Society
Gay Wive's Club
Deception and Discrimination
The social necessity of marriage has left millions of Chinese women trapped in unfulfilling relationships with closeted gay men. In recent years, more and more of China’s “gay wives” are coming out, and this formerly private problem is now entering public debate
Illustration by Wu Shangwen
An advertisement for a gay support hotline in Shanghai. While gay rights remain off China’s political agenda, gay men in China are enjoying greater freedoms thanks to shifting social attitudes.
“[Maomao] has stopped seeing herself as a victim and is instead supporting, rather than merely attempting to understand, her husband’s lifestyle.”
One month after her wedding, Xiao Yao caught sight of an intimate text message from a stranger on her husband’s phone addressing him as shagua - “fool,” a term of endearment typically used between Chinese lovers.
Xiao eventually plucked up the courage to call the number, expecting to confront the woman who was distracting her husband and causing the breakdown of her marriage. Her blood ran cold when a hoarse male voice answered the phone.
After her discovery, Xiao began to analyze her relationship, solving many previous mysteries. She had fallen in love with her husband after a chance meeting at a bus stop, and instantly decided he was her Mr Right. Caring, considerate and gentlemanly, he seemed the epitome of the ideal husband. His resistance to be physically intimate, which culminated in an unconsummated wedding night, was put down to shyness and an overly strong sense of decency. When he came home late, it was surely because he was working overtime.
However, her husband’s behavior changed dramatically once he and Xiao were married. The caring and considerate boyfriend became a sullen and abusive husband. Xiao told NewsChina that he experienced violent mood swings – one minute he would be joking with her, the next pounding her face with his fist. Abuse would be followed by hysterical laughter, tears and begging for forgiveness. After one particularly horrific beating, Xiao wrote in her diary: “I closed my eyes and felt the world die around me.”
After making that fateful call and discovering her husband’s secret life, Xiao started searching desperately online for information about tongqi - “gay wives.” For months she sifted through insensitive comic anecdotes about such women, until she finally stumbled across a gay wife blog circle with its own support group operated through the online instant messenger service QQ. Soon afterward, she divorced her husband.
Return of the Ex-gay-wife
After her divorce, Xiao’s friends suggested she never look back. For half a year she distanced herself from the gay wives who had given her the courage to separate from her abusive husband, but soon found herself drifting back in touch.
“I see myself in these women,” Xiao told our reporter. “To help them feels like helping my former self.”
Xiao now administers several major gay wife chat groups, runs a hotline and operates the Gay Wife Home website www.tongqijiayuan.com, which she built herself. On the website’s homepage, she writes: “If it hadn’t been for my own experience, I would never have imagined that such a hidden group existed. This website is meant to help more women who have lived my story.”
A busy civil servant in Xi’an, capital city of west China’s Shaanxi Province, Xiao Yao only has free time at night, and is the hotline’s only operator, manning the phone from 6 PM to 10 PM. Membership to her chat circle ballooned from 25 when Xiao joined to 750, though, if statistical estimates are to be believed, she may one day need a far bigger server.
Conservative estimates from researcher Zhang Beichuan, a professor with Qingdao University, Shandong Province and a pioneering researcher in the field of queer studies, state that China is home to a minimum 10 million gay wives.
Zhang’s interest in this phenomenon began when a woman who had recently discovered her husband was gay approached him for advice. Since then, he has met countless gay wives, all with unique circumstances – some newly married, some pregnant, and some already grandmothers. According to Zhang, many have mixed feelings about their marriages, something which is also reflected in the gay wife blogosphere. While news of a divorce is always applauded by the community, especially in the case of spousal abuse, one chat group administered by Xiao encourages gay wives to try to understand their husbands, and, if possible, rescue their marriages.
Some gay wives go to great lengths to maintain good relations with their husbands. One chat group member known only as Maomao has adopted a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” policy toward her spouse’s affairs with other men. “Why should I know? It will only make me sad,” she wrote in one post explaining this decision. Such fatalism is common among gay wives, many of whom even blame themselves for their circumstances and attempt to ignore their husbands’ affairs.
Four or five female volunteers, none of whom is a gay wife, are recruited to moderate each chat group of 200 members to provide “neutral” insight and balance the negative tone of many discussions with positive encouragement and support. Some even try to remonstrate with gay wives who, like Maomao, attempt to justify or overlook their husbands’ sexual orientation. Some volunteers believe this behavior is a manifestation of something like Stockholm syndrome. Volunteer moderator Lin Yike told our reporter that “[Maomao] has stopped seeing herself as a victim and is instead supporting, rather than merely attempting to understand, her husband’s lifestyle.” Lin believes that Maomao needs to learn to let her husband take partial blame for her unhappiness. “After all, he trapped her in a sham marriage,” she said.
However, rather than apportioning blame, the priority of Gay Wife Home is to support gay wives and allow them to minimize their own suffering. Many ultimately manage to resolve their problems, whether through divorce or merely by establishing an understanding with their husbands. Last October, even Xiao Yao herself managed to reconcile with her ex-husband. When they met to tie up some financial loose ends, she found he was once again the considerate man at that bus stop. He even insisted on walking her to her bus, both parting, in tears, as friends.
Hard to Help
Though the small number of subscribers to Gay Wife Home suggests that few gay wives are even willing to reach out to others for support, the handful who have come out publicly are shedding light on a world which had only previously existed behind locked doors.
At the end of 2008, Professor Zhang Beichuan invited two gay wives to speak at an AIDS summit. The first cried all the way through her 20-minute speech, while the other turned her back to the audience while speaking to protect her identity. Zhang told NewsChina that many gay wives feel a deep sense of shame about their marriages, and most have been victims of domestic violence, neglect and infidelity.
In March 2010, the Pink Space Sexuality Research Center held China’s first gay wife summit. The biggest stir was created when a gay husband appeared at the event with his wife, and found himself a reluctant hate figure, as gay wives cross-examined him about his sexual orientation and his marriage. The man revealed that he had attempted suicide on two occasions to end his desperation, largely because his wife, who believed homosexuality to be a disease, refused to divorce him and instead nagged him to see a doctor.
Together, attendees of the meeting took an HIV test, and then visited a gay bar, something many had been curious about but few had ever tried to enter, to “see the other side of their husbands.” After the visit, the summit’s solitary gay husband managed to convince his wife to agree to a divorce. It also resulted in the first joint declaration, signed by all attendees, which pledged to “abandon self-pity and help gay wives who dare not stand up for themselves.” The meeting also produced the slogan now most closely associated with China’s gay wives – “Let me be the last gay wife.”
After the meeting, director of Pink Space He Xiaopei established additional hotlines for gay wives, with eight volunteers stepping in to establish hotlines in their own cities. It was only after they had printed business cards they realized there was nowhere other than the summit they could hand them out – they joked that so far, nobody had thought to build a gay wife bar. The idea of handing the cards out in gay bars was quickly abandoned – reasoning that few husbands would be keen to out themselves to their wives.
Even if the hotline numbers somehow reach a gay wife, typically possible only over the Internet, it takes great courage to make that first call. One woman told NewsChina that she had agonized over making the call for months before she eventually picked up the phone “because making that call would mean admitting my husband was gay.”
Xiao Yao told our reporter that while many gay wives talk to their volunteers for hours, some even refusing to hang up after their telephone receivers overheated, “nobody made a second call.” Hotline volunteers believe this is because most gay wives simply want to tell someone about their predicament but have already made their minds up about how to deal with it.
Salvation
While gay people generally suffer less stigma in China than in other Asian countries, the power of marriage as the primary social institution makes life for gay people difficult, if not impossible. In rural areas, if a man is not married by 30, rumors begin to circulate. Even in China’s increasingly cosmopolitan cities, gay men invariably marry to protect both their family’s reputation and in order to conform to the expectations of their parents.
According to Zhang Beichuan, both gay wives and gay husbands both agree that the solution to their problems would be a change in cultural attitudes towards alternative sexualities. “If gay rights were protected in law, and people could be educated to respect other people’s sexual orientation, we could expect an immense decline in the number of gay wives,” he told NewsChina.
These are some pretty big “ifs,” in the view of Li Yinhe, for decades China’s foremost sex researcher with the China Academy of Social Sciences, who has even petitioned the central government to legalize gay marriage, to little effect. The Chinese government remains tight-lipped on the subject of homosexuality, pursuing a strict policy of non-acknowledgement. While this has allowed gay people to remain largely unmolested by official institutions, it prevents gay rights from being acknowledged in Chinese law.
The inevitable crossover between sex and sexuality has also meant that Xiao Yao’s blog and website have previously been closed down for publishing “lurid content,” though both were later reopened after she appealed. However, some posts continue to be censored due to their “sensitivity.” Despite such minor clashes with the authorities, similar to those experienced by China’s online gay forums, Li Yinhe believes that the main obstacle to greater tolerance of alternative sexualities in China is a cultural one.
On her blog, Li remarks that an “obsession with marriage and reproduction” has forced untold numbers of gay men and women into heterosexual marriages. Experts like Li argue that the vast majority of Chinese people consider someone who remains unmarried at 30 to be “abnormal,” while a son or daughter who fails to have children is “unfilial.” On the rare occasions that homosexuality is mentioned in the public sphere, violently opposing viewpoints are regularly expressed by the public. Posts on Xiao Yao’s website regularly elicit vicious responses from homophobic Internet users.
However, Gay Wife Home volunteer Lin Yike believes that social discrimination against gay people is not an excuse to cheat a woman into a loveless marriage. “Social pressure is most usually blamed for the gay wife issue, but nobody puts a woman in your bed,” she said.
Lin believes that the importance of parenthood alone is justification enough for some gay men to seek a sham marriage with a woman, an issue that won’t disappear even with a change in cultural values. As a result, she has compiled a handbook for girls instructing them in ways to “spot a gay suitor.”
Zhang Beichuan argues that the gay wife issue has to be debated with as much care as one should exercise when selecting a spouse. Because those gay wives who are victims of abuse are being victimized by a discriminated social group, the equation of domestic violence with homosexuality could result in even greater discrimination against gay people. “It is also not justifiable to undermine gay rights by supporting gay wives,” he said.
December 2011
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