From Glass Clique to Tongzhi Nation: Crystal Boys, Identity Formation, and the Politics of Sexual Shame

Since the onset of tongzhi (literally, “comrade,” denoting approximately lesbian and gay or queer) movement in 1990s Taiwan, Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys (1990), best known as Taiwan’s first gay novel, has come to be endowed with immense cultural significance with regard to the meaning of homosexuality. First published in 1983 in Chinese as Niezi (Evil Sons), Crystal Boys has not only been reclaimed as a writing of gay history for its depiction of the 1970s underground male homosexual prostitution subculture based in the New Park in downtown Taipei, but has also become, as the following instance illustrates, a site of identification for a new mode of tongzhi consciousness. This article intends to investigate the production of tongzhi identity politics vis-à-vis the cultural (re)signification of this particular text. In 1995, the Taipei city government, under Mayor Chen Shui-bian (former president) announced that it was to undertake an urban replanning scheme called the Capital’s Nucleus Project. Through spatial preservation and the rewriting of historical memories, the scheme aimed to displace the authoritarian ambience of the central government administration district shaped under martial law, thus embodying Chen’s populist slogan to transform Taipei into a “happy, hopeful city for the citizens.” Included in the plan was the historic site of the New Park next to the presidential palace, yet the park’s historical significance as Taiwan’s most famous gay male cruising ground was completely neglected. To oppose such exclusionary municipal engineering, a coalition of nascent university-based lesbian and gay activist groups was formed under the banner of “Tongzhi Space Action Network” (TSAN). Significantly, as the notion of tongzhi citizenship was enunciated for the first time in the Taiwan public sphere, Crystal Boys came to be deployed as a medium of articulation and became highly politicized during the course of this political contestation.¹ In a petition entitled “Tongzhi Looking for Tongzhi,” TSAN especially evoked the following passage from the novel, using this “sorrowful” 1970s writing to highlight the social predicament of homosexuals in 1990s Taiwan: “There are no days in our kingdom, only nights. As soon as the sun comes up, our kingdom goes into hiding, for it is an unlawful nation. We have no government and no constitution, we are neither recognized nor respected by anyone, our citizenry is little more than rabble.”² TSAN went on to urge people with same-sex desire to leave behind the sorrowful past linked to the pathologized label tongxinglian (homosexual) by taking on the new identity-name tongzhi. Significantly, in its attempt to recruit the homosexual subjects into the interpellated tongzhi subject-position, TSAN rewrote the above passage as follows:

In tongzhi’s kingdom, we are no longer afraid of daylight, are not forced to remain invisible, for it is no longer an unlawful nation:

we have reasonable distribution of resources from the government,

we are fully protected by the laws of the country,

we are recognized and blessed by the multitude,

we are being respected by History, which also inscribes us.³

What is the significance of this rearticulation of Crystal Boys? And in what sense does the “we” as tongzhi articulating agents diverge from the unnamed “we” enunciated in Pai’s narrative? Lastly, if the taking on of the new identity tongzhi signals a collective rejection of the past of homosexual oppression, to what extent does the call for social recognition fail to challenge the existing norms by which “we” are spawned and adjudicated in the first place?

This article seeks to conduct a critique of Taiwan tongzhi politics through a rearticulation of Crystal Boys. It argues that tongzhi politics and subjectivity as articulated through Crystal Boys is founded upon the normative exclusion of the gendered prostitute subject and that such repudiation is complicit with the dominant moral-sexual order upheld by Taiwan’s state culture, including the emergent Taiwan state feminism. As the novel was taken up as a signifier in the new tongzhi politics, the article shows, its legacy as a historical representation of the...