[Greyson]

April 4, 2011
Police Raid Shanghai Gay Bar and Detain More than 60

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING—More than 60 patrons and employees at a gay bar in Shanghai were swept up in a police raid early Sunday morning and held for more 12 hours, according to the state media and several of those detained.

Shanghai Daily, a state-owned English language newspaper, said the police were investigating reports that a male go-go dancer had been performing a “pornographic” show at the bar, named Q Bar, which recently opened on the city’s revitalized historic waterfront.

A man answering the phone at the local police station where the detainees were held declined to answer questions on Monday evening.

The raid, which coincides with one of the most concerted government crackdowns on dissent in a decade, sent a chill through China’s burgeoning gay community, which in recent years has grown self-confident despite intermittent harassment from the authorities. Gay activists say they cannot recall an incident in which so many people were taken into custody in one fell swoop.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1997 and officially removed from a list of mental disorders in 2001 although it remains largely taboo, and invisible.

During the past two years, organizers in Shanghai have tried to stage a low-key gay pride festival, although on both occasions the authorities have ordered the last-minute cancellation of several events — including social mixers, film screenings and a play performance — without explanation.

After bursting into the bar shortly after 1 a.m. on Sunday, the police allowed foreign patrons to leave but took almost everyone else to the Xiaodongmen police station, where they were photographed, questioned and held without food or water until the following afternoon, a number of those detained said.

A few complained of rough treatment and at least one man said he was told to sign a statement saying the performers had danced lewdly— a statement he said was false. “They asked me whether the dancer wore transparent underwear and if people were putting money in his underwear,” another man, who gave his name as Xiaobai, said in a phone interview Monday.

News of the raid quickly spread on microblogs, partly fed by indignant postings from those who had been detained. “What law have we broken just drinking at a bar?” one man asked in a posting after his release. “If there was any problem with the bar, why let it operate in the first place?”


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/world/asia/05shanghai.html?ref=world