She also helps these women get legal advice and speak out to the public. Now Jiang runs three QQ chat groups, which have over 200 members in total, and a social media account on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblog site. “They draw three ground rules for their husbands: Have sex, take care of the family, and look after the child.”Īfter watching other women share their ordeals and comfort each other in the chat group, Jiang volunteered to establish and operate new groups for newcomers.
Jiang Xinyi, a 24-year-old software engineer from Shanghai, who has been counseling women married to gay men since 2009, said this was a common alternative to divorce and separation. Some women in China unknowingly married to a gay man are openly choosing to maintain a nominal marriage to give their children a stable family. “If a man and a woman get a room, we can say it’s an extramarital affair but if it is two men, we can say nothing,” said Liu, 35, a judge from Shenzhen who agreed to speak on the matter if he was identified only by his surname. “A person who has a spouse but cohabits with another person” is one of the circumstances listed in China’s marriage law that allows a husband or wife to file for divorce, and demand compensation from the other party, but in its judicial interpretation, the “another person” only refers to “the opposite sex.” Though new generations are more open-minded, many still believe that to marry and have children are the two most important things in life, whether they are gay or straight.
The idea is still ingrained in modern China men are under social pressure to marry and produce a male heir to carry on the family line. “Among three ways of being an unfilial son, the most serious is to have no heir,” argued Mencius, an ancient Confucian philosopher. How can I come out of the closet to them?” Liu said to Quartz. “They said they would have nothing to worry about in their lives once I got married. Liu Jie, a 25-year-old homosexual interior decorator from Shantou, Guangdong Province, has thought of entering into a gay-straight marriage, because, like many Chinese of marrying age, he’s under a lot of pressure from his parents. “What’s wrong is to marry a heterosexual to make a tragedy.” Why China has millions of “homowives” Being “homosexual is not wrong,” said Qiu in an interview.
If men are free to openly have relationships with other men, sham marriages like theirs will no longer happen, they say.
The women in these marriages are quietly becoming an unlikely force in China’s nascent gay-rights movement. In contrast, according to a 2010 Economist report, 15 to 20% of gay men in America have married heterosexual women. According to an estimate by Zhang Beichuan, one of the first Chinese scholars to study sexuality, China has 20 million male homosexuals of marriageable age-and 80% of them will marry a woman. There are millions of gay men married to women in China, academics believe.