Finally! I have a chance to let you know what happened with that China Radio International Interview about the Shanghai Pride Festival a few weeks back. (Why keep a blog, James, when you never update it?)… So here’s an update for all four of you who read this.

Here’s the audio, hosted on the CRI website — but I recommend dipping in and out. As a radio producer, I can’t listen. I want tell the hosts to shut up, move on, cut their interviews down, have more production elements, do better research. It drags! But you might find it easier.

The interview panel was useful, surprising, serious, funny and homophobic. But not homophobic from the Chinese host – who asked good questions. It was the male expat host, Chris, who did the annoying, ‘everyman’ questioning: ‘why do gays need to put it in your face all the time?’ Such a tired cliche of a question.

It’s not a question that Chinese people ask. The issue for Chinese people, I reckon, is the threat of rocking the boat, upsetting stability, and the implications for family. It’s not Chinese to have a moral reaction to overt displays of sexuality.

For the first time in my life (having had better, more articulate friends to fight on my behalf) I put on my queer activist hat.

My favourite exchange began with ‘mock weddings’. Do they further dialogue, or create opposition? (A classic argument against gay visibility). I argued for knowing your enemy. ‘Opposition is not a bad thing’.

By staging mock weddings, ‘We get the chance to have this dialogue with the general public,’ agreed Xian, the founder of LGBT support group Common Language. (She runs the LaLa Salon I write about in BB).

Picture: The very colourful and kinda gay Hotel G in Beijing

(Around 33 minutes in) expat host Chris asks, “Sometimes wouldn’t it be better to not be so expressive, and have these high profile mock weddings and parades…Basically just get on with it without making an issue of it…”

“It’s a bit like saying stop being so gay every body! Can everyone just stop being so gay!” I responded. The problem with that thinking, I explained, was that this is serious: Gay people get rejected. There’s the threat of violence and misunderstanding. I think gay people have earned the right to do whatever-the-fuck they want! Shove it in as many faces as possible! I left that part of the conversation by saying that his mode of thinking had been outdated by 20 years.

As the organiser of Shanghai Pride wrote to me afterwards: “It’s never easy to answer the ‘why do they have to put it in our faces’ question”.

As the smarmy end-of-show clincher from Chris, (just to stick it in and twist), he said, “Progress is when we actually don’t need to have programs like this”.

“Perhaps”, I said, trying to load the word with all the disdain I could muster.

In the end, I was happy. And if CRI bothered to count how many listeners they have, we’d know how many young English speakers in China we reached.

If my own blog is anything to go by, during the following fortnight China developed a mini-rash of interest: in Chengdu, Xiangfan, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hefei, Nanjing, Shanghai. Hopefully a few kids somewhere got the idea that being gay was OK.

1 Comments

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August 30, 2010 2:31 am

Dereck (@dereckisdereck)

good job James!

I’m here in Beijing rn partly because of your awesome book, lol. enjoying the city so far.

anyway, I think it’s an important lesson to note how tragic the Jewish people’s effort to appear “less Jewish” in interwar Europe turned out to be. during the time, acceptance from the non-Jewish community were given to those who “were Jews and yet presumably not like Jews.” it’s a rather similar sentiment being aired by the “why do they have to put it in our faces” question, don’t you think? the new closet constructed by this not-shoving-it-on-your-face thing is a temporary abode that is neither genuinely safe nor helpful for the community. but yeah, I guess timing is king.

cheers James. keep being awesome