Tracing Chinese Gay Cinema 1993-2002

Abstract

This article focuses on the portrayal of homosexuality in Chinese films. Since its release, Ang Lee's "The Wedding Banquet" has received wide acclaim from audiences and reviewers, and has attracted much attention from film critics and scholars. To weigh the persistent exile of gay men from Asian culture as a whole, the elimination of "The Wedding Banquet" from the film critics' prize at the Berlin film festival is not a shocking accident but rather another example of misunderstanding and evasion. There are speculations about whether homosexuality never existed in Chinese culture, and whether it really is a contagious "disease" transmitted from the "decadent Western culture" to Diaspora Asians. Such citing of anecdotes about gay relationships recorded in Chinese history is not solely a rebuke of the problematic assertion that excludes gay from Chinese culture. Rather, this object maps the recent landscape of Chinese gay cinema through discussing the following three feature films: Chen Kaige's internationally acclaimed "Farewell My Concubine," Zhang Yuan's ambiguous "East Palace, West Palace," and Stanley Kwan's controversial "Lan Yu."