Amid grim AIDS situation, China's gay groups set to flourish

It was an ordinary apartment in downtown Shenyang with several computers and bookshelves in three bedrooms.

In the frigidity of the capital city of northeast China''s Liaoning Province, boys dropped in in twos and threes, chatting with the staff in the room or surfing on the internet to kill time.

But the rainbow flags hanging on the wall hinted that the room was not ordinary at all, as such flags were widely used to symbolize gay and lesbian community pride.

"Our ''Support of Love'' consulting center was aimed to provide service to the MSM group," said 24-year-old Xiao Shun (not his real name). MSM means men who have sex with men.

　　A GAY''S STORY

Xiao Shun didn''t realize he was gay until six years ago after a bitter experience with a girlfriend, which he didn''t want to recall much. "It hurt my feeling greatly," he said.

Then a male friend approached him, and Xiao Shun found that he gradually developed love to someone of the same gender as his own.

At first, Xiao Shun was depressed and embarrassed. He tried to date girls, only to find himself uninterested at all.

"I wanted to know more about gays, but I could just hide in the corner of an internet cafe to surf online."

He soon joined some gay groups and became member of a non-government organization (NGO) of gays.

"I began to know that I''m not alone," he said.

The boy became a member of the ''support of love'' consulting center in May after graduating from college with a bachelor degree on media.

One of Xiao Shun''s job in the center was to teach "money boys" (male who have sex with men to earn money) about safe sex in nightclubs.

　　GRIM SITUATION

The Ministry of Health estimated that 740,000 people were living with HIV in China at the end of 2009. Among the 48,000 new infections in 2009, 32 percent, or nearly one-third, were through sexual transmission between MSMs, said the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

In 2005, the proportion of man-to-man sexual transmission in new HIV infections that year was 12.1 percent.

The HIV infection rate among gays was climbing steadily in China, from 2.5 percent (out of 480 interviewees) in 1998, to 4.2 percent (of 800 interviewees) in 2000, to the current 5.9 percent.

Xiao Shun felt the threat well.

On the one hand, anal sex is highly risky as the walls of anus and rectum are thin and richly supplied with blood vessels which can be easily injured during anal intercourse.

On the other hand, "relationship between men is not stable in China," he said. "If two men are together for three months, that is pretty long."

Many gay men not only have sex with men. Under social pressure in China, where filial piety is always featured by leaving off springs, more than 90 percent of the gays would ultimately get married with a woman, according to Liu Dalin, famous sociologist and specialist in sexology.

Male prostitution makes the problem even more serious.

"In nightclubs, about 30 percent to 50 percent of the money boys are not gay at all, which means that if they got infected with HIV, they could infect their girlfriends," he said, adding that in almost all the nightclubs they could find HIV positive cases.


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