Is Fake Marriage a way out for gay people?
By Eva Lee
In the past few years as a lesbian activist in the Beijing LGBT scene, a few gay friends asked me to marry them, some jokingly and a few seriously. As one of them were very persistent in me guising as his potential fiancée, I eventually yielded to his constant phone calls and presents. I went with him to visit his family in Tianjin as his girlfriend. Unsurprisingly, his family loved me. Being the only child of the family, he was under a lot of pressure to get married at the age of twenty five.
Green as I was in meeting the parents, I was astounded when his mother asked me after 20 minutes I walked in their house, when I planned to marry his son! After the first encounter, she tried to call me and see me from time to time. She even deliberately said to me that I would “soon be too old to get married”. Soon afterward, I decided to “break it up” because I couldn’t handle the expectations of loving parents’ in their imaginary daughter-in-law.
Marriage is always a huge problem for Chinese LGBT people. Marrying a person of the other sex and making babies are the paramount duties for every one of us, gay or straight. In our long history, there were stories of Chinese gay lifestyle. But our queer predecessors all had a heterosexual marriage, and of course, children. Our morality father Confucius terrorized generations of Chinese people that “the worst unfilial is to have no descendants”. Until the one child policy, Chinese women were almost like baby factories. And to make sure the purity of descendants, marriage is the foundation to punish any out-of-wedlock sexual activities.
Last Friday I was sitting on a dinner table with my lesbian friends and two gay guys who were introduced to me by a close friend. I was the matchmaker for these two gay couples. The femme needs a fake boyfriend and the straight-looking gay guy needs a wife to play the game “I’m dating so stop introducing me to women/men.” For the fake couple (the lesbian and the gay man), fake marriage seems to be the only way out from the haunting parents.
But finding the Mr. or Mrs. Fake Right is not a simple task. My lesbian friend went interviewing three other gay guys before my fix. Her partner and she were quite picky with the guy’s family background, appearance, etiquette, taste, etc. She is quite tall so the earlier three Mr. Fake Right failed in the height department. Lucky, my guy is tall enough for her so there was a second dinner. On the other hand, my guy also had his requirements for his Mrs. Fake Right. He wants her beautiful, amiable, independent, reasonable (so she won’t blackmail him some day), etc.
Yes, they are finding a fake partner that conforms to social norms. And with the closeted elements, fake marriage match making is nothing easier, if not harder, than common ones.
Mr. and Mrs. Fake Right are now urging me to start a matching making service for people like them. 99 percent of the Chinese LGBT people have to deal with marriage pressure some time in their lives. A lot of them knew no other way out so they married a straight partner and live a life of unhappiness. Fake marriage is gaining momentum for the younger generation as it seems to be a win-win middle ground.
Even though I am still not 100 percent supportive of the idea, I helped my friends with their immediate need. I’m lucky enough to have a family who leave me alone with my decisions in life. Many of my peers don’t. I think any faking would fall apart sooner or later, but some compromises might give us more time and room to shape a future that we really want. Fake marriage, or some would call it pretend marriage, is now a logical alternative.
This Column was published in the METRO-section of the Global Times newspaper on Thursday, January 14, 2010.
