Acceptance of gay rights is growing. But gay marriage remains a distant prospect in China

[eridani]

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21697867-acceptance-gay-rights-growing-gay-marriage-remains-distant-prospect-rohmer-therapy?cid1=cust/ednew/n/bl/n/20160428n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/NA/n

AT THE end of March a website run by the Communist Youth League published news of a remarkable development in China’s staid, heavily censored film industry. A preview had been released online of what is being described as mainland China’s first film focusing on a gay romance, “Looking for Rohmer”. (On television, there have been documentaries about gay relationships before, as well as dramas hinting at them.) The new film, to be shown “soon”, describes the relationship of two young men, one Chinese, one French, as they travel across Tibet.

The two are not shown holding hands, let alone doing anything more intimate. But China’s cultural commissars, rarely open-minded at the best of times, have been in an unusually censorious mood since 2014, when President Xi Jinping stressed that art must “serve socialism”.

Cheng Qingsong, a film critic, says the makers of “Looking for Rohmer” worried that the censors might change their minds after they approved the film for release last year. The trailer’s appearance, and the Youth League’s interest in it, suggests all is well. More broadly, it shows that, despite a political chill, conservative attitudes to same-sex relationships are changing. In the past, homosexuals were sometimes jailed for “hooliganism”. In 1997 the removal of that ill-defined crime from the statute books lifted what was, in effect, a ban on homosexual activity. In 2001 the health ministry struck homosexuality off its list of mental diseases. But public tolerance remains low. Clinics still offer “cures” for gay people, involving electric shocks or nausea-inducing drugs. No well-known public figure in mainland China has come out.

In a recent survey of 18,650 lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people by WorkForLGBT, a China-based NGO, only 3% of the male respondents and 6% of the female ones described themselves as completely out. A third of the men (though only 9% of the women) said they were in the closet. Only 18% of the men said they had come out to their families, and nearly 80% were reluctant to do so because of family pressure. But half the men and three-quarters of the women had come out to friends, an indication that private tolerance is expanding.