![]() ![]() ![]() In cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the LGBT community, while far from receiving the visibility and legal recognition common in the West, is vibrant. Clinics offering cures for homosexuality still exist, though they are under increasing pressure from activists and are being forced to temper some of their more extreme practices. Official government policy is typified by the three nos - no support, no opposition, no promotion - which is loosely analogous to the now-defunct "don't ask, don't tell" of the U.S. "Normality" is culturally defined, and though it ceased to be considered a mental illness, homosexuality still exists in a gray area in China. I went to bed with them not because of physiological need, nor even because I liked them, but because of a need that was psychological: I wanted to prove to myself that I was a normal man." As Handong says, "I didn't completely stop sleeping with women. Within 18 months, he is divorced and alone. He marries a woman, the beautiful and ambitious Lin Ping, but he spends the entire marriage fantasizing about Lan Yu. In the book, Handong never fully embraces his homosexuality. "Most of the fictional works from late-1990s China are tragedies, and this perhaps reflects the feeling of the hopelessness of gay relationships, that gay relationships were something that could not last," says Myers. As such, it is a book that exists only in translation, a patchwork of fragments. The translation is drawn from these sources, as well as new sections the author gave to the translator, all of which remain unavailable to a mainland audience. A neutered and sexless version of the text was produced a few years later with an aim to be published on the mainland, but the censors were unmoved. It was then picked up by the Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan, who turned it into the movie Lan Yu, arguably the most famous and influential Chinese LGBT film of all time. Prior to publishing a version in Taiwan in 2002, the author reworked the text, smoothing some of the edges. It was also, as an online novella, patchy and error-ridden. Handong, who owns multiple houses scattered throughout Beijing, keeps an apartment specifically to bring boys back to, getting his right-hand man, Liu Zheng, to source them. Disheartened by the generally poor quality of what was available, she decided to write her own.īeijing Comrades spans the decades shortly after Deng Xiaoping's policy of opening and reform took full swing, providing a riveting account of the crony economy that emerged, as we follow the rise and fall of Handong, a princeling who leverages his connections to make it big in the new China. When she put the story online in 1998, serialized on the now extinct Web site China Men's and Boys' Paradise, Bei Tong was living in New York, bored and reading a lot of gay fiction. ![]() It is hard to determine whether the author is male or female, though Scott Myers, the translator, uses the female pronoun to describe Bei Tong in the book's introduction. Little is known of Bei Tong, the author of Beijing Comrades. ![]()
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