Gay Cathay.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Laws concerning homosexuals in China - Brief Article

Before April of this year, mainland China's gay population was crazy; now it's not.

Chinese gays haven't changed, but the Chinese Psychiatric Association has: Psychiatrists in China no longer classify homosexuality as a pathological condition. Having been insane by decree, the gays and lesbians of the world's most populous nation are now made normal by dint of category.

The West can spare itself a sense of enlightened superiority, as it was not very long ago--the 1970s--that a similar category shift occurred here. Before that, homosexuals were often institutionalized by their families, their Oedipal complexes scrutinized, their toilet training and dreams relentlessly analyzed in hope of a tallking "cure." The professional literature of "inverts," from Krafft-Ebing forward, is today piled high in the West's second-hand bookstores.

Communist dictatorships, for their part, commonly jailed gays as criminals. In China's case, there was no law against homosexuality; police would arrest them as anti-state "hooligans." China eliminated "hooliganism" as a criminal category in 1997. Indeed, that nation appears to be in a fit of officially recategorizing its social life. But there are never too few criminal categories for a state intent on targeting its citizens, and China's government continues to regard unwelcome political opinions and...