The past 20 years have seen increasing research interest in issues of gender and sexuality in China. I’m here to take a tour of its gay scene and 29-year-old Ah Tao is my guide. With a population of about 198,000 Jiaji is a small city.
I turn around to find Ah Tao* hurrying towards me, scrambling over a low hedge.
I’m standing in a park watching middle aged women dance in formation to music blaring from a loudspeaker when a voice from behind me shouts: “Ah Kang! Let’s go! I’ll take you to see the place where the gays go to play mahjong.” His heart pounds but he cannot speak he’s a fraud-a catfish-and he doesn’t realize that the photo he used as his profile belongs to another person, a boy of 19 whose mother, right now, sobs incomprehensibly into a phone’s cradle.It’s around 7:30pm on a warm November evening in Jiaji, the county capital of Qionghai, on the east coast of Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. He sees the man with the bangs and recognizes him from his QQ profile. A Uighur, he has Turkic features and dark, leathery skin. The real 419 is a migrant worker from Xinjiang province. Tongzhi sit around on park benches, cracking jokes and laughing. There are rats out tonight, and roaches as well.
Meanwhile, halfway across town, their son stands smoking between a swing and a bench in People’s Park when a man with crooked bangs approaches and asks, a note of joy in his voice, “Are you 419?” Her husband, watching the news coverage about tomorrow’s meeting of the National People’s Congress, hears a sudden thud-the boy’s mother has fainted. Tall men, short men, American men, Asian men. The boy’s mother tears the calendar off the wall, only to discover a taped patchwork of men’s pictures. The man with the screen name 419 (For One Night) tells him, via QQ chat, “Meet me in the back of People’s Park.” Heart thumping, teeth chattering, with sweat on his brow and a flush in his cheeks, the man with the crooked bangs enters, for the His T-shirt clings tight to his chest and his pants are cropped to reveal ankles pocked with mosquito bites. A man exits a cab at the edge of the park and adjusts his hair. You can hear the cars over on the next street, the honk of trucks and the skid of moped wheels. Old men and women pick up their orange peels, abandoning the Go tables they’ve been gathered around since morning. Couples desert their benches for warm beds. It’s 7 pm on a Sunday and the kids are leaving People’s Park, their books and tennis rackets cradled under swinging arms. See how they slap each other’s shoulders in the milky dusk. Listen to how they talk, to how their voices rise with flirtatious lilts. They are the men who cruise the parks at night, with their eyes wandering and a hand planted over their hips.