Coming Out in China: The True Cost of Being Gay in Beijing (Time)
After he left Tianjin last year, Zhang Xiaobai realized that homosexuals are not "rare birds."
When he was still in primary school, Zhang (not his real name) found that he was attracted to boys. Particularly after each physical-education class, when he looked at the sweat-soaked back of a boy he liked, he felt dazed. The feeling got stronger when he entered high school and fell secretly amorous of a tall and strong classmate. He was always eager to approach him and became fascinated with the occasional moment of physical contact.
That was in the mid-1990s, when the term homosexuality was far from ordinary in Chinese people's life. Zhang couldn't find anyone similar to him, and he thought he was strange. He couldn't tell his parents, sure that they wouldn't be able to understand. "I was trying to hide it from everybody. Nobody told me this is normal," Zhang recalls. "I felt like I was sick."
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Complete article at Time : http://ti.me/oZk2x8
