Gay Men in/and Kangsi Coming

In September 2015, I interviewed Tiger-Girl, a 32-year-old Chinese gay man in Beijing, who was a video game designer. Like many other Beijing drifters, he came from an industrial city in the northeast of Hebei province, China, and moved to the city to seek a better life. Tiger-Girl was a loyal fan of TV entertainment. When asked about memorable images of gay men in the Chinese-language media, he cited two male entertainers, Mix Xiao (肖骁, a gender-nonconforming Chinese TV celebrity) and Edison Fan (樊野, a hunky Chinese influencer and gay model) from the popular Chinese online talk show U Can U Bibi (奇葩说; iQIYI, 2014–2021), to exemplify the two most common ways gay men have been constructed by Chinese-language media and popular culture, as either “sissy” or “outstanding” (which refers to the “macho” men). Tiger-Girl explained that being gay means “two men love each other in a manly way.” Therefore, by lacking masculinity, effeminate gay men like Mix Xiao “have a negative impact on the Chinese gay community, who only reinforce the stereotypes of gay men as ‘sissies’ (娘娘腔).” By contrast, Tiger-Girl highly commended Edison Fan for his masculine images and viewed him as a positive role model for Chinese gay men. Tiger-Girl’s story led me to wonder what the social meanings of the new “gay” images on entertainment media screens, such as Mix Xiao and Edison Fan, are, and how these representations can create new meanings of Chinese gay sexualities. How and why do these new gay representations differ from their precursors in the Chinese-language media?

I begin by outlining the rise and fall of Kangsi Coming in the context of Chinese language TV in transition. Despite remaining under certain regulation and censorship, TV has become increasingly dynamic, digitized, heterogeneous, and transcultural in the Chinese-speaking world. In this context, I explore the discussion of “gay typification” in popular media, which is, as Dyer argues, “a near necessity for the representation of gayness, the product of social, political, practical and textual determinations” (2002, 20). I examine two dominant gay types represented in Kangsi Coming and U Can U Bibi: the “sissy” and the “macho,” which each signifies both a gay subject and object of desire. The new gay representations analyzed in this chapter show how popular culture both creates and constrains gay identities. Nevertheless, they do not exhaust the range of gay types in Chinese-language media. In conclusion, I argue that it is impossible to treat the issue of gay visibility and representation in isolation from the actual consumers of queer media cultures. Hence, I call for a reflexive ethnographic approach that is able to unpack the incompatible expectations and outcomes at stake in the increasing queer visibility enabled by digital media technologies.