I asked one of the managers: ‘Aren’t you afraid of business competition?’ He answered: ‘I wish the whole street was full of gay bars.’ He did not care about business he cared about the community and wanted the community to grow. When they met on the way, they would ask one another where they were going. People would walk out of one bar and into another. The three bars were all on the Sanlitun Bar Street and they were all about a ten-minute walk from each other.
They did not say ‘Dragon’: they said ‘Drag-On’, because the bar had drag shows. There were three well-known gay bars: Half & Half, On & Off, and the Dragon. It was called Half & Half.īH: Half & Half was quite well known in Beijing at that time. After that day, people just went there, and the bar eventually became the very first gay bar. The word went around the room in whispers and people got extremely excited. One cute guy ran up to me and said he knew whose birthday this was: it was ‘our’ birthday because it was the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. People whispered in each other’s ears, one after another. I told everyone that it was a birthday party and I asked people to guess whose birthday it was. He said that he could not say anything because he was not allowed to stay in Beijing, and asked me to host the party instead. After he had entered the bar, he told me that there were plainclothes policemen inside. Gary had already been arrested and expelled from Beijing during the Conference, but he secretly returned to the city. It was after the Fourth UN Conference on Women, which was held in Beijing in 1995. On that day, many people turned up, including eight women. We told the participants that it was a birthday party. The bar owner was happy for us to hold a party there, but we did not tell him what kind of party it was. Gary had found an artist bar in a small alley. So I cut my trip short, left the mountain climbing team and returned to Beijing. Eight was an astronomical number at the time I had never heard of eight lesbians gathering in one place in Beijing.
When I called Susie, she said that there would be eight lesbians coming to the party. We then organised a Stonewall celebration party in Beijing, but I was away in Tibet climbing the Himalayas. So we had to keep changing meeting places. When the bar owner realised who they were, he was not particularly welcoming to these ‘weird-looking’ guys. Gay men also regularly met at the bar on Wednesday evenings. Then City Bar opened in Sanlitun-a place where foreigners often hooked up with sex workers. In the early 1990s there were no gay bars. There were not many female participants at the time. Susie also invited people to her flat for breakfasts and parties.
There were usually ten guys who regularly attended these meetings. It started with Gary (Wu Chunsheng, a gay activist) and Susie (a queer activist from the United Kingdom), organising gay and lesbian meetings in Beijing’s Sanlitun Bar Street in the early 1990s. How did you get involved in China’s queer activism at that time? Was there a queer community back then? As one of China’s leading feminist and queer activists since the 1990s, He’s experiences and perspectives are valuable for understanding the formation of queer identities, communities, and activism in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the past three decades.īao Hongwei: You have been an active participant in China’s feminist and queer movements since the 1990s. Her films include The Lucky One (宠儿, 2012), Our Marriages: Lesbians Marry Gay Men (奇缘一生, 2013), Yvo and Chrissy (如此生活, 2017), and Playmates (玩伴, 2019). He Xiaopei is a leading queer feminist filmmaker, activist, and director of Pink Space (粉色空间), a Beijing-based NGO dedicated to promoting sexual rights and gender equality.