A note before getting into it
I do not usually chase current events, and I have never treated writing as something that needs to follow a schedule. When I have something to say, I write it down; when I do not, I leave it alone. But what happened on July 7 ended up pulling together several things at once: the date itself was sensitive, a small but widely discussed incident took place, and that incident triggered a fierce argument in one of the group chats I am in.
Any one of those would have been enough to write about on its own. Put together, they are harder to ignore. So I am recording what happened and laying out my own view of it.
Everything below reflects my personal judgment. Since the subject is contentious and the discussion in the group chat became heated very quickly, that is probably worth making clear from the start.
What happened on July 7
During the night leading into July 7, a number of WeChat public accounts run by university-affiliated LGBT groups were all changed to “Unnamed.” In a reading group chat, one member posted the news and asked what everyone thought.
Article link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/bBI-DBeD5vuCeG_z_plP2g
Backup link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210707003943/https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/bBI-DBeD5vuCeG_z_plP2g
The responses were probably not what that person had hoped for. Most replies, whether calm or aggressive, approved of the shutdown: “good riddance,” “well done,” “serves them right,” and similar reactions. Mixed into that approval was open hostility toward gay people as a group.
That quickly turned into direct confrontation. At first the disagreement stayed at the level of opinion. Before long, though, one participant lost patience and began cursing at the other side, which pushed the exchange into something much uglier.
Then someone noticed that this person’s profile picture appeared disrespectful toward revolutionary martyrs, and several people immediately shifted their attention to that. The discussion nearly turned into a full-scale verbal brawl.
After that, the center of gravity gradually shifted back to homosexuality itself.
In the end, the group owner stepped in to mediate, some members left the group, and the argument finally subsided.
Below is a very long screenshot showing the main course of the incident.
A small clarification about the screenshot: the names “Don’t Confuse Set Theory with Logic” and “The Complement of A Is Not the Negation of A” refer to the same account at different times; the person whose display name is partially masked was the group owner.
On homosexuality
I have explained my broader stance on homosexuality and same-sex marriage elsewhere before, so here I will focus on a few supplementary points.
The biological plausibility of homosexuality
One view I hold is that natural selection does not operate only at the level of the individual. Groups matter too. If homosexuality persists as a real and recurring human phenomenon, then that at least suggests that whatever traits are associated with it are not necessarily harmful to the continuation of the human population as a whole.
One explanation sometimes offered is that people who do not need to invest their resources into producing and raising their own children may be able to devote more time, material support, and energy to helping siblings or other relatives raise theirs, thereby improving those children’s chances of survival. Research is often cited in support of related ideas—for example, findings that men with older brothers are more likely to be homosexual.
If we speak in terms of genetic relatedness, an individual shares about 50% with parents or full siblings; about 25% with grandparents, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, or half-siblings; 12.5% with first cousins; and 6.25% with second cousins.
Take a common example: if a homosexual person helps raise the children of a full sibling, the resources they contribute are indirectly helping continue only about 25% of their own genes. But from the standpoint of the larger group, children receiving doubled care may be more likely to survive, especially under harsh conditions or scarcity. In that kind of setting, such a mechanism could be highly beneficial to the survival of the whole group. By contrast, if everyone is preoccupied only with having and raising their own children under those same conditions, that may be less favorable for the group overall.
The idea that group-level pressures matter can also be illustrated in other human traits, such as hatred or revenge. If someone attacks you, then from a narrowly individual standpoint the safest strategy may be not to retaliate: revenge consumes time and energy, carries the risk of death, and may bring no direct benefit to you personally. But at the group level the picture changes. If you never strike back, the attacker may conclude that you and your group are easy targets and attack again. If hatred drives retaliation, the chance of repeated aggression may fall. Even if the avenger dies, the wider group may still benefit.
The social position of homosexuality
No matter how popular certain forms of homoerotic pop culture may now be, and no matter how accepting some people or online communities appear, homosexuality remains a highly sensitive subject.
A few basic questions are worth asking: Is homosexuality really discriminated against? Is the target of discrimination the entire gay population, or only some individuals? Is the discrimination coming from a few people, or from society as a whole? The answers are not all the same, and that difference matters.
One analogy may help explain what I mean. Some people enjoy foods with strong smells—luosifen, stinky tofu, durian. For those who like them, eating them is perfectly natural, and they should be free to do so. But for people who cannot stand the smell, merely being near that food can be unpleasant.
So if someone eats such food within range of others who find the smell unbearable, those others may not respond warmly.
Would lovers of pungent food necessarily say they are being discriminated against? Would people form organizations around the slogan that those who eat luosifen and those who do not should enjoy equal rights? Would those who hate the smell insist that liking such food is an illness that needs treatment, or question whether it conforms to biology?
As for pungent food, there is an easy compromise: eat it at home, or in a place meant for it. Nobody needs to object. But if someone insists on eating it in a hotpot restaurant, on a high-speed train, or in a shared dorm room—and not only eats it themselves, but keeps aggressively recommending it to friends and coworkers—then resentment is not hard to understand. In that case, what others dislike is not the person’s existence, nor necessarily the group they belong to, but the act of bringing something they find unbearable directly into shared space.
If that analogy makes sense, then so does a certain reading of homosexuality’s real social position, along with an explanation for why many people who say they cannot accept homosexuality are not especially friendly toward it.
Who is right and who is wrong?
Strictly speaking, it is hard to call either side simply “wrong.” A homosexual person is more easily attracted to the same sex; that in itself is not a moral fault. Likewise, people who oppose homosexuality or feel disgust toward it are not necessarily acting out of some freely chosen malice; in many cases, that aversion is simply what they feel.
But reality is more tangled than that.
Many people who say they hate homosexuality do not necessarily reject the mere fact that homosexual people exist. What they cannot tolerate are those who behave in ways they see as flamboyant, transgressive, shameless, or socially disruptive while presenting themselves under the banner of homosexuality. That may include indecent conduct in public, online or offline; constant emphasis on one’s identity as a sexual minority in order to demand validation; or using that identity as a shield after doing something others regard as contemptible.
On the other side, many people who loathe “anti-gay” voices may in fact be reacting only to those who mock, insult, verbally abuse, or concretely discriminate against sexual minorities. They may not object nearly as strongly to someone whose position is simply: “I dislike homosexuality, but if it does not affect me, I will not treat homosexual people differently from anyone else.”
My view of the crackdown on those LGBT public accounts
To be frank, I am not in a strong position to judge the incident itself. I had not followed any of the accounts on the list, and before this happened I had not even heard of many of them. In fact, I had not subscribed to any WeChat public accounts centered on homosexuality at all. So I cannot claim first-hand knowledge of what those specific accounts, or accounts like them, were regularly posting.
If I had to guess, their content probably included things like sexual health information for same-sex activity, advice on same-sex intimacy, emotional essays aimed at gay readers, LGBT-related news, recommendations for films or literature, invitations to offline gatherings, promotion of products for gay consumers, discussion or promotion of overseas surrogacy services, and updates about HIV/AIDS research and treatment.
If that was more or less the extent of it, then some people might still find the material excessive. But given how public accounts work, anyone who does not subscribe to them is unlikely to see their content constantly pushed to them. For people who had chosen to follow those accounts, such material would not have been surprising. And considering how cautious wording usually is on such platforms, it is difficult to imagine that content of that kind alone would easily lead to a coordinated mass shutdown.
That is why it does not seem unreasonable to suspect that there were other causes behind this round of action.
From one angle, that possibility is not easy to dismiss.
There is a common rule of thumb in workplaces: those in power often prefer to draw in people at the bottom, because they are easier to win over. More broadly, people who see themselves as vulnerable or marginalized are often more likely to be moved by those who speak for them—and therefore easier to make use of. In the case of gay communities specifically, when organizations speak on their behalf, even in a limited way, that support can feel like warmth in the middle of winter.
Whether such communities were in fact being used, and if so in what way, is something I have not investigated. So I do not want to push that speculation too far.
What can be said is that the “Unnamed” incident did not only expose the fragility of campus LGBT spaces on Chinese social media. It also revealed how quickly public discussion of homosexuality can collapse into hostility, moral panic, and mutually reinforcing resentment. The shutdown itself was one event; the reactions around it were another.