From: rwockner@netcom.com (Rex Wockner)

Date: Thu, 30 Jun 1994 13:05:04 -0700 (PDT)
SOME ARTICLES BY FREE-LANCE JOURNALIST REX WOCKNER ARE SENT TO GAYNET AND 
UPLOADED TO THE QUEER RESOURCES DIRECTORY APPROXIMATELY ONE MONTH AFTER 
THEY ARE PUBLISHED IN 50-SOME GAY NEWSPAPERS...


REPORT: CHINESE GAYS LIVE MISERABLE LIVES 
 
by Rex Wockner 
 
        The millions of gays in China live miserable lives, according to 
a groundbreaking study by the Taiwanese magazine China Times. 
 
        The magazine's reporters spent two months surveying the gay scene 
in the cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing, Tianjin, Shenyang, Harbin, 
Dalian, Qingdao, Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan, Xian and 
Urumuqi. 
 
        They found that gay men can meet only in public toilets, parks 
and baths due to the cramped housing situation and police arrests. 
 
        They found that gays are treated with drugs, acupuncture and 
electro-shock to turn them straight. At one hospital, the Nanjing 
Psychiatry Research Institute, 1,832 gays were treated between 1981 and 
1991. Only 11 became heterosexual, according to staff. 
 
        Nearly every gay man interviewed said he could survive only by 
marrying a woman, with the option of maybe divorcing later and then not 
remarrying. 
 
        They found gay men completely unwilling to be tested for AIDS for 
fear of being caught in a government "trap." 
 
        And they found that most gays do not use condoms because, as one 
man in Shenzhen said: "If I love someone, I am ready to die for him. Who 
cares about AIDS?" 
 
        "The most difficult part of our work was to gain their 
confidence," the reporters wrote. "Every gay man feared exposure because 
they have known others who lost jobs or were jailed on charges of 
hooliganism." 
 
        Only three gay men agreed to be photographed for the magazine. 
One was Gao Yanhai, the China Health Research Institute employee who 
formed the Men's World gay-support group and launched China's first AIDS 
hotline in Beijing in 1992. Yanhai was fired in 1993 and the group and 
hotline were shut down, China Times discovered. 
 
        Meanwhile, Chinese officials told a domestic newspaper May 20 
that there are 5,000 to 10,000 cases of HIV infection in the country even 
though only 1,159 cases have been reported. 
 
        Eighty percent of the cases are in Yunnan province among people 
who shared needles, Ministry of Health spokesman Sun Xinhua told the Ming 
Pao Daily News. 
 
        Yunnan borders Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar (formerly Burma). 
 
                                == END ==