China: A Little More Gay

Homosexuality as a mental illness, that is beyond ignorance.

this segment sucks..

There are gay people all over the world. Why should we care so much Shanghai's gay night clubs and bars?

saying it as a Homosexuality as a mental illness is way better than saying it as a choice where you can get other to become gay!!
this is just showing another side of china and how open and different this side can be ...
without Christianity and other religious influence classifying it as a mental illness this is how this country deal with the new and unrecognized

Believe me this have nothing to do with religion, average chinese people don't practice any religion, when you ask most of them are atheist, followed by buddhist and muslims just a little percentage are christian, very little.

But the way the people think about homosexuality as a mental illness is pure and completely communist bullshit influence.

What can you expect from a government who banned the religion and any kind of cultural expression because they believed that those activities distract the man away from his only purpose and moral duty towards the country, WORK AND ONLY WORK. They would even tell you what career they need you to study.

The idea of a gay couple in that time was more than inconceivable, in a religious community it would be a product of the devil, for the ignorant communist politics was just a mental illness.

Maybe homosexuality could be the answer to china's overpopulation problem. You think they would be a bit more celebratory concerning their gay populace.

As the person who was actually there and observed how people reacted to the questions, and also living in China for two years, I would have to agree with mundosanto about the communist bullshit of homosexuality as a mental illness.

BUT at the same time I agree with yanjason80 even more that it's much better to have this view then to think that it's a choice. If you noticed all the people who said they thought it was a mental illness they also said that they think we should accept this condition, therefore it's just what they were told, there is no underlying unacceptness that comes from the culture or the religion...and that's what I have observed in China for the last two years with so many things, not just homosexuality.

I am not sure why this segment is relevant or necessary either. It is unfortunate that China used to qualify homosexuality as a "mental illness" (and yanjason made a good point, that classification is actually more progressive than simply stating it is a choice as many Americans believe), but they do not anymore. As recent studies have finally confirmed (and as anyone who has been around a gay person could tell you), homosexuals brains are simply wired for the opposite gender.

However, I am bothered by the fact that current and other media outlets focus so much attention on gay issues when there are many more important things that effect us all. Why should we care that Shanghai is "more gay"? We shouldnt, not in the world we live in currently. As only 1-8% of the population is gay (according to various studies), their issues get a disproportionate amount of media attention, and this pod is a prime example.

mundosanto

whats all this riffraff about it being communist?
american psychologists are the ones who tried so hard to have it classified as a mental dissorder
last i checked we are capitalists
and you think communism is evil? at least they all have jobs over there our country and its "free enterprise" forces people to work for hours and hours at two jobs just to come home broke as hell
who cares if they dont have religion personally i think that is a marvolous thing when something as trivial and stupid as religion can just be tosssed out the window like the trash it is

from everything this segment says it sounds like the commies have it more figured out then we do

interesting story. i wouldve thought the scene was bigger so there it goes, the people are just starting to come out. they seem pretty tolerant in china unlike some other countries where gay people are still victims of violent crimes if they were discovered.

well we dont have the cleanest human rights record either. just because the government doesnt openly accuse and punish minorities doesnt mean that society doesnt take it in their own hands.

While it does seem that China has come pretty far in terms of accepting it's LGBTQ population, it looks like it still has a long way to go. Based on the reactions of the people in the pod, it appears that most Chinese think of homosexuals as immoral mentally ill people at worst and unfortunate victims in need of "tolerance" at best, which really isn't that far behind the United States.

china's GAY!!!

Did anyone watch Ted Koppel's piece on China? It gave me the impression that gay people were tolerated, even by the government, as long as they didn't do anything political.

Wow... I just realized that ive never seen a gay asian girl. Have u?

Nice pod - Current provides probably the best way to cut through the simplistic ideological propaganda regarding today's China [China bad, mmmkay?] by showing the on-the-ground effects of rapid industrialisation, urbanisation and so forth. Pods like this one go further by showing the social developments that inevitably accompany general development.

However - as the earlier responses clearly show - coverage like this can backfire in that it can appear almost as a 'freak show'. With the millions upon millions of LGB people in China [a conservative 5% estimate would be over 60 million] surely some less stereotype-friendly representatives could have been interviewed. This would automatically undermine and disrupt much of the phobic sentiment guaranteed to excrete itself in response to this pod.

I'm delighted for the gay people of China. There is a long way to go for them to gain the respect and integration they deserve, but they are making progress. They are no different to the gay populations worldwide, with similar levels of disrespect and distance from the wider populations (apart from tiny pockets around the world where gays truly took over and really are treated as "normal" humans).

By the way, a few people mentioned dubious statistics in responses... especially korourke in reference to "As only 1-8% of the population is gay (according to various studies), their issues get a disproportionate amount of media attention, and this pod is a prime example."
Well here in Ireland it has been confirmed that at least 10% of our population is not straight (AKA 10% are LGBT) I can't see how anywhere else would be any different, although surveys can get whatever results they so wish if not conducted correctly.

Also, in response to you who think gay issues are getting too much media coverage... why? LGBT people have been bashed for long enough, some people are trying to make the playing-field a little more level... deal with it. If LGBT people weren't discriminated for so long we wouldn't have to deal with LGBT issues now!

Today I showed this video during a group presentation for a Cultural Anthropology class at Fudan University in Shanghai. This piece is a great representation of the progression of homosexual tolerance in China. The class consists of about 40 students, all Chinese except for three (I'm one of the three). For many people in the West, it's hard to understand how a society could consider homosexuals as having a "mental illness," but this is the reality here in China. The content of this video clearly displays that there are still obstacles that people in different parts of the world have to overcome to be accepted in regards to sexual orientation. I really appreciate your work and I'm glad that I was able to share it with my classmates.

I am very honored to have had you show my video to one of China's top universities.

I agree with you about there still being a obstacles to accept homosexuality in China, but I think it can easily be addressed in China with education as opposed to places like the middle east and even some of the more religious areas of the west. If you notice in the video people say it's a mental illness, but the most interesting part, almost everyone said we should tolerate them regardless and not look down upon them. In the more religious areas of the world however people say that homosexuality is against God and therefore it should never be tolerated.

As a lecturer in psychology at the University of Hong Kong, I pioneered information about sexual orientation in Hong Kong. One of the speakers from Shanghai says there were no clubs in Hong Kong. That is wrong. Clubs have been present in Hong Kong since the 1970's. As a sexual orientation researcher, I visited a number of these bars with research colleagues from the U.S.

Whoever said Hong Kong did not have Gay Bars before Shanghai is very ill informed.

I worked for the Hong Kong Attorney General on this very issue.

Sexual orientation is based on neurological factors that are beyond the conscious control of humans. Many who fight their natural sexuality become mentally ill as a result.