- Your number’s up! - 29th January 2025
- Secrets and lies part two - 28th January 2025
- Secrets and lies part one - 27th January 2025
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 41 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, the fair treatment of persecuted sections of society was fundamental, and an important source of stories. Now this is underlined by a continued crackdown on LGBTQ rights in China, with news now that 10 people have been arrested for writing ‘gay erotica’.
It goes on and on.
The persecution of gay people is great for journalists like me, because so many stories are prompted, but it is an AWFUL insight into certain official moral values.
Let’s look at China.
According to multiple reports reviewed by the news service Radio Free Asia (RFA), dozens of Chinese gay online fiction writers have been targeted since June as part of the huge country’s campaign against “pornographic” content.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) have stated that 10 people in the province of Anhu received prison sentences for posting ‘gay erotica’ online.
Meanwhile a ‘special task force’ has been arresting writers who have been publishing works on the adult fiction website Haitang Literature (HL).
The task force has targeted writers who have earned at least 300,000 yuan ($41,000) from their work.
Chinese law states that writers who make more than 250,000 yuan from erotica could be sentenced to a maximum of life in prison.
This level of persecution of gay people started many years ago under Xi Jinping but has been significantly ramped up recently.
Six years ago the Oscar-winning Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody fell victim to this appalling attitude.
Censors in China took out all references to Freddie Mercury’s sexuality and AIDS diagnosis, despite the fact that these are central to the narrative.
Several minutes of footage were edited out of the film, among them scenes of two men kissing and the word ‘gay’.
In the Chinese version of the film, several scenes were amended or deleted.
Explicit and implicit references to the Queen singer’s sexuality were edited out, including an important scene in which he comes out to his then-girlfriend.
Other scenes which were cut out included a close-up of Freddie Mercury’s crotch as he performs, interactions with his partner Jim Hutton, and the entire sequence in which the character and his onscreen band-mates recreate Queen’s iconic music video for 1984 single ‘I Want to Break Free’, in which they dress in women’s clothes.
There have been many other outrageous events in China as the crackdown on gay people has continued.
For example, the country’s largest Pride event has been suspended since 2021.
People taking part in political protests in China (as gay marches appear to be deemed), often face punishment, so instead of holding parades, ShanghaiPride had to organise dance parties, community runs and film screenings in the city.
From this point onwards, only a few low-profile events have been available for the LGBTQ community such as ‘voguing balls’, where dancers executed moves inspired by model poses.
And ShanghaiPride was not the only major LGBTQ group to cease operations in China either, several others had to shut down too.
Dozens of accounts dealing with LGBTQ topics on the popular Chinese messaging app WeChat were deleted in 2021. The same year, a group which filed lawsuits on behalf of members of the LGBTQ community closed down, and its founder was detained by the authorities, with the closure of the group being a condition for his release.
The Beijing LGBTQ Center had to stop operations “due to forces beyond our control”, as space for gay rights advocacy shrank, along with a clamping down of civil rights movements and online dissent.
In 2021, a notice from China’s education ministry suggested that young men had become too “feminine”, and it called on schools to reform physical education as well as strengthen their recruitment of teachers.
It advised recruiting retired athletes and people from sporting backgrounds – and “vigorously developing” particular sports like football with a view to “cultivating students’ masculinity”.
Later that year, China’s broadcasting regulator said it would ban “effeminate” aesthetics in entertainment shows and that “vulgar influencers” should be avoided.
it is clear that LGBTQ people in China face legal and social challenges that are not experienced by non-LGBTQ residents.
Same-sex couples are unable to marry or adopt, and households headed by such couples are ineligible for the same legal protections available to heterosexual couples.
Being gay, it appears, is considered by the authorities in China to be a medical condition, and there are heart-rending reports of people who have been subjected to forced “gay conversion therapy”.
Gong Lei has described in terrible detail what happened to him: “The doctor asked me to relax because I was going to practise some kind of hypnosis and to think about sex scenes with my boyfriend – at that moment I felt pain in both wrists. I did not know what was happening”.
Another interviewee remembered going through nine electroshock sessions during his two-month ‘treatment’: “My wrists and arms felt numb, my head too. But the most painful part was my stomach”.
Reports such as these are dreadful to read – the situation they describe in China may be good fodder for journalists like me, but not for the people concerned…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing, decades long award-winning career in journalism (when stories about what was happening were all-important) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Soon on The Eye, ‘Trouble at the top’ – why a new book about one of the leading pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, highlights how its title is identical to what Phil calls himself!
Tomorrow – how China’s official statistics cannot be relied upon…
