MOSCOW – China’s government has banned “sissy” and “effeminate” males from television, part of a vicious propaganda campaign that brands them as “abnormal” and somehow in violation of the country’s morals.President Xi Jinping’s targeting of gay men — and of anyone who doesn’t conform to conventional standards of masculinity — should not be surprising.
Homophobia is an authoritarian trademark. When I was a student at Moscow State University in the early 1980s, one of my classmates — a soft-spoken lover of literature — was expelled, supposedly for plagiarism.
But I’ll never forget when another classmate leaned in and whispered that, in fact, our expelled peer’s crime was that “he was gay.”Whatever his sexuality, our classmate was clearly.