第19章 Eye on China(18)

Wan, along with a team of volunteers, has been running a safe sex awareness programtargeting low-end prostitutes in Sichuan since 2005. The project is supported by theGlobal Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, an international financing project.

“We started by making friends with some of the women and encouraged them tospread the knowledge to their peers. Then we managed to talk to some clients, as well asowners of commercial sex venues,” said Wan.

The team holds community lectures for elderly men and promise small gifts for thosewho come. Wan said they have so far been well attended.

“We tell them not go to prostitutes, but we also give them information on what to doto stay safe if they decide to go, and what they should do if they find a problem or needhelp,” he said. “Men sometimes dial the hotlines for the local disease control offices duringthe lectures.”

Prevention projects are not expensive, require few resources and pay large dividends,said Wan, who revealed that after just a year of lectures, condom use among clients of lowcostprostitutes rose to almost 70 percent.

The government should encourage more NGOs to get involved in helping to promotesafe sex to prostitutes, urged Wang Min, director of the AIDS Study Institute affiliatedwith the First Hospital of Changsha, Hunan province.

“It is difficult for the authorities to help those in the illegal commercial sex at thesame time as trying to clamp down on them,” she said. “The country’s disease controldepartments, who lead most programs, are not able to handle such a huge task.”

One solution could be involving neighborhood committees and local women’sfederations in the nation’s war on AIDS.

“Raising awareness among female sex workers and their male clients should be part oftheir everyday activities,” she said.

January 11, 2010

Gay rights in China:ROAD TO RESPECT

Pensioner’s life shows the shift in attitudes towards homosexuality in China but experts say challenges still lay ahead.

Cao Li reports.

To many gay men and women, Ba Li is an inspiration. At the age of 72, he hasendured decades of humiliation because of his sexuality, including being sentencedto a total of seven years hard labor. Yet it is his message of hope that resonates most withyoung homosexuals.

His extraordinary life charts the slow but sure transformation in Chinese attitudestowards the gay and lesbian community, and although difficulties still exist, he believespeople now enjoy more freedom than ever to express their sexuality.

The pensioner, who asked to be called Ba Li - the same Chinese characters forParis - to protect his family, invited China Daily to his birthday celebrations at a smallrestaurant not far from Xidan, the commercial heart of Beijing.

“I have lived through sorrows and joys,” he said after blowing out the candles on hisbirthday cake, surrounded by several gay friends. “I am no longer considered a wrongdoerand I can finally live my life with my head held high.”

At his birthday party Ba Li sang, read poems and posed for numerous photographswith friends, stopping only to look at a picture of his boyfriend he kept in his shirt pocket.

Many of his guests said how much they admired him for his courage in tougher times.

“I knew I was a woman’s soul in man’s body at very early age,” he said, his round facebreaking into a broad smile. He was 16 when he started his first relationship, which lastedfour years. “At the time, homosexuals were called ‘rabbits’ or other more derogatory names,and they met in secret at parks, bathhouses or public restrooms.”

His mother refused to accept his sexuality. “One night she sneaked into my bedroomwhen she thought I was sleeping and checked my body for abnormalities,” he said.

His parents eventually forced him into a marriage that lasted less than six months. Themarriage produced a daughter but he has no contact with her.

In 1977, Ba Li was sentenced to three years in a labor re-education camp after beingfound guilty of sodomy. He said another homosexual reported him to the police. Theteacher was immediately fired from his job at a respectable high school as the supervisorfelt he had “committed a crime that could never be forgiven”, he said.

He was also interred in 1982 and 1984, each time for two years.

“I even suffered discrimination from other inmates in prison,” he said. “Once I gavea young boy a steamed bun out of sympathy and I was beaten like a dog. It was so bad Icontemplated jumping off the top of one of the labor camp buildings.” When he walkedfree from the camp in 1986, he said attitudes were already starting to change. “I began tosee more gay people being active within their circles and the word ‘homosexual’ was beingused more by the media,” he said.

Unemployed, Ba Li sold maps of Beijing to make a living and worked as a volunteerto distribute leaflets on AIDS prevention among the gay community. “Police used to takeus back to the station and confiscate the pamphlets because they said they contained eviland pornographic content,” he said.

Since the early 1990s, the Chinese government has become increasingly tolerant abouthomosexuality. By 1997, the law that outlawed sodomy was repealed, while homosexualitywas officially removed from the nation’s list of mental illnesses in 2001.

Li Yinhe, a renowned sexologist with the sociology institute of the Chinese Academyof Social Sciences, proposed legalizing same-sex marriages during the annual session of theNational People’s Congress in 2000. However, the suggestion was not publicly discusseduntil 2003 when policymakers met to talk about amending the Law on Marriage. Theydecided not to approve same-sex marriage.

Following a nationwide study, the Chinese government estimated in 2004 that thecountry has between 5 and 10 million homosexual men aged 15 to 49.

Despite being open among his friends, Ba Li still hides his relationship from hisadopted son. Like many in the gay community, his boyfriend has a wife and family.