Hong Kong: a queer world opens in the New York of Asia

Two lithe young Chinese men in nothing but white spandex shorts and a generous coating of body glitter burst out of nowhere carrying huge rainbow flags. They race around revelers, twirling the flags in that defiant, revolutionary Les Miserables manner before mounting matching pedestals on either ends of the dance floor in a fit of pretty-boy triumph.

At the Sanctuary party, the revolutionary analogy is more than apt. It's precisely what resident queers--not to mention more than a few I long Kong Tourism Board officials--hope will take the city's transitioning and burgeoning gay scene to a new level. The party, held in the pit of a concrete amphitheater at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, was indicative of both what this community is about and what potential it has. About 500 revelers bought tickets on word of mouth and a little Internet advertising alone; hundreds more were turned away, and the out-of-town crowd was barely approached. Promoters feared being shut down by police for overcrowding as they had been months earlier at another location, so they kept it smallish. Still, the place exploded with excitement.

Party organizer Patrick Sun envisions greater things yet for these kinds of events, which occur intermittently for now but which he hopes to build into a predictable cycle that would turn Hong Kong into a worldwide gay mecca. First, though, he needs to show local authorities he can keep things orderly and illustrate the boundless tourism potential for queen size queer bashes. Sun explains, "Eventually we want this to be like Sydney Mardi Gras."

That's ambitious for a city that doesn't even host a gay pride parade. But I long Kong is nonetheless one of a microscopic handful of Asian cities with a bona fide and textured gay scene for the foreign traveler. (Only Bangkok and Phuket in Thailand and reputed up and corner Singapore come close.) In Hong Kong, queer activists view attracting the mighty gay dollar as a primary, means of persuading straight Hong Kong to be tolerant and legally progressive.

"It is true that if we had a gay pride parade, only a few people would show up and it would be an embarrassment," says leading Hong Kong activist Chung To, a Chinese-American who quit a lucrative career as a Wall Street investment banker to fight for queer and AIDS causes across China. "But if we throw parties, they will come. It is the best way we have to bring people together." Thus, to visit Hong Kong's gay world is to support a civil rights movement.

The last time I was in Hong Kung, it was dying-literally. Just a year ago that nasty little bug known as SARS was infecting scores and killing dozens every day. The panic reduced a buzzing metropolis to an isolating ghost town where paranoid masses donned surgical masks with Michael Jackson-like fervor. Even the finest Hong Kong hotels, typically full every spring, were reporting gasp-worthy occupancy rates below 10% from April to June 2003. Economic rain was nigh.

And yet, for all the destruction and havoc SARS wreaked, it is also largely why I found myself this overcast Wednesday afternoon in late April on a test run of the city's first officially sanctioned gay themed tours. That is, the Hong Kong Tourism Board, frantic in the post SARS era to seek out new markets to jump start its devastated economy finally embraced the idea of selling the city on its queer merits. It had come close in 2002 when a board committee bestowal a creativity honor on Chung To for his entry in a contest where he sketched out a few gay city tours as potential new products. But after Chung's victory the board let the proposal collect dust until desperation struck; then late last year it licensed a start-up firm called Tongzhi Holidays, owned by a 21-year-old Chung protege, to actualize Chung's vision. (Tongzhi literally translates as "comrade," but the word has become colloquially synonymous with "gay" or "lesbian.") Folks who take the tours receive a rainbow-colored Tongzhi card that makes them eligible for discounts at more than 20 restaurants, shops, bars, and saunas. They are currently working on developing four different tours of hidden gay Hong Kong, and they wanted to give me a taste of what these tours would include.

I was a little dubious about this tour from the outset. From my years of reporting on China and Hong Kong, I expected to be shown the usual tourist sites--the tram ride to exquisite Victoria Peak, the Star Ferry passage across Victoria Harbor, a walk around the Western bar area known as Lan Kwai Fong, a visit to a Toist temple--that are all well covered by Lonely Planet. But the tour quickly proved quite interesting.

Tongzhi owner Sammy Li and his guide (who is closeted and asked that his name not be used) ran me through some of China's fascinating queer history as we walked through the city. The vast Middle Kingdom's past in general dates back millennia, the guide explained as we made our way to the nondescript Queen's Pier, where colonial British dignitaries used to arrive. A popular euphemism for same-sex love that is still used today' in China is "breaking the sleeves," which comes from the 2,200-year-old tale of the Han Dynasty emperor who woke to find his lover, Dong Xian, sleeping on top of his sleeve. Rather than wake him, the emperor thoughtfully cut his own sleeve so he could get up. Chinese literature is dotted with great homosexual love stories and poetry, and Chinese society was so indifferent to same-sex relations that a dismayed Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, complained about it during a 1583 visit. Still, Confucian and Buddhist teachings do oppose gay sex, and the British brought modern Western homophobia along with them to Hong Kong in the 19th century.