It is generally argued that male homosexuality was reasonably tolerated in ancient and Imperial China (Hinsch 1990; Samshasha 1997). However, the colonial government made buggery a crime in Hong Kong in 1842. In English law, buggery is a generic term for both sodomy (between two men or between a man and a woman) and bestiality (between a man or a woman and an animal) (Lethbridge 1976: 300—306). Hong Kong followed English law closely. The death penalty for buggery, for example, was abolished in 1861 in England and in 1865 in Hong Kong; the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, dealing with acts of ‘gross indecency’ between males, was made into law in Hong Kong in 1901. The colonial government, however, did not follow suit with the UK’s Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which decriminalised male homosexual conduct in private. It is believed that homosexuality was not even perceived as a social problem by the population before the 1980s and thus the government had no intention of changing the law as such a move would have been considered too ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’. Chinese homosexuals were highly discreet under British rule, and the few more ‘visible’ and ‘outrageous’ homosexuals were mainly Europeans who were usually sent back home, with their contracts not renewed, or encouraged to resign (Lethbridge 1976: 306—10). It should be noted that male rather than female homosexual conduct was the main concern in all these legal changes.
The majority of the Hong Kong population (over 90 per cent) is Chinese. Ho (2004) argues that the colonial government employed various means to depoliticise Hong Kong in response to the influx of refugees and immigrants from China since 1949. One of the strategies was to block major access to civil rights and prioritise economic development which only granted civil rights that related exclusively to market rights. Moreover, the colonial government treated social welfare as a residual concept, with the underlying principle of charity and benevolence. Hong Kong Chinese thus sought help from their families, voluntary agencies, or the market, rather than from the government, to satisfy their welfare needs. Under British rule, with the conditions of laissez-faire capitalism and a high land-price policy, Hong Kong Chinese families developed extraordinary discipline for hard work, fierce competition, and tight control over family members in order to improve family livelihood and wealth, which is famously characterised by Lau (1982) as ‘utilitarianistic familism’. Ong (1993: 753—62), however argues that this ‘utilitarianistic familism’ is actually a colonial product which she calls ‘family biopower’. It is this family biopower that shifted the site of governance from the state to the family. Moreover, ‘family biopolitics’ not only encoded a series of family practices and ideologies that regulated economic, productive, and hardworking Chinese bodies, but also disciplined healthy, reproductive, and heterosexual bodies: the disciplined father, the sacrificing mother, the filial son, and the dutiful daughter in post-war Hong Kong. This largely explains why most Hong Kong tongzhi, especially the first tongzhi generation (those who were born before the 1950s), were highly discreet and always worked within the parameters of the family institution. They mainly found others in public spaces (public toilets, railway stations, streets) or in a few bars or clubs with substantial gay clientele (e. g., Disco Disco, Wally Matilda, Dateline) (Kong 2012).
Public debate about homosexuality suddenly came to the surface when the Scottish police inspector John MacLennan, who was employed by the colonial police force at the time, was charged with acts of gross indecency and then committed suicide in his apartment in 1980. Some observers, however, suggested that his death was a murder resulting from a police cover — up, which raised media attention and brought into question the justice and integrity of the colonial government. The colonial government responded by appointing a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the case, and charging the Law Reform Committee of Hong Kong with reviewing laws governing homosexual conduct. The Commission of Inquiry concluded that the case was one of suicide in 1981, with the Law Reform Committee publishing a report in 1983 recommending that male homosexual conduct should be decriminalised (Ho 1997: ch. 1; Chan 2007: 38-45).
If the Stonewall Riot in New York in 1969 signified a formal beginning of the LGBT movement in the US, the MacLennan Incident in Hong Kong in 1980 shared the same significance in paving the way for the tongzhi movement in Hong Kong. The incident was an opportunity for different social sectors to examine the prevalence of homosexuality and evaluate the appropriateness of existing laws governing homosexual conduct (Wong 2004: 200).
This decriminalisation of male homosexual conduct debate involved three main issues: whether homosexuality was scientifically proven to be normal, whether homosexuality was a ‘Western’ disease not found in traditional Chinese (family) culture, and whether homosexual activity was a human rights issue. The debate involved many parties. Among the most visible was the Joint Committee on Homosexual Law, an anti-decriminalisation alliance formed in 1983 by Choi Yuen-wan, an evangelical medical doctor, and made up of 31 pressure groups consisting mainly of social workers, teachers, and church leaders. A loosely structured alliance arguing for decriminalisation was also formed, consisting of a group of academics, journalists, progressive thinkers, the Hong Kong Human Rights Commission, and a few gay men (Ho 1997: Ch. 3). Religion (particularly Protestantism and Catholicism) and Chinese tradition (in the name of the Chinese family) were two major weapons used by members of the anti-decriminalisation coalition to present their arguments, while the pro-decriminalisation alliance used the language of democracy and human rights to advance their own arguments. After a decade-long debate, a law decriminalising male homosexual conduct was passed in 1991. The final move to decriminalisation was believed to have been a response to the newly introduced Bill of Rights and the urgent need to speed up legal and democratic reforms in the aftermath of the 1989 June Fourth Incident in China (also known as the Tiananmen Square
Massacre), rather than an endorsement of gay rights or recognition of gay lifestyles by the government (Ho 1997: 75-80; Chan 2007: 39).
The 1980s thus marked the first wave of the Hong Kong tongzhi movement. The relevant parties focused on the conduct-based claim that consenting male homosexual adults should have the right to have sex in private. It should be noted that very few gay men came out in the debate to fight for their own rights. So the coming out of tongzhi identity was almost absent from this process and the right for gay men to engage in consensual sex in private was the primary concern. The first wave of Hong Kong tongzhi movement was thereby a movement without tongzhi identity and symbolised the politics of privatisation which confined tongzhi rights to the sphere of ‘private individual rights’ rather than ‘human rights’ (Kong 2011: 50).