Out Spotlight CVXXIX

Today's Spotlight was profile by Time Magazine as China's gay pionner. Today's spotlight is GLBT activist, lawyer, and scholar, Zhou Dan.

Born in January 1974, Zhou lives in Shanghai, China and is a leading voice for GLBT rights in mainland China.

Zhou was born during the last days of China's Cultural Revolution and by the time he started school it at the beginning of a new decade and even bigger shift for China.. A decade that would see China beginning an economic change that created the power that it is now, and the political change that brought calls for democracy. Zhou studied law at the University in Shanghai and stayed to start his law practice in there. During all of this he had become increasingly aware of his own orientation and faced the hard fact that in China it was still regarded as an ‘illness’ or ‘disorder.’

In the 1990's, finding information about homosexuality was difficult in China with only clinical medical books available in the university library. It wasn't until fate play a role, and a chance ofriding his bike past Shanghai’s Little Garden that he met other men like himself and his life changed. Back then in China unless you knew someone, even finding a place where there were other gay men was difficult. What Zhou didn't know at the time was the Little Garden a well known gay meeting place.

“The internet has changed everything, especially since the end of the 90s. Many are still too frightened to go to bars and the virtual world is a safer one. I met my partner on the net ten years ago,”

The internet expanded the world as well as gave an opportunity for people to find information about homosexuality and to find other gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders who felt isolated and were seeking community.

In 1997, the National Peoples’ Congress abolished the law penalising ‘hooliganism,’ a statute under which many gay men had been prosecuted. China's Ministry of Health removed homosexuality from its diagnostic list of mental illnesses in 2001.

Zhou came out to his friends in 1998 and in the media later. Writing with his real name about being gay on Chinese websites for years, when many GLBT Chinese pseudonyms. He came out to a local newspaper about his gay identity in November 2003, after establishing the Shanghai Hotline for Sexual Minorities early that year. Since then, he has been from time to time mentioned in Chinese newspapers, magazines and television programs.

In 2004, Zhou attended Yale Law School's China Law Center as a visiting scholar. From January to May 2004, he was a visiting scholar at the Yale Law School China Law Center with research emphasis on equality and anti-discrimination related to sexuality and HIV/AIDS. In 2006, he taught China's first graduate class on homosexuality and health and an undergraduate class in homosexuality at Fudan University in Shanghai.

As a lawyer, he fights for the GLBT community and people living with HIV/AIDS. He successfully lobbied the Ministry of Health not to bar HIV-positive people from government jobs. He has also founded and currently serves as Executive Director of Yu Dan, the first Chinese organization promoting the recognition and acceptance of gay rights throughout mainland China.

In 2006, the university held a conference on law and social policy related to homosexuality which attracted some of the country’s top legal minds. “If you want to change legislation,” Zhou says, “you have to educate straight lawyers and scholars, and not just in matters of fact but emotionally and sentimentally.”

Just one generation removed from the persecution of gays under the People's Republic of China, Chinese gays encounter different obstacles than their American counterparts. Many Chinese believe that homosexuality exists only in the western world. The absence of legal protection and the threat of social isolation keep most Chinese GLBT individuals in the closet.

In China, he said,"homophobia has been replaced with what he describes as ‘homo-blindness,’ for despite the gradual growth of freedoms, a few additions to literary and cinema canons, some acceptance of public demonstrations of affection or gay fashion on the streets and the growth in the number of gay bars and saunas in the major cities, most gay life remains invisible in most of China. Very few gay men have had the courage to come out in public, and even fewer publicly recognized figures. "

Zho has been encouraged by changes in the rest of the world, and thinks the acceptance by Vancouver’s Chinese community of Canada’s same-sex marriage law is a pointer to the way Chinese pragmatism is capable of grappling with change. Another is also China’s decision to authorize and fund local group to carry out HIV education and prevention outreach programs. He is cautiously optimistic about the future, but has no illusions about the length of time that it will take to bring in legislation against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.


In 2005, Zhou was featured in Tetu, a French gay and lesbian magazine. He was also profiled in TIME Magazine as China's gay pioneer. In 2006, Equality Forum named Zhou the recipient of the "11th Annual International Role Model Award."

“All this must be approached one step at a time, and it’s not just a river across which you’re feeling the stones, but a whole ocean.”