Pretending to be straight for Lunar New Year homecoming
BEIJING: This year, like every year, Tiger Zhao will make the trip from the northern Chinese city where he works to his semirural home town. But this time, he won’t be travelling with a wife for cover.
For much of his adult life, Zhao, a gay man, has periodically pretended to be straight to please his parents, a ruse that involved finding and legally wedding a lesbian looking for the same, in what’s known here as a “lavender” or “cooperative” marriage.
Now divorced, 39, and heading home for the spring festival holiday on his own, he is readying himself for some version of the queries that haunt so many young Chinese: Why aren’t you married? And what about kids?
Beijing’s newfound desire to boost the birthrate has spurred a state-led marriage drive that reinforces traditional views about what a life ought to look like. Most parents expect their child to marry someone of the opposite sex and give them grandchildren - they count on this for care in their old age.
This pushes people toward lavender marriage. For some, it is a way to temporarily appease their parents. Others get married to have children in a state that does not recognise same-sex unions and makes it nearly impossible to be an unwed parent.
There are no reliable figures - people don’t generally talk about these things - but the phenomenon is so common that there are lesbian-gay matchmaking events and lavender-marriage forums online. Until recently, there was a lavender-marriage app, Queers.
Queers closed because it couldn’t make money, but the founder, Liao Zhuoying, says he still hears from former clients desperate for help. “Every year, users still send emails asking us, ‘Can you help me find a lesbian to take home for spring festival?’ “he said.
“I don’t look forward to spring festival like I used to,” said Zhao, who asked to use his English name because he is not out to his parents or all of his co-workers. “There’s a lot of pressure and you don’t know what to say.”
Zhao never expected to marry a woman - he loves men - but by the time he hit his mid-30s, it seemed as though there was no choice.
Growing up in the northern heartland in the1980s, he did not once hear the word “homosexual.” He realised he was gay in college, but it was not until online chat rooms took off that he was able to connect with men. Later, living in the city, he could discreetly date.
By the time he hit his late 20s, the pressure to marry was intense. When he went home each year, people would urge him to settle down. “They’d say, ‘You’re already 28, or you’re already 30, your classmates are already married with kids!’ “he said.
He didn’t feel that he could tell his parents. He did not want to disappoint them, or to have them worry about not having a grandson.
The pressure is not just from parents but from extended family and the community.
“When relatives and friends get together for the spring festival, the most common topic for our parents’ generation is the marital status of the children,” said a Beijing-based LGBT rights campaigner, who goes by the name Zhuchuan Maoerbing.
Patrick, a 30-year-old who works in the capital, and who asked to be identified only by the English name he has adopted, summoned the courage to tell his parents he liked men, only to have them rush him to a doctor in hysterics - and then urge him back into the closet.
“They still hope that I can change - that if I get married, if I live with a girl, I will change,” he said. Last year, he took a female friend home for the holidays. They pretended to be a couple in front of the extended family and Patrick’s old friends. His parents were pleased.
This year, however, the friend has other plans. Patrick plans to tell people, including his parents, that his “girlfriend” is busy. “I can’t tell them we broke up this year,” he said. “Maybe next year.”
After nearly a decade of tough trips home, Zhao started frequenting lavender-marriage forums to look for a lesbian to marry. Since there are far more gay men looking to marry lesbian women than the other way around, it took a while to find a match. When someone was willing, he went for it. They met three times before getting hitched.
The year after the wedding, Zhao spent Chinese New Year in relative peace. Parents: appeased. Neighbours: less nosy.
But the rest of year, he was miserable. He and his wife moved in together, then fought bitterly about everything from household chores to visiting their parents to whether to have children.
A 32-year-old gay man who spent two years married to a woman said the day he was married he felt like a lifeless figurine on top of a wedding cake. He asked to be identified by a nickname, Kong Qi, to protect his privacy.
“We needed the marriage,” he said. “And the people around us needed the marriage, but there was no meaning in it.” —Washington Post