Even in relatively cosmopolitan Beijing, gay people rarely come out
is an accountant at a multinational firm. At night he can sometimes be found quietly sipping a cocktail at Destination, his club-cum-cultural centre. On China’s most popular navigation app, Baidu Maps, the venue is listed as a “comrade bar”. That does not mean it is a watering hole for Marxists. Comrade is Chinese slang for gay.
Since Mr Yang opened the club in 2004, just three years after China ceased to classify homosexuality as a mental disorder, the venue has become a beacon for gay Chinese across the country. Destination was one of the first places to aim explicitly to attract gay customers. Today there are several such venues in Beijing as well as in other big cities. But Destination is unusual for being open every day. It also stands out for its longevity and enormous size.
Originally the club was a ground-floor room with a disc-jockey’s booth in a building near the Worker’s Stadium in north-eastern Beijing, a once-quiet residential area that is now full of bars with exotic names such as Golden Age, Heaven’s Supermarket and Superlife Lounge. Destination has since taken over the three storeys above. On the first is a hallway with several adjoining rooms, each of which can fit 30 people. Customers chat on their plush couches.
Originally Mr Yang, a native of Hong Kong, saw the club as a place to indulge his love of pop music. As the only foreign pupil at boarding school in England, he had been “picked on, 24/7”. Such music was an escape. He has since amassed thousands of records ands. His partner jokes about coping with this “trash collection” when Mr Yang dies.
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