Official gay bar to open in Dali
- Source: Global Times
- [02:57 November 30 2009]
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"The gay bar at least provides a private place for gay people to communicate and it caters to their needs. It'll help contain sexually transmitted diseases," Duan Honggang, a Dali resident said.
A-Qiang, a gay man in Guangzhou, said, "That's a positive move by the government in its efforts to focus on the group."
Doubts, however, were also notable regarding the intentions of officials in their decision to open such a bar.
Lu Jun, director of the Beijing-based Yirenping Center, an NGO dedicated to promoting public health equality, said, "I doubt how the government can protect the privacy of homosexuals who frequent the bar if it receives much publicity."
However, Wan Yanhai, director of the Love, Knowledge and Action Organization, an NGO dedicated to protecting the rights of people with AIDS and public awareness of AIDS prevention, said there is a possibility that officials just want to collect money under the excuse of cooperating with NGOs to fight against AIDS.
"Some local governments' work is only done symbolically," A-Qiang said. "Gay people are more likely to hide themselves in the dark."
Bars for homosexuals were first seen in China 15 years ago, experts on the theme say, but the social stigma against gay sex appears to still be common, and gays are often likened to socially unacceptable activities such as prostitution or drug use.
"Aside from deep-rooted discrimination, the biggest frustration right now is that I cannot get married to my lover, and obtain legal marriage status," Xiao Dong, a gay man in Beijing, said.
"Room for us to live respectably in this society is still too narrow," he said.
Zhang Beichuan, a professor at the Qingdao University specializing in sexual health, said among Chinese homosexuals, 60 percent feel extremely distressed, between 30 and 40 percent show strong inclination to committing suicide, and between 3 and 13 percent have attempted suicide.
Gay men were regarded as a group of people suffering from mental derangement until 2001 in China, but since then homosexuality is no longer considered a mental disorder.
While there are no official figures on the number of homosexuals in China, Hong Kong-based magazine Phoenix Weekly estimated that there were around 40 million homosexuals in a story published last year.
The Ministry of Health estimated that 740,000 people were living with HIV in China at the end of 2009.
Statistics showed that 48,000 people had been infected in 2009 and more than 70 percent of new infections are through sexual transmission.
Song Shengxia and Liang Chen contributed to this story
