Eight Chinese men were due to strut their stuff in front of hundreds of people yesterday at China’s first gay pageant, in a sign of new openness about homosexuality in a nation where it remains largely taboo.
The contestants are taking part in the Mr Gay China competition — which organizers say will include an underwear show — vying to represent the Asian giant at the Worldwide Mr Gay pageant in Norway next month.
“If the winner is some guy who is masculine, caring and a responsible person, this image will help society,” said Jiang Bo, 29, one of the contestants from Sichuan Province.
“Lots of people have misunderstandings about gay people, they think gay people are sissies and feminine. But it’s not true — some of them are very straight-acting, they’re totally responsible just like straight men,” he said.
Jiang says he entered the contest as a personal challenge, but there could be higher stakes.
He has not yet come out to his family, and said he hopes they won’t find out because of the pageant, which is being staged at a Beijing club and is being covered mostly by foreign media, according to organizers.
“It would be so embarrassing to the whole family — they would lose face because their son is gay,” he said.
Jiang’s comments echoes the feeling of other homosexuals in China who find it difficult to come out to their friends and family, although many say the situation has improved over the past few years.
One problem lies in the nation’s one-child policy, which makes parents rely on their only child to marry and produce grandchildren.
Homosexuality was a crime in China until 1997, and it was officially considered a mental illness until 2001. Since then, however, an increasing number of visible gay and lesbian events has taken place.
Last June, China’s first gay pride festival was held Shanghai, albeit in a very discreet fashion and with some events canceled at the last minute by the authorities.
Ben Zhang, the organizer of Mr Gay China, said he was still worried about government intervention ahead of the contest, which he hoped would help raise awareness about the country’s gay community.
“I expect the pageant will encourage those who are in their shell to be more comfortable with their sexuality,” he said.
Jiang, however, said he would not come out to his parents even if he won.
“But if they find out, I will not deny it,” he said. “Let destiny lead me.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS