A Tweeted Invitation to a Same-Sex Wedding in China

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-24/a-tweeted-invitation-to-same-sex-wedding-in-china.html

Same-sex weddings are illegal in China, a fact known to Lu Zhong, 24, and Liu Wangqiang, 20, when they tweeted an invitation to theirs, via the Sina Weibo microblog, on Sept. 22.

The big day would be Oct. 2, the two young men announced, and anyone was welcome to attend. For the precise location, a prospective guest needed only contact the instant chat address included in the tweet. And for those still unclear about the parties to be married, the couple attached several affectionate engagement photos. In the days that followed, they received RSVPs and a few hundred dollars worth of donations to defray the costs associated with what they hoped would be a traditional ceremony.

In some sense, there’s not that much new here. China’s first public (and illegal) gay marriage, so named by the media, took place in 2010 in the southwestern metropolis of Chengdu and was given sympathetic coverage by Communist Party-owned news outlets at the time. Proposals to legalize gay marriage have been introduced (and ignored) at the People’s Political Consultative Conference, China’s mostly ceremonial rubber-stamp legislature, for almost a decade. Though there are no statistics on just how many gay marriages (public or private) have taken place, growing activism for the legalization of the unions attracts significant media and netizen attention.

One reason for the increased awareness is that China is opening up to the fact that it is home, by one expert’s calculation, to some 10 million marriages between gay men and straight women. A less common, but equally well-known analog is for a gay man and a lesbian to marry legally while remaining loyal to their same-sex partners. These sham marriages are closet-re-enforcing ruses pursued under social pressure to produce offspring, among other familial duties. They also have something that illegal gay marriages don’t: legal protections that range from the right of inheritance to the benefits of divorce law in the case of a marital breakdown.