On 4 June 2005, I was invited to a private party at a karaoke lounge in downtown Shanghai. I was told it was a surprise proposal party between two women. I followed my new lala¹ friends to a splendidly decorated karaoke complex and entered one of the small rooms. More than ten women were already waiting inside. I saw candles and rose petals on the table. Without knowing who these women were or what was going to happen, I joined them in lighting up the candles and arranging them into two hearts, one big and one small. Rose petals were...

Shanghai is a city of desires. For hundreds of years, it has been a metropolis of commerce and trade, adventure and entertainment, sex and desires. The old Shanghai in pre-1949 had been dubbed as the Paris in the East, the Hollywood in the East and a paradise for adventurers. It was in this coastal city of China that entrepreneurs, opportunists from all walks of life, movie stars, socialites, pleasure seekers, well-known prostitutes, politicians, writers, artists, and manual labourers from rural areas all conglomerated. It was romanticized as a city where one could turn dreams into reality and desires into practice....

This is quoted from one of the fifty-six letters that Ruan Fangfu, a medical expert in China, received from readers who responded to his article “Homosexuality: An Unsolved Puzzle” (Tongxinglian: yige weijiezhimi ), published in 1985 in one of the country’s popular health magazines, To Your Good Health. In the letter, the gay respondent yearns for a space where homosexuals in China can get in touch with each other freely. To him, it is an unattainable fantasy. Twenty years later, the fantasy has almost turned into reality.

Since the economic reform period, many formerly condemned sexual practices have started to...

Beginning in the economic reform period, the country has seen significant changes concerning private life and sexual morality. Models of intimacy that deviated from the normative one (heterosexual monogamous marriage) began competing for legitimacy and acceptance. Alternative models such as singlehood, multiple partnership, cohabitation, extramarital relationship and same-sex relationship have entered public discussion relatively free from the ideological and moralistic constraints that typified the pre-reform era. However, the dominant position of heterosexual marriage as the only socially acceptable form of intimacy has not been threatened. One shared theme of informants’ life narratives is the pressure of marriage. To almost all...

It is one of the central concerns of this book to document and examine lala women’s everyday struggles and strategies in post-reform China. The pressure of marriage, whether it is the pressure to get married or to maintain a marriage, is shared by almost every lala women I met in Shanghai and other cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou. As discussed in the last chapter, the fact that marriage was cited as the major source of pressure in daily life is because most of the informants in this study were in their twenties at the time of interview (the years...

In this chapter, I look at the social, political and cultural contexts that have led to the emergence of a tongzhi politics, which I term “the politics of public correctness”. I also look at the various ways in which lalas put this politics into real-life practice, including through the increasingly popular practice of “cooperative marriage”. Through this discussion, I intend to bring into view culturally specific forms of homophobia that are practiced in the domains of family and public discourse of homosexuality in contemporary China. The discourse of “Chinese tolerance” of homosexuality, in particular, usually defined in opposition to the...

The tongzhi communities in China are fast changing and internally diverse. The life stories, survival strategies and concerns of lalas included in this book represent mainly those of the group of lala informants whom I met in Shanghai during 2005–11. The discussion and analysis of tongzhi politics are based on my participation in the local tongzhi communities during the same period of time. My major site of research was Shanghai, but my participation in tongzhi activism in China allowed me to get in touch with local communities in other parts of the country. From the outset, this book did...