by Linda Jaivin
There are conflicting views on whether Chinese medical tradition approves of homosexuality or not. Van Gulik contends that traditional medicine has no quarrel with homosexual activity so long ‘as it is engaged in by grown-up persons, it being taken that intimate contact between two yang elements cannot result in a total loss of vital force for either of them’. An English-language book published in Shandong in the early nineties on the use of traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of AIDS, however, attributes the following passage to Yu Jinghe, a famous physician of the Qing Dynasty:
Females belong to Yin. Yin is adept in lying and streaming downwards. Males belong to Yang. Sexual intercourse between two men signifies the combination of two Yang. Since there is no way to discharge the Ministerial Fire, Flaming Toxin accumulates in the rectum and invades his partner through the penis.
According to this account, homosexuality between two men not only ‘depletes Kidney Essences, but also brings about the danger of Flaming Toxin invasion.’
Kinky.
By the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), attitudes towards male homosexuality in particular began to change. According to Hinsch, homosexuality was increasingly, if selectively, regulated by the courts. Sodomy became a crime, and ‘Qing officials oversaw the promulgation of increasingly sophisticated laws to punish homosexual rape.’ Chinese cultural conservatism combined, if not conspired, with more ‘modern’ influences from the Victorian West to give homosexuality an illegitimacy and stigma it had never before suffered and to drive it underground.
Where it has stayed, more or less. The official puritanism of the Communist regime after 1949 ensured that it did not surface again until the late eighties, when sexuality in general began to come out of the closet.
The significance of the publication of Their World cannot be overstated. Li and Wang conclude unequivocally that homosexuality is neither immoral nor an illness, nor should there be any basis for considering homosexual acts between consenting adults to be a crime. Their sympathetic treatment of the subject makes a clear and decisive break with the judgmental and ill-informed views normally espoused in the Chinese media.
Their World only enjoyed an initial print run of 7000 (compared with, for example, the 90,000 copies of the tract on STDs by the Guangming Daily Press). Yet its conclusions and observations have been quoted in a number of publications throughout China, including the China Youth News, organ of the Communist Youth League.
The China Youth News published an article in August 1993 in which the writer, Lan Yan, pointed out that even if, by the most conservative estimate, 1 per cent of the Chinese population were homosexual, then there would still be more than 10 million in the country, a number equivalent, as she notes, ‘to the size of a small to medium nation’. She says Chinese gays simply hoped that ‘on the premise that they did not endanger public security or jeopardise the lives of others, then society would be able to treat them with a certain degree of tolerance and permit them to live their lives as they wished’. She endorses Li and Wang's conclusion that tolerance for homosexuality and the homosexual subculture is a sign of social progress.
Chen Kaige's award-winning film about homoerotic love, Farewell My Concubine (which shared the Palme d' Or with The Piano) was released in China in 1993. Although somewhat problematic in its portrayal of homosexuality (seeing it primarily as a form of gender confusion) it has at least put the issue before the public in what is an intentionally sympathetic manner.
Anchee Min's courageous memoir Red Azalea has also helped to breach the wall of silence surrounding Chinese homosexuality. A true story, it tells the thrilling tale of a furtive Cultural Revolution love affair between the author and the female commander of her farming brigade. Anchee Min presents the lesbian affair as the love of a lifetime. Yet she also attempts to explain it away as the result of frustrated heterosexual desire.
The threat of an AIDS epidemic, meanwhile, has forced the authorities to acknowledge and reach out to the gay community for the first time. The national Health Education Research Institute established an AIDS hotline on 7 April 1992 with a staff of twenty. Callers were assured confidentiality and anonymity. Set up in Beijing, Kunming, Shanghai, Shijiazhuang and Shenyang, it offered advice on safe sex as well as other information. The head of the hotline operation, Wan Yanhai, also organised a number of activities under the name of nanrende shijie, or ‘Man's World’: dances and karaoke with a safe-sex theme, discussions with health experts and radio programs. Unfortunately, Wan was forced to leave his position when the hotline was accused of ‘promoting homosexuality’. The head of the institute, Chen Bingzhong, a party member of forty years standing, was relieved of his job for supporting Wan's efforts as well.
In the book Latest Reports on the Hot Topics of Today, published in late 1993, journalist Liu Yida concludes his chapter on homosexuality with a report about a lesbian marriage. The couple, who live in Henan province, conducted a traditional wedding ceremony attended by over one hundred guests. Querying the legal authorities about this, Liu was told that any marriage ceremony conducted outside of the authority of the civil law was strictly forbidden. Still, they told him that their policy was only to arrest homosexuals if they were having sex in public places or if there was harassment or rape involved. Anyway, they acknowledged, even if many people couldn't accept it, the existence of homosexuality in China had ‘a certain logicality’.
Alien Sex Fiends
or
How I left the fig section
of my local supermarket and ended up
in outer space
Look at the stars! Look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!1
Greetings, fellow earthlings. I bring you the news that our world is being taken over by aliens. Don't panic. But do take note: the space dudes have already wrested control over prime-time television. They've captured whole shelves in the bookstores. They have made significant inroads into popular music and penetrated the world of advertising. Humungous alien war machines, meanwhile, blew up New York and Washington once every fifteen minutes or so right here in Australia, when Independence Day carried out a massive blitz on first our cinemas and then our video screens.
Titles like UFO Library and Nexus have infiltrated the magazine racks in newsagents, mainstream journals carry reports on alien-obsession, and the tabloid press brims with flying saucer sightings—UFOs traumatising late night drivers in the Dandenongs one week, performing fly-bys on policemen in Queensland's Gladstone the next. The new true believers wave copies of their bible, Eric Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods?, ask, ‘Is God an astronaut?’ and mount the public confessional box of talk shows to reveal: I SAW THE LIGHT AND IT CAME FROM A FLYING SAUCER, MY MOTHER WAS IMPREGNATED BY ALIENS, MY DOG WAS ABDUCTED BY A UFO.
Do you know where your dog is tonight?
You've surely noticed the signs of alien mind-control. Has it occurred to you, for instance, how many people—people living right next door to you, perhaps living with you—refuse to leave home on Wednesday nights? Wednesday night stay-at-home syndrome is a direct result of abduction by ‘The X-Files’.
We've seen this sort of thing before. The first time they came from outer space—and came and came and came—was in the fifties. In 1950 an Oregon farmer called Paul Trent took what purported to be the first photo of a flying saucer. The wave of sightings that followed lasted the entire decade. The fifties were a major era in the annals of UFO mania. It was also a time when the Cold War dominated the popular imagination—and with it the fear of a foreign enemy capable of brainwashing, of infiltration and of destroying our way of life. Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh in memory, and people were coming to grips with the notion of mass death and horror that came from the skies.
Hollywood certainly had its antennae tuned to the Zeitgeist. Studios churned out films with titles like The Thing, Invaders from Mars, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidde
n Planet and, of course, It Came from Outer Space.
The aliens launched themselves into the world of pop music around the same time with such songs as Billy Lee Riley's 1957 hit ‘Flying Saucer Rock n Roll’. Jimi Hendrix included space themes on his 1968 album Axis: Bold as Love, and UFOs have appeared in songs by Earth, Wind and Fire, John Lennon, the Byrds, the Rolling Stones and too many others to catalogue here. The jazz composer Sun Ra believed he was an alien, David Bowie pretended to be one, and it is my understanding that scientists working in secret, US-government-run installations somewhere in the Nevada desert are very, very close to verifying the fact that Michael Jackson is one.
When former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl decided to start up a band of his own, he called it the Foo Fighters after the term given to glowing balls of light that World War II pilots saw darting around their aeroplanes.
The term ‘foo fighters’, incidentally, comes from a phrase used by a cartoon character from that era named Smokey Stover, whose stock phrase was ‘Where there's foo there's fire’, apparently a play on the French word for fire, feu. In my novel Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space, I borrowed the moniker Smokey Stover for the name of a band.
We may think it all a bit of a laugh—I certainly milked UFOria for all it was worth in Babes. The aliens in my book think the earthlings' obsession with them is a cack. They hold ‘X-Files’ parties in which they all dress up as agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, consult The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a sort of intergalactic Lonely Planet handbook and take the piss out of poor little ET for making such an exhibition of himself on his ill-fated trip to earth.
But there are a huge number of people who take the whole UFO thing extremely seriously indeed. A Saulwick opinion poll from eight years ago revealed that 42 per cent of Australians believe in UFOs. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that percentage proved even higher today. If you look in the Sydney phone book under UFO, you'll find UFO Abductions & Contacts, UFO Australia Encounters, the UFO Experience Support Association, the UFO Investigation Centre, the UFO Report and Sightings Hotline, UFO Research, and UFO Researchers Independent Network. The UFO Report and Sightings Hotline told me that they've received 12,000 calls in four years. That's an average of more than eight calls a day. They stressed that probably nine out of ten of the calls report phenomena that can be explained away fairly easily. That still leaves 1200 possibilities that, as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully would have it, the truth is out there.
Personally, I keep an open mind on the subject of whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Our galaxy alone is home to some 400 billion stars, about one quarter of which, scientists believe, may have planetary systems. If only a few planets in each system were capable of supporting life, that's still more than 100 billion planets. Even if only a tiny fraction of those actually did develop life forms of some sort, and only a minuscule proportion of those had some kind of intelligence, say, even up to the level of a rock n roll drummer, we might still be talking about millions of planets—and a lot of interplanetary noise complaints.
And that's just our galaxy. The universe contains about 100 billion galaxies. Given all that, a belief at least in the possibility of little green men or women (or great big purple people eaters) is not necessarily a sign that it's time to call in the guys in white coats—the ones with stethoscopes, not telescopes.
One of Britain's most celebrated airmen, Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, wrote in 1955, ‘I have never seen a “flying saucer” and yet I believe that they exist. I have never seen Australia,’ he added, ‘and yet I believe that Australia also exists. My belief in both cases is based upon cumulative evidence in such quantity that, for me at any rate, it brings complete conviction.’
Of course, my position as renegade China specialist, occasional journalist and baby novelist hardly qualifies me to give you a definitive answer to the question of whether there is life in outer space. And the scientist Paul ‘Are We Alone?’ Davies is always good for bringing us all back to earth on such questions. In an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1997, he pointed out that even if similar conditions to earth exist on other planets, the precise chemical steps that lead to life are so ‘incredibly convoluted and improbable’ that it's possible they've only occurred once. He wrote, ‘Much as I would love to believe that aliens are on our doorstep, I am singularly unimpressed with the evidence I have seen so far.’
Oh well. As Davies says, the truth is not so much ‘out there’ as ‘in here’—in our little earthling hearts and minds. And I really am most interested in earthling hearts and minds.
As in the fifties, we are gripped today by generalised anxieties about the end of the world. Wars rage around the globe, nuclear holocaust is still a threat and environmental prospects grow ever bleaker. Then there's the coming of the new millennium. Not surprisingly, we tend to imagine aliens either fulfilling our worst fears—they have come to destroy us—or on a mission to save us from ourselves, bearing a cosmic message of love and peace.
But there's something else that intrigues me about our fixation on aliens. There is an element of the fairytale in stories of encounters with aliens—whether the stories come out of Hollywood or the inside pages of the tabloids.
… there was first a dazzle of light, and then I saw that this came from the heart of a tall figure with a body apparently shaped out of half-transparent or opalescent air, and throughout the body ran a radiant electrical fire, to which the heart seemed the centre. Around the head of this being and through its waving luminous hair, which was blown all about the body like living strands of gold, there appeared flaming wing-like auras. From the being itself light seemed to stream outwards in every direction; and the effect left on me after the vision was one of extraordinary lightness, joyousness or ecstasy.
That was actually written by the Irish poet George William Russell, ‘AE’, who lived between 1867 and 1935. It is, quite literally, a fairy tale, for ‘fairy’ is the name which he gave to the ‘being’ in his vision.
Some people have suggested that perhaps one way to understand the phenomenon of aliens—and fairies and elves and leprechauns and all the other marvellous and fantastical creatures that have demi-populated our world since just about forever—is to think of them as apparitions produced by chemical reactions in the brain, unusual inner states or psychic visions.
I'm not sure when the nymphs surrendered the rivers and mountains to the UFOs, or when the angels and sylphs gave the skies up to the space people, or when the fairies' skin began to take on a metallic hue, but I suspect that, if you could put a date on it, it would broadly coincide with Nietzsche and the death of God, the elevation of science into a new church for the modern age, and the beginnings of aviation. However you explain it, there is something about aliens—and fairies before them—that intrigues me: the opportunity they present for exploring a more magical realm than is contained within more realistically grounded genres of writing.
In the introduction to his book UFOs: A Manual for the Millennium, Phil Cousineau writes:
For millions of people, the UFO phenomenon, whether experienced firsthand or vicariously through movies, books or magazines, has re-enchanted modern life. Enchantment not in the sense of being hypnotised, but of being deeply moved, revitalised, through a renewed awe and wonder about the riddles of our world.
Enchantment, awe and wonder strike me as excellent ingredients for fiction. That declaration, incidentally, should liberate me at last from any lingering accusations that what I write belongs to the category of grunge fiction. Whatever grunge fiction is supposed to be, you can safely say it does not trouble itself much with enchantment or mystery.
Of course, enchantment doesn't have to be literal. It may be contained in a meeting between two people, such as when Miranda first claps eyes on Ferdinand in Shakespeare's Tempest and pronounces him ‘a thing divine’, or in the description of place, like John Berendt's Savannah in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, or it may permeate an enti
re body of work as in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera.
Personally, I've chosen the literal approach. Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space tells the story of three spunky extraterrestrial chicks who come to Sydney, Earth, neither to save us nor destroy us, but for sex, drugs and rock n roll—to have a bit of fun, in other words. Along the way, they enchant nearly everyone they meet, a few hapless earth boys in particular, with that good old alien magic. What I enjoyed most about writing the novel was the fact that while most of the action takes place in very real settings—in my favourite Newtown pub, poolside at the Sebel Townhouse, and on the beach at Byron Bay, for example—I could animate this world with such characters as Baby Baby, alien sex fiend, Eros the lonely asteroid, and Captain Qwerk the earnest alien commando, as well as a young earthling slacker or two.
Have you noticed the frequency with which alleged alien abductions are supposed to involve some form of ‘sexual experimentation’? Forget black lace and suspender belts—it would appear that the uber-fantasy of the human race involves silver skin, large, insectoid eyes and an alarming array of medical instruments. I like the idea that sex with aliens connects us to some cosmic grid, that it's a symbolic bridge to some greater spiritual reality. I also like the fact that it gives you incredible freedom to write hot sex scenes involving such things as unstable genitalia, cuddly space pets and very strong teeth.
My years as an alien in China gave me a reasonable basis for imagining some of the trials and tribulations of intergalactic cross-cultural communication. My ever-hyperactive erotic imagination, meanwhile, meant that I could see intriguing possibilities in earthling-alien sex.
And so I wandered from China, where I'd learned to understand the treachery of facts, into the fig section of my local supermarket, where I gave myself up to the seductions of fiction. From there, it was only a small step to take the advice given by Horace: ‘Look at the stars! Look up at the skies!’