The Communist International of Queer Film

“Have you eaten yet?” This is how we greet each other in Chinese. This is the greeting that I learned as a little boy when I saw my neighbors and everybody else. Such is the country that I’m living in. This country was also one of the most prominent ones in the world to reject its own traditional culture to embrace Westernization since its founding in 1949. The largest banner that hangs on the Tiananmen Square reads: “Long Live Marxism!” Marxism, a Western doctrine invented by a man who never went to China, was established as the principle of the state in my country. Socialism and Communism became the future ideals of Chinese society. China began its development under the directive of Communism.

The globalization of this ideal in 1949 was quite different from the globalization we are experiencing today. In 1949, China accepted the globalization of Marxism in a wholesale manner, whereas today’s globalization relies on the strategic promotion of an Americanism. With the passage of time, however, these Western theories that the Chinese once accepted unconditionally began to show their limits. We found, for example, that despite its enthusiastic acceptance of developmental theory from the West, China never accepted Western religions, such as the Catholicism of the Vatican City. To this day, the Bible (both the Old and New Testaments) has never been officially published in China.¹ The state has resisted the multiparty political system. Homosexuals, and homosexual culture, were considered a disease when they first emerged in China. This perception is the main reason homosexuality is prohibited in China today. This prohibition has met resistance from the people. Many popular voices are trying to break through official censorship. In the earliest days, NGOs and activists tried to form many gay and lesbian organizations. They even wanted to start their own “revolutions.” The early “queer revolutionaries” included both native Chinese people and friendly foreigners. When the first gay bars appeared in Beijing, the main players included our own Wan Yanhai, Wu Chunsheng, as well as friends from other countries like Susie [Jolly], Lily, Lisa [Rofel] and Erica [Marcus].²

These underground activities formed the first Communist International to me. Unfortunately, this Communist International still remains an underground secret society to this day. Twenty years have passed since the 1980s. Despite official censorship, more and more information about the lives of queer Chinese people has been made visible through magazines, newspapers, and television. The only exception to this is film. It is not that no films have been made, but that people who made queer films have all been censored and executed!³ This has to do with China’s censorship system. The censorship system of films in China is much stricter than the censorship of printed materials and TV. This is also one of the rare stubbornly totalitarian elements in Chinese law today. All films have to be sent to the Beijing Film Bureau for inspection after they are done. Certain filmmakers have attempted to get works with queer content past the censors, but they have all failed. In 2000, Ning Ying first made a queer movie called Xiari nuan yang yang (I Love Beijing) and I played a role in that movie, but unfortunately my parts all got cut out by the Film Bureau, who said that my character represents an ugly, morally repugnant social phenomenon. Next we had two queer films this year, Kongque (Peacock) and Yinshi (Silver Ornaments).⁴ The original story of Peacock contains an episode of a homosexual relationship between a schoolboy and his math teacher, which we don’t see in today’s censored version.

Silver Ornaments is a about a love triangle between an aristocrat, a woman, and another man during the Republican period. This movie was already scheduled to come to the theaters, but it suddenly got taken off the screen, and no DVDs were released either. The fortunes of these censored movies reflect the status of gay and lesbian life in China. They also tell us that there are many underground movies that never went...