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Queer Comrades has shot a new documentary profiling 10 leaders of China’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, called Cream of the Queer Crop. Director Wei Xiaogang said he wanted to give the activists a chance to talk about their work, exploring their wishes for the gay movement and how to lead gay people into the future.

Wei used three criteria to pick them. They had to be working in the area for a long time. They had to be willing to show their faces in front of a camera. And Wei strove to have a balanced representation for the community, trying to pick people of different gender, ages and occupations.

“In our film we have all L, G and T,” he said. “No B,” he said, adding that one of the people he profiles is kind of bisexual but identifies as a gay man.

“We have a lawyer, a professor, a director and an editor of a magazine,” Wei said.

Below are Wei’s choices, and the reasons.

Cui Zi’en

Cui came out on a Hunan TV talk show in 2000, becoming one of the first people to publicly come out in China. He is also one of the driving forces behind the Beijing Queer Film Festival. In the late 1980s, he started watching gay films and lecturing on them to students at the Research Institute of the Beijing Film Academy. He is proud that one of his students, Zhang Yuan, went on to direct China’s first gay movie, East Palace West Palace. He directed and wrote scripts for some of the first gay movies, like Men and Women, filmed in 1999.

Sam

After graduating from university, Sam noticed a strain of negativity or despair running through the lesbian community. In response, in 2005 Sam started Les Plus, the longest continually running lesbian magazine in China. In the beginning it was just the work of a few people, but the staff has grown quite a lot. She is also on the board of the Lala Alliance, who coordinates activities between different lesbian organizations in China. A lot of activists cite Sam as a big inspiration.

Zhou Dan

Zhou Dan is a Shanghai lawyer in his 30s who spends his free time giving legal advice to gay people. He said the questions he is most frequently asked concern gay marriage and dealing with blackmail or violence. Many of his clients are gay men seeking advice on divorcing their wives, or who are considering marriages of convenience with lesbian women. He was the only openly gay person in Time magazine’s 2009 list of the 60 most influential people in China.

 Xu Bin

Inspired by her experiences as a foreign student in the United States, Xu Bin became active in China’s LGBT movement in 2003. She works with an NGO called Common Language, and is considered one of the people pulling the movement forward. Last year, she helped organize a gender diversity art exhibition in Beijing last year, and was a big force behind the well publicized same-sex wedding pictures taken in Qianmen on Valentines’ Day last year.

He Xiaopei

He Xiaopei was involved in the LGBT movement before there were any bars, when it was still basically a crime to be gay in China. She focuses sexual rights. For example, with her organization Pink Space she is doing work with wives of gay men, a forgotten group. She also focuses other marginalized people like the disabled, prostitutes and transsexuals. She believes that women should be able to enjoy sex.

Xiao Hei

Xiao Hei, a relative newcomer to the LGBT community, started a group called No Boundaries for transgender people. Her organization is not only about reaching out to other people, but putting out a voice about what it is to be transgender. It’s not only about being transsexual or being a drag queen. There are people who don’t identify as their biological gender, but don’t identify as the other gender either. They don’t seek to undergo surgery, and don’t want to be controlled by social norms. Xiao Hei’s work also focuses on bisexuals, who are also more mobile in their sexual identity.

Jiang Hui

Jiang Hui helped found China’s biggest gay news site, Aibai, which got its start 11 years ago as a personal website about one gay couple’s loving relationship. Over time it attracted more visitors, added some question and answer forums, and then evolved into its present form. He volunteers his work at the site, while holding down a steady job. Aibai plays a big role in helping other organizations get together, serving an umbrella function.

Xiangqi

Xiangqi helped set up a pioneering NüAi lesbian website in Shanghai in 2001. It became a hub that let them get more deeply involved in the local gay community. In 2005, they set up an organization called Shanghai NüAi, which runs salons and sets up a hot line. The group also runs an oral history project to record the lives of lesbians, because many people don’t know lesbians exist in Chinese society.

Tong Ge

Tong Ge is the oldest activist in the documentary. He was picked up by police for gay sex in the early 1990s, and lost his job as a result. He became a researcher, writing papers and books on men who have sex with men, personally interviewing prostitutes and their clients. He has a big knowledge and very keen insight into the whole gay community, especially the parts you don’t see very often. Much of his work focuses on older homosexuals.

Ray Mahoney

This 51-year-old English teacher visits dance halls and saunas, handing out information about AIDS prevention and homosexuality. He runs an LGBT English corner, and volunteers for many organizations, with a focus on reaching out to middle aged people. He also goes to parks where Chinese parents seek spouses for their children, in order to educate them about homosexuality and open their eyes to the possibility their children might be gay.

The Cream of the Queer Crop will be screened Friday Aug 27 at 8 pm at the Beijing LGBT Center

Address: Bldg B, Rm 2108, Xintiandi Plaza, Xibahe Nanlu Jia No.1, Chaoyang distict, Beijing   

Tel.: 010-64465698

Fee: 10 yuan

Article by: By Hao Ying www.queercomrades

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Top Stories, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.