My adult life and career began in a very unconventional way.
I moved to Beijing at the beginning of 2005. My girlfriend and I had just graduated from American University in Washington, DC, during which we had spent a semester abroad at BeiDa (Beijing Daxue/Peking University). It was the beginning of the second Bush administration and I had been working at the FAA for a few months after my graduation while my partner finished her last semester. It was clear our dreams to work for the State Department were no longer viable – same-sex relationships were not yet recognized in government agencies and we would surely be posted separately (likely in the Middle East).
At some point I suggested we move to Beijing (because what better way to escape American homophobia then to move to a communist country? We were young!) and went about finding us jobs that would sponsor our visas. I had interned at that’s Beijing (now The Beijinger) during my semester abroad so I was able to arrange for them to hire me in a sales position. Randomly I found a lawyer looking for a native English-speaking assistant for international cases who ended up hiring my partner. And off we went, with very little savings and a few years of college Chinese under our belts.
The aforementioned jobs didn’t work out (that’s another story!). Just before we managed to get out of these positions, we had started a sort of support group with two straight friends and a gay friend to try to make more friends. From our arrival to this point just a few months later, we had struggled to find our community. Though our friend was the DJ at the legendary gay club Destination where we became fixtures, standing out as some of the only girls who attended early on, we found it hard to connect with expat and local queers. At that time, the scene was quite underground and you needed to know the right people to get connected. In addition, the community was very split along gender lines and we wanted a space where we could meet gays, lesbians and trans people alike. Our Chinese wasn’t great and just going to the bars and clubs wasn’t helping us make friends. So, we printed up a little flyer and held our first meeting at a café run by a Tunisian man (the original Bookworm).
That first meeting sparked the beginning of what would become BGLAD – Beijing Gay, Lesbian and Allies Discussion, a nebulous organization existing both on- and off-line. The name was democratically selected by voting from a list of suggestions by our members, including BOA, originally standing for Beijing’s Others and Allies, which was our suggestion and later became the name of our event and marketing business. This being 2005, a Yahoo! Group was started and became our primary online discussion and recruitment space, growing to 800 active members ranging from activists and academics to government officials and average citizens at its peak in 2007. We counted a number of US Marines (during the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell years), Diplomats and even Chinese government employees among our membership. Until we left Beijing, regular in-person meetings were held in restaurants and cafes, usually with 10-15 in attendance. At these meetings, we would often choose a topic for discussion in advance, addressing issues concerning the broader international community as well as local issues. The discussion would continue online, sometimes becoming heated international debates as our members moved around the world.
BGLAD created a space for expats and locals belonging to the LGBTQ+ community to connect in many ways. It didn’t take us long to realize, for the safety of our members, that communication in English was preferrable. The first few times we had posts and flyers in Chinese, we attracted unwanted government attention. Presenting ourselves as a group of mostly expats who happened to be LGBTQ+ to the outside world kept our local members and associated organizations protected. We learned firsthand that our American passports, white faces and English language held enormous privilege in China. BGLAD could get away with things local organizations could not, such as fundraising. So, we began to leverage our growing community to help raise money and awareness about local organizations, who in our mind were doing the critical grassroots work. Though this work was risky, we were generally left alone. However, our 2006 and 2007 World AIDS Day events to raise funds for Chinese HIV org, Aizhixing, were clouded by the disappearance of its founder, Wan Yanhai, just prior to each event. Our host venue received a scary call from the government about the “fundraiser” which wasn’t allowed without permission. We learned quickly to speak about our events as commercial, even when they were clearly to collect donations for nonprofits. Making money for personal gain was just fine but funding a cause was problematic.
The success of our friend-making scam turned discussion group encouraged us to explore producing nightlife events for queer people, the first of which was a lesbian night at Destination. We threw those first few lesbian events for free, later moving what had become a successful mixed event to a friend’s straight club (Top, later renamed Kokomo) and renaming it Queer Night. For most of its existence, this was a bi-monthly event featuring theme nights and queer DJs from around the world, eventually moving to Alfa. Queer Night was where BGLAD and BOA officially overlapped, but all of BOA’s events were heavily attended by the queer members of BGLAD. The success of these events encouraged BOA to book more queer international musicians and manage tours in China.
BGLAD and BOA grew to play a central role in Beijing’s queer community, providing safe spaces for exploring gender and sexuality but most importantly for making connections with queer and queer-friendly people. What started as a way to make friends succeeded in doing much more, but we made life-long friends in spades. There are some great stories that came out of this group, which I hope to tell here in the future. Yahoo! Groups is now defunct and much of the press surrounding BGLAD and BOA is no longer available online. If you or someone you know has any ephemera, digital or otherwise, related to BGLAD or BOA, drop me a line! I would love to add to my archive.