Coming out, coming home, coming with: Models of queer sexuality in contemporary China

ABSTRACT

The authors investigate coming out and coming home as models of queer sexuality for contemporary Chinese queer subjects. Through semi-structured interviews with 13 Chinese queer subjects, the authors investigate the distinctness of the coming-out and coming-home models, their points of dissonance and consonance, and the ways in which queer subjects take them up (partially or fully, temporarily or enduringly), revise them, or reject them. Finding that interview narratives exceed the normative parameters shaped by these two models, the authors elaborate a third, distinct model—coming with—which better accounts for how some contemporary Chinese queer subjects are crafting livable lives.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• queer
• coming out
• coming home
• coming with

Acknowledgements

Parts of this article appeared in the first author’s doctoral dissertation. The authors gratefully acknowledge Dr H. L. T. Quan, Dr Jacqueline M. Martinez, the anonymous reviewers, and the editor, Dr Todd Sandel, for their insightful feedback, and Dr Terrie Wong for her generous help and warm support.

Notes on contributors

Shuzhen Huang conducts research and teaching at the intersection of intercultural communication, gender and sexuality studies, and critical-cultural communication studies. Her recent research has focused on the communicative practices of marginalized groups and their global, cultural, and material articulations through gender, sexuality, race, and class.

Daniel C. Brouwer conducts research and teaching in genders and sexualities, HIV and AIDS activism, the rhetoric of social movements, cultural performance, and public and counterpublic sphere theories.

Notes

1 Throughout, we italicize the phrases coming out and coming home when we refer to them as models. When we refer to the specific communication practices of coming out or coming home, and when the interviewees use these phrases, we do not italicize them.

2 This was an online survey of the queer community in China. Twenty thousand people completed the questionnaires, of whom 16,690 were LGBTQI folks. From among the categories that were offered, 26% self-identified as gay/bisexual males, 42% as lesbian/bisexual females, 8% as transgender, 6% as questioning, and 2% as intersex. The rest (16%) identified as heterosexual.

3 Using census data from 2011, Zhang Beichuan, a queer scholar in China, estimates that there are approximately 16 million heterosexual women who are married to gay men in China (“Gay marriage,” 2012; see also Bie & Tang, 2016, pp. 351–352, 358–365).