More hope for gay rights in China than the US

• Source: Global Times
• [00:34 November 18 2009]
• Comments

By James Palmer

Recent setbacks in Maine, where a gay marriage law was rejected, and in Rhode Island, where the governor arbitarily forbid gay partners from enjoying funeral rights, have many civil rights activists in the US despairing.

If anything, the situation in China can seem worse. Gay marriage isn't even on the administrative agenda yet, and most Chinese homosexuals still live hidden lives, pressured into marriage by their family.

Yet history and culture may offer more hope in China than in the US.

The Jesuit priest and pioneering Sinologist Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) once wrote disapprovingly of homosexuality in Chinese society, "It is spoken of in public and practised everywhere without there being anyone to prevent it."

Ricci was a tolerant, gentle and inquiring man, willing to adapt to others in the quest to bring them to God. His horror at the sight of men loving men, however, was typical of the prejudices of his time and place.

He came from a continent where homosexuality was condemned by religion, law and custom, and vicious punishments, even including death, were handed down to gay men.

The China he came to was much more open. Although none of the major Chinese re-ligious traditions smiled upon homosexuality, and social pressures for marriage and children were strong, there was never the absolute condemnation of Europe.

Some Chinese writers sneered at homosexual love, others laughed about it, and some celebrated it. That tradition carried on into the reformers of the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), such as the famous scholar Kang Youwei (1858- 1927), who proposed a future egalitarian society where gay marriage would be accepted on equal terms as straight.

However, since 1950s, homosexuality was condemned as a "Western bourgeois vice,"and it was effectively impossible to have open homosexual relationship except in isolated pockets of tolerance and homosexuals.

Today, gay rights in China are less advanced than in Europe or the US. Although a commonly accepted rule is "no approval, no disapproval, no promotion,"and legal persecution is rare, gays rarely live openly and have a difficult time, in particular, coming out to their parents.