Marriage of convenience in China

A piece this morning from the Washington Post talks of young Chinese gays and lesbians entering into marriages of convenience in order to please their parents by conforming to the status quo... I can't imagine how rough it must be to have to create and maintain an imaginary life because family pressure is so intense.

Stick with me - I'm going to take a detour but it all ties back in together: A quick look at Guilford County rates of HIV/AIDS infection will show you that black men are currently the highest risk group, by which I mean that the infection rate is growing more rapidly for black men than any other group. You would also see that while many of them contracted the virus through hetero- and homosexual contact, there's a huge percentage under the category of "risk not specified."

I asked a woman at the Guilford County Health Department about that late last year and she said that the stigma around homosexuality in the black community is so intense, that many men will say they don't know their risky activities and/or will say they are hetero then later admit to having sex with men. Maybe it's along the lines of the (maybe defunct - I researched this five years ago) belief held by some Latin American countries that only the bottom is gay.

Either way, these men seem to feel that they can't admit their homosexual desires because they feel intense pressure to conform... like the Chinese in marriages of convenience(see, it all comes full circle).

It seems to me that the fear surrounding gay men, in America at least, comes in great part from some socially ingrained discomfort with the gay sex act itself (though I'm guessing one can find people spending millions on male on female anal porn in dirty bookstores and Web sites across America) and with the GLBT community as a whole because we have a tendency to fear what we don't know.

When Rob and I were in our maybe-friends/maybe-dating phase, I took him to a party a friend of mine was throwing in which there were 40 or more gay men, a handful of lesbians and us. I didn't know Rob all that well at the time and was a little nervous about taking a straight guy to such a soirée. Of course, one of my friends gave him a hug that lasting quite a bit longer than the average hetero guy hug, probably as a little test, and Rob was neither uncomfortable nor did he somehow catch a gay germ and start liking guys.

It seems silly to have to say that but given the tv shows and commercials that show straight men becoming physically ill upon contact with anything even vaguely homosexual, it apparently bears saying. Regardless of what Haggard and the rest of the "formerly gay" say, people are born with their sexual orientation - unfortunately, stigma still forces some people to deny and repress their natural attractions.