young people. Perry’s doses were insanely high. After a week, he was unable to walk. The doctor increased the dose, but, upon inspect
ing Perry a few weeks later, had to make an admission to the parents.
‘I don’t really think I can successfully cure him of his homosexuality,’ he said. ‘It’s possible I could make him asexual, though.’ To be honest, he said, all of this was really about trial and error. Still, the parents were willing to do whatever it took. Together, the doctor and Perry’s parents agreed to increase the dose again.
Eventually, Perry had to stop taking the drugs, not because they were physically disabling him as such, but because they were imported and oppressively expensive. His parents became bankrupt after spending all their savings. When Perry told his story at Aibai’s meeting, everyone started crying quietly. From the stop-start, slurring way Perry was now speaking, it was clear he had suffered irreversible neurological damage.
‘When he talked to you,’ Damien told me, ‘he was like a drug addict. His eyes couldn’t even focus on you. He was never able to go to college or hold a job. This is common now: the first thing parents do when they find out their kid is gay is go on the internet, look on websites and try to find cures. But the mental health profession in China is somewhere between fifty and sixty years behind the West. There are still many people – licensed clinicians – who are stuck in the 1950s and 1960s who offer “cures”, which are sometimes very inhumane and cruel types of treatment, claiming to be able to cure homosexuality. Electroshock therapy and drugs that induce vomiting are routinely used.’
It was cases like Perry’s that kept Damien answering every question he received on Aibai. Because of the sheer volume of correspondence, Damien kept responses short. There was a section on Aibai dedicated to frequently asked questions, but that hadn’t stopped the same questions from coming through.
‘From Day One, the question I’ll always get is: “I’m like this, and this, and this. Am I gay?” That question continues to persist, non-stop,’ he said. ‘But some questions have certainly changed. Ten years ago, more people were asking where they could get condoms. In some parts of China, if you wanted to buy condoms from a drugstore, you had to show a marriage certificate. It was thought that if you weren’t married, you shouldn’t need it, right? Today, nobody asks that anymore.’
Massive numbers of questions centred on marriage. In Damien’s experience, there were four types of married homosexual men in China. Type #1 was men who didn’t know they were gay when they married. Type #2 was men who suspected they were gay, but believed – or at least hoped – that getting married to a woman would cure them of their homosexuality. Type #3 was men who instinctively knew they were gay, but felt it was morally wrong and wanted to get married.
‘Then there are a large number who are the fourth type,’ Damien said. ‘They’re really the problem. These are people who know they are gay, who fully intend to break their marriage vows even before they get married and completely use their spouse to cover themselves. Before, during and after the marriage, they have homosexual relations. They might have a boyfriend, get married to a woman, and continue to have that boyfriend or several boyfriends.’
Damien said it was common for these guys to have unprotected sex with other men, transmit diseases – including HIV – to their wives and still be unapologetic. Partly it was due to a particular brand of ingrained Chinese misogyny, he thought. Men often believed that so long as they provided for their wife financially, they could do whatever they wanted in their own time. Many married men – gay and straight alike – saw their wife as simply someone who could produce a child for them.
Despite the constant barrage, Damien said his job with Aibai wasn’t too difficult. He fit answering the questions into three daily sessions: one in the morning, another in the late afternoon and a final one late in the evening before he went to bed. But despite Damien’s discipline, there had been times where readers hadn’t been able to access his responses. There was one particularly bad patch in 2005, when the entire site was blocked without explanation for a year. It was definitely the Chinese censors at work; the only question was why.
‘No one from government has ever told us we could not operate,’ Damien said. ‘We were never able to verify whether it was a deliberate shutdown of Aibai or not. We just don’t know.’ Since then, authorities had occasionally contacted Aibai about specific content they wanted removed, such as a short story someone had posted about Tiananmen. But for the most part, Aibai played it safe.
‘The Chinese government is somewhat schizophrenic on this,’ Damien said. ‘I don’t think they consider us a threat, and some portions of the government – particularly in health – are much more friendly to gays. But the propaganda branch is still stuck in the ’70s. The Chinese authorities have put out very clear directives to mainstream media saying positive portrayal of homosexuality and homosexual culture is not allowed.’
After talking to Damien on the phone, I went for a walk back through Mudanyuan Park to have a think. This time, I stuck to the areas where the families were gathered, although I knew dozens of men would have been covertly groping each other only metres away, over in the bushes. A couple of months later, twenty police cars would descend on this site at night, catching eighty men in the middle of sex acts and dragging them out of the bushes to detain and question them. After the police mandated blood tests and forced the men to produce their ID cards, it would be revealed that many of them were married. For some of the wives, the arrest wouldn’t come as a surprise. For others, it would. A couple of wives might find Xiaopei’s tongqi hotline in the end, but most would stay quiet, not knowing whom to turn to or how even to describe this development in their marriage.
People had to manage their sexuality in the same way that webmasters in China administered their websites: by necessity it was about constant self-censorship. Outsiders always pointed to the government or China’s legal system as being the biggest issue for gays and lesbians, but it cut far deeper than that. It was social, cultural and personal. It was internal. The young men cruising in the park right now weren’t getting any younger, and the unmarried ones would have to make their choice eventually. As a gay man, do you plan to get married? Some would find their answers on the internet, or they’d find a gay pride centre, or they’d find a woman to sham-marry. Some would go online because they felt lonely and lost, while others would be led to weird places and given terrible doses of drugs. And sometimes they would just disappear entirely. This was what it was like to be a ghost in this country: a person who was entirely invisible, even to yourself.
JAPAN
In which we discover that drag queens, camp gays and transsexuals are popular on television. (Lesbians and non-camp homosexuals: not so much.) Key question: ‘Why is Japanese television so gay?’ Key quote: ‘Sure, there are gay characters on TV, but they are only characters.’ Celebrities approached for this story: twenty-two. Celebrities actually spoken to: four.
IT’S TRUE: YOU WILL find the most breathtakingly messed-up porn in Japan. From outside, the gay sex shop looked innocent enough – decorated with cartoon motifs of Popeye with his muscular, vein-bulging forearms (the perfect icon for hardcore gay porn, I later realised) – but inside, it housed some of the most dizzyingly intense examples of filth I’d ever seen.
Fisting was a given. So were blow jobs, anal sex, muscled gods, twinks, interracial stuff, locker-room fantasies and transsexuals. I had expected all that. But because Japan specialised in catering to super-specific niches, the until-now-unheard-of (at least to me) genre of Fat Men Masturbating in Business Suits took up an entire shelf. So did DVDs of predatory gay men sucking off kidnapped and rope-bound ‘straight’ boys, and videos of boys so young, feminine, fine-featured and hairless that the images on the covers veered close to underage lesbian territory. There was also the infamous guro (gore) porn, an umbrella category of nightmarish stuff that involved blood, disfiguration, beatings, urine, enemas or faeces, as well as a generous and diverse bukkake selection, one of Japan’s more successful inter national exports.
Just metres away from the entrance, a DVD played
in a loop showing two guys going to town on each other. Twisting themselves gymnastically into a 69 position, each reamed the other’s butthole with the enthusiasm of a diner at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Although Japanese law dictated that below-the-waist orifices were to be pixelated out of pornographic films, you didn’t have to work your imagination to make out what was happening. All you had to do was blur your eyes and your brain filled in the blanks.
After browsing around the sex shop, I reeled outside and almost ran into a primary school kid, skipping along with his mother after finishing the day at school. It struck me as both impressive and appalling that the only thing separating this kid from a widescreen hardcore homosexual rim-job video was a semi-sheer plastic curtain.
Welcome to Shinjuku Ni-Chome – ‘Shinjuku, Second Block’ – Tokyo’s premier gay hub. Shinjuku is an engine of human activity, the beating heart of Tokyo’s megalopolis. Its train station is the world’s busiest, with 3.5 million commuters coming through its automated turnstiles every day. At night, the district throws an epileptic fit of neon light and colour. In the midst of this fluorescent wonderland sits Ni-Chome, tiny, low-key and relatively dim, despite its international reputation as a gay enclave. Even with its clubs, bars and the famous 24-hour Kaikan male sex sauna, Ni-Chome is unassuming: a cluster of narrow grey buildings with ropey tangles of power lines stretched between them like old vines. During the day, the place is quiet and sleepy. After lunch, fast-talking salarymen and slow-moving elderly women stroll through, seemingly oblivious to the parallel world of gay hotspots.
You had to look up. The only way you could tell Ni-Chome was any different was by the small square signs that jutted out like fins on buildings, advertising gay bars on the upper levels. These were pokey places with names like BLOKE (all caps; men only) and BAR (women only), tucked away so that you had to climb stairs and knock on the right door to get in. Because of Tokyo’s insane rental prices, the bars were small and restricted their clientele by type. In Ni-Chome, there were bars for guys like me – garisen (skinny guys) – as well as places dedicated to fukesen (old men), gaisen (foreigners) and debusen (fat men). And then there were the lesbian bars, most of which banned men entirely on the basis that they usually came to ogle.
