How a Dating App Helped a Generation of Chinese Come Out of the Closet

How subversive can language be. In the 1980s - before the erasure of China’s Communist era honorifics from popular usage - the word ‘tongzhi’, commonly translated to English as comrade but having a more literal meaning suggesting a shared philosophical path, was the politically correct form of address. How clever it is that at some point along the way Gay people slyly coopted the levelling Communist Party terminology.

Amazing article!

Reading stories like this makes me sad that humans have been around for over 100k years and >99.9% of that time was spent with extreme LGBTQ oppression. Reminds me of Family Guy's Road to the Multiverse... imagine a universe where reality was not judged/oppressed.

This was really informative--I was surprised Chinese society/government was not more repressive. I do though wonder, along with others, where the lesbians are in China. Certainly not in this article.

Where are the lesbians? Why are most of these articles regarding the L.G.B.T.Q. community always about gay men? Lesbians face the same kind of scrutiny and discrimination that gay men face. Never in my life, did I think I would still be fighting for the same things I was fighting for as a young lesbian. While gay life in China is both modern in some ways and backwards in others, any gay person in America will recognize and appreciate their struggles. It's more than 50 year since I fought for equal rights for lesbians and gay men. It's 50 years since I attended and started some consciousness-raising groups. And, it's 42 years since I helped organize a tribute to Harvey Milk in Los Angeles after his assassination. We're still fighting for acceptance and equal rights. We'll never stop. To my fellow lesbians, make your voice heard and stand up for yourselves. No one else is going to do it for you.

At last, a positive story to take my mind off all the awful men. So far, so good for LGBT people in China. I hope their success grows. If the government would pay for surrogacy, they'd have a lot more wanted children.

Historical Chinese culture might not have condemned homosexuality, but gay men - especially the eldest son - were still expected to marry women so they'd produce (male) children to carry on the family name. I'd guess it was similar to Greek (Roman?) culture.

fang/shou (“opening up and tightening”). This explanation of the political status quo's relationship to the Queer community in China gave me a good chuckle for not very noble reasons.

Can you please translate this to Chinese for some of my Chinese speaking friends?

I've been to China many times and have many friends there, and have traveled together with my husband too. We've never felt the slightest bit awkward either among our friends or walking along the streets of various towns holding hands together. The lack of a Judeo-Christian ethic is a blessing in disguise for Chinese gays. True, the social stigma of having a family and children remain, but it's a societal issue that doesn't have anything to do with homosexuality, per se, but rather making an equal contribution to Chinese society as defined by basic family standards. Having said this, the notion of family and children and so forth is also changing in China and it's only a matter of time before China joins Taiwan in legalizing same-sex marriages. Cases have already made it to court and I believe they will be approved sooner rather than later.

I read the comments, and many have imprtant things to say. But what is important here is that they can be said in the very first place in mainland China. I understand the opinions of lesbians and transgendered people. But this is a good safe quiet start. After reading this one thing I thought about was all the very very brave gay chinese who are trying to make a better life for themselves, and others.

A fascinating article but, like many NYT articles about LGBTQ people, it is devoid of any discussion of the experiences of women and transgender people. How can an article about what is purportedly the biggest gay website in the world fail to quote or interview one Chinese woman or trans person about their coming out experiences with respect to Blued?

Very interesting article, many older Chinese I know tend to deny the widespread existence of homosexuals in China and ascribe it to the shortcomings of Western morals. Yet another example of how remarkably conservative and backwards the Chinese Communist Party is with respect to anything having to do with sexuality. Not exactly revolutionary. By the way, "tongzhi" isn't "the Chinese word for homosexual," that would be "tongxinglian." But as "comrade" fell out of favor over the past 30 years, the homosexual community adopted it as a euphemism for referring to their own. The use of "tongxinglian" would risk censorship, "tongzhi" of course would not.

Terrific article. I also think Liu's description of the tension b/t activism and change-by-the-rules is both real and not a real tension at all for a simple reason: There's no choice. This is reality. And change by the rules that allows for ever increasing growth, for the quiet growth of tens of millions of openly gay people and hundreds of millions of straight people who are friends with and family of openly gay people is, in any case, the only real thing that makes real change. All there is is just coming out. That's all there ever was or will be. Just coming out. On we go.

This “feature” appears to me – a Hong Kong gay man with a reasonable exposure to the general happenings in the mainland – to be a picture penned somewhat behind rosy glasses. To put things gently. First thing first, calling Jin Xing “the nationally beloved talk-show host sometimes called China’s Oprah” is utterly ridiculous. The lady’d be the first one to agree. From what I know of her. She doesn’t even have her talk-show. Or any influence to talk about. At best, she is the guest of a reality-show. Jin Xing became the TOLERATED token transgender woman in China before Xi’s reign. She was lucky. To say that “in contrast to other minority groups, the LGBTQ minority poses no explicit threat to party value and is low-priority to be on the government’s radar” is presuming the party values military threats above ideological threats. Which is not the case of the current regime. Xi, for the past few years, has been working hard on his legacy, tearing pages off Mao’s little red book, tidying up loose ends to secure that he’d not be another Gorbachev – the guy who lost the Communist Party to the people. It was not a military lost. Of course, how people work and play is not necessarily in accordance with the party’s wish. When it comes to play, Travel Guides do tend to stay away from any LGBTQ outlets on their China pages. Because they want to stay on good pages with the regime. Or else…they are not welcome. Like NYT.

In China everything seems to move in lightning speed, but cultural inertia is hard to move. The acceptance of gays & lesbians in USA took decades. Americans are very "religious", most people grow up brainwashed by traditional Sunday schools. Still, the move towards modernity and turning the back on medieval religious dogma worked. Chinese can learn a thing or two from Americans in this case. How did they managed to finally make same-sex marriage legal, TV shows about gay characters, and a gay mayor running for American President? A couple of things could work for gays & lesbians in China, just as they work in USA: money, fame & success is one. If one is as successful as Apple's CEO Tim Cook, all is forgiven. The other is pledge of patriotism. Pete Buttigieg won a badge of honor for being a veteran, which has considerable currency in America's military & macho-culture. The same could work in China. Being an ex-cop or ex-PLA, or better yet, a CCP party member, could help to turn cultural tides.

This article claims to be reporting on “gay” culture in China, yet there is not one lesbian female quoted or mentioned by name. And the one transgender female mentioned holds male supremacist views. No matter the demographic—gay, straight, white, black, rich, poor— there seems to be a troubling propensity to assume that the males of that demographic are the default and that it’s acceptable to ignore the voices and intersectional concerns of the women of that demographic—in this case, lesbians.

Does the paper have a Chinese owner now? This is the second front page story about Chinese culture in the NYT today. Seems unnecessary given the primary and the virus.

Marxist and Marxist-capitalist countries like Russia and China normally ban homosexuality. (Marxist capitalism is a system combining thought control with love of money). China's one-child policy led to a great surplus of young men, since baby girls were given away for adoption or aborted so that the family could try again and perhaps have a son. Because of the surplus of young males, Chinese rulers grudgingly modified their position on homosexuality, since too many single men might have led to a more rebellious society. Allowing gay men to follow their instincts would lower the number of men who could not find mates. Unfortunately, this could not help the situation of Chinese lesbians.

What an extraordinarily thorough and well-researched article. As someone with a gay friend in Shanghai, this echoes the challenges of his day-to-day experience, especially as he continues to live with his family. I learned a lot, and articles like this are why I continue to subscribe to NYT.

This well-written article was a reminder of the enormous progress we've experienced in the US in my lifetime, and of how far we have to go worldwide to overcome archaic beliefs. I was heartened to read about Duan's progress, and hope that our brothers in China take heart. It gets slowly better.

I am both hopeful and reserved about this article. Hopeful because it is nuanced and in-depth enough to provide a more complicated view of LGBTQ in China. Reserved because underneath the surface it still employs the same over-universalized substructure of identity that has defined the movement in the west. I hope that readers will lean into the paradoxical aspects presented, not as problems to be resolved, but differences which are unique to each place - proliferation without activism, culture and economy, acceptance vs. publicity. These uncomfortable differences are surely felt by many Chinese as well, but it is also important to note that: 1) in the most fashionable and trendy public spaces in Shanghai you can openly walk out in drag 2) American companies such as Burger King can openly target LGBTQ customers in their base in a way that they never could in the US 3) The Chinese streaming platforms such as Bilibili or Tiktok have become increasingly ambiguious spaces in which themes (such as beauty and cosmetics) are utilized for expression of sexuality in the guise of tutorials (by gay men, for example). The catastrophic situation for LGBTQ in China is for the community to become yet another pawn in the ideological battle between China and 'the West.' In this regard I think the western free media holds a great responsibility.

It should also be mentioned that the CCP is firmly committed to raising the birth rate as China ages precipitously because of the decades of one-child policy. Anything that impacts marriage and child-bearing is given close scrutiny; same sex relationships fall into that category in China. As an example, the common modern vasectomy procedure (NS non-scalpel) was pioneered in Sichuan two decades ago. Upon arrival in Chengdu hospital two years ago to request the procedure, I was told it was no longer offered in public hospitals. The urologist gave me the party line: it is against nature.

Engaging article on a topic that should receive more attention. Regarding terminology, I find the blithe substitution of "queer" for "LGBTQ" problematic. I understand that for those under 35 (or so) who were educated in the Global North or for those who now reside there, "queer" might be an acceptable catchall, but it is to me and to many highly limited in its applicability (i.e. age-, site-, and culture-specific), unlikely to be of use in advancing or extending human rights globally, and loaded with pejorative overtones. Yes, the shifting alphabet soup is clumsy, as well, but perhaps we could find consensus around UN nomenclature: LGBTI.