I’m not sure if this is the correct sub for this and apologies if it’s in the wrong place.
Okay so first things first - this is a clearly bullshit article. It’s published by a US state propaganda mouthpiece, and consists of about 30% “a thing happened and we have no information about why” and 70% screed against evil CCP. I have the critical reading skills to understand that there’s nothing of value here.
However, I can’t read Mandarin so my ability to actually find out what’s really going on is essentially non-existent. I was hoping maybe someone here could help me get more information on what this LGBT center was doing and why it was shuttered so I can file that away for future discussions with my queer acquaintances that are less open minded about China. Was it a front for US NGOs to push capitalism with a rainbow flag? Was it something completely mundane like not paying taxes or filing some paperwork? Is it just an unfortunate case of LGBT people being mistaken for western chauvinism again?
In foreign countries, the US will often try to hide their spy operations behind things like gay nightclubs, so that the governments of these nations crack down on them, and the US can sell of their “rainbow imperialism” to their people and so that gay people become increasingly marginalized (and increasingly easy to radicalise.)
That would be my guess, that this place was shut down because their owners were found to be in bed with the yanks or something like that.
Apparently during the Cold War, the GDR was concerned about just such a possibility, so they opened a whole bunch of state-funded gay bars
There was some discussion of LGBT in China here a while back. This thread, and the link to a thread on /r/sino were pretty enlightening for me. The impression I got was that it was unnecessary fanning of political flames.
Yeah so apparently the co-founder of the LGBT center is a fellow with the NED which is immediately extremely suspicious so…yeah probably shut down for being another front for US government funded “regime change” operations.
Oh that’s fantastic, thank you! I’m not sure why that didn’t turn up on my reddit search of r/sino, oh well.
Because it is in Lemmygrad, they said “/r/” by accident, it should be “/c/”.
That was not in error. The link to the /r/sino thread is in the post I linked.
Ah, excuse me.
Not sure why either.
On an unrelated note, some people in China use the term for “comrade” (同志) to refer to homosexuals, you can see why this very insulting.
Some people don’t get it, it’s not meant to insult homosexuals, it’s meant to insult socialism and the CPC, because we call each other comrades!
Copied from my other reply:
The organization mentioned in the article was called “北京同志中心”, which they mean to be “Beijing LGBT Center”, but I would think it meant “Beijing Comrade Center” if I didn’t know it was LGBT-related. They renamed to “北同文化”(Beijing "同“ Culture) later probably to avoid this. “同” in Chinese means same, and can be short for “同性恋”(homosexual).
Another update:
You know what, I think it’s both an insult to socialists and homosexuals, because people who use it to insinuate that socialists are all homosexuals think that it would be insulting to call anyone homosexual.
I don’t see why it’s insulting unless it’s meant as an insult. Being a comrade, being a homosexual, neither of these are bad things to be.
It’s common for people in China in the past to call strangers by the term comrade, whether they’re CPC members or not, though it’s not as common nowadays. However, official news have always used comrade when mentioning party members.
Even though “comrade” can also mean someone with the same ideals, it’s like saying “gay” also means happy. So when some people use it to refer to homosexuals, they’re not insulting homosexuals but the CPC.
The organization mentioned in the article was called “北京同志中心”, which they mean to be “Beijing LGBT Center”, but I would think it meant “Beijing Comrade Center” if I didn’t know it was LGBT-related. They renamed to “北同文化”(Beijing "同“ Culture) later probably to avoid this. “同” in Chinese means same, and can be short for “同性恋”(homosexual).
A lot better than being called the f slur, like in America.
I updated my comment:
Some people don’t get it, it’s not meant to insult homosexuals, it’s meant to insult socialism and the CPC, because we call each other comrades!
Update:
You know what, I think it’s both an insult to socialists and homosexuals, because people who use it to insinuate that socialists are all homosexuals think that it would be insulting to call anyone homosexual.
I went to the Center’s website that is linked on Wikipedia, and the all the images on there are porn. I can’t read Chinese so idk what the text says. What’s up with that??
This article is dated May 16, the group’s notice was posted on May 15, so the website was probably shut down. You can try web.archive.org.
Honestly it looks like it got bought and has been used by someone else? The domain has been registered with the current owner since 2022-05-07, and if you look at the Wayback Machine for 2022-05-12 it says it’s up for sale. It looks like the domain used to be used for the Center, for example this snapshot from 2016. Even back in March 2023 the site wasn’t showing porn but was not being used by the Center.
