We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.

José Esteban Muñoz (2009, 1)

How to suspend the very idea of endings? How to maintain the space of exception without blind optimism? How to prolong the inhale of collective breath for as long as possible? How to tell a story while holding your breath?

Elvia Wilk (2019 online; emphasis in original)

Let us move briefly from Hong Kong further up north, to Beijing. The MAXX music festival that took place in Beijing on May 1, 2012, felt even more regulated than other music festivals in the capital city, such as the Strawberry Festival. There were multiple mills barriers surrounding the stage, where we and other audience members stood, and the gongan (police) presence was palpable. Anthony Wong was the closing act of the day. When he entered the stage, rainbow flags, large and small, here and there, were hoisted, waving and celebrating a sense of queerness in the Chinese capital (Fig. 4.1) (Lo 2012). The performance was just a few days after Anthony Wong’s coming out, also on stage, in Hong Kong, which we also analysed in the previous chapter.

Fig. 4.1
A photograph of a hand holding a rainbow flag in a crowd.

(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Rainbow flags at the MAXX music festival, Beijing

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Whereas lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+Footnote 1) communities and practices have been increasingly active in Beijing for the past decades, they remain by and large invisible to the public eye. Gay and lesbian film festivals are held discreetly and sometimes are disrupted, while a number of bars and discos have rapidly opened, closed, or changed location to survive (Bao 2018, 2020, 2021; Kong 2015, 2023). Destination, a gay club north of the Workers’ Stadium, is still operating in 2023, almost twenty years after it opened in 2005. Nevertheless, rainbow flags in a public space, at an event not linked to queer culture, with all the police officers around—that moment in 2012 felt as if mainland China had entered a new phase. It is indicative of the queer possibilities of popular music. We hasten to add, however, that in the early 2020s, such waving of a rainbow flag in a public crowd has become again politically sensitive in mainland China, pointing sadly at the instability and fragility of the increased freedom for LGBTQ+ cultures. For our purposes here, we want to note the striking occurrence that it takes a pop singer from another locality, Hong Kong, to facilitate that queer expression in public space in Beijing. Moreover, Hong Kong is not and has never been the queer centre of East Asia. In the Sinophone world, Taipei has been considered the capital of queer politics and pink money. Hong Kong, a British colony for more than 150 years, is haunted by a disturbing mixture of Victorian and Confucian values that has for a long time limited sexual expression.

Indeed, before the public coming out of Anthony Wong and other celebrities in 2012, queer culture in Hong Kong was characterised by a playful politics of invisibility, opacity, and ambivalence, which several scholars have proposed as a queer alternative to the confrontational, identity-based politics often advocated in the West. Helen Hok-sze Leung, for example, claims that the queer undercurrent of Hong Kong ran against the grain of “the ‘global gay’ narrative that assimilates non-Western queer expressions into its own trajectory and image” (2008, 4). We witness here a curious and productive alliance between postcolonial Hong Kong and queer theory. Sudeep Dasgupta aptly describes the theoretical zeal of the latter, saying that “the discursive production of the homosexual subject, queer theory argues, is marked by incompleteness, ambivalence, and instability precisely because of the inability of representation either to adequate the object it refers to, or to control the discourse-effect it engenders” (2009, 3). With hindsight, queer theory’s poststructuralist mistrust in identity and representation corresponded neatly with Hong Kong’s ambivalent and multivocal queer politics. This is what Leung refers to as Hong Kong’s queer undercurrent, inspired by the pop lyrics written by Lin Xi (“In this city / It is not possible / To love without undercurrents”) (2008).Footnote 2

But then, as an unexpected blast that cracks open the undercurrents of queer invisibility and unrepresentability, reality overtook theory, and surprised and challenged it, in the year 2012. The coming out of Anthony Wong during a Tat Ming PairFootnote 3 live performance, that we have analysed in the previous chapter as a carnivalesque act, marked the turning point. This act was soon followed by similar acts of coming out of other pop stars. This chapter investigates the articulation between sexuality and popular music, in particular Tat Ming, in the context of Hong Kong and mainland China. In doing so, we will trace the emergence of a Chinese movement to find indigenous ways of understanding sexual diversity. Interwoven with such resistance against dominant Western theories and practices, particularly the politics of visibility, is a local cultivation of ambivalence and invisibility, itself a complex manifestation of the ongoing interaction between queer identity and Hong Kong identity. Reflecting upon the events in 2012, we will come back to—and try to make sense of—the disruptive surprise of public figures coming out, apparently in accordance with Western models and in contrast to earlier local sexual politics of ambivalence and invisibility. However, as we will finally show, in the years following 2012, the potentiality of this disruptive surprise has shifted and has been, sadly, pushed back. First, by national policies against effeminate masculinities and sexuality- and gender-related activism at large. Second, by increasingly strict policies towards NGOs and social movements. Paradoxically, and again sadly, the political activities of Anthony Wong in and after the Umbrella Movement may have further jeopardised the potentialities of queer politics. Ironically, these political developments may well inspire a strategic move back towards a politics of invisibility and ambivalence.

In short, this chapter presents an inquiry into global queer theory and local popular music cultures and aims to show how the latter holds the potential to upset, or at least surprise, the conceptual premises of the former. Given the developments since this moment of surprise, we are bound to be ambivalent about its political implications. Before going there, let us revisit briefly the queer history of Hong Kong, particularly the city’s intersection with its “colonisers” and the intersection of queer politics with popular culture and music.

On Tongzhi and Ku’er

As we hope to show in this book, Hong Kong occupies a special place in the recent history of China. Once part of the British Empire, Hong Kong lives on with a legacy of morality and laws deeply influenced by Victorian values that, in their validation of family, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, sit comfortably with hegemonic understandings of Confucian values. The postcolonial condition of Hong Kong is highly ambivalent. Not only does Hong Kong lack a strong precolonial history—it was a small fishing village rather than a city—its “return” to the mainland was and is still severely contested. Rather than branding it as the place where East meets West, as the local authorities do (Chu 2011), it makes more sense to read it as a place that is always already in-between, impure, and incomplete—a place where neither East nor West suffice, where both constructs are characterised by a lack rather than substance.

For most of the time during British rule, male homosexual acts were illegal in Hong Kong and subject to the maximum penalty of life imprisonment. In 1980, the police inspector John MacLennan was found dead under suspicious circumstances in his apartment after charges of gross indecency. The controversial incident and an ensuing official inquiry stirred up heated debate in Hong Kong, leading to the subsequent decriminalisation of sexual acts between men in 1991 (Ho and Tsang 2000). With the forthcoming return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, the British colonisers demonstrated a slow but perceptible change of attitude and policies, arguing for more freedom, democracy, and individual (including sexual) rights. Such a turn provoked scepticism and downright criticism, attributing the outgoing administration’s change to geopolitical agendas (namely, imposing “Western” notions of democracy and human rights upon Chinese territory), rather than genuine concerns.

Regardless of the colonisers’ intentions, the result was that it allowed more legal, discursive, and performative space for sexual rights. The years surrounding the Handover—the 1990s—were also the years when processes of globalisation went into full swing, allowing a global proliferation of discourse on LGBTQ+ rights. The reappearance of Hong Kong culture hence came with a surfacing of sexual cultures that had remained until then largely hidden and censored. One key moment in this proliferation of emerging sexual cultures in Hong Kong was the organisation of a recurring gay and lesbian film festival, the first of its kind in the Sinophone world, beginning in 1989. Remarkably, this festival appropriated an important communist term, “tongzhi” (meaning “comrade”), as a label for gay and lesbian populations. The fact that it takes a film festival to claim a new category attests to the importance of cultural productions for the negotiation of sexuality.

Since then, the term “tongzhi” has circulated widely among Chinese-speaking communities with reference to gay and lesbian people and cultures. Some authors have pointed at a friction between these labels, arguing that tongzhi stands for a Chinese articulation of “homosexuality” that is decidedly different from the Anglophone term “gay.” One important advocate of the assumed virtues of tongzhi is Chou Wah-shan. In two book-length treatises, On Tongzhi and Postcolonial Tongzhi, Chou argues that the Chinese attitude towards sexuality, including same-sex acts, has always been tolerant, nonstigmatised, and nonstigmatising (Chou 1995, 1997). He mobilises essentialist notions of Chinese culture to make his point, claiming that so long as family obligations (notably reproduction) are fulfilled, sexual enjoyments of all kinds are permitted in traditional Chinese culture. For Chou, Chinese culture is “a crystallisation of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, all of which do not consider sex shameful, nor is homosexuality treated as a perverted, sinful act” (1997, 322). He consequently argues for a model that is non-confrontational, non-verbal, and non-sex-oriented, thrusting forward tongzhi as a rejection of Western nomenclature and his model as a postcolonial one transcending the categories imposed upon China by the West. In other words, calling oneself tongzhi is a political act that radically reroutes homosexual practices and identifications from the gender and the sexual—as prescribed by dominant Western forms of gay politics—to the more tolerant, if only discreet, Chinese culture of sexual enjoyment and beyond. Being tongzhi underlines solidarity, community, and politics of a certain kind—a comrade of an unannounced revolution. According to Chou’s theorisation, “‘tongzhi’ is not defined by the gender of one’s object of sexual desire. It represents the political choice of one’s (sexual) identity” (1995, 363).

The problems with such an argument are manifold; not the least of these is the reification of a monolithic reading of Chinese culture and the potential conservative implications. The non-confrontational, non-verbal, and non-sex-oriented model that Chou proposes corresponds, for instance, to a conservative preference for harmony, for the status quo, which continues to privilege certain classes. After all, those who were allowed to enjoy their sexual freedom so long as they did not disturb the familial, patriarchal system were men with good backgrounds. Nevertheless, Chou’s gesturing towards the possibility of an articulation of sexuality that does not rely on fixed identity positions like “gay” or “lesbian,” and one that integrates local traditions into globalised narratives, remains valuable. We witness here a friction between the postcolonial desire to resist the disciplinary hegemonic workings of labels that have a specific history in the West, thus pointing at the need to provincialise notions like “gay,” “homosexual,” and “queer,” and the critical urgency to resist any form of cultural essentialism, as can be traced in a call for indigenous theory with culturally specific labels. This requires walking on a conceptual tightrope. Others, including Hongwei Bao (2021), Chris Berry (2001), Lucetta Kam (2013a, 2013b), Travis Kong (2012, 2023), Helen Hok-sze Leung (2008), Song Hwee Lim (2006), Fran Martin (2003), Jia Tan (2023), Denise Tang (2011), and Audrey Yue (2000), have pursued that postcolonial direction, but in more critical and promising ways, as we will show later when reflecting upon the work of Leung.

Before we move on to discuss Leung’s mobilisation of another term, we want to underline the circulation and mutation of tongzhi in the Sinophone world; the amplification of its meanings and associations that often contradict and contest Chou’s conceptualisation. Indeed, the popularity of the term tongzhi has helped to shape the gay community in the Sinophone world over the 1990s and 2000s. It provides a tongue-in-cheek twist to communist jargon, making fun of a political system that has for a long time denied the existence of homosexuality. However, while the term continues to offer an indigenous, ambivalent alternative to homosexual people, it has also paradoxically lent itself as a postcolonial label to the pursuit of an LGBTQ+ identity politics not unlike its counterpart under the Western model.

Leung observes how the notion of ku’er (literally “cool child”) proliferated in Taiwan in the 1990s. She argues that “[k]u’er was conceptualised in explicit contrast to tongzhi: while the former approximates the theoretical and deconstructive stance of ‘queer,’ the latter is associated with LGBTQ+ identity politics” (Leung 2008, 3). Leung argues against the universality and linear progression of gay and lesbian liberation that she aptly labels “the global gay narrative” (3–4). To steer away from that narrative, she proposes to “look for stories half-heard and dimly remembered that circulate in the nooks and crannies of daily life” (Leung 2012). Postcolonial Hong Kong, to Leung, is a city whose story is difficult to tell, a city whose claims for sovereignty are difficult to make; it is a city that borders on the unrepresentable while being on the verge of disappearance. This, in her view, is what makes it so suitable for queer stories, as these are the stories that cannot quite get told. For her, “it is perhaps no coincidence that some of the most creative tales about the postcolonial city, and the most visionary stories of survival under its crisis-ridden milieu, are told through a queer lens” (Leung 2008, 6).

Queering Tat Ming

A queer lens hints at the importance of queer cinema, which has received considerable scholarly attention (see Chao 2020; Lim 2006; Pecic 2016)—but what about queer sounds? Few scholars have probed the connection between sexuality and Chinese popular music. This is striking, as numerous pop stars in the Sinophone world, among them Faye Wong, Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, and Anthony Wong, have transgressed gendered and sexual boundaries for decades. They did so not in an open and loud voice; on the contrary, like the queer undercurrents that Leung claims to be emblematic for Hong Kong cinema, their voices whisper, giving an almost inaudible twist to the heteronormative flows and sounds of the city.

De Kloet shows in his work on Chinese popular music how Anthony Wong, in his music, lyrics, and imagery, plays a multivocal game with gender and sexuality (2010). For instance, for one of his album cover images, Anthony, striking a reptilian, narcissistic pose, adorned his face and his hands, the only exposed and readily gendered parts of his body, with thousands of crystal beads (Fig. 4.2). As we analysed in the previous chapter, during the concert that became the occasion for his coming out, Anthony wore heavy mascara, a thick moustache, a phallic hat, and an outfit with protruding flashlights circling and flickering at himself, a comment on celebrity and paparazzi culture (Fig. 4.3). On the huge screen behind him played a video of Anthony acting as a man and a woman flirting with, chasing, and finally embracing each other. His campy outfits, the ambivalent and at times sexually evocative lyrics, his audacious stage performances, and the electronic soundscape all evoke sexual ambiguity and fluidity. This can be read not so much as a hidden claim on identity, but rather as a resistance to surrendering to fixed identity categories.

Fig. 4.2
A photograph of Anthony Wong lying on his stomach with crystal beads in his hands and face.

(Courtesy of Wing Shya)

Anthony Wong posing for one of his album cover photos

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Fig. 4.3
A photograph of Anthony Wong with a thick mascara and a phallic hat.

(Courtesy of Dan Ho)

Anthony Wong in his “coming out” concert

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From the start on, Tat Ming’s music and aesthetics have always had a distinct queer edge. In their 1989 song “Forget He Is She 忘記他是她,” for example, of which the lyrics were written by co-author Yiu Fai Chow, the band sings:

Verse

Verse Do I remember whom? Only a lock of hair fragrant as thousand roses in bloom Do I remember whom? Only a broad shoulder and a dark green tattoo Do I remember whom? Only a pair of welcoming eyes in the living room Do I remember whom? Only a neck bending to some sexiest routes

Verse

Verse I’m in love with him or her or him or her or whoever makes me happy Or is it the sensation of beauty? I’m in love with him or her or him or her or whatever is happening Or is it the luxury of forgetting?

Verse

Verse Do I remember whom? Only the tender smiles that lead me through a deserted wood Do I remember whom? Only a passion that burns down all soul’s roof

The song deliberately plays with the linguistic fact that in Chinese, one cannot hear the difference between him (他) and her (她), thus stressing the ambiguity in gender as afforded by the language itself. This ambiguity is further strengthened by the line “I’m in love with him or her or him or her or whatever is happening.” The MV of the song is shot in a Wong Kar-wai-esque style. This is not surprising, given that cameraman Christopher Doyle and director William Chang are also collaborators of Wong Kar-wai. The MV further amplifies the dreamy, ambivalent, and melancholic atmosphere the song evokes.Footnote 4 Shot in a shaky, dreamlike, and sluggish style, the camera time and again zooms in on body parts, often blurry, at times behind glass. Body parts are touching one another; at times the bodies are clearly gendered. The clip seems to feature two men and one woman, but at other moments they are not what they appear to be. The body is turned into a fluid, amorphous, and porous being; the singer stands behind window grilles, watching two other people making love, being excluded, an outsider. As if love and desire remain unattainable. But later it is the singer Anthony Wong whom we see with the other man, leaving the woman behind, who looks bewildered, gazing upwards in the stairways, feeling abandoned. Towards the end of the clip, we see the woman returning to the other man, but then, in a short shot, we see the two men walking away in the street, with Anthony looking anxiously backwards over his shoulder, as if he is chased by someone, or haunted by this conservative mix of Confucian and Victorian values. In blurry, reddish, and chimerical shots, the woman runs around in despair in the apartment, with a knife in her hands. She looks straight into the camera, bewildered, as if asking the audience, “Why is this happening to me? What is happening to me?” But in the end, we see Anthony sitting in a bathroom, with the woman made visible through the mirror, indicating that the three lovers remain entangled with one another, however fragmented, however shaky, however fluid (Fig. 4.4).

Fig. 4.4
A photograph of 2 persons in the movie Forget He is She.

Shot from MV of “Forget He Is She”

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“Forget He Is She” can be read as Tat Ming’s response on its earlier song “Forbidden Colours 禁色,” the lyrics of which was written by another long-term collaborator Keith Chan. When the former song lodges an opaque appeal for the fluidity of gender and sexuality, the latter is a darker complaint, well-nigh requiem, about oppression and its injuries. Together, they formed a loud and clear statement of Tat Ming’s queer aesthetics and politics in a time when such issues remained largely in a stigmatised silence and invisibility. “Forbidden Colours” was released a year earlier than its sequel, in 1988, lyrics alluded to the 1951 novel Forbidden Colours by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. The character for colour, 色, also stands for erotic love in both Japanese and Chinese. The corresponding clip is far less explicit when compared to the song we just discussed.Footnote 5 We see Anthony and Tats sitting in an ethereal landscape, a somewhat Orientalistic setting, a pavilion, overlooking. They are often rendered blurry by the camera, evoking a misty, dreamlike atmosphere that corresponds with the melancholic sound of the song. We see Anthony singing in nature, in a park, his face and figure slowly dissolving in the bright backlight of the sun. Aside from his long hair and feminine look, the imagery is more opaque than it is queer.

As this brief analysis of the two Tat Ming songs attest to, Anthony Wong’s choice not to come out, nor to align himself to labels such as tongzhi or ku’er until 2012 can be read as an act to remain deliberately ambivalent, as a queer escape route out of fixed identity politics. To borrow Daniel Williford's words, Anthony can be read as practicing a politics of invisibility, given that “the visible, sayable, and doable, are the possible aesthetic enunciations that circulate in a social world which is already the realm of the political, and every aesthetic gesture is either allowed or must insist upon its legibility” (2009, 13). Hence, a politics of the invisible, of the undercurrents, may constitute a stronger vantage point for queer cultures, particularly in the postcolonial context of Hong Kong. Anthony’s choice to remain silent, of course, can also be read as a marketing choice, driven by a desire not to alienate Anthony’s female fan base and possibly lose money-making opportunities.

In many ways, what Anthony did was not unlike the ambivalence that some Western performers cultivated; Neil Tennant, Michael Stipe, Boy George, and George Michael, for instance, all evaded questions about their sexual identity until, starting in the mid-1990s, they explicitly came out as gay or queer, invariably after their music careers had reached their peaks. Some celebrities of the younger generation still went through a period of unclarity before coming out, such as Mika and Sean Hayes. What differentiates Anthony’s performance and politics from his Western counterparts, however, is precisely the distinctly local context—the postcolonial underpinnings of the reluctance or refusal to do the same as the West, which is always there. And his coming out in 2012 was also embedded in another local condition—that of paparazzi culture.

We will discuss that point later in this chapter. For now, it suffices to note that Tat Ming’s as well as Anthony Wong’s music resonates clearly with a queer aesthetics, whether in terms of lyrical content or musical style—for instance, in one of his songs, “How Great Thou Art 你真偉大,” Anthony Wong twisted the Christian hymn of the same title into a critique of Chinese patriarchy, releasing a version in a remix of tango and house styles subtitled “Tango in My Father’s House.”Footnote 6 Tat Ming has often been compared to the Pet Shop Boys, both for their common roots in electronic music and their penchant for satirical commentaries on heteronormative society and culture. Nevertheless, Anthony’s opaque identity politics rendered impossible a clear-cut articulation between the star and his sexuality.

Among the few studies on queerness and pop music in the Chinese context, Helen Hok-sze Leung has devoted one chapter to Leslie Cheung, the singer and actor who committed suicide on April 1, 2003, in her book focusing on cinema. In the chapter, titled “In Queer Memory,” Leung explicates the ambivalence of Cheung’s sexuality that, in her view, precisely constitutes his queerness. His refusal to come out, like the pre-2012 Anthony Wong, and his reference to his partner as a good friend are indicative of another kind of sexual politics—the opaque, the playful, and the ambiguous kind. After his death, the gay movement in Hong Kong hailed him eagerly as their icon; yet in Leung’s view, “Cheung’s life and work tell a story that is much less about pride and courage, as the eulogies emphasized, than about negotiation and foreclosure” (2008, 88). The ambivalence of Cheung’s sexuality allows for multiple readings and identifications; it encourages a queer audience to look for queer meanings, and as such engage in a hidden, secret play of queer decoding. For Leung, it “seems fitting to honour his life’s work not with what we think we know of him but precisely with what he so persistently compelled us to not know about him” (2008, 105; emphasis in original). In short, as with Anthony Wong, it is a politics of invisibility and opacity that, in the context of postcolonial Hong Kong, allows for queer undercurrents in popular music culture.

In her book-length study on Leslie Cheung’s “artistic image,” including a chapter on his gender representation in Hong Kong pop music, Fung Lok rebukes the media in Hong Kong for its negative coverage of Cheung’s suicide and obsession with his sexuality (2008). On the other hand, as Leung argues convincingly in her book chapter, the queer undercurrents of popular music may also be enabled, if not amplified, by Hong Kong’s gossip and paparazzi culture. Cheung’s assumed “gender insubordination” was not so much a lone battle, as Lok claims, but rather “part of a local/global trend whereby artists’ gender experimentation on stage could be widely accepted in the mainstream, while their sexual preference off stage remained ambivalent” (Leung 2008, 90).

Gossip, in this sense, can be considered constitutive for self-making and queer culture, rather than oppositional or antagonistic—in particular, for a dialectical politics of invisibility and (spectacular) visibility, which is what keeps Hong Kong’s queer undercurrents going. According to Leung, gossips are ambivalent, as they are always haunted by the possibility of dishonesty, deceit, or fabrication. In other words, they may “disclose” a pop star, be it Leslie Cheung or Anthony Wong, to be gay, but such disclosure, given its gossipy nature, is never totally trusted. It is in this representational insecurity and eternal deferral of meaning that the potential for self-making and queer culture lies. As such, Hong Kong queer culture can serve as a salient case of the unrepresentableness of queer identity, as a possible alternative to LGBTQ+ identity politics, and ultimately as an alternative to the Western way of coming out and claiming a sexual self. In other words, the case of Hong Kong pop stars in such a reading corresponds closely with the poststructuralist theoretical zeal of queer theory. But then, in 2012, this queer ambivalence was suddenly interrupted by Anthony’s public coming out on stage.

On the Year of Coming Out

If, following Leung, ambiguity, the playfulness of not knowing and of ignorance, has been the legacy of Hong Kong’s queer icon Leslie Cheung, and “undercurrents” the running theme of the city’s queerness and music, we saw breaking waves in the year 2012. In that year, to refer back to the song “Forbidden Colours,” it did seem that the moment had arrived to paint dreams with all the forbidden colours of the rainbow. During the concert staged by Tat Ming on April 23, Anthony Wong announced to an audience of almost 10,000 in the Hong Kong Coliseum: “I am a Geilo.” “Geilo” is a Cantonese term circulated in local vernacular. Used initially and derisively by the larger society against gay men, the term is appropriated by gay men themselves, sometimes defiantly, sometimes jokingly. “Gei” is the sound translation of the English “gay,” and “lo” denotes “man” or “guy.”Footnote 7

Almost half a year later, during the closing performance of the annual Hong Kong Pride Parade on November 11, another pop star, Denise Ho Wan-see, came out, proclaiming: “I am a tongzhi.” These two pop music celebrities were not the only ones who came out in this historical year. In September, politician Ray Chan Chi-chuen came out after he was elected to the city’s legislative body, becoming the first publicly gay political figure not only in Hong Kong, but also in the Chinese-speaking region as a whole. In the same month, Gigi Chao Sik-chi, a businessperson and daughter of a local tycoon, “admitted” to the press that she and her female friend were married in France earlier that year. Her father, Cecil Chao, in a gesture evoking both patriarchy and global capitalism, made a public offer of $65 million to any man who could woo and marry Gigi (BBC 2012). Surfing on these waves of coming out, a number of Chinese-language LGBTQ+ websites ran feature articles listing public figures who came out and the ways that they did it (King 2013). Then, on April 1, 2013, Anthony Wong, Denise Ho, Ray Chan, Gigi Chao, and some of the other public figures concerned established a group called Big Love Alliance to pursue LGBTQ+ rights in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong-based gender studies scholar Lucetta Kam calls 2012 “the year of coming out” (2013a). Time Out Hong Kong writes that “this year has seen gay issues placed firmly on the table in our generally conservative city” (Tam 2012). Another highlight was the February 2013 issue of the local signature lifestyle and intellectual magazine City. Displaying the words “Gay & Proud” prominently, in English and in rainbow colours, the cover featured the four public figures mentioned previously, as well as Joey Leung Cho-yiu, an actor who had staged several gay-themed performances. City’s then chief editor, Tieh-chih Chang, in his editorial commentary, foregrounded the disenfranchised position of people with alternative sexualities: “Even though they have come out of the closet, even though they are high-profile political figures, stars and celebrities, they still do not enjoy the same rights as heterosexuals” (Chang 2013, 24). In conclusion, he said, “‘We are tongzhi’—yes, in the campaign for equal rights, no matter you are heterosexuals or homosexuals, no matter Hong Kong, Taiwan, or mainland China, walking hand in hand, we are tongzhi” (Chang 2013, 24). Here, Chang used “tongzhi,” a term that is indigenous, ambivalent, non-sex-oriented, presumably more inclusive than the Western “gay” or “queer,” to rally support for the politics that he and his magazine were championing. Put differently, Chang’s reference to heterosexuals and homosexuals in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or mainland China underlines the discursive space opened up by the linguistic shift from “gay” or “queer” to “tongzhi.”

What does the year 2012 tell us? If the metaphor of undercurrents was useful in helping us understand, to repeat Leung’s words, “the story that cannot quite get told” (2008, 6), or the queer story of Hong Kong, what was going on that seemed to have broken the undercurrents into high-profile waves, to have told the not-quite-told? More specific to our purposes, how can we make sense of these waves of coming out when we continue our thinking on pop music and queerness in Hong Kong? In the following discussion, we offer an initial attempt, by mobilising three themes: stardom and gossip culture, queerness, and Hong Kong, to revisit finally the central issue of knowledge production in queer studies in general.

First comes stardom and gossip culture. When asked subsequently if he had contemplated his action at length before his coming out, Anthony Wong replied that it was more like a decision made on the spur of the moment. “I only told my manager minutes before the concert started and he said ok,” Anthony explained during a private conversation with Yiu Fai Chow. In particular, Anthony was fed up with all the stalking and interrogation by the local paparazzi. When Denise Ho came out, she offered a similar line of thought.

Their statements, while not necessarily undermining their politics of resistance to the heteronormative order, underscore a personal act against infringement of their privacy by radically going public. That very act itself was queer. The argument that we want to make here is: While Anthony Wong and Denise Ho, not unlike Leslie Cheung, had long been performing with ambiguity and playfulness, literally and figuratively, what compelled them to assume a different practice, tactic, and politics of their queer identity was violence of a different order: that of the tabloid press. In other words, it took another popular medium—popular at least in the sense of its correspondence to democratic fantasies and capitalistic logic—that evoked the limits of the politics of ambiguity. Whereas gossip can be productive for self-making, the public gossip culture of Hong Kong apparently reached its limits for these stars and required a whole different act of self-making. In fact, the doggedness of the local paparazzi and the popularity of tabloid press in Hong Kong earned this group of entertainment journalists the name of “doggies.” Recall Anthony’s outfit with flashlights during the “coming out concert?”

Shelving the moral issues brought forward by the tabloid press and paparazzi practices, what we want to contend is this: Insofar as these coming out stories were embedded in multiple intersections among the celebrity, entertainment, music, and queer cultures, the Hong Kong experience reminds us that it is not enough to investigate the music and the extramusical styles of Anthony and Denise, for example, as queer pop stars and Tat Ming as a queer pop formation. In a local context like that of Hong Kong, we argue, the study of queer practices in pop music must also be situated in the fields of celebrity and entertainment culture, which themselves are situated in related and larger issues of capitalism and democracy.

Second comes queerness. Allow us to continue the narrative—or one version of the narrative—about the tabloid and paparazzi culture in Hong Kong. While Anthony Wong and Denise Ho reacted against these voyeuristic attempts by coming out themselves, it should also be noted that the same media seemed to be reporting their coming out rather kindly, sometimes even positively. According to Hong Kong-based music scholar Paris Lau, it is the same logic of gossip fabrication that drives these media to expose, scandalise, and ultimately silence queer existence, and at the same time to report the coming out moments as “another hot gossip of popular culture.” In his paper on media representation and coming out politics, Lau continues to compare the situation of Hong Kong to the much harsher media representation of sexual minorities in mainland China, and finally to “rethink gender politics and the progress of democracy in Chinese societies” (Lau, forthcoming). It is the reference to Chinese politics that this particular queer experience in postcolonial, or some would say renationalised or recolonised; Hong Kong seems to continue to insert.

Lucetta Kam also connects the stories about the coming out (of Anthony Wong and the others) and the coming home (of Hong Kong to Beijing rule, at least in dominant official discourse) and reflects on the connection (Kam 2013a). Unlike Lau, Kam is not comparing mainland China to Hong Kong; instead, she alludes to the imbrication of the local to the national and contemplates identity politics, both as a queer person and a Hong Kong-Chinese person. While coming out may be an act to actualise the agency of sexual minorities, coming home or the assumption of a fixed national Chinese identity, Kam argues, should not become the hegemonic interpellation among the people living in the postcolonial city. Quite aside from Kam and Lau’s arguments, what we want to foreground is that discussions of local queer politics in any historical conjuncture of Hong Kong always already interact with national, postcolonial politics. As Kam writes at the very beginning of her piece, “This essay was written in a chaotic time in Hong Kong. Or, to put it more accurately, it was written in one of the chaotic times in Hong Kong” (2013a, 152).

Indeed, interviews and commentaries on Anthony Wong’s coming out are similarly embedded in the postcolonial context. Speaking to a reporter from a mainland Chinese website, Anthony gestured to the increasing Beijing domination of local affairs and said, “My coming out represents Hong Kong’s tolerance and freedom” (Wong 2012). To another mainland Chinese magazine, he said, “Hong Kong always cherishes this: freedom. This city has many valuable things, like its openness and tolerance. But at the same time, it is always confused about its identity” (Lee and Wu 2012). Anthony’s utterance led the interviewer to comment:

For many Hong Kongers, Wong’s coming out is not only his coming out. He is coming out for Hong Kong. His identity confusion is just like Hong Kong’s identity confusion now. He is speaking on behalf of Hong Kong. Anthony Wong = Hong Kong. (Lee and Wu 2012)

In another interview with Radio Television Hong Kong, Anthony pointed more specifically to a thorny political issue between Hong Kong and Beijing: direct election. Connecting the issue of LGBTQ+ rights to direct election, he said, “To me, they are the same. If we don’t have a representative legislature, no one will fight for our rights. Our current administration doesn’t have the mandate to represent the people” (RTHK 2013).

If Anthony’s personal identity confusion is thus conflated with the city’s identity confusion, queer politics as manifested in Hong Kong in the year 2012 must be understood via its intersection with the city’s other politics, postcolonial, and national. Queerness, in that sense, is not “only” about sexual minorities of any locality, but about that locality being a minority as well. Queer studies of pop music should also be informed accordingly. Following this line of thought, the coming out narratives of these Hong Kong pop stars should be seen as a counternarrative to Hong Kong’s political and economic marginalisation. Right after Anthony Wong’s coming out, news immediately circulated in and dominated the media and queer space in mainland China. As we already mentioned, rainbow flags were waving at a music festival in Beijing, presumably the first time in a public space in mainland China (Lo 2012). To quote Aaron Lecklider’s introduction to a special issue of Popular Music Studies dedicated to queer studies of popular music, the fundamental question is “how ‘queer’ is defined by performers, audiences, and the academics writing about them” (2006, 120). The Hong Kong experience defines “queer” as a practical and analytic category always and already enmeshed in the matrix of the local, national, and postcolonial.

Following his critique of subcultural theories, Jack Halberstam spells out four considerations that need to be taken into account when studying queer subcultures. One of these is to rethink the relationship between theorists and subcultural participants (Halberstam 2005). While we do not necessarily subscribe to the notion of subculture, we align ourselves with such a call to rethink, particularly now that so much happened in 2012 in Hong Kong. Before this “year of coming out,” as we have shown earlier, theorists on queer culture in Hong Kong, like many other colleagues operating in fields dominated by “Western” nomenclature, concepts, and practices, have made many attempts to oscillate and reconcile between Western theories and what was happening locally. Queer politics in Hong Kong, as noted by Cheuk Yin Li, is historically different from its European and American versions. Citing three major disciplinary discourses on sexual cultures in “Hong Kong as an East Asian locale”—residual Chinese ethics, the British colonial legacy, and the growing influence of rightist Christian influences and nongovernmental organisations—Li predicted a continuous “absence of voices demanding institutional and confrontational queer politics” (2012). What took place in the year of Li’s publication, 2012, rather, was precisely the emergence of such voices. If the relationship between theorists and queer subjects in Hong Kong has been characterised by understanding (i.e., the theorists trying to understand their subjects), 2012 witnessed a shift towards surprising (i.e., the subjects surprising their theorists), towards a need to reunderstand after the surprise.

This obviously engenders a series of questions and attempts: What is the “new” queer politics in Hong Kong, in the larger Chinese cultural context, and even in the East Asian locales? While ambiguity is not sufficient to understand local queer practices and politics, how should the coming out of these local pop stars be understood? Instead of coming out, would it be more meaningful and productive to talk of “breaking open,” as some commentaries have done (Kam 2013a; Leung 2012)? Amidst the earnestness to reunderstand, we believe that we need to refer to Halberstam’s plea again, not to reunderstand the queer subjects per se, but to rethink the relationship between them and their theorists. It is, in other words, about production of queer knowledge as much as about queer production of knowledge. If “the bizarre, the unusual, or the transgressive” is the vernacular expression of queer (Lecklider 2006, 120), we want to add “the surprising.” As informed by the Hong Kong experience, we who work on queerness and popular music queerness and film, or queerness and whatever, either in the West or elsewhere, must allow ourselves to be surprised. If queer studies, like any other mode of knowledge production, will become normative and thus expected, then such surprising moments are the moments that the queer subjects are queering the queer studies that we are doing.

After the Surprise, Holding Our Breath

We are now writing more than a decade after that year 2012, a year that with hindsight seems pregnant with possibilities, or, in the words of Muñoz, cited at the start of this chapter, “imbued with potentiality.” The word “surprise” seems to be far too frivolous to capture the developments since 2012. In the first few years after the “year of coming out,” we observed two intertwining strands of queer politics and practices in Hong Kong. First, almost as expected as it was once surprising, the pop stars who came out in 2012 have transformed rather smoothly and swiftly from queer celebrities to queer activists. As soon as January 2013, Anthony Wong and Denise Ho joined with Gigi Chao, Ray Chan, and some other sympathisers to form a new organisation called Big Love Alliance. Their objective, according to their website, is “to promote the equality of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, and queers and their liberation from all forms of discrimination.” Most of the activities organised by Big Love can be characterised under the kind of identity-driven politics known in the West, such as lobbying and fighting for antidiscrimination and gay marriage legislation.

Given the high profile of these pop stars and Big Love, the post-2012 queer landscape of Hong Kong saw an increasing alliance between this group and other organisations already active in the city. Anthony and Denise have become indispensable rallying figures for such campaigning events as the Gay Pride, Pink Dot, Pink Season, and IDAHOT HK, attracting thousands of participants, claiming a new visibility for queer people and issues in the community at large.

Second, the decade following 2012 has also witnessed an increasing and increasingly visible participation of queer activists, as well as an insertion of queer politics in the “larger” struggle for democracy and freedom in Hong Kong. Following his long-term engagement with issues concerning the future of Hong Kong and the city’s relationship with Beijing, Anthony Wong became a logical ally for pro-democracy and anti-establishment forces, especially in his capacity as one of the figureheads of Big Love. It was hardly surprising, then, that he placed himself at the centre of the Umbrella Movement in 2014. Looking back to his coming out more than 10 years ago, Anthony Wong said in his interview with us in 2022:

Like after coming out, we have set up Renaissance Foundation, and Big Love Alliance, and two years later, it’s the Umbrella Movement, and then it’s a road of no return.

For him, this coming out is closely aligned to his identity as a Hong Konger:

The coming out in 2012 made me realise, right, if you stand up, you need to be honest to yourself, and it’s important… You start to think who you are as an individual, or as a Hong Kong person. You want to find out and preserve your identity.

Slightly less expected was Denise Ho’s involvement, as her music has never really dealt with political issues like Anthony’s and Tat Ming’s. Nonetheless, as visibly as they joined hands in queer events, they occupied the streets with the Umbrella supporters, stood on the main podium to speak to them, and disseminated messages on their social media platforms—to the extent that both Anthony and Denise were put on a blacklist compiled by authorities in mainland China.

While Beijing would not confirm the existence of such a blacklist, it became apparent that both artists stopped receiving invitations to perform in mainland China. Anthony told the authors how his contract negotiation with a Beijing-based record label came to a suspiciously abrupt end when he took a high-profile position with the Umbrella Movement. In 2016, Denise Ho found her concert sponsor, L’Oreal, retreating from the Hong Kong project, as mainland consumers were reported to be angered by the French cosmetic concern’s support of such an anti-Beijing artist, threatening to boycott L’Oreal. The intricate overlapping of queer and pro-democratic politics and activism became one of the “chapters” in Evans Chan’s 2016 documentary Raise the Umbrellas. As we discussed earlier, after the implementation of the National Security Law in 2020, the political powers became more visible and tangible, and both Anthony Wong and Denise Ho faced charges. The queer move towards “real” politics has been costly, not only literally—in losing the mainland market and (partly, but certainly not entirely) audience—but also in partly losing one’s freedom of speech within the context of Hong Kong. As for the mainland market, Anthony explained:

I could still work in the mainland after my coming out, it’s only after the Umbrella Movement that I couldn’t. (…) I think it’s a loss. Whether to them or to us, it’s a loss. But that’s life, there’s nothing we can do. (…)It’s not like I choose not to go to mainland, I can’t. If I can be assured of my safety and freedom, I am most willing to.

As we already alluded to and will further elaborate in Chapter 6, a ban can never be complete; the influence of Tat Ming continues to resonate, also in mainland China. Even the act of banning itself is paradoxical, as it alerts audiences to the sensitivity of the object or subject being banned, thus possibly triggering their curiosity. And to satisfy that curiosity it only takes a VPN account. As Anthony asserts:

But then I also think even when I can’t go to mainland China, I may still have my influence. People can’t really be locked up, they will look for inspiration. I don't want to think too much of myself, but if I do have some influence, I would imagine the fact that I can’t go there may have its impact as well.

Tat Ming has been at the forefront of a queer politics in Hong Kong, first in articulating a politics of invisibility, opacity, and ambiguity, and then, as by shock, moving towards a politics of visibility in the coming out of Anthony Wong in 2012. We read this as a powerful move in which queer theory is challenged by reality. But the years after do make us also more hesitant in univocally embracing this reading of Tat Ming’s queer politics. An earlier version of this chapter, written around 2015, ended with our affirmative claim that the alignment between queerness and politics prizes open a promising LGBTQ+ space with clear direct political implications as testified by the Umbrella Movement. His subsequent move towards, for lack of a better word, “real politics” during the Umbrella Movement and afterwards, intersected with his queer politics. Lucetta Kam opens her article on the involvement of Anthony Wong and Denise Ho in the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement of 2019, with the 2020 Tat Ming concert she attended:

The Tat Ming concerts took place in a very depressing social atmosphere. They bore the burden of reigniting hope, of telling Hong Kong people to add oil. In a short span of three hours, the audiences and Tat Ming co-created a space for dissenting voices, at the same time opening up a podium that doesn't forget queer politics and gender troubles (Kam 2022, 32).

Confrontational politics has moved backstage since 2019, and we agree with Kam, as this book attests to, that popular music constitutes an important resilient form of cultural activism. However, developments after 2019 force us to reconsider our hopeful conclusion. First, when we move back to mainland China, we witness increased control over the allegedly bad influence of K-culture, including its effeminate aesthetics. In 2021, both boy bands, as well as celebrity fan cultures, have been cracked down for being unruly and chaotic, and specifically, “effeminate men” (niang pao娘炮) are deemed part of an “abnormal aesthetics.” Consequently, earrings worn by male celebrities were pixelised in entertainment shows (Sohu 2019; Song 2022). As Shuaishuai Wang writes (2021 online), “using the Chinese derogatory slur ‘niang pao’—literally, ‘girlie guns’—Chinese cultural authorities explained that they were rolling out a rule to purge ‘morally flawed celebrities’ in order to ‘correct aesthetics’ in ‘performing styles’ and ‘wardrobes and makeups.’” Second, whereas foreign NGO’s in the early 2000s paved a way for what is termed embedded activism (Ho and Edmonds 2007), their activities have been increasingly restricted since 2017, (Feng 2017). “The institutional environment for foreign and domestic civic actors in China has changed significantly over the past decade” (Holbig and Lang 2022, 595), making it more difficult for feminist and queer organisations to survive. These legal changes, in tandem with tightening censorship, radically reduce the space for public articulations of LGBTQ+ cultures and feed into an enhanced homophobia (Tan 2023, 148). While such overt regulations against effeminate masculinities and strict laws against foreign NGO’s are not (yet) enacted in Hong Kong, the National Security Law has effected a dramatically shrinking space for any kind of activism.

With hindsight the worries raised by Kong et al., in 2015, were justified, perhaps for different dynamics. In a review of activist practices in Hong Kong, which marks the post-2012 years tentatively as a new wave of tongzhi movement, their piece concludes that “[i]ncreasing queer visibility in the political arena may pose new challenges for Hong Kong and the tongzhi movement” (Kong et al. 2015, 200). They predicted a societal backlash from conservative religious communities; but what we have witnessed is more how “real” politics creeps back into queer politics. This may, ironically, inspire a move back towards the opaque and the ambivalent, towards a politics of invisibility and disguise. Jia Tan refers to such politics as one of masquerade. In her words, “masquerade, with its connotations of disguise and performing, can be understood at once as both submission and disruption to the dominant social orders” (2023, 17). The ambivalent aesthetics of Tat Ming as analysed in this chapter can be read as articulations of a queer sonic masquerade. Hong Kong of the 2020s requires a different politics when compared to the 2010s. What and how these politics will look, sound, and feel like is unclear. But it will bear the traces of masquerade, of ambivalence, of coming out, of rebellion, of occupation, and above all, of resilience. For now, we are holding our breath, hoping for other times, hoping for better times.