Closeted gay men on dating sites looking for women

Luo Hongling was a tongqi , one of the estimated millions of heterosexual women in China married to closeted gay men.

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A day before her death, her husband, Cheng Jiansheng, had posted a public message to her on his microblog: I am gay and I cheated on you. The reason I married you was to hide the fact I am gay. Though China decriminalized homosexuality in , it remained classified as a mental illness until According to a Pew survey, only 21 percent of Chinese people approved of homosexuality ; just this March, the government banned the depiction of homosexuality on film and TV as " pornographic or vulgar ," putting it in the same category as portrayals of incest and sexual abuse.

Read more: Their parents' generation was raised in the tail-end of the Mao era, when comprehensive general education was disrupted by the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and sex ed was non-existent. Wish Lanterns author Alec Ash, who has written about the lives of young people in China, says that the cultural divide between parents and their children is enormous: As he admits in the film, he is gay, but married to a woman. Despite the geographic proximity of his hometown, Cangzhou, to Beijing, they are a world apart in terms of attitudes towards LGBTQ people.

The prevailing attitude towards gays is one of non-acceptance and discrimination," he told Broadly.

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He says that he was introduced to his wife through an matchmaker, which was not uncommon in the early 90s when they met. They never stopped. And then when the internet arrived, I learnt what being gay meant——that it was something innate, and that I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. For him—as well as an entire generation of queer men and women in China—there was very little way of understanding their sexual orientation before the internet came along.

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But, if it gets water, and the soil is ripe, the environment is good, and it's warm, then it will sprout. And once that happens, it can never return to being a mung bean. The corridor outside his office has no windows and the lights were broken. To find it, I had to use the flashlight on my phone. Due to the nature of Zhang's research, his office is not on campus—he has had to relocate to an apartment block, an unremarkable grey building lost in Qingdao's urban sprawl.

As a medical researcher in the late 80s, he was one of the first in the country to identify the growing HIV epidemic and write about it in non-discriminatory terms. In , his research into China's queer community took an unexpected turn: A woman came to his office, crying, and told him that she had unwittingly entered into a sham marriage with a gay man. Zhang's conservative guess is that there are at least 10 million straight women in China married to gay men.

Similar research by Chinese sexologist Li Yinhe puts the figure at around 16 million, and research quoted in Yale anthropologist Tiantian Zhang's study puts the figure at 19 million, which is about the population of Romania. According to Zhang's research, 80 percent of gay men in China have, due to the toxic combination of family and societal pressure, entered traditional marriages with straight women. Social security in China is notoriously basic, and children still carry the burden of supporting their elders. For LGBTQ people, these family obligations ratchet up the pressure to remain closeted—and it goes some way to explain why gay men like Cheng Jiansheng feel compelled to marry heterosexual women.

From today, I'll never let another person touch me. I thought I had the wrong number, but I tried again and got through to the same person That's how I knew. Her partner refused to grant her a divorce, saying it wasn't a big deal. Her father agreed, she says, telling her that she had "unrealistic aspirations for marriage. In , she found a bottle of pills in the bathroom. After looking up its label on the search engine Baidu, she discovered that they were drugs for HIV treatment: Her husband had become HIV-positive. Zhang Beichuan's filing cabinets.

A decade of stories, categorised by region. Zhang says over 30 percent of tongqi will contract a sexually transmitted disease—for many, this is how they discover that their husbands sleep with men. Around 10 percent of tongqi will attempt suicide, he adds. In his office, he gestures towards the rows of filing cabinets that sit floor to ceiling. They contain thousands of letters and correspondence sent from women in these sham marriages.

Zhang has recently begun digitizing this archive with the help of assistants; they have scanned 43, pages so far. Qingdao Agricultural University is far on the outskirts of the city.

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QQ is a Chinese social media app optimized for group messages, with administrators who can control who enters the conversation. Tongqi's Family is one of the liveliest of such groups. We met at the gates and walked together along a tree-lined street that circled the campus. Small roadside food stands did a brisk trade, the smoke from small coal fired barbeques mingling with the mist that had rolled in from the sea. In the months after we meet, countless women join the group to ask for advice. I used anonymous, aggregate data from Google. The advantage of this data source, of course, is that most men are making these searches in private.

Women search, too, but in much smaller numbers.

While tolerant states have a slightly higher percentage of these searches, roughly 5 percent of pornographic searches are looking for depictions of gay men in all states. This again suggests that there are just about as many gay men in less tolerant states as there are anywhere else. Since less tolerant states have similar percentages of gay men but far fewer openly gay men, there is a clear relationship between tolerance and openness.

My preliminary research indicates that for every 20 percentage points of support for gay marriage about one-and-a-half times as many men from that state will identify openly as gay on Facebook. In a perfectly tolerant world, my model estimates that about 5 percent of men in the United States would say they were interested in men. Note that this matches nicely with the evidence from pornographic search data. These results suggest that the closet remains a major factor in American life.

For comparison, about 3. In states where the stigma against homosexuality remains strong, many more gay men are in the closet than are out. How deep in the closet are these men? Obviously, it is possible for a gay man not to acknowledge his sexuality to Facebook or surveys but to still have healthy, open same-sex relationships. But data from Match. This suggests that these men are not only not telling Facebook they are gay but are also not looking for relationships online. Additional evidence that suggests that many gay men in intolerant states are deeply in the closet comes from a surprising source: It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently.

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The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in 21 of the 25 states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average. Craigslist lets us look at this from a different angle. Among the states with the highest percentages are Kentucky, Louisiana and Alabama.

There is, in other words, a huge amount of secret suffering in the United States that can be directly attributed to intolerance of homosexuality. One man contacted me. He told me he was a retired professor, in his 60s, married to the same woman for more than 40 years. About 10 years ago, overwhelmed with stress, he saw the therapist and finally acknowledged his sexuality.

He has always known he was attracted to men, he says, but thought that that was normal and something that men hid. He and his wife do not have sex. He says that he would feel guilty ever ending his marriage or openly dating a man. He regrets virtually every one of his major life decisions. The retired professor and his wife will go another night without romantic love, without sex.