GLR November-December 2023

filial piety: “They then asked me if I were gay. I said, ‘If you think I am, then I am.’ And then we got into a fight. She [his mother] hit me, and I hit her back.” After days of not speaking, his parents “reluctantly accepted that I won’t have children and continue the family bloodline and worry that I might get HIV / AIDS .” But his parents still want him to “be normal” and get married, even if they have accepted that it will never happen. The end result? “They rarely discuss it these days.” Hiro, on the other hand, got this reaction when he came out to his parents in Taipei: “Oh, so you won’t get married and have

that the gay liberation movement is exclusively Western. But even now, a young gay male is expected to get a stable job and an apartment, to marry and have children. (This, in a country with 1.4 billion people, eleven million new college graduates this year, and a troubled economy.) So, people like Yojo and Hiro must not only come out to their parents but also decide whether to marry, and if they do, whether to marry a les bian or a straight woman who doesn’t know they’re gay. (The plight of the Chinese woman married to a man she doesn’t know is gay has actually inspired a national TV show.) Meanwhile

children,” his father said, “so you don’t need to worship all these ancestral plaques, and you can destroy them.” What happened next, Hiro reports: “He then cried in front of me. That was the first time and the only time I saw my dad cry. But he does not oppose or deny (me).” Thus Taiwan and China are changing, even in that most universal and classic of gay

they dream of a monogamous partnership with another man, a fantasy that critics call “cruel optimism”: wasting your life believ ing in the possibility of something that’s not likely to happen. (None of the interview sub jects quoted by Kong was able to maintain a closed marriage.) At the same time, there are the familiar snobberies that make gay life so competi

The modern version of homosexuality in Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan all seems to be the an ti thesis of rebellious, di ff erent, alienated.

tive: the prestige of gym bodies, successful careers, good looks (there seems to be a marked disgust with being fat), masculin ity, and even, it must be noted, whiteness. The description Tony gives of his life in Taipei, for instance, seems all too familiar to the gay reader: “The tongzhi circle is full of discrimination. ... The fatties look down on the skinny. The skinny look down on the muscled. The muscled look down on the fatties. ... For me, if a skinny guy wanted to approach me, I would ask him to leave. ... I am part of it, too!” Tony aspires to belong to the

experiences: coming out to your parents. It sounds suspiciously Western—i.e., narcissistic—when Kong says that “generally speaking, parents’ expectations of their children have shifted from ‘be normal’ to ‘be happy’ while children’s expectations of them selves in relation to their parents have shifted from ‘please one’s parents’ to ‘be yourself.’ Those expectations have changed in con junction with growing acceptance of LGBT people, changes in parenting culture and a shift toward individualism among the younger Chinese generations.” Even so, Kong dismisses the idea

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November–December 2023

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