II. Sons of Sin — A Betrayal of Familial Obligations
Another crucial theme that surfaces in queer literature from both Confucian and Western contexts is the tension between one’s homosexuality and their family. Writers from both cultures agree that the pursuit of sexual freedom will be at the expense of familial harmony, incidentally both portraying family members making violent threats towards any suggestion of homosexuality. However, they disagree on how important this tradeoff is. Confucians often portray gays experiencing crippling familial guilt which can even smother their homoerotic desire, while Individualistic Westerners tend to dismiss their ties to their family with a level of nonchalance. As with their quarrel on coming out, the difference comes from the ideological divide between Confucianism and Individualism on the importance of the family.
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It is widely known that Confucianism emphasises the familial hierarchy, with the child under the authority of the parent and being responsible for bringing a good name to them. The role of the family is further emphasised because it holds a significant place in defining the purpose of life. Robert T. Ames writes in “Achieving Personal Identity in Confucian Role Ethics” that Confucian ideology dictates that one only becomes human “by cultivating those thick, intrinsic relations that constitute one’s initial conditions.” He explains that to define one’s life, one must “locate the trajectory of one’s life force within family, community, and cosmos.” The value of life is defined relationally, and destabilizing one’s family, which is seen as the bedrock of one’s human relations, is thus a destabilisation of the value of life itself. This means that as with community, the Confucian emphasis on the family makes being gay and thus necessarily sacrificing the family due to pre-existing homophobic narratives a far more unbearable amputation of the self.
This usually manifests in Chinese queer literature as a consistent juxtaposition of characters’ homoerotic sentiments with a strong undercurrent of familial guilt. The most notable example of familial guilt in Chinese queer literature is the case of the Crystal Boys protagonist, A-Qing, who firmly believes that his homosexuality is the cause of his family’s destruction — his brother, Buddy’s death, her mother’s indignity, and his father’s isolation and despair. When describing A-Qing’s sexual experience with the laboratory manager Zhao Wusheng, Pai compares A-Qing’s feeling that someone was “pounding the inside of [his] head with a mallet” during sex to the sound of hammering “five-inch nails into the lid of Buddy’s light casket” in directly adjacent sentences, drawing a connection between A-Qing’s homosexuality and his brother’s death during youth. Furthermore, after reminiscing about Buddy’s funeral, A-Qing describes his “dirty, sweaty hands”, a metaphorical hint at his subconscious feeling of culpability and guilt, and proceeds to contemplate suicide by “[flying] right out the window”. These hints at self-incrimination clearly show that A-Qing believes that he has failed his caregiver role for Buddy as an elder brother due to his homosexuality.
A-Qing’s belief that he failed his father, however, is even more obvious and direct. In the latter half of the novel, he reflects upon his veteran father’s wish for him to become a soldier like him and thinks that “if [he] hadn’t been expelled from school”, he “could have been an excellent military officer and made [his] father proud”, and been regarded as “the true son of a military man.” It is clear that A-Qing feels an obligation to his father — to make him feel satisfied and respected — and believes that his homosexuality is the reason that he cannot fulfil that responsibility. This is evidenced by how eventually, A-Qing’s guilt surrounding his father becomes completely interwoven with homoerotic contact to a debilitating extent. When he lay in the same bed as Mr. Yu, someone he describes as “the most decent, the most endearing” out of all the men he had met, he could not permit sexual contact. Pai writes in A-Qing’s voice: “I felt ashamed, like my body was covered with sores that I did not want anybody to touch” and proceeds to narrate the indignity of his encounters with other men. Crucially, A-Qing only grows disgusted with his homosexuality after contemplating his failure of his father’s expectations, and it can thus be inferred that his internalised shame and consequent sexual incapacitation does indeed arise from his belief that he abandoned and ultimately destroyed his family due to his homosexuality.
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Not only have Chinese authors emphasised the immense familial shame homosexuality brings from an internal perspective, but they have also approached homosexuality from an outsider’s perspective, and used gays’ rejection of family as an important argument against homosexuals. In Chiang Kuei’s 1961 Chong Yang, a piece of anti-communist literature, the communist antagonist Liu Shaoqiao is bisexual, and although he is not gay, his sexual exploits and political statements destroy both his and the protagonist’s families. The fact that Kuei uses a character’s homoeroticism and consequent repudiation of the family structure as an attack on communism shows the extent of negativity with which he views the tradeoff between queer sexual liberty and familial obligations.
The two Chinese works Crystal Boys and Chong Yang are written by very different authors — one a homosexual himself, and the other a homophobe. However, not only do these authors portray their characters’ homosexuality to be at odds with their responsibilities to their families, but they have also consistently shown these responsibilities as tantamount. Therefore, in queer Chinese literature, the weight of familial obligation manifests as the homosexual’s guilt and social ostracisation and results in his sexual restraint.
Western individualism, on the other hand, prioritises individual desires over familial structures, thus allowing one to detach from familial obligations in pursuit of queer liberation. This is supported by Robert M. Orrange, who writes in “Individualism, Family Values, and the Professional Middle Class” that Individualism creates “tensions between (individual) aspirations and ability to develop trust and make commitments to others”, weakening one’s familial bonds. These weakened familial pressures in the Individualistic West explain why its gay characters are often dismissive or even openly antagonistic to their family, allowing them to escape the crippling sense of guilt that their Chinese counterparts feel when they choose to abandon their families for sexual fulfilment.
In Dancer From the Dance, Holleran describes the young, gay men who have abandoned their families to live the gay life of New York City, and explains that their disappearances in the metropolis were “understood less (by their families) than if they had been killed in a car wreck.” However, despite this complete abandonment of their family, these men “lived only to bathe in the music, and each other’s desire”, seemingly completely without guilt or care for the people they grew up with. Later, Holleran confirms the gays’ oblivion toward familial obligations, writing that most of them “forgot that anyone had families, living among the queens of New York City.”
While Holleran’s depiction of the gays of New York dismisses any role the family has to play in their lives, other Western authors of gay literature make significant mentions of its importance. However, unlike the Chinese writers, whose characters feel indebted to their families, these Western autobiographers believe the opposite — that their families owe something to them. In Cures, American historian Martin Duberman takes an oppositional stance to his parents, describing his father as “indifferent” and his mother as “termagant, nagging, and voluble”. Notably, this criticism of his parents implies that both failed a certain parental obligation they had to him. Another instance of a Western writer pushing responsibilities onto family is J.R. Ackerley’s autobiography My Father and Myself, in which he attempts to prove that his father was a gay man too, and thus using his father to justify his current life. He exclaims at one point: “If [only] it could be proved that he had led in his youth the very kind of life that I was leading!” The significance of this ‘proof’ lies in the fact that not only does Ackerley not express an ounce of guilt about familial responsibility, but he also goes a step further in an attempt to prove that his father shirked it too.
The motif of dismissing and opposing familial responsibilities with the effect of sexual liberation remains common throughout Western queer literature. Meanwhile, the weight of familial obligation makes Chinese homosexuals the victim of both internal and external restraint and vilification, unable to relinquish the family to pursue sexual liberation.
III. The Portent of Collapse — A Failure of National Obligations
The final prominent restriction against homosexuals in queer literature is that of national obligation. Again, there was tension between serving the nation and the pursuit of homosexual liberation due to social narratives that arose in the early twentieth century which blamed homosexuality and the loss of masculinity in Chinese men for national weakness. Whereas Chinese gays turned their national loyalties into yet another source of sexual guilt, Western gays are able to ignore or even confront the nation.
The hierarchical nature of Confucian society again comes into play. In Social Ethics in a Changing China, He Huaihong identifies the ‘five constant relationships’ — “those between ruler and subject, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, husband and wife, and friend and friend” — “constitute the basic hierarchical structure of Confucian society.” This tie between ruler and subject is further reinforced with the concept of Zhong, or Loyalty, which demands the “steadfast support of someone in a superior position” according to “Loyalty from a Confucian Perspective” by Kathleen M. Higgins. As such, given the established tradeoff between homosexuality and national obligation in the twentieth century, the entrenched position of the ruler and the state in the Confucian hierarchy makes national obligations paramount, and thus homosexuality becomes an unacceptable betrayal of these responsibilities.
Kuei’s Chong Yang consistently ties homosexuality with what he perceives to be the corruption and weakness of the Chinese nation. As mentioned, his main bisexual character is a communist, which to Kuei, a member of the Kuomintang, is emblematic of national corruption. Later in his novel, he also fuses homosexuality with the Japanese invasion, describing a scene where Japanese soldiers rape a male character, which correlates the subjugation of the Chinese nation to the homosexualisation of Chinese men. This idea is nothing new by the mid-twentieth century in China, which has been in national peril since the onset of the “Century of Humiliation” in 1839. An announcement by the Orthodox Patriotic Newspaper issued in 1912 condemned dan actors, female impersonators known for their homosexual activity, for causing the nation to be “ridiculed by foreigners”, thus failing the nation by bringing it shame. A 1932 article from the Tianjin tabloid Tianfengbao further criticised this group and wrote that “[the] country is on the verge of extinction because such freaks and monsters are present”, which emphasises national weakness as a consequence of homosexuality. Professor of Chinese history, Kang Wenqing, sums up the general perception of homosexuals at the time in his Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China 1900–50, commenting that writers were “blaming [homosexuals] for the political crisis of the nation.” Indeed, this homophobic rhetoric all revolves around one idea — that homosexuals had reneged upon their obligation to the nation.
Even the bisexual writer Guo Moruo conveyed similar ideas in his writing. In the foreword to The Years of My Boyhood, which contains significant descriptions of his homoerotic experiences, Guo claimed that he would “dig [these experiences] from an ashen pit under the dark stone and charcoal” of the feudal Chinese society that he was born into, tying his youth to a corrupt age. Furthermore, he then attributes his identity to the state of his time, writing that it was “a society like this [that] birthed a man like this.” In essence, he blames his ‘queerness’ on the debased state of the Chinese state, thus adopting an apologetic stance that appeals to the narrative that homosexuality is tied to a failing nation, which is consistent with the pressure of a national obligation against gays found in the other Chinese works.
Individualism of the West preaches the opposite: a rejection of the state power. The political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, known for coining the term ‘Individualism’ in his Democracy in America (1835–40), wrote that a “general (political) apathy is the consequence of what I have termed individualism”, identifying the ideology’s effect on American citizens’ nonchalance to the state. Burckhardt supports this view in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, in which he describes the emergence of “the private man, indifferent to politics” from the Medieval man who was “conscious of himself only . . . through some general category”, linking the rise of the Individualistic ideal of privacy and selfhood to a weakening political and national consciousness. This Individualistic detachment from politics and the nation manifests in Wester's queer literature as a unique ability to dismiss or even express hostility towards the state and achieve sexual liberation.
In works from the first half of the twentieth century, especially in depictions of the First World War, queer literature exhibited an indifference to the state. In a myriad of autobiographical works, authors described WWI as an opportunity for satisfying their homosexual desires. According to Gay Lives by Paul Robinson, professor of history at Stanford University, J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself described the War as an important sexual experience, and this was also the case “for many British Intellectuals of his generation.” Indeed, Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant, another queer autobiography which Robinson examines, also described a significant romance with an American soldier stationed in Britain during the War. A similar sexual liberation occurred in the Second World War, which author Allan Bérube extensively documented in his work Coming Out Under Fire. According to Bérube, passes to the war-boom cities “promised gay male and lesbian GIs the allures of fun, romance, and sex”. Indeed, for these Western gays, there seemed no contradiction whatsoever between war, serving the nation, and homosexual romance.
However, in the middle and latter half of the twentieth century, which saw the Lavender Scare, the rise of conversion therapy in psychoanalysis, and later, the AIDS epidemic, queer literature began to display active antagonism to society and the state for restricting sexual freedom and failing its obligation to its gay citizens. Duberman’s 1991 Cures, for instance, harboured this discontentment. According to Robinson’s Gay Lives, Duberman portrayed his suffering “as the product of larger cultural forces”, describing his first great romance as a “victim to America’s unexamined notions about constancy” and the lack of institutional support — marriage and the ability to raise children — for gay relationships. Thus, Duberman protests both societal oppression and state failure towards homosexuals and pushes the complete opposite of the rhetoric perpetuated by Kuei and other twentieth-century Chinese sources, which blamed homosexuality as the cause of national failure.
On both sides of the world, the homophobic narrative that homosexuality is in tension with the state exists. The work of Western queer authors reveals a strongly individualistic dismissal of the state, allowing them to detach from this toxic tradeoff, whereas both homophobic and homosexual Chinese were unable to do so, with their work demonstrating a uniquely Confucian attachment to the nation and thus an inability to reject these state obligations in favour of gay liberation.
Conclusion
Portrayals of homosexuality during twentieth-century China permeate with self-restraint, guilt, and homophobia — whether internal or external. The root problem lies in the existing homophobic narratives which portray homosexuality as a gross failure of a triad of duties — whether communal, familial, or national — all of which are championed by Confucian ideology and thus made more difficult to sacrifice for Chinese gays. This fills the academic gap around how and which elements of Confucianism are internalised and come in tension with homosexuality in the queer imagination and adds nuance to the dominant academic claim that Confucianism has some correlation with homophobia, noting that the ideology itself is not homophobic, and can only amplify homophobic narratives that exist already.
Importantly, this implies that should such pre-existing homophobic beliefs dissipate, then the prominence of Confucianism itself will be unable to perpetuate homophobia. This seems to align with historical trends. By 1997, after the introduction of capitalism and private property to China, the private sphere began to form, to which sexuality as an issue receded. This meant that the perception that homosexuality conflicted with one’s obligations to the nation lost steam, and while China remained Confucian, with one strand of the three homophobic narratives gone, all mentions of homosexuality in criminal law disappeared. However, while the nation was delinked from homosexuality, families and communities remained proximate and unfriendly to it, and this animosity continues to be amplified by Confucianism, creating the relative conservatism in China today.
This leads to the question of whether and how these remaining homophobic narratives could be changed. Could the perception that homosexuality destroys the family unit be weakened with the development of new technologies which allow gay men to have biological children? Given greater visibility of gay couples and weakened taboos around sex in general, could homosexuality lose its ‘deviant’ status and no longer appear to be an affront to the community? In times of geopolitical conflict, could queerness again be branded as weakness or Western decadence, and become tied to national interests once more?
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Confucianism is often seen as part of the Chinese identity. If the LGBTQ community makes it an enemy, then a gay Chinese man will always hate one part of himself. By isolating homophobia and Confucian obligations, I hope to open the path of the Confucian gay, and embolden him to pursue, without fear of losing five millennia of his culture, the freedom and dignity to love.
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