“I said, ‘What, you do that here?’ I’m from Singapore, and we’re conservative. There is that constant fear,” recalled Ms. Lee, 30.
“I felt it was no problem,” said Ms. Wu, 30, a native Beijinger, grinning at Ms. Lee as she stirred a bloody mary in a cafe.
It wasn’t. Lesbians in China today are remarkably free, the result of profound social changes over three decades of fast economic growth, and of being female in a society that values men far above women. Invisibility provides lesbians with room to live and love amid the anonymity of China’s millions-strong megacities.
“I think people are more tolerant of female gays than male gays,” said Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “China is a very patriarchal society, so people feel if a man is gay that’s really shameful.”
“Traditional society basically overlooks women in some ways, and there is a certain freedom in that,” she said. “But that free space isn’t necessarily power.”
Lesbians’ freedom exists in a gray area. Like male homosexuals, lesbian couples cannot marry or legally form a family, creating problems in separation, illness or inheritance issues. Confronted too openly, relatives often object, too.
“Chinese people can accept people being lesbian or gay. But not within their own family,” Ms. Wu said, who is an events manager and plans to start an online sex toy business.
“In China it’s very weird,” Ming Ming, a lesbian documentary filmmaker, said. “If you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist. But actually it’s not at all easy. The pressure to marry is enormous.”
Traditionally, men are expected to carry on the family line, creating greater pressure on male gays to marry. In theory, that offers lesbians greater freedom. But in practice, “It’s a huge loss of face for a family when a daughter doesn’t marry,” said Ms. Ming.
Also, China’s one-child policy has produced around 140 million only children, Ji Baocheng, president of Renmin University of China, told the official People’s Daily newspaper in March. This has increased pressure on lesbian only daughters to produce offspring.
Lesbianism was officially taboo until 1997, when “hooliganism,” a catchall term that included homosexuality, was struck off the criminal code.
The Communists’ narrow morality in the decades after the 1949 revolution contrasted with the preceding Republican period and the end of the last imperial dynasty, when women refusing marriage — many of them lesbians — gathered in villages in southern Guangdong Province to “comb their own hair,” as noted recently in People’s Daily. The phrase refers to the traditional practice of women tying their hair in a bun when they marry.
Today, most major cities in China have lesbian bars or cafes offering support groups, talks and parties. In Beijing and Shanghai there are gay pride events, held privately in the hope of avoiding cancellation by the authorities (as happened this month with the biennial Beijing Queer Film Festival. The festival went ahead anyway, “guerrilla-style,” organizers said.)
State media discuss lesbianism and commitment ceremonies, and the official Legal Daily newspaper even reported on a survey showing that about half of lesbians had experienced violence from relatives or partners.
Campaigners for gay marriage say they are gaining ground, though very slowly.
In terms of personal behavior, “The change is coming faster and faster,” said An Ke, organizer of Lala Salon, a weekly lecture and discussion at Half Dozen, a bar in Beijing.
Speaking after a recent salon — on rape in eastern Congo — Ms. An said lesbians are, cautiously, “coming out.”
“There are 70-year-olds, 50-year-olds who have come out. Seven years ago that wasn’t happening,” she said. “The age of women coming out is also getting younger and younger.”
In the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou, Ms. Ming and her partner, Shi Tou, have been making a documentary film about more than 100 Chinese lesbians for seven years. Due out in 2012, they plan to show “Sweet Desert” at international film festivals and wherever they can domestically.
Lesbian-themed films can be shown, discreetly, in bars and universities, said Ms. Shi, 42, who acted in China’s first feature film about lesbians, “Fish and Elephant,” screened in 2001 at the Venice Film Festival.
Lesbian government and Communist Party officials refused to be filmed. Being openly gay in government is a career killer, Ms. Shi said.
“There is so little about lalas in China,” Ms. Shi said, using the slang term by which Chinese lesbians refer to themselves. Debate about homosexuality is focused on men, and on issues like H.I.V., she said.
Still, said Ms. Wu: “I think it’s really very free here. People close one eye — as long as you don’t demand too many human rights.”
Yet interest in rights is growing.
