Life and Leisure

Sexuality is just a part of who we are

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-11-09 08:00

"Love your children. Be patient with them. Sexuality is but a small part of who they are," says Tom Neill.

The largely Chinese audience listens with rapt attention to the man standing on the podium.

The Canadian father, 58, who teaches at Jilin University in Northeast China's Jilin province, admits he was taken aback when his son came out to him, in 2003, in China, yet happy that he was honest with him.

He was speaking at the third conference of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in Beijing recently, which saw more than 100 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals, their families and supporters, get together.

In recent years, China's LGBT community has been enhancing communication with their foreign counterparts, to learn from others' experience. One such example is the ties that Beijing LGBT Center has been forging with the world's biggest homosexual NGO, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center.

The participants at the conference discussed the pressing issues facing the nation's LGBT community - coming out to their parents, fake marriages between gays and lesbians to satisfy conservative families, and gay men marrying heterosexual women.

Wu Youjian, 63, founder of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in China, says the conference aimed to offer a platform for an exchange of views on LGBT issues. Wu was the first mother to openly support her gay son on Chinese television, in 2005. Her blog has emerged as the main source for parents struggling to come to terms with their children's homosexuality.

While the first two conferences were both held in Guangzhou, in 2009, the third was moved to Beijing, to help raise awareness of gay issues in the capital and in nearby cities of Northeast China.

"Also, this is the first time we invited foreigners," Wu says. An American mom came all the way from the US to support her son, who is studying in China.

Besides mainland couples, one partner of the first gay couple in Taiwan to get engaged, in 2006, also attended the conference.

Professor Caitlin Ryan, an American social worker who has worked on LGBT health and mental health since the 1970s, shared her research findings on how family reactions to LGBT youngsters affected their physical and mental health.

She said gay youngsters whose families do not accept their sexual preferences are more likely to attempt suicide, experience severe depression and use drugs than those whose parents accept them.

"Many Chinese-American subjects told me it is very shameful to come out to their parents. Chinese do not accept homosexuality because they want to continue the ancestral line. But in some foreign countries, adoption can solve this problem," she says.

Wu Youjian says, "Many Chinese parents (who came to the conference) had many questions. For example, a father was hoping to find a way to 'convert' his only son to heterosexuality. I believe the views of a foreign expert can really help such people."

The conference provided an opportunity for parents from different countries and regions to share their ideas on how to accept their children's sexual preferences.

Neill says the conference opened his eyes to the LGBT situation in China and threw up the commonalities in the dilemmas that families with homosexual children grapple with everywhere. "I'm sure parents from all countries find the 'learning curve' to adjust to the idea that our children are gay a personal process," he says.

China Daily