Blogging from the Highlands of Scotland
'From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step' - Diderot

Thursday 19 May 2005

China says 'No!' to gay information website

A website dealing with LGBT issues within mainland China has been blocked by the Chinese authorities. The site, although hosted outside China, is run "by volunteers mainly in mainland China" and apparently got 50 to 60,000 hits a day. The site, GayChinese.net, is still available outside China - although if you don't have Chinese character script installed on your PC it won't make much sense. There's another much more detailed report on this latest incident in the Sydney Morning Herald.

China seems to blow hot and cold (mainly cold, of course) about matters relating to issues of sexuality, even purely informational and non-political sites such as this one. Just last month a gay film festival at Beijing University was forced to move venues, although it took place later at a disused factory nearby. Incidentally I heard recently that there had been police interference of late in a number of the gay bars and dancing clubs/'saunas' in Hong Kong's Hollywood Road area, although it does remain much more free than the rest of China. When I first lived in HK homosexuality was completely illegal, although it was decriminalised in the late 1980s and since then has become much more widely acknowledged, if not universally accepted.

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