Chongqing isn’t as cosmopolitan as Beijing or Shanghai or as westernized as Hong Kong, all of which have a relatively visible gay community. Having spent most of my life in one of North America’s gayest cities, I’d come to China expecting to encounter some major culture shock in this area. What I hadn’t expected was to find myself living in the gay capital of China. As it turns out, Chongqing has a huge gay subculture, albeit a rather underground one.
It took some searching, but a couple weeks back I managed to track down the names of a couple gay bars and find a friend who was interested in checking them out with me. Pretty much all the nightlife here is in Jiefangbei, which is about an hour away by bus, and bus service back to Beibei ends at around 10 o’clock at night, so a night out is really a night out – unless you want to pay for an hour-long cab ride, you’re stuck there till the next day. So we prepared ourselves for a weekend trip and set out on Saturday afternoon with plans to find the bar, check into the nearest hotel, grab some dinner and then go party the night away.
By the time we got to Jiefangbei it was dark out, and we only had a vague idea where the bar was, so we asked everyone we passed for directions as we walked. After half an hour of searching, we found out it had closed. Not to be discouraged, we decided to go to another gay bar which was somewhere nearby. My friend didn’t know the way, so she called a friend, who called a friend, and eventually we got a call saying that one had closed, too. At that point, I started to worry, but then the friend told us that there was another gay bar only a few blocks away. We set off in search of the other bar, asking at least a dozen people for directions, until we finally found ourselves in a rubble-strewn alley next to a partially demolished building. We were about to give up and look for the next bar on our list when I saw a sign at the other end of the alley with some familiar-looking characters on it – it was 天堂酒吧 (Tian1 Tang2 Jiu3 Ba1), Paradise Bar, the one we’d originally planned to go to. After taking a look inside to confirm that it was indeed the right place, we found a little hotel around the corner, got a room for 88 yuan (about $14, and hit up the roadside snack stalls for dinner and some snacks to sustain us through the evening.
At around ten we went back to the bar, which was now completely packed. The nightly drag show was about to start and there were no tables left, so we ended up sharing a table with the group of girls just in front of us. The shabby exterior, we discovered, hid a pretty decent interior. The place was huge but not too exposed, with lots of tables tucked off in intimate little corners, all within eyesight of the stage in the middle of the room. The ceiling was filled with funky chandeliers and tiny hanging lights which reflected off the mirrors on the walls. They even had a gogo cage, although there was nobody dancing in it.
We sat down, made introductions, and ordered Chivas and lemon tea for the whole table. A drag queen in a curly blonde wig tottered over with a tray of snacks and served us little plates of chicken feet, spicy marinated seaweed, and dried tofu on the house. One of the girls taught us a drinking game and we all chatted, rolled dice and tossed back shots as we watched a troupe of impossibly pretty drag queens do a few dance numbers and shriek their way through a Beijing Opera. The show lasted until midnight, and was clearly the main attraction of the bar – there was no dance floor, and by 12:30 the place was deserted. We thought about checking out another place but weren't really in the mood for another search, so we called it a night and headed back to the hotel. I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to dance at all, but we'll just make that our mission for the next outing.
Chinese word of the day:
同性恋
tong2 xing4 lian4
homosexuality
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