Though China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997, it remained classified as a mental illness until 2001. According to a 2013 Pew survey, only 21 percent of Chinese people approved of homosexuality; just this March, the government banned the depiction of homosexuality on film and TV as "pornographic or vulgar," putting it in the same category as portrayals of incest and sexual abuse.
It's little wonder that WorkForLGBT, a China-based NGO, found that only 18 percent of gay men have come out to their families. Their parents' generation was raised in the tail-end of the Mao era, when comprehensive general education was disrupted by the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and sex ed was non-existent. Wish Lanterns author Alec Ash, who has written about the lives of young people in China, says that the cultural divide between parents and their children is enormous: "It would be the equivalent of if my parents were born in 1880." [...]
Zhang's conservative guess is that there are at least 10 million straight women in China married to gay men. Similar research by Chinese sexologist Li Yinhe puts the figure at around 16 million, and research quoted in Yale anthropologist Tiantian Zhang's 2015 study puts the figure at 19 million, which is about the population of Romania. [...]
Zhang says over 30 percent of tongqi will contract a sexually transmitted disease—for many, this is how they discover that their husbands sleep with men. Around 10 percent of tongqi will attempt suicide, he adds. In his office, he gestures towards the rows of filing cabinets that sit floor to ceiling. They contain thousands of letters and correspondence sent from women in these sham marriages. Zhang has recently begun digitizing this archive with the help of assistants; they have scanned 43,000 pages so far.
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