Gay China News & Reports 2007

February 02, 2007

1
Chinese gays feel compelled to marry: In China, attitudes toward homosexuality have relaxed, but there is still pressure to start a family.

by Tim Johnson
Beijing – Like many gay people in China, 22-year-old Chen Lei enjoys the newfound liberties of urban gay life. But he feels he can’t fight his destiny: to marry a woman for whom he feels no attraction. For economic, social and cultural reasons, the pressure on gays in China to wed and raise families is high. In Chen’s case, his family hails from a village in Inner Mongolia, and he dares not tell them of his private life in the big city, knowing they wouldn’t tolerate it.

”I only have an older sister. So I’m definitely going to have to marry and have children,” Chen said. His mother already has made introductions to two young women. Attitudes toward homosexuality in China have relaxed in the big cities, where gay bars flourish and websites nurture a sense of community. Mentioning homosexuality no longer is taboo on television newscasts and public service announcements, and government media have stopped lumping homosexuals as deviants along with prostitutes, gamblers and drug addicts. Gay groups have sprung up on university campuses.

Yet China appears unique in the way that enormous family pressures are brought to bear on gay men. Nearly three decades have passed since China began a ”one-child policy” of limiting most couples to single offspring to curb a population that’s already soared to 1.3 billion. Most young gay men are the only sons of their families. If they don’t marry and have children, their family trees wither, a fate that most Chinese deem dreadful. ”The major difference between Chinese homosexuals and those in the West is that many of them [here] will get married with people of the opposite gender,” said Li Yinhe, a researcher into sexual behavior with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “No matter how hard they fight or how long they delay, they end up getting married anyway because the pressure is so high.” This has led to a spate of loveless — and often short — marriages designed to placate the family and procure progeny.

”Many gays hurry to marry, then hurry to divorce,” said Xiao Dong, the head of a volunteer civic group in Beijing’s Chaoyang district that battles AIDS. Li, who appears regularly on television as perhaps China’s most widely known sexual behaviorist, said distraught parents often contacted her.

”Many parents feel that the sky has fallen when they learn that their children are homosexuals,” Li said. “One mother wanted to commit suicide.” Parents want their gay children to marry not only because they themselves want grandchildren — in some cases for financial support in their old age — but also because they think that their sons will be miserable without children, Li said. In rural areas of China attitudes toward homosexuals are palpably negative, harking back to the era more than a decade ago when state media commonly referred to homosexuality as a “foreign disease.”

McClatchy special correspondent Fan Linjun contributed to this report from Bejing.

(The author is director of the Research Center for HIV/AIDS Public Policy at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.)

nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/world/asia/16china.html?_r=2&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

February 16, 2007

2
China Covers Up Detention of AIDS Doctor

by Jim Yardley
Beijing — The photograph and article in Tuesday’s Henan Daily could have been headlined “Happy Holidays.” Three highranking Henan Province officials, beaming and clapping as if presenting a lottery check, were making an early Lunar New Year visit to the apartment of a renowned AIDS doctor, Gao Yaojie. They gave her flowers. Dr. Gao, 80, squinted toward the camera, surely understanding that pictures can lie. She was under house arrest to prevent her from getting a visa to accept an honor in Washington. Her detention attracted international attention, and the photo op was a sham, apparently intended to say, “Look, she’s fine and free as a bird.”

On Thursday, Dr. Gao said in a telephone interview, a handful of police officers remained stationed outside her apartment building in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou. “I just can’t simply swallow it all,” she said. “I want to know two things. First, who has made the decision? I am an 80-year-old lady, and what crimes have I committed to deserve this? Second, they must find out who has been slandering my name on the Internet.”

Perhaps no issue is more emblematic of a changing China than AIDS. In less than a decade, China has gone from trying to hide its AIDS epidemic to confronting it openly. International groups like the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been welcomed. The Chinese government has initiated medical research, a free drug program and a nationwide public awareness campaign. But for a Communist Party intolerant of public dissent, embracing grass-roots AIDS activists is a different matter. They often complain loudest about inadequate care and official corruption. And few people have complained louder, or with more influence, than Dr. Gao, who gained fame for helping expose the tainted blood-selling operations that spread H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, in central China in the 1990s.

Dr. Gao was detained on Feb. 1 as she was leaving for Beijing to pick up a United States travel visa so she could attend a banquet to be held in her honor in March by Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit group whose honorary chairwomen are Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas. International organizations and the United States Embassy in Beijing soon inquired about her status. Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch saw the Henan Daily article online and assumed that it meant the pressure had worked.

“I almost fell for the ploy,” said Mr. Bequelin, who later learned that Dr. Gao was still under house arrest. “Now it appears it was a very cynical move to try to assuage international concern. They had no intention to release control of Gao Yaojie.” Officials in Henan are famously hostile to AIDS workers. But Mr. Bequelin said Dr. Gao’s case was particularly alarming because it suggested that officials in Beijing were complicit. He said the Henan Daily article had been posted on a Web site administered by People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s most authoritative outlet. He noted that Dr. Gao’s detention had come only three months after another high-profile AIDS activist, Wan Yanhai, was detained and blocked from holding a conference in Beijing for AIDS advocates and people infected with H.I.V.

“It calls into doubt their commitment to let the grass-roots groups and H.I.V. activists carry out their work unhindered,” said Mr. Bequelin, who is the Hong Kong-based China researcher for Human Rights Watch. “It really, clearly shows that Beijing has endorsed this restriction on Gao. They are probably worried about her going there and talking to Hillary Clinton and other people.” International pressure seemed to have weighed on the Henan officials who had visited Dr. Gao since her detention. She said one official visited three times a day, urging her to write a letter blaming poor health as a reason for not attending the Washington ceremony. Dr. Gao said she finally relented Wednesday.

“After negotiation, we agreed that I will just say I am preoccupied and won’t be able to leave for the award,” she said. “The letter I wrote only had two lines.” Dr. Gao said she had written it to relieve political pressure on the local health department and her family. She was also upset with entries on a blog she recently started in which she posts AIDS cases to give them public attention. “Various posts accused me of lying and making these cases up,” she said. “Personal insults were posted. These posts were then rebutted by victims. My blog then became a battlefield.”

During the Maoist era, dissidents who spoke out against the government were brutalized or even killed. That era is long past, though rough treatment can still occur. Dissidents are now sometimes jailed on dubious charges. The authorities often tap phones and otherwise monitor people deemed troublemakers. Fear of international embarrassment appears to be the motivation for stopping Dr. Gao from going to Washington. Indeed, the doctor has received past recognition in China. She was given a “Ten People Who Touched China in 2003” award from the government’s television network. But she was prevented from traveling outside China to receive awards in 2001 and 2003.

Wenchi Yu Perkins, human rights program director with Vital Voices Global Partnership, said the group had protested Dr. Gao’s detention to an official at the Chinese Embassy in Washington. The embassy official praised Dr. Gao’s work on AIDS. “He also stated that Dr. Gao was in poor health and unable to travel to Washington,” Ms. Perkins said by e-mail. “We know from sources close to Dr. Gao that she has repeatedly expressed her desire to travel to the U.S. to receive Vital Voices’ award.” Mr. Bequelin and others say they think that officials were alarmed at the potential of Dr. Gao meeting Senator Clinton. Dr. Gao said she believed that the Washington ceremony, as well as her blog, were to blame for her detention. She said Zhengzhou’s former police chief, Yao Daixian, had gone to her apartment and personally warned her not to “communicate with foreign journalists.”

She recalled his saying, “These people are liars, and you must consider the negative influence it will bring on our country.” Mr. Yao, now director of the Zhengzhou Communist Party’s organization department, also addressed the young woman cooking and doing other tasks for Dr. Gao. “He told her to love the country, the party, the government,” the doctor said. The woman quit. Citizens in China understand where boundaries exist in society, and most do not cross them. But Dr. Gao has always trampled across.

In her youth, she was a rare woman admitted to medical school. She survived Japanese bombing raids during the 1940s and worked delivering babies as an obstetrician in the 1950s. When the famines of the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1960 unleashed mass starvation, Dr. Gao sometimes gave her food ration tickets to emaciated women. During the violent class struggles of the Cultural Revolution from 1965 to 1975 she was labeled a “black element,” a term for members of the former ruling class or rightist intelligentsia. In a 2003 interview, she recalled surviving one night during that era by hiding among the bodies in a hospital morgue to avoid Red Guards.

Her involvement in AIDS began when she learned that H.I.V. was silently spreading through Henan in the 1990s. A government-endorsed blood-selling campaign had led to the infection of thousands of farmers. She traveled to villages to provide medical care and free informational brochures to people who had no idea why they were dying. She also spoke out against local officials trying to cover up the crisis.

Her status came up on Thursday at the regular news briefing by the Foreign Ministry. “Please ask the local government about this,” the spokeswoman responded. A spokesman with the propaganda office of the Zhengzhou Communist Party refused to give out a number for Mr. Yao, the former police chief. He referred the call to the city government’s press office. A spokesman there seemed startled when asked if Dr. Gao was under house arrest. “What?” he answered. “That sounds very unlikely. We have not been informed of such a thing. But please be assured if we have any information we will inform you in time.”

A final call went to the press office of Henan Province. It had more information. “Did you read the newspaper?” a provincial spokesman said. “Our provincial officials have paid her a visit to see how she’s doing and wish her a happy New Year. I will look into it and get back to you.”

His response came quickly: a faxed copy of the Henan Daily story.

Dr. Gao said her restrictions had been loosened a bit. Her telephone was reconnected this week. Her family can visit her. She can step outside her apartment building for some air. But she can go no farther. Police officers remain posted. A group of AIDS advocates tried to visit her Wednesday but were turned away. “Luckily I am still clear in the mind, or I could have been fooled by the government into speaking for them, telling untrue tales,” she said. “It does not matter to me at all whether I can go pick up the award.

“I think my absence at the ceremony will be more influential than me being there.”

fridae.com
http://www.fridae.com/newsfeatures/article.php?articleid=1857&viewarticle%20=1

21 February 2007

3
The second International Conference of Asian Queer Studies will convene in Sydney this week. New Jersey has became the third state in the US to offer civil unions, meanwhile in Italy, the civil union debate rages. A Russian lawmaker has introduced a bill to recriminalise homosexuality, punishable with a five-year prison sentence.

The second International Conference of Asian Queer Studies will convene in Sydney from Feb 21-23 as part of the Sydney Mardi Gras Festival. First held in 2005 in Bangkok by the AsiaPacifiQueer Network (APQ) founded by academic Peter Jackson of Australian National University in Canberra, the conference will feature keynote addresses from major figures in Asian queer scholarship and a series of themed panel streams on intra-Asia/Pacific queer cultural flows.

Jackson said he founded the APQ to combat the difficulties of conducting queer Asian research in Australia and getting funding. “Queer studies have been minoritised in the university system,” he says. “People submitting applications for queer projects are advised to make the title sound straight or you’ll be very unlikely to get funding.” He hopes that in having an international conference, it lends more creditability to the field of queer related research in Asia.

Keynote speakers include Rosanna Flamer-Caldera of Sri Lanka, Co-Secretary General of the International Lesbian and Gay Association [ILGA]; Prof. Neil Garcia of University of the Philippines, Diliman; Dr Chandra Shekhar Balanchandran of Dharani Trust, Bangalore, India and Dr Dédé Oetomo of Surabaya University & GAYa Nusantara, Indonesia. Queer Asian Sites is held in collaboration with the Trans/forming Cultures (TfC) Key University Research Centre in Communication and Culture from Feb 21-23 and the Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries Conference convened by the UTS Centre for Social Theory and Design in the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building on Feb 20 & 21. For more info, visit apq.anu.edu.au/qas.

planetout.com/
http://www.planetout.com/news/article.html?2007/02/16/2

February 16, 2007

4
Gay domestic abuse called rampant in China

Summary: Sixteen percent of same-sex couples suffer from domestic abuse, while only 9 percent of straight couples do, claims a study by Hong Kong LGBT groups. A new Hong Kong study reveals that domestic abuse is especially prevalent in China’s gay community. Gay men and lesbians in China are 60 percent more likely to abuse their partners than straight couples. The study, conducted by a of coalition of LGBT civil rights groups, found that 16 percent of same-sex relationships suffer from domestic abuse, while only 9 percent of opposite couples do.

The researchers found that the most common form of abuse followed threats of outing a partner to employers or family members. Domestic violence is often only thought of as physical violence, but can also involve emotional abuse or violence including undermining of self-confidence, sexual violence or the threat of violence by a person who is or has been in a close relationship. This can also include financial control and using a partner’s sexuality in a bid to blackmail him or her. Same-sex domestic violence is slowly getting more attention worldwide. Starting Jan. 1, 2007 in California, same-sex couples who register with the state as domestic partners pay $23 toward same-sex anti-domestic violence programs, mirroring similar programs the state funds for straights.

In the United Kingdom, the Domestic Violence Crime and Victims Act 2004, for the first time, specifically acknowledged lesbian and gay couples as possible victims of domestic abuse. The act allows same-sex couples to obtain restraining orders, and it ensures that lesbian and gay victims of abuse have access to the same protection as married couples. Statistics suggest that as many as one in four LGBT people have suffered or will suffer from domestic violence in their lives. Nineteen percent of American gay men report physical abuse by an "intimate partner" during the previous five years, according to a study published in 2002 in the American Journal of Public Health. (Hassan Mirza, Gay.com U.K.)

Washington Post Foreign Service
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201899.html

February 23, 2007

5
For Gays in China, ‘Fake Marriage’ Eases Pressure

by Maureen Fan
Beijing – It is Saturday afternoon in a half-empty restaurant on the fourth floor of a modern shopping mall. Two young women kiss slowly and continuously, one permed head of hair poised above another, arms entwined, as other customers ignore them completely.

This is the weekly gathering of Tongyu, a lesbian group that meets publicly to socialize, watch gay movies and discuss important issues, such as whether to come out of the closet and how. Most nearby patrons are gay, but customers at the front of the restaurant are straight. The owner doesn’t seem to care about the public displays of affection, as long as the young women of Tongyu keep buying drinks. The two women kissing are not yet out to their families, and they wouldn’t try this at home, said Xu Bin, 34, founder of Tongyu. Their parents wouldn’t stand for it.

Ten years after China decriminalized homosexuality and six years after officials removed it from a state list of mental disorders, gay men and lesbians say one of their biggest obstacles is parental pressure to get married. Coming out isn’t easy anywhere in the world, they say, but in a culture that still emphasizes Confucian family ideals, such as obeying one’s parents and bearing children, the pressure to conform is enormous. It is compounded by the fact that parents of younger gay Chinese came of age during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. During those years of social upheaval, failure to conform could mean death.

"I’m an only child, and my parents put all their hopes on me," said Lucy Ma, 32, a Beijing software engineer who regularly attends Tongyu discussions. "They belong to the Cultural Revolution generation. They only graduated from high school, and they suffered a lot, so they really think I should live happily. To their mind that means a husband, a happy family and a good job." After China’s Communist revolution in 1949, homosexuality was considered grounds for persecution. Today, the environment for gay men and lesbians here is more tolerant. Groups such as Tongyu are accepted, gay bars can operate openly, and a special hotline has been set up for lesbians seeking support.

Despite the advances, though, gay Chinese still face job discrimination and stigmatization, even by family members. Those fears can be glimpsed in online personal ads, which are dominated by appeals for "fake marriages," or marriages of convenience. "Here is my basic plan," a 30-year-old gay man in Beijing said recently in a posting for a bride. "Acting as husband and wife outside, and being close friends with each other. The New Year is approaching. The pressure of facing parents in your home town is growing."

Tong Ge, an independent scholar, two years ago surveyed 400 gay men 35 and older. He said he found that 85 percent of respondents were married. More and more younger gay men are now refusing to marry, Tong said, but among the answers to his survey, this one was typical:

"Now the most difficult people to deal with are not the police, as long as you don’t break the law. It’s your parents. I finished my master’s degree at 26 and was urged to get married. At first, I wanted to escape by going abroad, but I didn’t have so much money," one man told Tong in an interview. "I considered marrying a lesbian, and dated some. But the more we talked about the house and our finances, the more complicated it got."

Sun, a gay 37-year-old software engineer from the coastal city of Tianjin, said he might be able someday to tell his parents about his secret life. "But the key point is the people around them. They live in the countryside," he said in an interview. "If you’re a man who is single for a long time, they think you have problems. They will think I’m not doing what a man does. It’s just the way it is, from the time of our ancestors."

Many tradition-minded parents are so concerned about avoiding the shame of friends and neighbors that they threaten suicide. Lucy Ma, who spoke on condition that her full Chinese name not be used, said she has known since middle school that she was attracted to women. But she has also been wary of upsetting her ailing mother, who does not know she is gay. Like many lesbians in China, Ma said, she tried to date men over the years. One treated her well, bought her gifts and talked about their future. "But to me, he spoke too much, and I would disappear at the weekends, secretly traveling with my girlfriend," she said.

After their breakup, her parents introduced her to a parade of men. It was then that she began considering a marriage of convenience. "You can appear to have a relationship to your friends and colleagues," she said. "And it’s the most important thing for your parents." First, she searched online. She received three or four responses within two months. Eventually, she said, she connected with a gay man who was also looking for a marriage of convenience. "We e-mailed each other, then met, just like a normal meeting of a boy or a girl," she said.

They registered as a married couple in January 2006 and had a ceremony in the groom’s home town. More than 500 guests ate duck, fish and noodles to symbolize longevity. Ma wore a red silk Chinese-style dress; her fiance wore a dark-blue suit. "His parents and relatives prepared everything for us. We were just like two puppets on strings manipulated by others," Ma said. She was grateful her husband didn’t expect her to cook or clean while she was visiting his family and home town. And when he met her mother, he put her at ease.

"We had a big dinner, and my mother asked her brother and his wife to come. She didn’t know much about my husband, and she was nervous. But she smiled a lot that night, she was telling jokes. I can tell she and my dad are very satisfied with him," Ma said. What her parents don’t know is that Ma still has a girlfriend — and that they’ve been together for six years. The girlfriend lives in another city, is married and has an 11-year-old daughter. "I’ve completed everything according to plan: I have a fake marriage, and my parents are happy and I’m still independent," Ma added. There’s just one small problem. "My mother didn’t used to talk about grandchildren, but now she sometimes mentions that she would like one."

Researcher Li Jie contributed to this report.

From: Dr. Jason Moore Ph.D. reklawwodahs2000@yahoo.com

February 2007

5a
Gay China From the Inside–a Gay American Living in China Tells Stories about the ‘Good Life’

My name is Jason Moore. I have lived in China now for five years plus. I own my home here. I have a couple of small businesses here. My home is in Beijing. I have traveled to 98 different cities around China , mainly for business but also for visiting.

The one thing I have done is to always check out the local city to see if there is any gay life of any kind. What I have found is very interesting: I have found gay life in every city I have visited, which has amazed me.

China is actually very misunderstood. During the last three national Peoples Congress meetings in China proposals have been presented to legalize same sex relationships. In fact in 2006 one of China’s best known sociologists presented a study that had been done during the previous year that documented the general populations attitudes on same sex relationships. What she concluded was that most Chinese did not have any problem with the idea of same sex relationships. What their main concern seemed to be was that their children would not have someone to take care of them when they became old (not understanding that same sex relationships can last) . She concluded that it would not cause any problems with social harmony if the government were to legalize same sex relations due to the fact that the Chinese people have a history of accepting changes in laws by the government.

The refreshing part of China is a lack of prejudice-creating Christian beliefs that fuels the fires of the U.S. I came to China five years ago. I had a relationship that had lasted 22 years. After coming to China my life partner decided he wanted to date Chinese men. So we altered our lifestyle and we still live together but each of us has found a new partner. I have been with my new partner for two and a half years and he is with a new partner now for just three months. We all live in the same home with zero problems.

We designed our current home to accommodate this change so that we can live together but still have privacy. We do have the usual relationship problems with our respective lovers. There are the cultural differences to be aware of also. But for the most part being gay in China is much freer, no one is yelling at queers, throwing bottles, or being just rude because they do not like your lifestyle. I enjoy the fact that it does not matter if we go to a ‘straight’ bar or gay bar. We can dance and be ourselves wherever we are and not have to worry about the gay bashing that I was always aware of as being a potential problem.

During my travels in China (and I have traveled a lot) I have never been threatened, felt uncomfortable, or ever been in any situation where I was concerned for my safety. Once I was in a disco in a city called Tongzhou and I was told that two gangs were having a fight in the lobby entrance and that I should not go out there for a few minutes. But I wanted to test an idea, so I went to the lobby. Sure enough there were about twenty or thirty guys attempting to bang each other around with a few bats and a couple of those big trash cans. The bathrooms were directly across the room so to get to them I had to walk right thru the middle of the guys fighting. So I did.

As I walked they actually managed to not stop fighting but to also separate so I had a path to the bathroom . They saw that I was a ‘weiguoren’ so that makes me off limits. I walked to the bathroom and then came back and each time was the same.

One other story I found interesting. One day I was inspecting a company outside of Taiyuan . My translator (I do speak mandarin but not well enough for business negotiations) knows I am gay. She and I have a game of trying to spot the gay guys. (She is straight) . What really threw her and me for a surprise was that after our inspection we sat down to have lunch and one of the V.P.’s from the company we were visiting sat down next to us and starting talking as we were eating. He spoke pretty good English. He started off by saying he had a bad day because his "lover" had the flu and he had to take him to the hospital the night before because he could not stop throwing up. I then said sorry to here that I hope she feels better soon, but he then said his lover is a man , not a woman. He then told us how they had met and how he had left his wife after three years of marriage because he realized he actually loved this guy more then his wife.

Now this is a situation you had to be present to understand just how unusual this was. This was in a small town in China where I never would have imagined this conversation. He said that his ex-wife hates his lover but he was ok with that because he is happier then he had been before.

There is a very large foreign gay population in Beijing where we live and we have created a pool of friends. The bet is that China approves same-sex relationships and marriage long before the United States even gets past the "don’t ask–don’t tell" hang up.

I have been surprised by the truth about China ever since I first came to realize what China is all about. I have been constantly amazed about how much misinformation exists , particularly in the United States. I came to China by mistake , but quickly realized that everything I was afraid of before coming was misinformation. I believe the U.S. (government) feels there is a need to have a boogey man (so to speak) to enable the U.S to maintain it’s military expenditures. Currently it is centered on the middle east, but after it will need a new target.

China will be the largest economic super power within the next 15 years. The fastest growing middle class is in China. More people are buying homes and cars. China is predicted to be the largest car market, the largest consumer goods market in human history once the middle class is fully established. (I am not political in any way , and I do not get involved in politics).

But there is so much inaccurate information concerning human rights in China I have made it a point to pay attention. I was a practicing psychologist in San Diego in the ’80’s so I have an interest in many facets of society here. I also have spoken at Peking University on two occasions after being invited to discuss same sex relationships to a couple of small groups that were interested in understanding the lifestyles in the United States.

I do have many other experiences that I was totally surprised by (in a very good way) as I traveled around China. One very important point that is necessary to understand about China is that this is not a "communist" country in the way we were led to believe communism is supposed to be. It is what I like to call capitalistic socialism. China is actually the fastest growing economy of independent successful small businesses you could ever imagine.

What I have really enjoyed about China is that I can go to any disco, any bar, and I "never" have to give a single second of thought to prejudice or homophobic behavior. Many times Chinese men will dance with me–straight ones–and have a great time. There is not the attitude here that gay people get from most "straight" bar environments. Many Chinese gay people are now becoming open about their lifestyles (but it does still have a long way to go). Many of my friends will talk to me about not telling their parents about their boyfriends, but also many times they come up to me and tell me that they finally did and their parents already knew. Just didn’t talk about it to them. But because it is their son they still love them anyway. (I can think of five or six friends in the last few months that have told their parents and now feel better).

One problem in China is you have two separate cultures, so to speak. You have the well educated middle aged Chinese who understand and therefore are more accepting when their children tell them. Then you have the rural parents who have a tendency (from the years of being large families) to feel that their sons need children to be secure in their old age.

So many things are transitioning. That is what makes China such an interesting place to live. What is today will be different tomorrow. There are many active gay groups on college campuses (they are small groups). I have the dubious label of being the oldest full time student to ever attend Beijing Second Foreign Language University. In China ‘older’ people do not go to college as a rule. I even had to have special permission to attend classes due to my age, which at the time was 49. Everybody kept telling me I should be one of the professors instead of a student. (They also told me on a regular basis that they ‘know’ because of my older age that I cannot learn as fast as the younger students, so the professors would be easier on me).

There are also many active gay business groups. I belong to a group in Beijing known as PROMEN (there are others). This is a group with around 700 total members. We are mainly gay businessmen, both Chinese and foreign. We meet each week on Thursday. Our current location of choice for regular socials is a place known as the "Q" bar. The object is to be able to network thru the gay business community and support each other.

What I am trying to point out here is that there is a healthy, active, growing gay population (granted we are new and evolving), but the reality of China is that it is a great place to be and it is not the dangerous, prejudiced, repressive country that so many people seem to believe. It isn’t perfect. As a gay man I feel safe and able to live my life without the fear of gay bashing, egg throwing homophobic straight men trying to eliminate our existence from this planet.

The Associated Press
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/03/news/web.php

April 3, 2007

6
Show on gay themes to go online in China

Hong Kong – A Chinese Web site will present what its producer describes as the country’s first show to focus on gay issues and the first with an openly homosexual host. The weekly hourlong Internet TV show, "Tongxing Xianglian," or "Connecting Homosexuals," is scheduled to make its debut Thursday on www.phoenixtv.com, the producer, Gang Gang, said in a phone interview. The Web site is run by the same company that owns Phoenix Satellite TV. Gang said clips from the online show will be aired on the satellite station.

Gang said that while homosexuals have appeared on Chinese TV shows, this will be the first to focus on gay issues and the first with an openly gay host, Didier Zheng, an AIDS educator and activist. He said he hopes that the Beijing-based show will improve public understanding of Chinese homosexuals. "There are many people in China’s gay community, but people don’t have a deep enough understanding about this community," Gang said. "This community faces a lot of trouble and difficulties. They face a lot of pressure." Homosexuals in China were heavily persecuted after the 1949 Communist revolution, when they were condemned as products of decadent Western and feudal societies.

Official attitudes have changed gradually since the late 1980s; in 2001, the Chinese Psychiatric Association stopped listing homosexuality as a mental illness. The new show will explore homosexuality from legal, parental and sociological perspectives and will deal with issues like gay marriage, Gang said. The program will also feature a friend-matching segment. It is not known whether the show will face censorship. Though the Communist government promotes Internet use, it has also set up an extensive surveillance and filtering system to prevent Chinese from accessing material considered obscene or politically subversive.

Fridae
http://www.fridae.com/newsfeatures/article.php?articleid=1897&viewarticle=1

April 6, 2007

6a
Chinese TV comes out of the closet

by Dinah Gardner
He’s cute, has a good sense of humour; and is still single. Meet 27-year-old Didier Zheng who’s the host of China’s first gay Internet TV show. He tells Fridae in an exclusive interview about the government’s restrictions on the show and the observations he has gleaned while hosting. Gay TV has landed in China. Starting from the beginning of April, every Thursday at the odd time of 3pm, Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television broadcasts Gay Connections on its website, live from Beijing. It’s a far cry from a peak hour slot on popular TV, but it’s a start.

And who is the host?

Didier (pronounced “deedee-ay”) Zheng is a 27-year-old AIDS activist. Single. Cute. And with a charming French accent – he spent seven years studying social sciences and psychology in Lyon and Paris. Zheng says that while the show is freely available to anyone with an Internet connection in China, the “government” messed with the format a little. Originally they had planned to include a matchmaking second half where gays and lesbians could search for friends. But this was scrapped, says Zheng. “The government didn’t think it was a good idea.” Instead the 12-part show, which runs for an hour, has Zheng, the show’s producer, Gang Gang, and openly gay guests chatting about homosexual issues. The first show invited lesbian singer Qiao Qiao (pictured with Didier above) and Chen Jianqi, a drag queen performer from Sichuan. They discussed a range of topics including whether gay celebrities have a responsibility to come out and set a good example to society, what it means to be gay and social discrimination. “I don’t hurt anyone by being gay,” said Qiao Qiao on the show. “But by discriminating against me, you are hurting me.” Qiao Qiao has also won fame among Beijing’s lesbians for running the capital’s hottest lesbian night at Pipe Bar.

Zheng says Qiao Qiao sets a good role model for other lesbians. She is in a long-term relationship with her girlfriend and the two are trying to have a baby via artificial fertilisation – her egg, donated sperm and her girlfriend’s womb. This is almost unheard of in China. “In fact Qiao Qiao sets a good example to other lesbians,” Zheng says. “She has a solid relationship, is starting a family and is successful with her career.” But when will China’s state TV be ready to host a gay chat show? Not for a long time, says Zheng, although a state-run channel has already made sounds that it wants to make such a show. “I was approached by a producer from Beijing Television [a state-owned TV company in the capital],” says Zheng. “He asked me to be a presenter for a similar gay chat show on their local channel. But in the end it was not approved.”

The Chinese public is simply not ready, he says. “A lot of straight people would feel ashamed if they saw something like this on popular TV,” he says. “They would think this isn’t really what most Chinese people are like, why should we have this on TV?” It’s also difficult to find gay celebrities willing to appear on the show. “It’s very hard to find guests,” Zheng says. “We invited a lot of gay Chinese actors and singers but they refused.”

Are there any topics out of bounds?

“We are not allowed to discuss anything in relation to legal matters or the government,” Zheng says. “So we can mention gay marriage but we can’t say anything about changing the law.” Even so, the authorities have allowed the show to go ahead and its website remains unblocked within the mainland. That in itself is good news for China’s gays. “You know I’ve been interviewed by a lot of foreign reporters… they were all so surprised by the fact that this show is happening in China,” says Zheng. “They couldn’t imagine China could be so open to have this gay TV show. I think the Chinese government must be very happy about this because all this foreign news gives a good impression of China.”

Zheng, has a serious daytime job, which, he says, gives him a good background to be a host for Gay Connections. He is China MSM (men who have sex with men) Manager at the Beijing office of the Chi Heng Foundation, a Hong Kong-based NGO that helps China’s AIDS orphans and supports public education programs to combat discrimination against homosexuals on the mainland. Chi Heng runs China’s only nationwide free gay and lesbian helplines. “You know a lot of the other guys said ‘Why should Didier get it? I’m younger and much more handsome than him’,” Zheng laughs. “But they were all too young and they didn’t have any experience about the social situation to do this kind of job. I think I have a good background, I can give the program a lot of ideas.”

One of the show’s aims is to help gays and non-gays gain a better understanding of homosexuality, linking directly with what Zheng thinks is the most pressing problem for China’s gays right now. “The biggest problem for gays here is a lack of information,” he says. “How to be gay, what does it mean to be gay, and how to be happy as a gay person.” He adds that he thinks some older Chinese people would be afraid that this kind of program would encourage straight people to “try” being gay. “It’s ridiculous that a TV program could turn someone gay,” he says. “But it shows their lack of knowledge of what being gay really means.”

While China doesn’t have a hatred of gays powered by the religious right common in some parts of the west, a lot of people here still can’t accept homosexuality. “In general I can say that the average person will accept you being gay if you are a success – if you have a good job, you have money – but if you don’t have this – say you are poor – then they will look down on you, they will say you are not successful because you are gay,” he says.

It seems girls are more enlightened than men.

“In fact out of everyone I think Chinese women can accept gays much easier than men,” he smiles. “They are very understanding about homosexuality. Straight men are not as understanding.” And it seems women – gay, straight or transgender – are more willing to appear on the show. Following the first program’s dyke and drag queen guests, the second installment of Gay Connections invited the alluring Tian Yuan, who played lesbian Yip in Hong Kong dyke movie, Butterfly (2004), to talk about showing gay movies to the general public. It’s hard to imagine anyone objecting to a movie starring Tian, whatever the characters’ sexuality. Zheng says he thinks the shows are going OK “considering I’ve never been a TV host before.” The show may have ditched its matchmaking section, but for those who are interested – his accent is cute; he has a good sense of humour; and he’s still single.

Reuters
http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=2007-04-05T201514Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-293272-1.xml

April 5, 2007

7
China’s first gay chat show goes live on the Internet

Beijing (Reuters) – For singer and bar-owner, Qiao Qiao, talking about her sexuality live on an Internet broadcast accessible to millions of people was easier than telling her parents that she was a lesbian.

"My mother was very supportive," she said on Thursday, as cameras rolled in a small studio in northwest Beijing. "But my father still has not accepted it. He said I was young and would feel different when I was older … But he is still saying that even though I’m now in my thirties," she said. Qiao Qiao was the first guest on "Tongxing Xinglian", China’s first gay chat show, an interactive online forum hosted by gay presenters and accessible to more than 130 million Internet users across the country.

With the title a loose play on words of a Chinese idiom "people with the same afflictions sympathise with each other", the weekly 12-episode show, produced by PhoenixTV.com, aims to open minds in a country where homosexuality was listed as a mental illness until 2001. "Of course, not everyone will be able to accept this show," producer Gang Gang, told Reuters after the Web cast. "But 90 percent of people think we’re doing meaningful work here," Gang said, who also appeared on the show. In the first one-hour instalment, Gang joined Qiao Qiao, the show’s host Didier Zheng, and Shu Qi, a cross-dressing social worker, to talk about sex, identity and discrimination. Subsequent episodes will feature celebrity actors, lawyers, teachers and psychologists, Gang said.

DISCRIMINATION

Since Mao Zedong rule, when homosexuals were persecuted and imprisoned, China has slowly become more accepting, opening support hotlines for gays and lesbians, and offering free tests for sexually transmitted diseases in recent years. "China is more and more open. In big cities, there are many gay groups participating in all sorts of activities," Gang said. "Of course, discrimination remains … The kind of pressure on gay people in China is different to the pressure in Western countries," Gang said. "In the West, it is usually pressure brought by religion. In China, it is usually family and neighbours and peers." Gang, who said his parents would be "very angry" if they knew he was producing "Tongxing", said the show’s content would be modified according to viewer’s reactions.

"Of course, it will not change some people’s attitudes toward homosexuality, but we hope that it might teach them not to take issue with their family members’ choices." In episode one, this meant confronting misconceptions, ignorance and, at times, ugly prejudice conveyed in Internet posts on discussion boards and text messages. Qiao Qiao heatedly responded to an anonymous Internet poster who said gay people were "dirty" and "freaks."

"When you say such a thing it attacks people, it attacks me," she said. While frank and open, the panelists were more polite than confronting, steering conversation toward relationships and identity, rather than sex. "As a woman who enjoys looking at beautiful women on the street, does that mean I’m homosexual?" was typical of the questions posted by Internet users. Having promised experts and celebrity guests, Zou Ming, PhoenixTV.com vice president, said the show’s content would remain mainstream and unlikely to shock.

"Online we can be a bit freer than on television," Zhou said. "But we don’t want our viewers to think gay people are abnormal. This would cause a backlash and we don’t want that."

Shanghaiist
http://www.shanghaiist.com/archives/2007/04/06/eye_on_gay_shan_9.php

April 6, 2007

8
Eye on Gay Shanghai: LBGT, a group for everyone

Gay in the city and want to meet new people without A. Consuming unseemly amounts of alcohol, B. Making a Gaydar or Fridae account, C. Begging friends for introductions, D. Gyrating on the dance floor? Well, Shanghai’s No. 1 Fag Hag is here to make your day. Welcome to the city’s newest, and first all-inclusive, alternative group: Shanghai LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender). (Full disclosure: The author of this post is a co-founder of Shanghai LGBT). Shanghai may be leading the world in GDP growth, but in queer activities and social groups it still lags behind. Even Beijing has had a gay association, Beijing Gay, Lesbian, and Allies Discussion (click link to see scary penis logo), since 2005. Meanwhile, Shanghai’s own group formed only a few months back.

Shanghai LGBT organizes events for queers and straight friendlies (like the Beijing Olympic Friendlies, but not as cute) to meet on a social basis through Yahoo groups. Events have included a pub quiz, scavenger hunt, bowling, dinner, and drink nights. They also just started a regular “meet and greet” night on the last Thursday of each month at good old Frangipani. LGBT has organized a brunch event for this Sunday and plans are in the works for a KTV night in May. The club is still waiting for its first couple success story, but with over 250 members, the wait shouldn’t be that long. A baby, on the other hand, may take awhile longer with the new adoption laws in China.

Fridae
http://www.fridae.com/newsfeatures/article.php?articleid=1902&viewarticle=1
April 18, 2007

8a
200 visit first gay HIV clinic in beijing

by News Editor
Gay men – who constitute 7.3 percent of the total HIV/AIDS sufferers in China estimated to number 650,000 in 2005 – will be the first group enlisted to help in a government-initiated program. More than 200 gay men received a free check-up in a private Beijing hospital on Sunday, the first of such a project in the Chinese capital. The Xinhua news agency reported on Monday that the clinic was organised by Chaoyang – the Chinese AIDS Volunteer Group – a non-governmental group. The men who turned up – most of whom were in their 30’s – were given a personal number and a password to the Chaoyang Web site so they could easily retrieve their test results. The check-up mainly targeted sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS Information about the free medical examinations was posted on a website for gays, www.hivolunt.net, a week ago, according to Xiao Dong, chief of the volunteer group.

Safe-sex booklets were also distributed and psychologists were on hand for anyone needing help at the venue. Organisers said they were encouraged by the turnout and plan to distribute 50,000 "rainbow cards" in gay clubs, entitling the holders to four boxes of condoms each month. In 2004, China put the total of gay men in the country at between five and ten million – a number western activists call "extreme low." Some Western AIDS groups estimate the number closer to 48 million. The Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, has warned that up to 10 million people in China could be infected by 2010 without more aggressive prevention measures.

The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has also announced this week that it is currently soliciting opinions on the country’s first government-initiated program to eradicate HIV/AIDS among homosexual men by enlisting the help of its gay population. According to a China Daily report, gay men – who constitute 7.3 percent of the total HIV/AIDS sufferers in China estimated to number 650,000 in 2005 – will be the first group asked to the join the effort. Statistics from the CDC show that the virus has been increasingly spreading among gay men and the number of sufferers has doubled since 2004.

The project to be implemented by May is aimed at containing the spread of the virus which is said to be a growing threat among China’s 20 million gay men.

shanghaiist.com
http://www.shanghaiist.com/archives/2007/04/26/online_gay_tv_s.php

April 26, 2007

9
Chinese online gay TV shows battle to be first

While April is Alcohol Awareness Month in the States (some of you might be in the dark). If you are living in China, it might as well be Promoting the Gay Agenda Month Online Gay TV Awareness Month with news of the arrival of three online gay TV shows. Earlier this month, we reported about China’s first online TV show about issues relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities within China. Aired via streaming video on Phoenix TV’s website, the show entitled, Gay Connections claimed to be the first program of its kind in China. That claim has been, um, repeated recently with the premiere of two other online TV shows about the LGBT scene in China.

The first challenger to the title of first LGBT online TV show in China is Queer As Folk in English (not to be confused with the long-running British and American shows), which you can watch here. Based in Beijing, the low-budget production has no Chinese subtitles and both hosts of the show (Steven and Xiaogang) sit together on one side of a table, while the week’s guest sits on the other side. One of the interesting features of this show is that its two roving reporters are Chinese-speaking laowai guys named Jack Beck and Martin Trojanowski.

Not to be outdone, Sina.com has also rushed to produce its own show entitled Comrades Must Carry On (the term ?? or ‘comrade’ is a euphemism for ‘gay’ in colloquial Chinese), which will go on air in May and will be hosted by director Cheng Qingsong. Our well-informed friends at China Digital Times tell us this is a reference to the reputed last words of Sun Yat-Sen, "The Revolution has yet to succeed. The Comrades must carry on." . The show makes the very dubious claim in its press release (in Chinese) that it is not only to be the first gay TV show in China, but in all of Asia! (Sometimes you have to give it to Sina’s marketing guys!) Read more about the ensuing controversy over who’s really first here.

While international news outlets like the BBC, CNN and the IHT have all been quick to cover the supposed advent of Chinese gay TV, mixed reviews have been received from Chinese viewers. Shanghaiist thinks that while Chinese media have often been derided for being overly acquiescent to the state, they have to be given credit for creatively pushing back the ambiguous out-of-boundary markers of state censors, especially in recent years. And to the cynics out there, we would just like to say that these shows are really not about preaching to the converted, but for reaching out to the large swathes of ignorant masses here.[1] In this arena, the Internet presents much hope and opens up previously unthinkable opportunities. With time, one can only hope that these issues can be given a proper airing not just on the Internet, but also on state TV, because let’s not forget — over a billion Chinese people are not online just yet.

Kudos also to guys like those behind (Queer as Folk), who have taken it upon themselves to do their bit for the promotion of understanding, even without the deep pockets of broadcasters like PhoenixTV or the backing of a marketing machinery like Sina.com. Yes, thank God for the Internet, for digicams and for blogging technology!

[1] To be fair, we asked a gay Chinese friend to watch the first episode of the Chinese Queer as Folk show and his review was: "It’s not worth writing an article about. The hosts are the most superficial people in the world. It sucks."

pinknews.co.uk
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-4625.html

13th June 2007

10
China uses gay bars to spread safe sex message

by PinkNews.co.uk writer
Free condoms, AIDS awareness posters and even safe-sex themed dance performances are some of the tools being used by venue owners in Beijing to educate their patrons about the dangers of HIV. Staff will be offered bonuses for educating gay men about safe sex in a joint campaign in nineteen of the city’s gay bars.

"When our volunteers promoted the concept of safe sex in entertainment places, people always showed antipathy to us," Xiao Dong, chief executive of Chaoyang Chinese Aids Volunteer Group, told China Daily. The managers disliked us because it affected business. But now we have persuaded the owners to join in this campaign and make a united front."

The new scheme comes in the light of recent statistics on HIV/AIDS in China. According to the Chinese Centre for Disease Control, the number of HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM) has doubled since 2004, with only 10-20% of China’s estimated 20 million MSM using condoms. Xiao said that the rise of the internet means young men of only 16 are exploring their sexuality and being exposed to the virus. "I believe gays in China face less discrimination than in the West. Some people think it is just different sexual orientation," one bar owner surnamed Sun, who signed the AIDS education campaign statement, told China Daily. "But this community still faces a lot of trouble and difficulties. The soaring pandemic is our greatest enemy."

URL for Chaoyang Chinese Aids Volunteer Group: http://www.china-aids.org/test/index.php?action=front&type=view_directory&id=250

The Times
http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=520605

July 20, 2007

11
‘Asia must overcome HIV stigma’

Sydney – Asia has made progress in containing HIV but must remove the stigma associated with the virus to fully consolidate the gains and keep it under control, international research chiefs say. Speaking ahead of an international conference of 5,000 HIV/Aids researchers in Sydney next week, America’s top expert Anthony Fauci and his Australian counterpart David Cooper said HIV remained a major public health risk in Asia. Fauci said predictions HIV would devastate Asia as it had Africa had proved false after local health authorities, which were initially slow to heed warnings, adopted pro-active policies. But he said the potential for an epidemic still existed in a region estimated to have eight million people with HIV, a figure aid agency USAid says could climb to 40 million by 2010.

"The population density in Asia is so great, with countries like India and China that have a billion people each, that infection rates just have to track up a few percentage points and you’re potentially looking at a catastrophe," Fauci told AFP. Cooper, the co-chair of the International Aids Society (IAS) conference, said responding to HIV was complicated by the fact that many suffers existed on the fringe of Asian society and faced discrimination. "We’re not going to have the generalised epidemics in our region that we’ve got in sub-Saharan Africa, we’re going to have explosive smaller epidemics," he said.

"They tend to occur among drug users, also among gay men, sex workers or mobile workers such as truck drivers, fishermen who are more likely to pay for sex. In Asia, they’re stigmatised and discriminated populations. The trick is to get into these vulnerable populations and provide non-judgemental healthcare." Cooper cited China as an example of a country that had overcome its initial denial of an HIV problem but could go further if discrimination ended. "China is responding pretty well, their response has changed, they’re putting treatment in place and doing research," he said. "But people are still very much concerned about the human rights issues and how people with HIV are treated in Chinese society."

China estimated last year that it had 650,000 HIV cases, although United Nations (UN) officials estimate the actual number is now higher. A recent paper in British medical journal The Lancet praised China’s adoption of schemes such as needle exchanges and awareness campaigns among gay men, although the UN said there was still resistance to confronting the problem at a local level.

In India, where the estimated number of HIV cases was this month halved to 2.5 million, the government has set out to target the type of at-risk groups identified by Cooper. "They’re talking about upscaling programmes with marginalised groups," said Anjali Gopalan, head of the Naz Foundation, which works primarily with men. There was quite a bit of silence on them earlier." Indians with HIV are still often treated as social outcasts, with reports of doctors shunning Aids patients and HIV-positive children being barred from attending school with other pupils.

In Cambodia, one of the countries hit hardest by HIV/Aids, the authorities are concerned that discrimination is helping the virus spread. "It is difficult for us since stigma causes infected people not to speak out and this quietly spreads the infection," said Ly Peng Sun, deputy director of the National Centre for HIV/Aids and Dermatology. "Bias can prevent us from fighting the virus successfully."

Vietnam has introduced laws banning discrimination against people with HIV, although locals say it means some employers simply find a pretext to sack infected workers, rather than admitting it is because of their illness. "If this new law is effectively implemented, it will serve not only as a shield for the fundamental rights of people living with HIV…but also as a positive tool for fighting stigma and discrimination," UNAids Vietnam director Eammon Murphy said.

Thailand has adopted a different tack to breaking down the taboos regarding HIV with innovative education campaigns such as traffic police handing out condoms, an initiative dubbed "Cops and Rubbers." The country, which has experienced about half a million Aids deaths and has about the same number of HIV cases, has slashed infection rates since it appointed a cabinet-level anti-Aids co-ordinator to oversee prevention efforts. It is also pushing international drugmakers over access to generic versions of newer and more expensive HIV medications that are needed to treat patients who have become resistant to the old drug.

China Daily
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-07/24/content_5442476.htm

July 24, 2007

12
An insight into gay life in China

by Erin Zureick (chinadaily.com.cn)
A lot can change in six years. At least that’s the experience of Didier Zheng, an openly gay Chinese man who just wrapped up a stint hosting China’s first Internet television show devoted to addressing homosexual issues. Educated at the Sorbonne University in Paris, Zheng said he found a new climate in China after returning in 2006 from his six years abroad. That’s because in 2001 the Chinese government took homosexuality off its list of mental illnesses; and Shanghai’s Fudan University introduced its first undergraduate course on homosexuality in 2005. And then there’s Zheng’s live weekly show, which made its Internet debut in April. Called "Tongxing Xianglian," or "Connecting Homosexuals," the show’s purpose was to educate gay and heterosexual communities about issues ranging from AIDS prevention to why some people are gay.

Speaking to chinadaily.com.cn in French-accented English, Zheng is talkative and eager to talk about gay issues. The 27-year-old has a slim build and engaging personality.

"After 2001, everything changed," Zheng said. "Society is changing. We are paying more attention to gay man’s socialization and integration [into society]." A French teacher and AIDS activist at Chi Heng Foundation, Zheng believes that China’s economic development, coupled with an influx of foreign ideas from across the globe, has helped China make progress in its treatment of gays. The show’s guests were chosen to represent different aspects of gay life. For example, some were celebrities such as singers and actors, while others included doctors and ordinary Chinese. Zheng also conducted interviews at a gay bar called Destination in Beijing’s Sanlitun nightclub area.

"I just want to give more information, especially to non-gay people," he explained. "They know very little about gay life." But despite the warming climate in China for gays, the show also indicates how much more progress the country needs to make. Zheng thinks the Internet format of the show worked well because content is archived online at www.phoenixtv.com and viewers can watch it at their convenience. But he also acknowledged that the authorities monitored the show’s content carefully, though he declined to cite specific examples of changes. So far, 16 million people have logged on to watch the talk show, which had 12 episodes.

"There are many people in China’s gay community, but people don’t have a deep enough understanding about this community," the show’s producer Gang Gang said before the debut. "This community faces a lot of trouble and difficulties." Zheng said his family, especially his brother, have been very supportive of his decisions. But many of his friends have not been as fortunate – which partly motivated him to host the show.

"Discrimination is very common in a society," Zheng explained, adding that he thinks that younger generations are slowly changing this behavior and that this is an international norm. The show aired through the year’s second three-month programming season. Zheng said he is unsure if he will be asked to do something similar for another season. Zheng hopes in the near future to produce some special reports and conduct more interviews. His goal is to speak with high-level international officials such as the mayor of Paris to ask them about the government’s role in legislating rules related to homosexuals. He said these interviews could serve as possible models for Chinese behavior.

"I just want to speak out about gay life in China."

August 2, 2007

13
Ramon Magsaysay Award recipients announced

by Carlos H. Conde
Manila – Seven people from China, India, South Korea, Nepal and the Philippines will receive this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award, organizers have announced. The awardees include an environmentalist, an AIDS activist, a blind lawyer – all from China – as well as a journalist who writes about India’s rural poor, a South Korean pastor, a Nepalese educator and a former senator from the Philippines. The award, to be given out in Manila on Aug. 31, is named for Ramon Magsaysay, the late Philippine president. Some 256 Asians have received it in various categories since it was established in 1957. Each awardee will receive a certificate, a medallion and an undisclosed cash prize.

"Working in different countries on diverse issues of poverty, prejudice, politics and the planet’s future, these seven individuals nevertheless share an uncommon faith in the tremendous potential of people and social institutions," said Carmencita T. Abella, president of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, in a statement on Wednesday announcing the list of honorees. The Philippines’s Jovito Salonga, a former senator, will receive the prize for government service. A staunch opponent of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Salonga defended victims of the regime and led efforts to recover its stolen wealth.

The Reverend Kim Sun Tae, from South Korea, will be honored for public service. Orphaned by the Korean War and blinded when he was young, Kim struggled to become a Christian pastor and helped found the Siloam Eye Hospital in Seoul that provides eye services to poor Koreans. More than 20,000 people have received free eye surgery. Mahabir Pun, awardee for community leadership, used wireless technology for the benefit of poor villages in Nepal. After 20 years in the United States, Pun returned to Nepal to help establish schools and, later, with donations of computers and wireless-communications gadgets from all over the world, helped hook these schools and villages to the Internet.

Tang Xiyang is recognized with the prize for peace and international understanding. He was known for his "Green Camps," which have helped publicize the degradation of China’s environment. The camps, in which environmentalists and students are dispatched to areas in China where the environment is at risk, have helped influence government policy, according to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation.

Palagummi Sainath, a journalist from India, will receive the prize for journalism, literature and creative communication arts. The foundation said Sainath had written passionately about India’s poor and the injustices they suffer. Today, "his journalism workshops occur directly in the villages, where he teaches young protégés to identify and write good stories and to be agents of change," the foundation said.

The awardees for emergent leadership are China’s Chen Guangcheng and Chung To. Chen, who is blind, led the filing of a class-action lawsuit in 2004 against officials in rural Shandong Province for, among other complaints, coercing women into having late-term abortions or sterilization. Chen publicized his case, eliciting a backlash from officials that later put him in jail, where he is serving a four-year sentence for "inciting a mob" of supporters.

Chung was recognized for his work on behalf of people with HIV. Chung, who was born in Hong Kong but grew up in the United States, created the Chi Heng Foundation in 1998 to assist gay men in Hong Kong to protect themselves from the virus. He later extended his work to the Chinese mainland, where his AIDS Orphans Project pays for the education of children whose parents have died or are dying of AIDS.

pinknews.co.uk
http://pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-5249.html

23rd August 2007

14
China targets AIDS activists

The Chinese government’s harassment of HIV/AIDS activists and intensified surveillance of AIDS support groups raises serious questions about its commitment to combating the illness, says US-based Human Rights Watch. Over the past three weeks police have forced the cancellation of three separate meetings on HIV/AIDS in the city of Guangzhou in Guangdong province and Kaifeng in Henan province. Henan authorities have also ordered the closure of an HIV/AIDS support group’s offices and are harassing a leading HIV/AIDS activist there. "These individuals and groups dedicated to addressing the enormous suffering wrought by China’s HIV/AIDS epidemic should not face police threats and harassment," said Joe Amon, HRW’s HIV/AIDS director. China’s grassroots HIV/AIDS activists need and deserve praise and support, not intimidation tactics by state security forces."

The latest round of government pressure began late last month when Public Security Bureau officers in Guangdong province forced the cancellation of a conference of Chinese and foreign HIV/AIDS experts on bolstering the legal rights of people living with HIV/AIDS. The cancellation of the meeting, organised by New York-based non-governmental organisation Asia Catalyst, was justified by the Public Security Bureau on the grounds that it involved topics considered "too sensitive" for public discussion. Police subsequently cancelled two other HIV/AIDS meetings in Guangzhou and Kaifeng. Yi Ren Ping, a Beijing-based HIV/AIDS support group was told by local government authorities that it could not hold its planned August 4th meeting in Guangzhou.

Kaifeng police cancelled the planned August 19th-20th meeting organised by the China Alliance of People Living with HIV/AIDS, claiming that the organisation "was not registered and was illegal," Reuters reported. On August 15th, Henan province Public Security Bureau officials also ordered the "temporary" closure of the two provincial offices of the non-profit China Orchid AIDS Projects, without providing any reason for the closure. Chinese government authorities are also singling out individual activists. Kaifeng Public Security Bureau officers on August 16th ordered Zhu Zhaowu, the head of the Kaifeng office of the China Orchid AIDS Projects at Henan University, to clear out his office by noon the following day or risk his personal safety. Kaifeng authorities are reportedly now blocking Zhu’s efforts to secure new rental space for China Orchid AIDS Projects.

Human Rights Watch said that the Chinese government has a long history of persecuting people living with HIV and obstructing activists dedicated to supporting them. In the 1990s, Henan provincial authorities encouraged hundreds of thousands of low-income farmers to sell their blood, from which lucrative plasma was isolated and sold on the global market. To prevent anemia among those who donated blood frequently, the red cells left when the plasma was separated from the blood were pooled and re-injected into the donors’ arms without being screened for HIV or other blood-borne diseases. The central government acknowledged the problem in the late 1990s and ordered the phasing out of the blood collection centres, but many continued to operate.

It is estimated that thousands of rural dwellers died, in some cases virtually wiping out whole villages. Human Rights Watch reported in 2003 that while the earliest of these cases of HIV transmission were inadvertent, the provincial authorities continued the practice in some locations even after it was known that HIV and other diseases had been transmitted in this way. More recently, the Chinese government has strengthened legislation related to HIV/AIDS, including guaranteeing access to antiretroviral drugs, providing protection from discrimination, and rapidly expanding access to methadone therapy for injection drug users. Yet, despite the Chinese government’s repeated pledges to the international community that the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS is now a national priority, HIV/AIDS activists remain targets for repression by China’s security agencies.

"If the Chinese government had devoted as much energy to halting the epidemic as it has to persecuting activists, untold numbers of lives could have been saved," said Amon. Two decades of denial and repression are disgraceful."

Dr. Gao Yaojie, a doctor who helped expose the Henan outbreak, was barred earlier this year from going to the U.S. to receive a human rights award until an international outcry forced the Chinese government to reverse that decision. The husband-and-wife HIV/AIDS activist team of Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan spent most of 2006 under house arrest. After a brief period of relative freedom, their house arrest order was renewed in May 2007. In April some 350 people infected with HIV/AIDS were blocked by police from protesting over ineffective government-supplied drug treatments in Zhengzhou. Despite these repressive measures, as recently as July 17th, Peter Piot, the head of UNAIDS, praised China’s government for "strong leadership" in combating HIV/AIDS and said that China "supports those AIDS patients and cares about those AIDS-affected orphans."

"The Chinese government’s intensifying crackdown on HIV/AIDS activists deserves international condemnation, not baseless praise,” said Amon. "UNAIDS should make it clear to the Chinese government that ongoing persecution of HIV/AIDS activists is wrong, counterproductive, and threatens efforts to contain the disease."

www.pinknews.co.uk
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-5306.html

30th August 2007

15
Shanghai landlords urged to shun same-sex couples

by Alex Donald
New rules are being drafted in Shanghai urging landlords not to rent rooms to same-sex partners, according to Reuters. The city’s housing bureau has issued a report advocating conservative restrictions on who should and should not be allowed to rent rooms. In addition to same-sex couples, unmarried couples were also included in the ambiguous report which does not make clear whether the new rules would merely become guidelines or be enforced by law. Married couples, families and individuals would benefit from the recommendations if enforced. However, many see economical as well as morally questionable flaws in the report.

Local media have denounced the plan as ‘arrogant’ and unjustifiably targeting the Chinese LGBT community and also the City’s poorer inhabitants. "This matter in essence… attacks the people who can least afford it" comments the Southern Metropolitan Daily. Others point to the dubious situation that may arise when students and much needed migrant workers arrive in the city, often renting bunk beds in cramped communal rooms to save costs in a city where property prices and rents have soared in recent years. Far from living up to its’ colonial-dubbed name of ‘Whore of the Orient’, the People’s Republic’s rising status as a superpower is bringing with it conservative moral values imposed from the top down.

Last year, China banned foreign gay couples from adopting Chinese children in an attempt to stop an influx of foreign nationals wishing to adopt. Disabled people, unmarried couples and obese people were also included on the list upon which the Chinese authorities cite a desire for children to grow up in “better conditions”

MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20647865/site/newsweek/

September 17, 2007

16
Gay Rights Gain Ground Around Globe, Now mature in the west, gay power is growing worldwide, even in the land of machismo

by Joseph Contreras, Newsweek International
After eight years together, Gilberto Aranda and Mauricio List walked into a wedding chapel in the Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacán last April and tied the knot in front of 30 friends and relatives. Aranda’s disapproving father was not invited to the springtime nuptials. For the newlyweds, the ceremony marked the fruit of the gay-rights movement’s long struggle to gain recognition in Mexico. The capital city had legalized gay civil unions only the month before. "After all the years of marches and protests," says Aranda, 50, a state-government official, "a sea change was coming."

The sea change spreads beyond Mexico City, a cosmopolitan capital that is home to a thriving community of artists and intellectuals.The growing maturity of the gay-rights movement in the West is having a marked effect on the developing world. In the United States, the Republican Party is in trouble in part because it has made a fetish of its opposition to gay marriage. At least some gays in big cities like New York question why they are still holding "pride" parades, as if they were still a closeted minority and not part of the Manhattan mainstream. Since 2001, Western European countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain have gone even farther than the United States, placing gay and lesbian partners on the same legal footing as their heterosexual counterparts. And now, the major developing powers of Asia, Latin America and Africa are following the liberal road—sometimes imitating Western models, sometimes not—but in all cases setting precedents that could spread to the remaining outposts of official homophobia.

In Mexico, the declining clout and prestige of the Roman Catholic Church have emboldened gay-rights activists and their allies in state legislatures and city councils to pass new laws legalizing same-sex civil unions, starting with Mexico City in November. The rising influence of tolerant Western pop culture has encouraged gay men and lesbians to proclaim their sexuality in gay-pride marches like the one in the Brazilian city of São Paulo in June, which drew 3 million participants, according the event’s organizers. It was the largest ever in Brazil. Western models also helped inspire South Africa to legalize civil unions in November 2006, thus becoming the first country in the developing world to do so. In China, the trend goes back to the climate of economic reform that took hold in the 1980s, ending the persecution of the era of Mao Zedong, who considered homosexuals products of the "moldering lifestyle of capitalism." Among left-wing movements in many developing countries, globalization is a favorite scapegoat for all of the planet’s assorted ills. But even those who resist the West’s basically conservative free-market economic orthodoxy are quick to acknowledge the social liberalism—including respect for the rights of women and minorities of all kinds—that is the West’s main cultural and legal export. "I think it helped that Spain and other parts of Europe had passed similar laws," says longtime Mexican gay-rights activist Alejandro Brito. "These types of laws are becoming more about human rights than gay issues."

Key people have hastened the trend in some countries. Some activists single out a few political celebrities for de-stigmatizing their cause, including Nelson Mandela, who readily embraced British actor Sir Ian McKellen’s suggestion that he support a ban on discrimination on the basis of sexual preference in South Africa’s first post-apartheid constitution, and former prime minister Tony Blair, whose government was the first to recognize civil partnerships between same-sex couples. They also point to activist judges in Brazil, South Africa and the European Court of Human Rights, who have handed down landmark rulings that unilaterally granted gay, lesbian and transgender communities new rights. These include a judicial order that gays be admitted into the armed forces of European Union member states. The biggest and perhaps most surprising change is in Latin America, the original home of machismo. In 2002, the Buenos Aires City Council approved Latin America’s first-ever gay-civil-union ordinance, and same-gender unions are the law of the land in four Brazilian states today. Last year an openly homosexual fashion designer was elected to Brazil’s National Congress with nearly a half a million votes. In August a federal-court judge in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul broke new legal ground when he ordered the national-health-care system to subsidize the cost of sex-change operations in public hospitals, thereby putting sexual "reassignment" on par with heart surgery, organ transplants and AIDS treatment as medical procedures worthy of taxpayer support. By the year-end, Colombia could become the first country in Latin America to grant gay and lesbian couples full rights to health insurance, inheritance and social-security benefits. A bill containing those reforms is working its way through the National Congress at present. And even Cuba has turned a corner. In the 1960s and early 1970s homosexuals in Cuba were blacklisted or even banished to forced-labor camps along with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholic priests and other so-called social misfits. HIV patients were locked away in sanitariums as recently as 1993. Several Cuban cities now host gay and lesbian film festivals. The hit TV program on the island’s state-run airwaves last year was "The Hidden Side of the Moon," a soap opera about a married man who falls in love with a man and later tests positive for HIV.

The push for "more modern ways of thinking" about minorities, feminists and homosexuals has roots that go back to the political ferment that shook the region in the late 1960s and 1970s, says Braulio Peralta, author of a 2006 book on gay rights in Mexico, "The Names of Rainbow." But it has gained in recent years, due in part to troubles in the Roman Catholic Church, which includes eight out of 10 Mexicans and long stood opposed to any attempt to redefine marriage laws. Last November, the Mexico City Legislature took up the civil-union law just as the country’s top cardinal, Norberto Rivera Carrera, was facing charges that he had sheltered a Mexican priest accused of sexually abusing children in California. The prelate chose to stay under the radar as the vote loomed. "The Catholic Church was facing a credibility crisis," says longtime Mexico City-based gay-rights activist Brito. "So many of its leaders including Rivera knew that if they fiercely opposed the gay-union law, the news media would eat them alive." The change in attitudes is most vivid in the sparsely populated border state of Coahuila, an unlikely setting for blazing trails on gay rights. The left-wing political party that rules the national capital has made few inroads here. Yet soon after the state’s young governor, Humberto Moreira Valdés, was elected in 2006, he backed a civil-union bill modeled on France’s pacts of civil solidarity, and in the state capital of Saltillo the progressive Catholic bishop added his support. The 62-year-old prelate, Raul Vera, says he was comfortable doing so in part because the bill stopped short of calling for same-sex marriage. "As the church I said we could not assume the position of homophobes," he says. "We cannot marginalize gays and lesbians. We cannot leave them unprotected."

That seems to be the prevailing consensus in South Africa’s ruling party. The constitution adopted by South Africa after the African National Congress (ANC) took power in 1994 was the world’s first political charter to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In November 2006, the national Parliament overwhelmingly approved a civil-union bill after the country’s constitutional court called for amendments to a 44-year-old marriage law that denied gay and lesbian couples the legal right to wed. In pushing for approval of the Civil Union Act, the ruling ANC shrugged off both conservative opposition parties and religious leaders, some of whom accused the government of imposing the morality of a "radical homosexual minority" on South Africans. President Thabo Mbeki had been blasted by gay rights activists in the past for trying to downplay his country’s raging HIV/AIDS epidemic, but on the issue of same-sex civil unions his government stood firm. The sweeping terms of the 2006 Civil Union Act placed South Africa in a select club of nations that have enacted similar laws and that, until last year, included only Canada, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands. But there are glimmers of change in other nations. China decriminalized sodomy a decade ago and removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 2001. Police broke up a gay and lesbian festival in Beijing in 2005 but took no action last February against an unauthorized rally in support of legalizing gay marriage. The Chinese Communist Party has established gay task forces in all provincial capitals to promote HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention. And in April a Web site launched a weekly hour-long online program called Connecting Homosexuals with an openly gay host. It is the first show in China to focus entirely on gay issues.

Tolerance, however, by no means spans the globe. Homosexuality remains taboo throughout the greater Middle East. In most of the Far East, laws permitting gay and lesbian civil unions are many years if not decades away. In Latin America, universal acceptance of homosexuality is a long way off. Jamaica is a hotbed of homophobia. Even in Mexico, the first couple to take advantage of Coahuila’s new civil-union statute were fired from their jobs as sales clerks after their boss realized they were lesbians. The new Mexico City law grants same-gender civil unions property and inheritance rights, but not the right to adopt children. Even Mexican gays who still struggle against daily bias see signs of improvement, however. In 2003 José Luis Ramírez landed work as a buyer at the Mexico City headquarters of a leading department-store chain, and things were going swimmingly until he brought his boyfriend to a company-hosted dinner with clients. "My boss’s face just dropped," recalls Ramírez. Ramírez was subsequently denied promotions and left the company last year. But sexuality "isn’t an issue" with his current employer, a new household-furnishings retailer.

Tolerance is now the majority, at least among the young. A 2005 poll by the Mitofsky market-research firm found that 50 percent of all Mexicans between the ages of 18 and 29 supported proposals to allow gay marriage. Karla Lopez met Karina Almaguer on the assembly line of a Matamoros auto-stereo factory. The two became the first Mexican couple to marry under the civil-union bill; Lopez, now 30, is a mother of three. She urges more gays and lesbians to follow her example and come out publicly. "I felt strange at first because people would judge us and look at us from head to toe," she says. "But I now feel more secure and at ease." If more political leaders, clergymen and judges act to legitimize folks like Karla Lopez, the new mood of tolerance will surely proliferate across the planet in her lifetime.

With Monica Campbell in Mexico City, Mac Margolis in Porto Alegre, Karen MacGregor in Durban, Quindlen Krovatin in Beijing and Anna Nemtsova in Moscow

chinadaily.com.cn
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-10/08/content_6155820.htm

October 8, 2007

17
Scholars struggle to put gay marriage in spotlight

by Shan Juan (China Daily)
While their old school friends are walking up the aisle, China’s homosexuals have been left on the shelf. Despite the nation’s rapid development, society remains deeply conservative, and gay weddings are unimaginable for the majority of citizens. But a new generation of scholars is challenging the idea that marriage can only ever be between a man and a woman. Professor Li Yinhe, a sociologist and gay rights campaigner, is leading the call for marriage and other rights for the nation’s 40 million homosexuals.

With any discussion of sex in public still deeply taboo, and homosexuals often ostracized, many people have been outraged by her proposals. However, Professor Li has been echoed by Dr Zhang Beichuan, China’s leading scholar of homosexuality. Legal unions for homosexuals will lead to more stable same-sex relationships, notes Zhang, adding that they will also help better protect the legitimate rights of same sex lovers, especially the right to inherit their deceased partner’s goods.

But Zhou Dan, a Shanghai lawyer who is open about being a "comrade" (a euphemism for a homosexual), thinks otherwise. Zhou has lived with his long-term lover for many years. Many would expect him to be a supporter of gay marriage, but Zhou remains non-committal. "Personally, I do appreciate Professor Li for her bravery in calling for equal rights for homosexuals," Zhou noted. "But I think demanding marriage for ‘comrades’ is more of a strategy rather than a realistic target."

Countries including the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, the United Kingdom and South Africa now recognize same sex marriage, according to Zhou. However, he believes China still has a long way to go before homosexuals have the right to wed. For starters China still lags behind other countries in terms of anti-discrimination laws necessary to protect homosexuals, he said. "The government can’t simply allow gay marriages. The whole legal climate surrounding homosexual relationships needs to change," Zhou said. "Only when the whole of society understands homosexuals, can we start talking about gay marriage. "Currently even if the authorities give their support to gay marriage, society is too hostile for homosexuals to publicly tie the knot," Zhou added.

For homosexuals in China, legal marriage is a want, not a must, unlike welfare and insurance policies, said Zhou, citing the situation in other countries where a citizen’s welfare benefits can be shared with his or her legal spouse.

GayWired.com
http://pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-6023.html

12th November 2007

18
China should focus its efforts on stopping HIV transmission

by Chrys Hudson
China should focus its efforts on stopping HIV transmission, not on limiting the freedom of movement, expression and speech of people living with HIV, leaders from New York City-based Human Rights Watch said Friday at a global meeting of AIDS activists in Abuja, Nigeria. Human Rights Watch was commenting in advance of the November 11th to 13th board meeting of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Kuming, China. In arranging the meeting the Global Fund board received assurances from the Chinese government that delegates to the meeting representing people living with HIV/AIDS would not be required to disclose their HIV status on immigration landing cards or be subject to a current law excluding HIV-positive individuals from entering China.

On September 1st, however, without advance notice, the Chinese government made disclosure of HIV status a requirement on all visa applications. "Discrimination on the basis of HIV status in terms of international travel is both a violation of human rights and an ineffective public health strategy," Joe Amon, director of Human Rights Watch’s HIV/AIDS programme, said in a release. In recent years, the Chinese government has strengthened legislation related to AIDS, including expanding access to antiretroviral drugs, providing legal protection from discrimination, and scaling up methadone therapy for injection drug users (IDUs).

However, according to Human Rights Watch, AIDS activists continue to be intimidated and detained by Chinese security forces, and those groups most vulnerable to infection – IDUs, men who have sex with men, and sex workers – are routinely harassed and abused by the police. Human Rights Watch cited the cancellation this past summer of meetings on HIV/AIDS by civil society groups in Guangdong, Guangzhou and Kaifeng provinces, and the closure of two offices of a Chinese AIDS organisation in Henan province. In the past year, Human Rights Watch said that prominent AIDS activists such as 2005 Reebok Human Rights Award winner Li Dan, 80-year-old AIDS activist Dr. Gao Yaojie and the husband-and-wife HIV/AIDS activist team of Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan have been detained or put under house arrest.

In April, some 350 people infected with HIV/AIDS were blocked by police from protesting over ineffective government-supplied drug treatments in Zhengzhou. Responding to pressure from representatives of people living with HIV/AIDS on the Global Fund board who threatened to boycott the meeting, the Chinese government has now promised to rescind the new visa requirements and has said that they will work toward overturning their ban on people living with HIV/AIDS from entering the country. Human Rights Watch called on the Chinese government to take immediate concrete steps toward overturning the ban, and said that the Global Fund should closely scrutinise the Chinese government’s funding proposal to ensure that it included support for civil society organisations and respect for human rights.

"Until AIDS activists in China are allowed to speak freely, until people living with HIV are allowed to move freely and until the government focuses its strategies on effective, rights-based interventions, the Global Fund should find other places to hold its meetings and support other countries instead," Amon said.

From APCOM, New Delhi, India

November 30, 2007

19
New Asia Pacific Statistics Reveal an Alarming Incidence of HIV in MSM: APCOM Ready to Play a Key Role as Governments and Civil Society in the Region Ponder Urgent Strategies to Tackle the Crisis

New Delhi/Beijing/Bangkok – Today, on World AIDS Day 2007, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men who have sex with men (MSM) will become infected with HIV in cities across the Asia Pacific, becoming the latest statistics in an almost unrecognized but ever-growing crisis that many governments in the region are only just beginning to grapple with. As these efforts take shape, the Asia Pacific Coalition on Male Sexual Health (APCOM) is offering its partnership to develop and support new strategies aimed at tackling this regional challenge. Paradoxically, it may be more challenging for APCOM to draw attention to the MSM HIV issue. The recent adjustment downwards of global HIV and AIDS figures has been construed in some quarters as an indication that the AIDS crisis has been “exaggerated” all along. However, APCOM and the stakeholders it represents are urging the Asia Pacific region, and indeed the world, not to confuse the true picture.

Most MSM who contract HIV today in city after city in the Asia Pacific region will never know they harbour the virus until they become ill with advanced symptoms. Without that knowledge, they probably will not change the very behaviours that put them, as well as their partners and loved ones, at risk. A recent survey in a major Asian capital suggested as many as 32% of MSM there are HIV positive. In other cities across the region, HIV infection rates for MSM range from estimates anywhere from 5% to 15% or 20% and higher.

“Despite MSM having higher infection rates than the general adult population, the financial investment for HIV prevention, care and support services for this marginalized group across the Asia Pacific is abysmally low in national HIV and AIDS programme planning, usually between zero and four percent,” says Shivananda Khan, APCOM Chairperson and CEO of Naz Foundation International. “Less than one in ten MSM in the region have access to any sort of HIV services, woefully short of the eight in ten that UNAIDS describes as optimal coverage necessary for high-risk groups. Is it any surprise then that we really don’t have a clear picture of the true extent of the HIV crisis affecting men who have sex with men?”

Edmund Settle, HIV/AIDS Programme Manager for UNDP China, concurs. “You’ve got these really alarming statistics of ten, 20, 30 percent HIV infection rates among MSM in some major cities, but when you ask whether this picture holds true across other urban centres, or even in suburban or rural areas, the answer’s not at all simple. It ranges from `Yes, it’s somewhat likely’ to `Well, we’re not really certain.’ Still, we do know more today than just a couple of years ago.”

That growing clarity comes from a recent review of available data, soon to be released by UNAIDS, that describes the epidemiology of HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STI), and behaviours of MSM in the Asia Pacific region that put them at considerable risk of HIV and STI. As the paper states: “Severe and established HIV epidemics are found among MSM in some countries while imminent or beginning HIV epidemics were observed in others.” The review also recommends ways to change policy and programming that would confront this challenge and help improve the situation.

“This collection of data in the upcoming review allows us to highlight more accurately than before the extent of the HIV scenario vis-à-vis MSM in our region,” according to Geoff Manthey , Regional Advisor on MSM for Asia Pacific UNAIDS Regional Support Team (RST-AP). “It also comes at a most opportune time, with the recent creation of the Asia Pacific Coalition on Male Sexual Health. We hope that the work of APCOM, and its strength in bringing together representatives from governments, the UN system, donors and NGOs side by side with affected communities will finally make the difference in creating a truly regional strategy to address the MSM HIV crisis — and yes, even though it’s an overused word or sounds like a cliché, this is a crisis, make no mistake about that.”

In 2006, a year before APCOM’s creation, JVR Prasada Rao, director of UNAIDS RST-AP, had warned that “data in Asia show that without interventions, male to male sex will become one of the main sources of new HIV infections in the region,” He added, “We are facing a public health crisis, but you would never know it from the region’s almost invisible response so far” — a fact supported by a UNAIDS report published this past August, Men who have sex with men — the missing piece in national responses to AIDS in Asia and the Pacific.

The China Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) recently stated that HIV prevention for MSM was the latest hurdle for the government’s drive to curb a fast-rising AIDS epidemic. In fact, China — the world’s most populous nation — was the first country in the region to issue a specific national framework on MSM and HIV, which calls for urgent efforts to engage civil society in a concerted effort to reach out to men who have sex with men. China recently reported that male to male sexual transmission now accounts for 12.5 percent of new HIV cases in 2007, up from 2.5 percent in 2005.

Reflecting the growing regional awareness for enhanced surveillance that incorporates epidemiology as well as sociocultural awareness, the Center for HIV/AIDS/STI (CHAS) in Laos PDR has conducted the first survey of HIV among MSM in Laos and will soon be releasing the results. As governments and health partners across the Asia Pacific wake up to the realization that national HIV prevention strategies must include a significant MSM component, APCOM and its partners stand ready to support and strengthen such approaches.

“All of these surveys, these papers, these data and statistics represent hope that our region is making a breakthrough,” says Dede Oetomo, who sits on APCOM’s interim governing board and is a noted long-time gay activist in Indonesia , a country with limited but successful and well-documented results in HIV and STI prevention among MSM. “However, the good work that’s emerged in recent times also serves as a warning that the hard work now really begins. With the multisectoral strength that APCOM provides, we are poised to finally reach out to MSM groups in a way that hasn’t been possible before. It’s an important, exciting time — full of challenges, yet full of promise. Let’s go forward now and get the work done.”

Contacts:
Shivananda Khan / New Delhi : +91 98392 21091 (mobile) Paul Causey / Bangkok : +66 81 984 6515 (mobile) Edmund Settle / Beijing : +86 1391 136 3025 (mobile) Geoff Manthey / Bangkok : +66 81 870 2175 (mobile)

APCOM BACKGROUND

A concept that grew out of the mounting HIV crisis in MSM populations across the Asia Pacific, APCOM was formally launched in July 2007. APCOM is a direct outcome of the Male Sexual Health and HIV in Asia and the Pacific International Consultation held in New Delhi in late 2006. This three-day consultation brought together community members, government officials, policy makers and researchers to provide an opportunity to inform and develop strategic advocacy initiatives on key policy issues concerning MSM and the transgender community.

Opened to regional and sub-regional networks, as well as national networks and individual organizations, APCOM is governed by a 19-member Governing Board comprised of community representatives from 7 Asia Pacific sub-regions: the Pacific (including New Zealand), South Asia (including Mongolia but excluding India), Greater Mekong (GMS), South East Asia (excluding GMS), Developed Asia (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia), China and India. In addition, the board will consist of representatives from the transgender community, government sector, donors and a communication advisor.
UNAIDS, UNDP and UNESCO will support APCOM as technical advisors.

A coalition of governments, UN partners, donors, NGOs and populations that are directly affected by the AIDS epidemic, APCOM’s goals are ambitious but have been meticulously planned. Through increased participation and MSM representation in regional and global bodies and conferences, APCOM will seek to scale up and increase attention to the needs of MSM in general and HIV issues in particular. Forums that APCOM has been, or will be, represented at include ASEAN ministerial meetings, ICAAP-9 and the 2008 International AIDS Conference in Mexico .

By the leveraging of technical assistance, support and mentoring to MSM HIV projects, state and national governments and to existing technical assistance facilities, as well as by identifying and assisting the development of MSM and HIV networks, APCOM will strengthen community work and help partnerships so that work can be shared and improved upon.

With the current vacuum of data on MSM and HIV in Asia (although recent surveys and reports are gradually filling some gaps), a critical role for APCOM is to assess and track — country by country — both the degree and quality of inclusion of MSM and HIV issues, and to report on national AIDS plans. All the while, APCOM will seek to promote the principles of good practice and lessons learnt to policy makers, service providers and MSM based on qualitative research and cost effective studies.

An APCOM website is being developed to serve as a focal point for information and examples of good practice, a repository of research papers with practical applications as well as publications for anyone interested in the issues of HIV and MSM, including academics, policy makers and members of the MSM community itself. The website will also be an online governance tool for APCOM’s trustees and for its members. APCOM will work with UNESCO in the creation of a companion website envisioned to be a clearing house for state-of-the-art information, BCC/IEC materials and research data on MSM and HIV (particularly in the Asia Pacific). The APCOM website, scheduled to be online in early 2008, will be located at www.msmasia.org.

APCOM’s temporary office is based in New Delhi .
Contact information:
apcom@msmasia.org
Aditya Bondyopadhyay, Secretariat Coordinator

Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/americasCrisis/idUSPEK33361

November 30, 2007

20
Asia-Pacific must do more to tackle gay AIDS crisis-group

by Ben Blanchard
Beijing, Nov 30 (Reuters) – Asia-Pacific countries are not doing enough to tackle a growing AIDS crisis among men who have sex with men, hampered by social stigma and discriminatory laws, according to an advocacy group. Though in some countries such as China the government is now actively involved in reaching out to this community, in others, including Malaysia and India, progress has been much slower, said the Asia-Pacific Coalition on Male Sexual Health. It is an "almost unrecognised but ever-growing crisis that many governments in the region are only just beginning to grapple with", the group said in a statement ahead of World AIDS Day on Saturday. HIV infection rates in some Asia cities in the men who have sex with men (MSM) community are estimated to be as high as 32 percent, added the group, a coalition of U.N. bodies, governments and non-governmental organisations. "One of the main reasons is stigma around engaging in MSM behaviour, and also identifying as gay, transgender and so on in Asia," Edmund Settle, HIV/AIDS Programme Manager for the UNDP in China, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

That stigma can range from lack of visibility to homophobic violence in places like Nepal.

"There’s also a legislative reason. In a lot of post-colonial countries such as India and Malaysia, engaging in male-to-male sex is illegal, punishable by long prison sentences. So it’s very difficult to talk openly about male-to-male sex if it’s illegal," he added. Another problem is lack of data, though research has now started to take place, and lack of focus on the community in HIV/AIDS prevention work.

"Despite MSM having higher infection rates than the general adult population, the financial investment for HIV prevention, care and support services for this marginalised group across the Asia-Pacific is abysmally low in national HIV and AIDS programme planning, usually between 0 and 4 percent," group chairperson Shivananda Khan said in the statement. "Less than one in 10 MSM in the region have access to any sort of HIV services, woefully short of the six in 10 that UNAIDS describes as minimal coverage necessary for high-risk groups," Khan added. "Is it any surprise then that we really don’t have a clear picture of the true extent of the HIV crisis affecting men who have sex with men?"

Knowledge of safe sex can be pitifully low.

In China, which has an estimated 700,000 HIV cases, only 30 percent of men who have sex with men use condoms, according to a new Chinese government/UN report. And in urban areas, new cases are growing fast in this community. "If you just look at urban cases, in China they are starting to make up a large proportion of HIV infections," Settle said, adding this was also the case in other major cities around the region. "What we don’t know is the second and third tier cities." (Editing by Nick Macfie)

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