An organization of parents, families, friends of lesbians and gays has released a short video urging Chinese parents to accept their gay children for who they are during this Lunar New Year celebrations and which has gone viral on the Internet.
The six-minute video entitled "Coming Home" is geared for the Chinese New Year celebrations. The Lunar New Year is a time for much family celebration. Reports show that more than 700 million people travel from across the country leaving their workplace to reach home to their families to celebrate the start of Year of the Goat that began Feb. 18.
The film tells the story of a gay man who returns to be with his family this New Year, long after they initially rejected him for coming out. The film ends with many parents exhorting viewers who are parents to understand and accept their children and for children not to hide their sexual orientation from their parents. “Don’t think of the love of your parents as a burden,” says one mother while another one says, "Be brave and be yourself."
The Hollywood Reporter estimates that over 100 million people have already viewed the film online and which was a popular share via QQ Live, a Chinese video-based social networking platform.
The film was released to coincide with the Chinese New Year, China’s most important family holiday and produced by PFLAG China, a gay rights organization that provides counseling and support services and which is named after the U.S.-based Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
Recently, a series of advertisements titled ‘Love is not a Choice’ on the eve of Valentine’s Day also urged people to be more accepting of gay people in China. Produced by the China LGBT Awareness campaign (lgbtcampaign.org), it featured gay and lesbian couples in their homes, and had captions such as: “We did not choose to be homosexual. We just are.”
Both the film and the adverts are aimed at breaking the cultural taboo surrounding same-sex relations in China.
Although China legalized adult same-sex relations in 1997 and removed it from an official list of psychiatric diseases in 2001, the deeply held Chinese belief that children are required to marry and bear offspring to continue the family line makes it still heavily stigmatized.
That is why many gay men in China marry and have children because of pressure from their parents and to avoid social stigma. Studies show that an estimated 80 to 90 percent of gay men in China marry women and that there are nearly 10 million Chinese couples in such marriages. Marriage among same-sex couples is not legal.
There are no official statistics on the number of gay people in China but academics have suggested that gay people can account for at least 3 to 4 percent of the population, which means that the number of gay people in China could range from 39 million to 52 million.
You may watch the heart rending and touching video here: