"Hollywood's (Gay) China Problem" Transcript

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(This transcript was created from the original script uploaded as closed captioning. Differences where James skipped overdiverged from the script are highlighted.)

Doing videos about gay representation in movies and TV on a regular basis for about a year and half now, I’ve gotten a lot — and I mean a lot — of comments from people trying to explain to me that the reason movie studios dont put gay characters in their movies isn’t because of American or corporate homopboia^{[sic: homophobia]}. It’s not because they want to appease right wing Christians. And it’s certainly not because they know they can get the gay money without creating any real gay representation. No.

The real reason they don’t give us gay action stars and super heroes is... “China.”

They usually refer to it as the country as a whole, too. As if every single person in China signed a letter to Hollywood demanding no gay characters in movies or TV. Instead of the reality of it being the Chinese government.

You can check the comments of any video I make that mentions Disney and you’ll find hundreds of these people explaining this to me. That I simply don’t understand the politics of Hollywood or the business relationship the industry has with China.

Well, I figured that since I actually have a degree in film and another degree in business, maybe I could actually explain this whole situation in a bit more detail than you’d usually get in a YouTube comment. Because it is true that the Chinese government has very anti-LGBT policies across the nation, and they’re VERY not fond of any LGBT representation in media… and both sets of policies are actually becoming more draconian with each passing day.

But what you might be shocked to find out is that Hollywood is not required to bend to the will of the Chinese government in order to make a profit. In fact, the Chinese government is making it less and less advantageous for studios to be their whipping boys. And we’re gonna get to that...

But first, let’s have a look at China’s odd, winding journey into the film industry.

So the first thing we need to talk about is the box office, and how much money movies make while in theatres. When studios report the projected box office earnings of any given movie, usually on Sunday but sometimes on Monday if it’s a long weekend, you’ll see the gross amount the movie made by selling tickets at movie theatres. That number will be broken up into two different sections. Domestic, which includes the United States, Canada. And International, which is everyone else.

And then they’ll be combined for a Global gross. Gross being the most important word here. In business terms, “gross income” is how much is made before deductions, “net income” is how much is made after deductions.

Which, for most people, that means the Net is how much money you get paid after the government has taken its taxes, and you’ve paid your health insurance, and all that. The gross is always a much nicer number than that.

Now when it comes to movies, studios never EVER report the net income because that represents how much profit is made by the movie. And if they report the profit made publicly that leaves them open to things like paying higher taxes. A lot of actors also have points on a movie, which means they get a certain percentage of the profits. Jack Nicholson notoriously got points on 1989’s Batman, and publicly admitted to never having to work again if he didn't want to.

But that’s not the only reason movie studios don’t report net revenue from ticket sales. The other, arguably more important reason, is they don’t get to keep all of the ticket sales from the get go. Movie theatres take a giant chunk of that. It tends to be different per studio and per movie, with Disney demanding the highest percentage of the box office returns, but it works out to be around 50/50.

Studios will get a higher percentage when a movie first comes out, and the percentage will shift into the theatre’s favor the longer a movie sticks around in cinemas. So sometimes it’s not exactly 50/50, but that’s the average.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that marketing and distribution costs aren’t calcuated^{[sic: calculated]} into that figure. Some movies have advertising campaigns that cost as much as their production budget so they’d need to make 4 times their budget before they make a profit.

It can get so complicated that it’s no wonder there’s an actual industry term called “Hollywood Accounting.” Yeah it’s mostly to hide money from the government and people with profit participation, but it’s also because you need to be a special kind of accountant to wrap your head around this whole thing.

And that’s just the studio side of it. The theatre side can get complicated too. That’s why you’ll see a lot of theatre chains have special popcorn buckets and soda cups available for big new movies on opening weekend. And charge a surcharge for them. They want you to buy these things, which they put a giant mark up on, so that they can bring in more revenue at a time when any given movie’s ticket sales will be mostly going to the studio.

Some theatres, before the days of Covid anyway, would also charge extra for assigned seating. That extra money would go exclusively to the theatre, since they’re charging a convenience fee on top of the initial fee to see the movie.

And this has been the way that Hollywood worked for a reallyvery long time. Ever since the Supreme Court decided that movie studios were no longer allowed to own theatre chains. Which was a big thing back in the day. Studios would own whole theatre chains and only show their movies there. So if you lived in a small town and your local theatre was owned by Paramount but a Fox movie was coming out that you really wanted to see, well, you were shit out of luck. Better hope it ends up in a second run theatre in a few years.

But then, in the case of The United States v. Paramount Pictures in 1948, it was decided that studios could no longer own theatres and so this new 50/50 split was eventually worked out.

This will be changing soon though since the Justice Department under the former Trump administration decided to toss out the Paramount Decrees so in August of 2022 Disney will be allowed to buy as many theatres in the United States as it wants. But, for now, that 50/50 is still in effect.

And it’s all across the globe. Europe, South America, Australia, and most of Asia works under the same principle. But then a fly landed in the ointment and started messing things up. A gigantic fly called China.

Filmmaking had taken off in China in the 1930s when Chinese filmmakers, sick and tired of Hollywood’s racist and offensive depictions of the Chinese people, began making their own feature films. But After the communist revolution of 1949, domestic films that were already released and a selection of foreign films were banned. Despite this though, movie attendance increased sharply. But then during the Cultural Revolution, the film industry was severely restricted, coming almost to a standstill from 1967 to 1972.

But in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, the film industry flourished as a medium of popular entertainment. Production rose steadily, from 19 movies in 1977 to 125 movies in 1986.

And the numbers of films just kept rising from there, though a pretty big chunk of the movies released were actually propaganda films financed by the Chinese government.

Following the international commercial success of films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, Hollywood started to take notice of the growing power of the Chinese market. And so they began a campaign to have more and more Hollywood movies released in China, which the government at the time was more than willing to let happen because it helped the nation feel further legitimized by the international community.

China wasn’t a communist backwater nation like North Korea. It was a growing economy with happy citizens who wanted to enjoy films from all over the world. How happy their citizens really were is up for debate but that’s the narrative the Chinese government propagated.

At first Hollywood was actually able to negotiate pretty good terms with the country. Something closer to a 40/60 split, with Hollywood studios getting 60% of the box office returns. But as the Chinese box office began growing year over year, the Chinese government began to renege on those agreements, forcing studios back to the negotiating table, sometimes twice a year. Whereas studios would sign decade long contracts with American theatre chains.

All of this lead to today, where China reportedly keeps a whopping 75-80% of the box office returns. With studios getting as little as 20%. There’s no public financial data for representing this because, again, studios like to keep how much their movies make, and where that money comes from, as secret as possible. Lest they be forced to pay their share of taxes.

But people in the industry who work on the financial side of things seem to have loose lips, and they’re more than happy to talk about how China is screwing over an American industry.

Now 20% is better than nothing, right? Avengers Endgame made $629 million in China, so 20% of that is about 126 million. Nothing to sneeze at. It’s not the 315 million Disney would have gotten under a 50/50 agreement but it’s notwasn't nothing!

But Endgame may have made even more money in China. See, Chinese theatre chains have been known to be a bit sneaky. Tourists visiting the country and going to see movies while there have seen ticket sellers take your money for a Hollywood movie, ring up the sale as a ticket for a Chinese propaganda film, and then wave you on through.

These reports are all independent, and there’s no financial data reporting this, again, so take it with a grain of salt, but it seems to be reported... a lot.

In fact a lot of people who work in the industry are pretty convinced that China fudges their numbers all the time. Avengers Endgame had been the biggest opening weekend of all time at a domestic box office, with 357 million dollars in the US, and Canada. A record most industry professionals were convinced wouldn’t be broken for years.

But then, earlier this year, Detective Chinatown 3 opened in China to a reported opening weekend of 400 million dollars. These numbers weren’t released by any studio or production company, of course, they were announced by CGTN, China’s Global Television Network. Basically their English Language propaganda channel.

The news wasn’t even announced on local Chinese news, only the English Language variant. Making it pretty clear that it was a dick wagging move, allowing the Chinese film industry — and by proxy the Chinese government — to flex how well they were doing economically, while most of the rest of the world’s cinemas still stood empty because of COVID-19. And since there’s no way for Hollywood studios to confirm these numbers, they’re just forced to take the Chinese government at its word.

So not only is Hollywood getting a fraction of the money from China that they do from the rest of the world, now China is basically making the argument that while Hollywood apparently needs China, China doesn’t need Hollywood.

In recent years Chinese audiences have also shown a reticence to Hollywood movies, choosing Chinese-produced films instead. Leading to more and more domestic Chinese films being produced, leading to fewer theatre screens being available for Hollywood movies, leading to even less money being made in China by American studios. Suddenly that 20% number isn’t sounding all that great.

The Chinese Government, via their censorship bureau, is also making it increasingly difficult for Hollywood movies to get released in China at all. In November of 2016, China passed a law banning content deemed harmful to the “dignity, honor, and interests” of the People's Republic and encouraging the promotion of “socialist core values," approved by the National People's Congress Standing Committee.

So basically any movie that portrays China in anything but the most glowing light will be banned immediately.

Studios began trying to get around this by working with Chinese Production companies to ensure that a movie would meet the specifications set out by the government. Such as Alibaba Pictures, Wanda Media, or Legendary Entertainment… a company that was originally an American company but after years of investment from a Chinese production house, Wanda Media, the American stakeholders lost control of the company to the Chinese investors. Once Wanda Media reached 50% plus one of the voting shares, they took control of the company and fired the American executives.

But even when studios try to work with Chinese producers, that doesn’t guarantee success. It just leads to movies doing well in China, with possibly inflated returns thanks to those wonky ticket sellers I mentioned earlier. But then... doing worse in the rest of the world because everyone else sees the movie j**king off to the Chinese government and is a bit… turned off.

This has been happening especially obviously with the Fast and the Furious franchise. 2017’s Fate of the Furious, a Chinese co-production, made 226 million dollars in North America, but 392 million in China.

Another was Alita Battle Angel, with 85 million in the US, and 133 million China. Transformers: The Last Knight made 130 million in the US, and 228 million in China. This is becoming more and more common.

Meanwhile Hollywood, especially Disney, who got spooked at how poorly the new Star Wars movies did in China (which honestly was likely because the original trilogy was never released in the Middle Kingdom), have been trying to make movies specifically for China. The live action Mulan and Marvel’s Shang Chi come to mind. But Mulan only made 40 million dollars in China, and Shang Chi, to this day, still hasn’t been granted a release. While not officially stated by the Chinese government, it’s likely because the movie’s star, Simu Liu, publicly spoke about how his family fled China for Canada. And China doesn’t want that kind of back talk.

That’s also why, assumedly, Marvel hasn’t balked at the gay relationship in Marvel’s Eternals. They’re not cutting it out for countries in the middle east who demanded it, for the most part. Those countries have since banned the movie. They didn’t cut it out when Russia demanded it. They just ended up giving it an 18+ rating.

So why has Marvel grown such a back bone all of the sudden? Well. Because The Eternals never even had a chance to be released in China because director, Chloe Zhao, who was born in Beijing, left China to make movies in Hollywood. An act China will not soon forget, and so her movies are now verboten there. So why worry about appeasing the Chinese government’s backward policies on LGBT representation, when you know it’s never going to get released there anyway?

And even if they did agree to release it, who’s to say that they wouldn’t “sell” you a ticket for Eternals but count the sale for a domestic propaganda movie like The Battle at Lake Chanjin, a war movie released in China in September of this year. About Chinese soldiers overcoming the odds and defeating American troops in Korea. It’s apparently grossed 858 million dollars so far. Just in China. During a pandemic. And is, as of now, the highest grossing movie globally of 2021. …Allegedly…

And maybe all of this is for the best. Maybe once China is out of the equation, Hollywood will lose its excuse for not creating more LGBT characters. But the funny thing is, if the Chinese people actually had a say in it… we’d probably have more gay characters in movies than we already do.

One of the things I notice a lot when this topic comes up in comment sections (and really, I can’t afford a therapist so at the very least I need to stop going into the comment sections), is that people seem to think that Chinese people are inherently homophobic. That the very sight of two men kissing makes them vomit in rage!

Well! Have I got news for you, dear viewer. Have you ever heard of BL? It’s the less creepy way of saying “Boys’ Love”, which is a genre of movie, tv show, comic, and novel that’s taking parts of the world by storm. And one of those parts is China. The government wouldn’t be instituting “no gays in movies” laws if they weren’t seeing gays popping up in a whole lot of other places.

So what is BL? Well, I’ll differ to an expert. According to Manga Planet:

[Text scrolling on screen]:

“Originating in Japan, Boys’ Love or BL is a literary genre or media depicting the romance between male characters. Commonly referred to as “yaoi" by overseas fans, from books to fan fiction, manga, anime, and video games. BL stories tend to be written mostly by women.

Boys’ Love began as fan works by women fans. Later in the 1980s, yaoi manga expanded from fan groups to mainstream media via anime or OVA (original video animation) adaptations. Since then, Japan has produced yaoi media through various platforms.”

The internet propelled the global growth and popularity of Boys’ Love, as non-Japanese fans were finally able to read translated BL manga. And one of the largest markets for it... was China.

Subtle gay dramas and love stories, adapted from boys’ love webnovels, have become a very lucrative business in China. But even with the censorship laws, the appetite for queer content is just too big to ignore. A demand that comes mostly not from gay men, mind you, but straight women.

At least eight shows adapted from novels with boys’ love romances premiered in 2021 across China’s major streaming platforms. The stories range from historical-fantasy action flicks to modern mystery thrillers and teenage melodramas.

Making and showing BL dramas in China is a tightly wound tight rope act between the profit-driven entertainment industry and the homophobic censorship of the Xi Jinping regime. In 2016, the hit teen series Addicted (also known as Heroin), a drama with explicit gay scenes premiered. It grabbed the attention of the Chinese government’s censors when it first aired in January of that year.

The first episode garnered 10 million views in the span of 24 hours setting the record of the highest number of views on the first day in China's streaming television history. In less than a month, the series reached over 100 million views. It became a massive trending topic on Weibo, basically Chinese Twitter, with the show’s hashtag being viewed 849 million times.

But then on February 23, all episodes of the show were removed from all Chinese video streaming websites three episodes before the season finale. This was by the order of the NRTA, or National Radio and Television Administration, due to "the gay and explicit content".

The show is now impossible to view or access via mainland China’s internet. The last three episodes of the first season were uploaded to YouTube a few days later to make them accessible to viewers outside of mainland China. The censorship of the series sparked rampant criticism. Online discussions on Weibo with the hashtag "removal of Addiction" received more than 110 million views within a day of its cancellation. The Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine even published articles about it.

But despite the Chinese government’s best efforts to erase the show from existence, it’s gained a huge following outside of The Middle Kingdom, and a second season is coming soon, but production and distribution will be done in Taiwan. A country where the BL genre has become an industry all by itself. But I think that’s a whole different video.

In 2018, the sci-fi drama Guardian went offline two months after its release, even though the original gay romance storyline was re-written as a friendship to try to appeal to the censors. They didn’t care about the rewrite though because Chinese viewers were shipping the characters whether they were written gay or not. Before it was banned, Guardian had already pulled in over a billion views.

The potential for some serious money encouraged companies to continue with the BL genre in China, but with a more understated tone that could possibly bypass the government censors. The 2019 fantasy series The Untamed, featuring an unlikely bond between a man with magic powers and a stoic prince, started an online craze over the pair’s implicit romance. But the show’s promotion focused on its portrayal of Chinese traditional culture — a push consistent with Chinese Communist Party propaganda.

The show was queer baity, but the novel on which it was based certainly was not. That featured a very explicit love story between the two main characters, but was self-censored when adapted to meet the censorship guidelines of the Xi Jinping government. But it didn’t matter. Like so much queer baiting before, people saw through the weak venere^{[sic: veneer]} of heterosexuality. They took the bait, so to speak.

The series has accumulated a total of 9.5 billion views in China, as of this summer, and had also received an international release via Netflix. It was described as a global phenomenon, taking off like no BL series before it. Making its way all around Asia and, with the Netflix deal, all across Europe and North America as well. TenCent, the Chinese streaming platform it originated on saw 2.6 million new subscribers to the service when it was released. And WeTV, an app that lets you watch BL content anywhere in the world, saw growth of 250% while the show was airing.

In January 2020, the cast members planned to embark on a multi-city worldwide fan meetings tour. Cities included Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Macau, Kuala Lumpur, Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, but it was cancelled due to COVID19.

Even the Chinese government has endorsed it. The overseas popularity of these romantic sword-wielding heroes is often highlighted in Chinese media coverage, focusing in on the massive overseas streaming numbers and its ability to build a growing appreciation for the charm of Chinese culture.

Meanwhile, production houses and streaming sites have snapped up the adaptation rights of other popular BL novels. Priest, author of Guardian and Word of Honor, will see at least four more of her novels adapted into live action series or movies.

Knowing viewers jokingly call the homoerotic relationships in these dramas “socialist brotherhoods,” a reference to how on-screen homosexuality has to be disguised as a bromances in line with official state ideology. I’m surprised that moniker hasn’t been taken up by some of my subscribers, to be honest.

But the rise of BL in China, sadly, doesn’t mean the Chinese government is going to soften its stance on LGBTQ rights anytime soon. For all its appeal to homoeroticism, the BL business in China survives by avoiding any discussion of these rights while focusing on the physical attractiveness of its male characters.

Ge Liang, a researcher at King’s College London said:

[Quote scrolling on screen]:

“By hinting at male homoerotic love, the directors and actors are appropriating the interest of… gay life, trying to turn these into cash and traffic. But instead of speaking up for the LGBTQ community, they stay in line with China’s official policy on gay people: ‘keep them silent and keep them sinful.’”

Most gay people in China still face prevalent discrimination in households, schools, and workplaces. But these struggles are invisible to the public eye, as state censors ban almost all representation of obvious homosexuality in mass media. In 2018, a writer was sentenced to more than 10 years in jail for writing and selling gay erotica.

However, some members of the gay community see BL dramas as a precious platform for queer stories. Where Chinese state media often portrays gay men as enemies to traditional values, and sources of social instability, subtle BL dramas have perhaps become the best form of queer representation in China’s state-sanctioned pop culture.

But in March of this year, just as new series Word of Honor earned an impressive score of 8.6 out of 10 on review site Douban, an op-ed published via the state-run News Agency warned against the “negative influence” of BL on impressionable teenagers. Many feared this signalled an imminent crackdown on the genre.

And then… The Chinese Government officially banned any representation of men in media that did not fit perfectly within the ideal of masculinity. No more bromances. No more coding. No more lingering looks or soft touches. President Xi Jinping has called for a ‘national rejuvenation,’ with tighter Communist Party control of business, education, culture, and religion. Companies and the public are under increasing pressure to align with its vision for a more powerful China.

Which… if you look to your history books, when a country starts locking down the media and attacking a very specific minority group as being the propagator of all the nation’s ails, as the Chinese government is now doing with what they describe as ‘sissy men’... That usually means the government is on the ropes, whether we see it publicly or not.

Someone might be asking: well why is the Chinese government so obsessed with clamping down on removing gay representation — from their media? Why does any political body specifically target a removal of queerness from media? It seems to be kind of a weird and arbitrary thing to hate on, right? If you wanted a strong natoional^{[sic: national]} sense of unity, why would you specifically target one group of people — specifically a group of people that cannot be culturally erased because more gay babies are born every day.

You could argue that the reason is because a totalitarian state is interested in population expansion. Queer people can be seen as a population limmiter^{[sic: limiter]}. Especially if a nation is engaged in expansionism or involved in regular military conflicts.

But when it comes to China… they have population control mandates. As well as the fact that The People’s Army isn’t publicly engaged in any hot conflicts right now. As well as it would simply just be easier to have mandatory in-vetro^{[sic: in-vitro]} pregnancies for lesbian women, and mandatory sperm domantions^{[sic: donations]} from gay men.

Alternatively, you could argue that many totalitarian regimes tend to lean on scripture and religious doctrine as a means of controlling a population. There’s no better way to get someone to live their life a certain way, than by telling them they're going to go to hell if they don't. For all eternity. Or better yet, dangle afterlife rewards programs in front of them. As it so happens, gay people aren’t really compatible with MOST modern religions in the world…

But China is a Maoist Communist state, and as a result has banned most religious practices. Dictatorial theocracies are kind of hit and miss control method though, because what inevitably happens is one group of extremists pop up and declare that another group isn’t being extremist enough. And splintering is what regimes like the one in China tend to avoid.

Keep in mind the methodology of control in a dictatorship is to unify public, military, and commercial thought into a single national direction that all feeds into consolidating the power of the dictator.

The reason why Soviet communism banned religion was because they recognized that not only did religious freedom afford opportunities for diverting power away from the state, but also created a precedent for there to be power above the state. And if a religious figure can convince you that God wants you to defy the state, then the state is in trouble.

You only really see theocracies in smaller countries, both in terms of population and sheer geographical size. In order to assure that the people associate the religious order with state mandate, you usually need a strong martial presence. Which is much harder to organize in a significantly large nation.

This should illustrate just how delicate dictatorships actually are. In order for the state to function, everybody in the nation needs to be doing what the state wants them to do. Given that the state is meant to function as a well-oiled machine, there isn’t a whole lot of slack for, say, a workers strike.

Take this however you want, but... if your economy tells you that it can’t possibly survive a workers strike, you just might be in a totalitarian regime. [Raises eyebrows at the camera.]

In most cases, having a nation that is divided in its thinking means that the state has a diminished capacity to predict and plan the movements of its own people. It’s also just more efficient. If you’re going to the gas station for a slushie run, it’s easiest if your 10 friends all like blue. But if your friends all want something different, you’re going to need go in with a list. Or, you could just tell everyone that blue is the only colour available. If it’s the only colour they think is available, of course it’s going to be their choice.

Complete unity is the objective – it’s difficult to control a billion people. But it is much easier to control one culture shared by a billion people. The stronger the cohesion to a singular culture, the easier it is for the state to plan and predict social, economic, and cultural movements.

So how does all of this relate to gay censorship? Consider how much of our society is built around different milestones of life. When you graduate from high school. When you get married. When you buy a house. When you start having children. A lot of us don’t even realize these are milestones, and we don’t even realize they’re optional.

All those articles about how millennials are destroying the housing industry because we’re not buying houses, the car industry because we live in cities and take public transit, the... napkin industry because we use paper towels, or the diamond industry because we’re not getting married as young as we used to. Those are based on these expectations about how people are ‘supposed’ to act. Not feeding into these industries when we were expected to is a huge disruption in how these respective industries project what their profits will be.

Now take China, and instead of picturing many different industries, see China itself as an industry. In order for China to function, the state needs as many people in the nation as humanly possible to conform to a very specific collection of roles and identities. The more people deviate from that singular identity, the less control the Chinese government has to properly manage those people. And that’s why queer people, by nature, challenge the state’s ability to expect and predict the behaviour of it’s people.

In our modern society, queer people have existed on the fringe of society for thousands of years. As a quasi-legal, sometimes entirely illegal class of people, we mostly don’t feel a need to conform to social standards and milestones. There’s no reason to get married in your early 20s because getting married at all wasn’t an option.

Queer people, thus, don’t need to buy a house in the suburbs to have children. We don’t need cars if we live in the inner city. Domestic appliances? We’re cooking for one. We didn’t get engaged, so we don’t — or we didn’t used to — buy rings.

Take a moment to consider how disastrous this is to a society that is constructed around buying things at certain times in your life, under certain expectations of how you ought to live. And not only that, but each queer person can have a vastly different set of expiriences^{[sic: experiences]} from the next and therefor gravitate to different lifestyles.

Queer people — within ourselves — lack unity as a subdemographic. For a governing body which requires a homogenous population in order to consolidate power, we are a bit of a nightmare. And it’s for this reason, neither baby making nor religious bigotry, that China in particular clamps down on queer people. Increasing the available ‘accepted’ identities in a given society adds an incredible layer of complexity when it comes to managing how this population ought to behave.

One unified culture means that this one culture only needs one media stream to project messages toward. A state-sanctioned heterosexual romantic comedy which contains pro-state messaging will be received and absorbed by straight people — because they want a relationship like the main characters have, they model their life after the main characters. (This is in incredibly simplified terms but you would be amazed at how easily media can influence your actions, so this isn’t much of a stretch.)

If queerness is an acceptable identity, then queer people are not going to identify with that messaging in that heterosexual rom com. Then the state needs to make a separate media stream to accommodate queer people — a media stream that will not be absorbed by straight audiences. In a pragmatic sense, the state is spending twice as much money to project the same pro-state messaging to two different audiences. How old should gay people be when they get married versus how old should straight people be? Synchronising both of these messages and assuring that they both feed into state power consolidation is quite a task. And far less efficient than projecting one message to one homogeneous social group.

Limiting the available identities that a citizen can occupy is totalitarian regime 1-0-1. That dates back to the earliest empires. Rome, for instance, owed its success in no small part to a very rigid, very narrow, range of gender identities, family roles, and a very limited class mobility. As the state could trust that a Roman man in Italia would hold the same social values as a Roman man in Germania, they could plan and predict how large sections of provinces would respond to legislation and taxation.

As it so happened, same-sex intimacy wasn’t strictly incompatible with Roman family structures. But Rome also entirely demanded slave labour to function so maybe this isn’t a fantastic social model to look up to.

And it’s not like gay persecution is limited to “left wing” totalitarianism. China is undergoing a similar process to America in the 1950s. A very pro-free market, pro-white, pro-straight process that came to be known as McCarthyism, named after senator Joseph McCarthy. The legacy of McCarthyist crackdowns was an intended plot to root out any communist or socialist ideology from America, under the guise of rooting out Soviet spies.

Which… was not all that successful. They caught a lot of people who fed information to spies… but they didn’t actually catch a lot of those actual soviet sleeper agents.

In reality, McCarthyism was an effort to distinguish the cultural identity of ‘propper^{[sic: ‘proper]} American’ people. This is when you got all those info-videos about how to live your life, which got weirdly specific. How to hold a family meeting. How to be a popular teenager. How to go to the store. To say nothing of sexual education manuals directed to young women.

These government-sanctioned videos and other media like short stories and magazines were very interested in telling people how to function. What to like. What to buy. What to make for dinner. And how to do it all. Anyone who behaved like the people in the videos was a proper American. Those who did not were possibly ‘communists’ and should be reported to the authorities for investigation.

At the time, America was convinced that their capitalist way of life was under constant threat, and were informed by the government that even one ‘non American’ living in your neighbourhood could be a threat to national social cohesion.

But McCarthyism didn’t stick around in America, simply because singular power consolidation was conflicting with American party-politics, freedom of religion, and the free market which began to capitalize on artistic formats which McCarthy considered to be non-American. Black music and art, gay men in hollywood, women in publishing. There were simply too many channels of media for the state to regulate and countermand.

The Chinese government’s saving grace, thus far, had been the proverbial iron curtain¹ that separated global media from Chinese audiences. The state can control what media the public receives, the state can dictate what a ‘proper citizen’ is.

This is why Hong Kong was such a problem for--
[Screen cuts to color bars, tone plays, subtitles read "($ubt!tle$ 8locked)".]

So it’s not like China is deliberately opening their captured^{[sic: captive]} audience to the rest of the world. It’s just getting easier for the media to move fluidly across borders without a government’s consent. Chinese creators who travel abroad may return to China with fresh perspectives and want to include facets of life beyond what is strictly sanctioned by the Chinese government.

And as the government cracks down on representation, they find more clever ways to code it into the media, while still checking off all the other boxes for praising the state. Like The Untamed.

But for some reason, even coding queerness is too much for China now though. As I’ve said, Chinese laws about representation, specifically in line with gender roles and expressions of masculinity, have strange implications.

Right now, actors and creators from South Korea, Japan, Australia, and even China are flocking to Taiwan and Thailand, which right now stand at the dual seats of a media empire for producing BL content. Comics, novels, movies, television shows. There is so much BL media coming out of Taiwan and Thailand, that you need a website catalogue to track it all.

And there’s plenty coming from other Asian countries as well, but Taiwan and Thailand seem to be pumping out BL content faster than Disney pumps out Star Wars and Marvel combined.

China shares a lot of cultural identity and history with these countries too… broadly speaking. And given the massive amounts of cash that China hands out through its arts programs, you’d think that China itself would want to capitalize on BL the way Thailand and Taiwan have. The international outreach would be positive, and ultimately garnish a lot of goodwill from queer audiences, for softening their pespective^{[sic: perspective]} of China and Maoism. Not to mention the financial return.

So why is China not engaging? Because control over their own population is more beneficial to the legacy and stability of the state. A citizen may ask: “If it’s suddenly okay to be gay… what else is okay?”

And it may very well be that the people of China are starting to ask those kinds of questions. China’s new media laws — which also apply to forigen^{[sic: foreign]} media shown in China — crackdown on gender roles in a way that is both specific and very generalized.

For instance, a man cannot be depicted as effeminate in any way now. Which is always difficult to gauge because there’s a question of what kind of man are you talking about? Is this man sensitive enough to hug his children? Does he cry? Does he cook? We know that two men touching in any way is strictly off-limits. And given how successful China’s subtle approach to censoring gay content has been… this seems a bit heavy handed. Or… maybe it isn’t as successful as we believe.

I’ve met a few gay men from China, both online and in real life. And when it comes to the topic of queer acceptance in mainland China, I’ve been told it’s more or less an ambivilant^{[sic: ambivalent]} issue. No, it’s not strictly socially accepted, but homophobia is more about not wanting your own children to be gay — because of legacy — but no effort seems to be given to open bigotry toward gay people in general.

And bear in mind, this is… absolutely not an adequate sample size to gauge the overall attitude of queerness in mainland China. And is focused mostly on cultural attitudes in urban centres. And also limited by the individual perspectives of the people I’ve spoken to, and the kind of people that I am likely to encounter. So take this less as hard statistics and more of a glimpse into the possibility that we, in the rest of the world, may not have the clearest idea of what the Chinese people, themselves, are comfortable with.

To say nothing of the… throbbing statistics that demonstrate very clearly that the Chinese people are comfortable enough — with at least gay men — to fully support BL content... when it has been produced.

Because the new crackdowns on identity tell me that something very precarious is going on in China — and that the government is struggling to maintain social unity. They’re seeing splinters and groups which lean towards inclusive lifestyles. That they see the people becoming comfortable with fragmenting subcultures.

And so in a nation where the state controls all media in the hopes that they can use media to control the people, they are placing much tighter constraints about what messaging the media can depict. In other nations which influenced the population with propaganda, this was always a red flag... that the culture of the people was developing in a way that did not align with the state’s agenda.

And Hollywood is just another shred of evidence. As Chinese laws become tighter and tighter about what kinds of depictions of men can be screened in China, Hollywood is going to have fewer and fewer films that are going to be able to qualify. Not to mention, more competition with Chinese films, fewer screens in Chinese cinemas, and a smaller and smaller cut of the Chinese box office.

The rest of the so-called ‘modern world’ is pushing for more diversity. For a deconstruction of typical gender roles. So Chinese interests of the state are putting Hollywood in a very strange situation: conform entirely to Chinese demand for the chance that China will, first of all, screen your movie, and second of all, report accurate box office numbers. Or… Hollywood studios can simply make movies for (most of) the rest of the world.

I think that we, the queers of every damn country on this planet, should take pride in the fact that in a lot of cases in the last thousand years, the big focus of crumbling fascistic regimes was also queer people. We’re a bunch of homos living our lives, and yet we represent one of the single most pivotal disruptions to dictatorships.

Shouldn’t it be an awesome feeling that we have that kind of power to automatically disrupt authoritarian control? That our very existence runs so antithetical to a government controlling its people that they have to turn propaganda into a science to suppress us? They’d never admit that we have that kind of power but their actions say otherwise.

Every morning when you wake up and go about your queer life, you are inherently shaking the foundation on which dictatoriships^{[sic: dictatorships]} are built. Because they have shown that totalitarianism cannot exist when queer people exist alongside it.²

But unlike fascists and dictators, we don’t fall. No matter what the church, or politicians, or world leaders say… We remain.

When Rome fell, we were still there. When the church started losing influence, we were still there. When the fabled thousand-year-Reich collapsed, we were still there. And when this anti-queer Chinese government sees its last days, we will still be there.

We’ve always been here. We’re always going to be here. Remember that.