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GENDERS AND SEXUALITIES
IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

The Everyday Lives of

Gay Men in Hainan
Sociality, Space and Time
James Cummings
Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences

Series Editors
Victoria Robinson
Centre for Women’s Studies
University of York
York, UK

Diane Richardson
Department of Sociology
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
The study of gender and sexuality has developed dramatically over recent
years, with a changing theoretical landscape that has seen innovative work
emerge on identity, the body and embodiment, queer theory, technology,
space, and the concept of gender itself. There has been an increasing focus
on sexuality and new theorizing on masculinities. This exciting series will
take account of these developments, emphasizing new, original work that
engages both theoretically and empirically with the themes of gender,
sexuality, and, crucially, their intersections, to set a new, vibrant and
contemporary international agenda for research in this area.

More information about this series at

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 James Cummings

The Everyday Lives

of Gay Men in Hainan
Sociality, Space and Time
James Cummings
Department of Sociology
University of York
York, UK

Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences

ISBN 978-3-030-92252-8    ISBN 978-3-030-92253-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92253-5

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 Acknowledgements

This book would not exist were it not for the generosity of the thirty-one
men who shared their lives and experiences in such detail and with such
care during our interviews, nor would it exist were it not for the openness
of these men and others in Hainan to my participation in their everyday
lives. I will be forever thankful and indebted to them. Special thanks are
due to those named in this book as Ah Ji, Lao Fan and Ah Tao for their
friendship, guidance and inspiration.
The doctoral thesis upon which this book is based was completed under
the erudite supervision of Diane Richardson, Janice McLaughlin and
Joanne Smith Finley. Their intellect and care are embedded in every page
of this book and have profoundly shaped my development as a researcher.
It was an honour to work under their supervision and I am deeply grateful
for that experience. This book was prepared for publication under the
mentorship of Cathrine Degnen, whose careful reading of its chapters and
sensitive engagement with its arguments have sharpened my own under-
standing of what this book is about and what it means to explore questions
of being and living cross-culturally. Thanks are due to former colleagues at
Newcastle University, especially Emma Calvering, Elaine Campbell, Lisa
Garforth, Joel Minion, Madeleine Murtagh and Sabrina Qiong Yu, and
also to Stevi Jackson at the University of York for the support they have
variously given me. I am also grateful for the support of Richard Gao and
Wang Cai at Hainan Tropical Ocean University.
The friendship of Ursula Balderson, Li Yang and Pardis Asadi Zeidabadi
was vitally sustaining as we completed our doctoral research together.
Special thanks are due to Li Yang, who has been a constant source of

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

inspiration, intellectual challenge and personal support. I am also grateful

for the friendship of Zhang Hailin and his pivotal role in facilitating my
fieldwork in Hainan.
The love and care of my partner Jerry Chen has seen me through the
toughest times in the making of this book and has taught me so much
about what it means to live in relational co-dependence. My family have
also been an important source of support.
Finally, my sincere thanks go to the Economic and Social Research
Council, for funding both the research upon which this book is based and
the time taken to prepare it for publication, and also to Palgrave Macmillan
for their support in the publication process.
 About the Book

This book explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island
province of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Taking an ethno-
graphic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men con-
structed and experienced ways of ‘sexual being’—as gay, homosexual,
tongzhi and/or in the scene and what these meant for the ways of living
they saw as possible within a socio-cultural, political and material context
characterised by pervasive heteronormativity. Conceptually, this book is
structured around the themes of sociality, space and time. Empirically, it
explores what it meant for gay men in Hainan to ‘come into the scene’,
how internet and mobile technologies shaped their everyday processes of
sexual categorisation and how these men negotiated orientations and dis-
orientations towards the future in relation to cultural and material pres-
sures to follow heterosexual life scripts of marriage and reproduction. In
exploring these issues, this book also blurs boundaries between the con-
ceptual and the empirical, centring its analysis on the complex conceptual
frameworks through which gay men in Hainan make sense of their lives.
As one of the few studies to address non-heterosexual lives in the PRC
beyond the largest, most affluent and most globally connected cities, and
the first to do so in Hainan, this book offers vital insights into the living
and curtailment of non-heterosexual lives in diverse settings. It also
advances universal concerns for understanding how certain ways of being
and living are enabled and curtailed in living together with others through
powerful conditions of uncertainty and precarity.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Initial Notes on Terminology   7
Margins, Scales and Specificity   9
Everyday Life as Subject, Theory and Method  15
Sexual Meanings in Everyday Life  21
The Problem of ‘Sexuality’  23
Queer Indeterminacies and Powerful Matter  25
Thinking Sexuality Cross-culturally  28
Thinking Sexuality Ontologically  32
Structure of the Book  36
Bibliography  40

2 Contexts 47
Introduction  47
Hainan  48
Hainan Scene(s)  54
Histories of Tongxinglian/Homosexuality  64
The Republican Era  64
The Mao Years  65
The Reform Era  67
Contemporary Gay, Tongzhi and Homosexual Identities  69
Modern, Cosmopolitan and Transnational Identities  71
Family and Filial Piety  73

ix
x Contents

Fieldwork/Becoming Someone in the Scene  77

Bibliography  86

3 The Scene/Quanzi 91
Introduction  91
The Scene as a Floating Signifier  94
Coming in Through Sexual Desires and Practices 103
Coming in Through Social Interactions and Intimacies 109
Coming in Through Knowing and Being Known 115
Being in the Scene and Being Gay, Homosexual and/or Tongzhi  122
Conclusion 127
Bibliography 128

4 Being On-and-Off-line131
Introduction 131
Finding Others Online 133
Finding Selves Online 139
The Internet and Sexual Modernity 143
Locating Selves and Others On-and-Off-line 148
Being Seen 155
Conclusion 163
Bibliography 164

5 Life-Times167
Introduction 167
The Future? 169
Life and Death Under Heteronormative Confucianism 180
Essentialism as a Narrative of the Future 191
Accommodating Marriage 203
Conclusion 210
Bibliography 211
 Contents  xi

6 Conclusion215
Dis/Orientation and Un/Certainty 219
Social and Material Relationalities 222
The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan 225
Bibliography 231

Bibliography233

Index247
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Map showing the location of Hainan in the PRC 49

Fig. 2.2 Map showing the location of Hainan in the PRC
(Das steinerne Herz/Wikipedia 2011) 50
Fig. 2.3 View of Haikou’s central business district 52
Fig. 2.4 Baocheng, capital of Baoting County, central Hainan 53
Fig. 2.5 Street scene from a small town in Chengmai County, northern
Hainan53
Fig. 2.6 Pedestrian bridge recognised as the first gay meeting place in
Haikou54
Fig. 2.7 Gay meeting place in Yuefang Park, Haikou 55
Fig. 2.8 Former location of Tianchi gay bar in Sanya 57
Fig. 2.9 A quiet Wednesday night at Tianchi  58
Fig. 2.10 Representative map of Ah Hui’s village 63
Fig. 3.1 Conceptual content breakdown of quan 95

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Let’s begin with a joke. An eleventh-century Chinese poet, a leading

scholar of gender and sexuality in the People Republic of China (PRC),
and a young gay man wearing leopard-print cropped trousers and a sleeve-
less black shirt walked into a bar. The bar was hidden from outside view on
the first floor of an abandoned building on the north bank of the Sanya
River and accessed through an unlit passage between a teashop and a con-
venience store. The building was initially built as a hotel, but it now stands
empty, save for the various small businesses that have colonised the first
two floors. The bar is called Tianchi; it is the only gay bar in Sanya, a city
on the south side of Hainan, an island province of the PRC; it is also one
of only two gay bars in the province. Inside the bar, as ‘The Great Artist’
by Taiwanese popstar Jolin Tsai plays in the background, our first charac-
ter, the poet, began to muse on his journey to Hainan and his life there so far:

As soon as I arrive at Hainan, the first thing to do will be to make a coffin,

the second to make a grave. […] Between the end of summer and the begin-
ning of autumn, everything rots. How can a human being who is not made
of rocks or metal stand this for long? […] It occurs to me that a long life
depends merely on adjustment to the surroundings. A salamander can live
in the fire and a silkworm’s eggs can be preserved on ice. Sometimes by
mental control I keep my mind a blank and make my consciousness ­transcend
the material existence, whether it be in freezing cold or under a scorching

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
J. Cummings, The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan, Genders
and Sexualities in the Social Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92253-5_1
2 J. CUMMINGS

sun. In this way, it shouldn’t be difficult to live over a hundred years. Su

Dongpo (c.1097) in Lin Yutang, The Gay Genius (1948, pp. 322–333)

The poet is Su Dongpo. Having fallen foul of the ruling elite, he set sail
from the southern coast of the Chinese mainland in 1097, crossed the
Qiongzhou Straits and arrived in Hainan to begin a life in exile. As he
prepared to cross the 30 km stretch of water that physically and symboli-
cally separates Hainan from the mainland, he considered his journey to be
an orientation towards death. Having arrived in Hainan and found, as he
had feared, that the threat of decay and death was ever-present, he ques-
tioned how it was possible for anyone to live a life beyond the straits. He
concluded that such a life was possible only through concerted efforts at
adjustment to one’s surroundings and transcendence of the material con-
ditions of one’s existence. The poet was not speaking for himself but
through the voice of his biographer, Lin Yutang, writing in 1948. We
might assume that the poet should have felt at home in Tianchi, as we are
told by the biographer that the poet is a ‘gay genius’. But, alas, when the
biographer described the poet as ‘gay’, he was not using that word in quite
the same ways as it is used by other men who frequent Tianchi. For the
biographer, the poet’s ‘gayness’ was his insistence on making the best of
the difficult circumstances in which he found himself; ‘that was part of the
secret of the gay genius’ (ibid., p. xii).
I will return in a moment to the other two characters who entered the
bar with Su Dongpo, but first a necessary sidenote: I came upon the biog-
raphy of Su Dongpo on one of many desperate online searches for texts in
which the words ‘Hainan’ and ‘gay’ both appear. Very little has been writ-
ten on non-heterosexual lives in the PRC beyond those cities figured as
the forefront of national ‘modernity’—Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou—
and this book is the first study of non-heterosexual lives in Hainan, a
region long considered a peripheral backwater in state and popular imagi-
nations. It would seem that enduring perceptions of Hainan as distant,
different and backward, which filled Su Dongpo with such dread as he set
sail for the island, have played their part in ensuring that, in more recent
history, research concerned with a topic so ostensibly ‘modern’ as the lives
of gay men has never ventured across the straits. Imagine my excitement,
then, at finding a text entitled The Gay Genius with a chapter dedicated to
Hainan and, subsequently, my disappointment upon noting the publica-
tion date and subject matter. Yet, with much irony, the only other pub-
lished text about the everyday life of a ‘gay’ man in Hainan raises questions
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

that are also central to this book: what are the possibilities for living a gay
life in Hainan? How might such a life be conceived and practised within
the constraints and affordances of material existence? And what makes the
difference between a life lived in the direction of an infinite future and one
lived as an orientation towards death?
I begin this book with an excerpt from The Gay Genius not to suggest
any empirical connection between Su Dongpo and gay men in contempo-
rary Hainan; the parity of their concerns and their shared affinity with the
word ‘gay’ are largely coincidental. However, as most ethnographers know
well, a coincidental encounter can often prove illuminating. I came upon
this text not by chance per se but by force of the apparently oxymoronic
pairing of ‘Hainan’ and ‘gay’. The absence of previous research in which
these two words are collocated led me to the obscure biography of an
eleventh-century poet written in 1948 by a scholar for whom the word
‘gay’ had no connection to something we might call ‘sexuality’. That this
text should resonate, if not empirically at least aesthetically, with the lives
of men who call themselves ‘gay’ in Hainan today serves as a reminder of
the impossibility of knowing immediately what it means for someone to
call themselves or to be called ‘gay’ in a particular time and place. It is an
injunction to remain open to myriad historical legacies and to unexpected
ways in which gay lives may be encountered, understood, practised and
curtailed.
The life and times of Su Dongpo is not the only text in which the words
‘Hainan’ and ‘gay’ find themselves in close proximity. My searches
retrieved a much more contemporary and empirically relevant book. Lisa
Rofel’s Desiring China (2007) is a brilliant and highly influential account
of gender and sexual formations in the PRC amidst shifts away from
Maoist socialism and towards neoliberal capitalism from the early 1980s
onwards. In a chapter on emergent gay identities, Rofel writes that ‘[i]n
the mid-1990s, Chinese metropolises witnessed a veritable explosion of
people who call themselves gay’ (ibid., p. 86). This explosion is analysed
as enmeshed with the PRC’s postsocialist transition to a market economy,
the construction of new modes of neoliberal subjectivity and transforma-
tions in what it meant to ‘be Chinese’ vis-à-vis the PRC’s re-connection
with global capitalism and geo-politics. In this conjuncture, Chinese gay
identities are seen to have emerged in the tension between desires for both
national and global belonging; they signal identifications with an imagined
‘global gayness’ articulated in relation to the socio-cultural and political
conditions of life in the PRC. But where might Hainan fit into this story?
4 J. CUMMINGS

To put it bluntly, it does not. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to

Hainan appears in the opening chapter of Desiring China when Rofel
recalls:

Spring 1986. I needed to get out of Hangzhou and out of the intensity of
fieldwork as everyday life. I decided to take a road trip of sorts, actually a
train trip. I had heard that the island of Hainan off the south coast of China
was beautiful and so headed there. After several days on a train heading
southwest, I managed to get on a boat to cross over to Hainan. (ibid., p. 36)

Here too, irony abounds. It turns out that Hainan is not at all absent
from the literature on contemporary gender and sexual formations in the
PRC; it is mentioned in one of, if not the, most influential texts in the
canon. It is, however, not part of that text’s subject matter but an escape
from it. This is not a criticism of Rofel. Hainan is certainly beautiful and,
knowing well the ‘intensity of fieldwork as everyday life’ myself, her deci-
sion to escape to Hainan is understandable. Moreover, Rofel’s keen eth-
nographic eye was not blind to the part that Hainan played in the early
years of the PRC’s postsocialist reform. In the brief reference to her holi-
day in Hainan, she notes the voluminous presence of luxury cars on the
island awaiting shipment to the mainland, alluding to Hainan’s former
role as a gateway for illegal imports. However, we are not treated to fur-
ther discussion of the region and Hainan is not part of Rofel’s analysis of
postsocialist gender and sexuality in the PRC, which, while based primarily
on fieldwork in Hangzhou and Beijing, positions itself at the national scale
as research into gender and sexuality in ‘China’.
So, the eleventh-century poet was and was not a gay man in Hainan and
the leading scholar of gender and sexuality in the PRC did and did not
include Hainan in her research. But what of the young gay man wearing
leopard-print cropped trousers and a sleeveless black shirt? Well, he came
to Tianchi one evening in November 2014. It was his second or third time
in the bar, having recently discovered it; indeed, due to his gregarious
nature and eccentric style, he was fast becoming a well-known face in the
Sanya scene. That same evening, I had just finished dancing to Rollin
Wang’s ‘Bad Sister’ with Xiao Yi, one of the drag performers at Tianchi,
and was switching from leatherette hotpants back into jeans and flip-flops.
The manager of the bar came into the dressing room and said that a cus-
tomer at table fourteen had requested that I drink with them. I had
recently started working at Tianchi; three nights a week, I performed
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

‘male aesthetic’ (nanzhuang) in the bar’s ‘cross-dressing show’ (fanchuan

biaoyan) and drank with the customers. Trying to remember where table
fourteen was, I hurriedly pulled on my jeans, buttoned-up the black waist-
coat that was the other half of my Bad Sister ensemble and rushed out into
the smoke-filled darkness of the bar. It was a Friday night, and the bar was
busy. I squeezed my way through the patrons who were sitting on stools
or standing in circles around high tables, shaking plastic cups filled with
dice before slamming them down on the tabletops, taking shots of warm
beer, eating sunflower seeds, smoking and paying minimal attention to the
on-going show. On the other side of the runway that protruded from the
stage and cut the bar in two, a young man dressed in leopard-print cropped
trousers and a tight-fitting, sleeveless black shirt beckoned me over—table
fourteen.
I scrabbled over the runway, pulled up a stool and sat down at the table,
only then noticing that there was another man there, who smiled at me
shyly. ‘You don’t need pay attention to him, it was me who asked you to
come and drink’, said the man in leopard-print cropped trousers. He con-
tinued, ‘I just said to the boss, “I want to have a drink with that for-
eigner”’. I smiled, nodded and raised my glass to take a sip of beer before
asking what his name was. 'Ah Ji', he replied. After a few rounds of dice-­
guessing and shots of beer to break the ice, Ah Ji leaned in so that I could
hear him over the blaring music and shouted, ‘I’d heard the there was a
foreigner dancing here, but I didn’t believe it before I came today. The
boss must have a lot of money’, ‘I’m not getting paid’, I replied. Ah Ji
laughed and asked, ‘then why are you dancing in this rotten bar?’ I
explained that I was doing ‘research about the lives of gays in Hainan’ and
was working at the bar as a way to meet people. With exaggerated disinter-
est, Ah Ji tilted his head to one side and glared out across the bar at the
other patrons. He then rolled his eyes, turned back to me and said, ‘gays
in Hainan don’t have lives’. Intrigued by the bluntness of his statement
and feeling a little defensive, I retorted, ‘aren’t you a gay in Hainan? Don’t
you have a life?’ Ah Ji smiled, ran his hand over his heavily hair-sprayed
bouffant hair and replied, ‘I’m different’. He then prompted me to take
another shot of beer.
Taking Ah Ji at his word, it would appear that gay lives in Hainan are
not only absent from existing research on gender and sexuality in the
PRC, they are absent altogether—an impossible pairing, at least for those
who are not ‘different’ like Ah Ji. This is only one example of the many
times in which the idea of researching the lives of gay men in Hainan was
6 J. CUMMINGS

challenged as misguided by people I met during fieldwork. Often, this

would be followed by suggestions along the lines of: ‘if you want to
research gay lives, you should go to the big cities’. This was also not the
only instance in which this challenge came in the form of a claim that gay
men in Hainan do not have lives. In the early stages on my fieldwork, I
found such comments illogical and I dismissed them defensively. How was
it possible for someone like Ah Ji, who described himself as ‘gay’ and was
sitting in a gay bar surrounded by other gay men, to claim with such
resolve that gay men in Hainan did not have lives? My defensiveness was
heightened by a growing sensation, in those early months, that I did not
really know what my research was about. I had not adopted a familiar
sociological concept on which to hook my research; neither ‘identities’,
‘subjectivities’, ‘selves’ nor ‘communities’ sat comfortably, nor could they
be easily translated into Mandarin. In my efforts to be a ‘good’ ethnogra-
pher, I held these concepts at arm’s length and anxiously awaited the
emergence of something more situated. In the meantime, ‘lives’ seemed a
sufficiently broad placeholder through which to articulate the focus of my
research. Whatever else ‘being gay’ meant to men in Hainan who described
themselves as such, surely it was safe to say that this was part of their lives?
To be told that gay men in Hainan do not have lives seemed to suggest
that my research was entirely without a subject of inquiry.
As time went on, however, and especially as Ah Ji and I became close
friends, I came to see his assertion that ‘gays in Hainan don’t have lives’
not as illogical but as insightful. When taken seriously, this claim opens up
a series of vital questions: if ‘gays in Hainan don’t have lives’, then what do
they have? If ‘a life’ is not the trajectory along which being gay is practised,
in what other times and spaces does being gay become possible and
through what other modes of being are lives lived? And in what ways was
Ah Ji ‘different’ such that he understood himself, in contrast to others, as
living a gay life? Ah Ji’s short, blunt and powerful comment was a correc-
tive to my assumption that ‘a life’ could stand as the minimal ontology
upon which the specificities of context and culture are built. In claiming
that ‘gays in Hainan don’t have lives’, Ah Ji pointed to the fact that ‘a life’
is not essential, universal or certain, nor is ‘a life’ beyond the dynamics of
power that shape material and imaginative realities. His comment threw
the question of gay lives in Hainan into uncertainty. However, rather than
denying the last shred of a subject for this book, he placed the uncertainty
of a life at its centre.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

So, to the punchline of this joke. An eleventh-century Chinese poet, a

leading scholar of gender and sexuality in the PRC and a young gay man
wearing leopard-print cropped trousers and a sleeveless black shirt walked
into Tianchi. Each, in their own way, asserted the uncertainty of gay lives
in Hainan. For the poet, they were impossible; for the scholar, they we
irrelevant; and for the young gay man in leopard-print cropped trousers,
‘life’ was not the framework through which being gay was experienced,
not unless one was ‘different’ like him. And yet, each in their own way
provides a point of departure for this book as an exploration of gay lives in
a region long relegated to the fringes of ‘modernity’ and ‘civilisation’, one
thus far absent from research on gender and sexuality in the PRC and one
that appears to demand a range of powerful questions concerning the
meaning, production and regulation life. In the spirit of irony that charac-
terises these three opening stories, and which pervades the chapters that
follow, this book both is and is not about the lives of gay men in Hainan.
It is, to the extent that this book is about some of the everyday contexts in
which gay lives in Hainan become thinkable and liveable. It is not, to the
extent that the possibilities for living gay lives in Hainan are often uncer-
tain. Fundamentally, this book is about everyday struggles to practise cer-
tain modes of life within uncertain and precarious contexts. In this sense,
while this book is empirically grounded in the everyday experiences of gay
men in Hainan, the insights gained through an exploration of those expe-
riences are relevant to universal concerns for the production, regulation
and curtailment of diverse ways of being and living.

Initial Notes on Terminology

In the review article Queer Studies in the House of Anthropology, Tom
Boellstorff (2007, p. 18) begins:

There is no more symptomatic, productive, and vexing starting point for

this discussion than the impossibility of naming the very subject of study
[…] This impossibility constitutes not a problem to be solved but a kind of
syntax error or event horizon reflecting the complexity of the subject under
consideration.

What Boellstorff refers to is the politics of terminology in cross-cultural

research on sexuality. This includes, as we shall see, the question of whether
‘sexuality’ is itself a useful category in cross-cultural analysis. Something
8 J. CUMMINGS

similar can be said of this book in two respects. Firstly, while I have used
the term ‘gay’ so far to refer to the men whose lives are the subject of this
book, these men also referred to themselves as ‘tongzhi’ (同志), ‘homo-
sexual’ (tongxinglian, 同性恋), ‘people in the scene’ (quannei ren, 圈内
人), or more ambiguously as ‘someone on this side’ (zhe fangmian de ren,
这方面的人) and ‘this kind of person’ (zhe zhongren, 这种人). Such terms
were often used interchangeably. However, particular terms do sometimes
take on specific meanings when used in certain contexts. I use ‘gay’ in the
title of this book and most often throughout the following chapters
because, when asked directly during interviews, this was reported by the
majority of the men in this book to be their preferred self-description in
relation to ‘this side of themselves’. ‘Gay’ was also the term that circulated
most often and most comfortably in everyday conversations. That said,
asking interviewees to specify their preferred terms of self-description felt
like an imposition of artificial certainty and was often followed by asser-
tions of a general disinterest in questions of terminology. Some scholars
have sought to distinguish between the terms ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’ and
‘tongzhi’ (Chou, 2000; Rofel, 2007, pp. 102–103) as they are used in the
PRC along lines discussed in the following chapter. However, the extent
to which the men in this book used these terms interchangeably means
that their specificity should not be over-emphasised. These issues of termi-
nology speak of the complexity and uncertainty that characterise the self-­
understandings and everyday lives of gay men in Hainan. In this book, I
seek to work within this complexity and foreground both the interchange-
ability and uncertainty that can characterise these terms, while also address-
ing moments in which they take on specific and powerful meanings.
I follow gay men in Hainan in using a range of terms both interchange-
ably and in contextually specific ways. Most often, I will speak of ‘gay men
in Hainan’, though this should be read as shorthand for ‘men who under-
stand themselves as gay, tongzhi and/or homosexual’. I will use all three
terms when emphasising the terminological non-specificity of the collec-
tive sexual categories constructed and experienced by the men in this
book; italics are used to complicate the straightforward alignment of these
terms with the use of ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ in English-language con-
texts. Sometimes, I will include ‘… and/or in the scene’ as also inter-
changeable. However, as Chap. 3 will discuss, the meanings of being gay,
homosexual and/or tongzhi and being in the scene are relational but are
not always interchangeable. In discussing specific interview excerpts, I will
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

use whatever terms were used by the interviewee in that particular instance.
When discussing the work of other scholars, I will use their terms.
The second respect in which ‘the impossibility of naming the very sub-
ject of study’ presents itself is the uncertainty that surrounds the position-
ing of ‘gay lives’ as the subject of this book. This is less a question of
terminology than one of ontology (though the two are always linked). As
highlighted in the injunction to take seriously Ah Ji’s powerful denial of
gay lives in Hainan, gay lives are not a pre-existing subject of enquiry in
this book; they are an open-ended question; they are, everywhere, in states
of becoming, in constant processes of actualisation, or else, in contexts of
denial and curtailment. In this sense, I am concerned less with terms of
sexual self-description than with the processes and contexts that underpin
the words that precede self-descriptions: the words ‘I am …’ (woshi). This
book is about how gay men in Hainan construct and embody ways of
‘sexual being’, about how they come to say ‘I am …’, about what this
enables and what it complicates. It is about how such ways of being are
and are not oriented within social relationships, space and time as ways of
living. As such, any time I use the words ‘gay lives’, I am referring not to
an established, essential or singular object, but to a complex range of mul-
tiple, unfinished and uncertain processes, key aspects of which are explored
in detail in this book. I am also not only referring to gay lives in the affir-
mative but also to the denial of certain ways of living and, as we shall see,
to gay deaths. In a similar vein, it is not only the notion of gay lives that is
uncertain in the positioning of ‘gay lives in Hainan’ as the subject of this
book; the extent to which those lives are specific to Hainan is also an
open-ended question, as elaborated below.

Margins, Scales and Specificity

The appearance of Hainan in Desiring China as somewhat beyond the
preview of gender and sexuality research is suggestive of two geographic
imaginaries. The first is specific to Hainan’s discursive construction within
the PRC. As Su Dongpo’s damning account attests, the island has long
been imagined as other to ‘civilised China’ (also see Feng, 1999). Since
the late 1980s, discourses of distance, isolation and otherness that have
historically surrounded Hainan have been reworked amidst efforts the re-­
package the island as a domestic tourist destination. In contrast to many
of the PRC’s other peripheral regions, and in spite of an ethnically diverse
population, discourses of ethnic otherness are not a dominant feature of
10 J. CUMMINGS

the construction of Hainan in the popular geographic imagination. In

regions such as Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, amongst
others, exoticising images of ‘ethnic minority culture’ drive tourism and
regional branding. The imposition of these discourses upon non-Han
populations, as well as inter-ethnic inequality and conflict, have attracted
scholarly attention, including some research on intersections of ethnicity,
gender and sexuality (Gladney, 1994; Kehoe & Hall, 2017; Schein, 2000).
Touristic representations of Hainan are distinct in the extent to which they
turn not on the otherness of a local population but on a notable absence
of human activity, bar the activities of visiting tourists. Popular representa-
tions of Hainan are replete with unspoilt beaches and tranquil coconut
groves, while the island’s population of over nine million is often rendered
invisible. Such images feed into a long history of representing Hainan’s as
a ‘cultural desert’ (Feng, 1999, p. 1045) and a site of little general histori-
cal, sociological or anthropological interest, let alone one of relevance to
understanding dynamics of gender and sexuality in the PRC.
These dynamics are confounded by the overwhelming focus of existing
research on non-heterosexual lives in the PRC on the cities of Beijing,
Shanghai and Guangzhou. As such, the exclusion of Hainan from the
existing literature is not a special case. Rather, it is symptomatic of the nar-
row geographic focus of existing research primarily on the PRC’s biggest,
wealthiest and most globally connected cities. As such, there is little schol-
arly knowledge of non-heterosexual lives beyond these sites, the identities,
relationships, discourses or other epistemological and ontological forma-
tions through which they are lived and how these may be shaped by socio-­
cultural, economic and political disparities between regions and sites
within the PRC. This, in turn, reflects a wider pattern in global sexuality
scholarship, where attention has primarily been paid to sexual lives and
cultures in ‘global’ cities and much less to ‘ordinary’ cities, towns and
rural settings (Brown, 2008). Moreover, early research conducted in
Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou tended not to foreground the specific-
ity of these field sites, instead positioning itself as research into non-­
heterosexual lives in ‘China’ (Chou, 2000; Ho, 2010; Rofel, 2007; Jones,
2007). This further occluded considerations of geographically distinct
dynamics of gender and sexuality by scaling-up the experiences of non-­
heterosexual people in these specific (and themselves disparate) locations
as nationally representative. While such analyses have, at times, been quali-
fied as specific to ‘urban China’ (Ho, 2010), more nuanced qualifications
are necessary in order to open up considerations of how non-­heterosexual
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

lives are lived (or not) in diverse ways in relation to the differing condi-
tions of everyday life not only between urban and rural areas of the PRC
but between urban sites of differing size, wealth and global connectivity
and between differing cultural-linguistic regions.
Such specificity has begun to emerge in recent studies. Elisabeth
Engebretsen’s (2014) deeply ethnographic account of the lives of queer
women in Beijing adopts a geographic and temporal focus on Beijing in
the period 2004 to 2006, recognised as ‘a particular period of relative
political permissiveness and relaxed official censorship and control in
Beijing’ (p. 5). Similarly, Bao Hongwei (2018) has explored ‘how gays
and lesbians in Shanghai imagine cosmopolitanism in different ways’
(p. 41), situating his observations specifically in relation to Shanghai’s sta-
tus ‘as the “gay capital” of China’ (p. 37); he also explores the differing
affordances for community activism and cultural production between
Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. These accounts, while still located
within the PRC’s leading cities, acknowledge the specificity of these sites
and thereby leave open the possibility that the socio-cultural, political and
material contexts that shape non-heterosexual lives elsewhere in the PRC
may be vastly different. Wei’s (2012) work on ‘tongzhi space’ in Chengdu,
Sichuan Province, south west PRC, also stands out within the literature.
Wei explores relationships between sexual identities and social changes
wrought by forty years of national economic and social reform. However,
he explores these dynamics within the context of Chengdu’s changing
urban landscape, local leisure cultures and the shifting spaces within which
men seeking men find one another. Wei explores the disappearance of
local piaopiao or ‘wandering men’ identities in relation to shifts in the
spaces used by men seeking men, from public parks and teahouses, to gay
bars and on to information communication technologies. Wei’s research
emphasises the importance of recognising that contemporary sexual iden-
tities are constructed amidst broad processes of social change unfolding in
complex and disparate ways across specific and diverse contexts that are at
once local, regional, national and transnational. Further broadening the
geographic field of view, recent studies have addressed non-heterosexual
lives in Shenyang (Fu, 2015) and Dalian (Zheng, 2015), both in Liaoning
Province, north east PRC. Through its foregrounding of Hainan, this
book significantly advances this turn to sub-national scales of enquiry and
an emerging appreciation of the diversity and specificity of non-heterosex-
ual lives in disparate locations within in the PRC. At the same time, it
extends the range of contexts to which attention has been paid not only by
12 J. CUMMINGS

addressing a historically, and to a large extent still presently, marginal

region but also by providing insights into gay lives in city, town and village
settings therein. As such, this book departs from the metro-centric focus
of the above noted studies, which remain centred on major urban contexts
and regional metropoles.
This said, while this book is certainly about the lives of gay men in
Hainan, the extent to which those lives can be understood as specific to
Hainan per se is somewhat uncertain. Specific discourses of ‘Hainan’ were
not a pervasive or pressing concern for the men whose lives are the subject
of this book, nor did these men speak of regionally specific identities and
practices, such the piaopiao in Wei’s study of Chengdu. As such, and given
that my desire has always been to explore issues that are of particular con-
cern to gay men in Hainan themselves, regional specificity is not a ­question
I dedicate much time and space to in this book. It is, however, likely that
regional specificity pervades this book in more subtle ways. This is espe-
cially the case when taking into consideration the centrifugal histories and
uneven distributions of sexual community activism and AIDS prevention
work in the PRC, which have been most highly developed and resourced
in the PRC largest and wealthiest cities and have been absent, at least until
very recently, from more peripheral sites and regions such as Hainan
(detailed in the following chapter). Given the powerful role of such organ-
isations and networks in the dissemination of codified sexual discourses,
such as those pertaining to sexual health, identity, morality and modernity
(see Jones, 2007; Rofel, 2007; He & Rofel, 2010; also Chap. 5), their
absence from Hainan may be one reason for the pervasive sense of uncer-
tainty and definitional ambiguity that will come into view over the chap-
ters of this book as characteristic of the lives of many gay men in Hainan.
I return to this consideration in the conclusion to this book.
Further, as a complex, multiple and intersectional condition, marginal-
ity may clearly shape non-heterosexual lives in myriad ways beyond uneven
distributions of discourses and resources connected to community organ-
isations and activist networks. Hainan can be considered marginal vis-à-vis
the PRC’s largest cities along multiple axes of inequality and differential
access to social, economic and cultural capital (discussed in more detail in
the following chapter). This shapes the conditions of everyday life for
everyone living in the region, including non-heterosexual people. Indeed,
in his work on the social and material tenets of heteronormativity in the
PRC, Timothy Hildebrandt (2018, p. 4) has noted that ‘the family pres-
sure on men and women in poorer provinces to get married, procreate,
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

and take care of their parents is especially high’. This would seem to be the
case for some gay men in Hainan, given the extent to which their experi-
ences of social and familial pressures to marry women and have children
were shaped by material concerns for their own care arrangements in later
life—a key point of discussion in Chap. 5. Yet, it is also clear that within
both socio-economically marginal and central regions, there are vastly dif-
ferent positions of privilege that may be occupied. For example, a wealthy
factory owner in Danzhou, northwest Hainan, who regularly visits his
boyfriend in Taiwan, with whom he intends to have a child by contracting
a surrogate mother in Thailand, may have more in common with an
equally economically privileged and geographically mobile gay man in
Beijing than with an agricultural worker caring for his aging parents in a
village in Qionghai, on Hainan’s east coast, who worries about his care
arrangements in later life if he does not marry and have children. The lat-
ter may, in turn, have more in common with a gay migrant worker in the
affluent mega-city of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, who struggles to
make ends meet amidst high living costs and paying remittances to his
rural family (see Luo, 2020 on this context). In paying attention to such
intersectionality, this book contributes to recent considerations of the
ways in which non-heterosexual lives in the PRC are enabled and curtailed
by socio-economic privilege and inequality (Liu, 2019; Luo, 2020). At
the same time, this complicates the positioning of regional socio-economic
marginality as a distinctive feature of non-heterosexual lives in Hainan.
In this book, I take Hainan’s cultural, political and socio-economic
marginality and exclusion from existing research on gender and sexuality
in the PRC as points of departure. I recognise this regional focus as a sig-
nificant contribution to both PRC-specific and global literatures on gen-
der and sexuality, specifically non-heterosexual lives and identities, which
remain weighted toward a focus on ‘global’ cities considered the vanguard
of national and global sexual cultures at the expense of ‘ordinary’ cities,
towns and rural settings (Stone, 2018). I also hope to show, overall, that
there is much to be gained by increasing the range of locations in the PRC
to which researchers of gender and sexuality direct their attention. And
yet, with the above concerns in mind, regional marginality or specificity
are not key concerns in my analysis, nor is ‘Hainan’ necessarily the most
salient scale at which this book is pitched. In the following chapter, I retell
the story of shifts in my own geographic imagination of the scales of rel-
evance to the lives of gay men in Hainan and how this book emerged from
scalar, methodological and empirical uncertainties. I will also return to
14 J. CUMMINGS

questions of region, scale and specificity in the conclusion chapter. For

now, however, it will suffice to say that in reading the title of this book as
much attention should be paid to ‘the everyday’ as to ‘Hainan’.
The everyday is the ambiguous scale of analysis that I adopt. It is a way
of remaining open to the possibility of regional or local specificity without
submitting to a cartographic impulse (Boellstorff, 2007; Weston, 1993)
that would make the documentation of specificity a goal in itself or decide
in advance along which comparative axis specificity could be assessed.
Instead, the everyday signals a turn of attention toward multiple and
entwined geographic scales, social dynamics and historical legacies as these
arise in and shape quotidian practices of living. A focus on the everyday
does not assume in advance that any particular set of social, economic,
political or geographic dynamics will be of necessary relevance; the thorny
issues of scale, context and content are deferred in favour of an ethno-
graphic injunction to wait and see. This is not a claim to objectivity or
passivity on my own part. As I hope to convey in the following chapter, I
have tried to trace in detail my own conceptual and emotional investment
in the processes by which this book arrived at the set of issues it analyses;
moreover, I take my own ethnographic practice as part of the everyday
interactions and relationships analysed in this book. Rather, a concern for
the everyday is a commitment to illuminating the ways in which lives are
lived across multiple scales of varying intensity and along multiple lines of
varying urgency; it is to pursue an uncertain and moving target of analysis
with the aim not of hitting the bull’s eye but of following lines of inquiry
that are drawn in pursuit.
Taking the everyday as a primary scale of analysis allows me to hold in
tension the parallel but somewhat contradictory aims of this book. As the
first study of gay lives in Hainan and one of the few studies to explore non-­
heterosexual lives beyond the PRC’s leading cities, the most straightfor-
ward and concrete aim of this book is to provide detailed and nuanced
insights into those lives, the issues by which they are shaped and the modes
of self-understanding through which they are lived. To this extent, my
investment in the everyday does not preclude a concern for what may be
specific to the lives of gay men in Hainan, in socio-economically, culturally
and politically marginal regions of the PRC or even specific to the PRC
vis-à-vis sexual lives and identities in other national and global contexts.
However, if specificity is to emerge at a particular scale, it will do so only
as corollary to the primary task exploring, in depth, themes and dynamics
that shape the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan. The second, less
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

straightforward, more abstract and, for these reasons, I believe more pow-
erful aim of this book is to ask what new light such insights into the every-
day lives of gay men in Hainan can shed on broad, abstract, even universal
questions of how diverse ways of being and living become thinkable, prac-
ticable and sustainable, or are rendered unthinkable, impossible and
unsustainable at the level of lived, embodied and intersubjective experi-
ence. The everyday, then, also functions as a scale of analysis that is at once
inseparable from the immediate, the tangible and the specific and yet facil-
itates interrogation of abstract, conceptual and universal questions. As
outlined towards the end of this chapter, this adoption of the everyday as
an empirical-and-conceptual scale of analysis positions this book to make
a range of contributions to broad literatures and multiple lines of enquiry.
Deeping knowledge on the diversity and complexity of non-heterosexual
lives in the PRC through inquiry into a marginal and hereto unexplored
region is an important contribution made by this book, but it is one
amongst many that will come into view across its pages.
Amidst these proclamations of investment in the ambiguity of the
everyday—as subject, theory and method—an ethnographic vignette will
provide some necessary clarifications as to what this looks like in practice.

Everyday Life as Subject, Theory and Method

One afternoon in December 2014, as heavy rain lashed Hainan’s east
coast, I sat in a train station in the small city of Jiaji, Qionghai County,
waiting for my delayed return train to Sanya. Bored, I pulled my phone
out from my pocket and opened Blued, the PRC’s most popular app for
men seeking friendship, romance and sex with other men. Within minutes,
I received a message from someone nearby, his profile adorned with an
image of a bare chest:

Name: Ah Tao
Distance: 450 m
Age: 29
Height: 165 cm
Weight: 56 kg
Sex role: 0 (bottom)

The rain eased, my train was re-scheduled, and I returned to Sanya. Ah

Tao and I continued chatting and, after I explained to him that I was
16 J. CUMMINGS

researching ‘the lives of tongzhi in Hainan’, he suggested that I returned

to Qionghai to see ‘the places in the scene’.
Some days later, Ah Tao and I were messaging as I sat on the sofa in the
changing room at Tianchi. Beibei, one of the drag performers, drifted by
and swiped my phone from my hands, ‘Let’s see who you’ve been hook-
ing-­up with recently, Miss Kang’ (as she affectionately called me). ‘Dee
la!’, she laughed, ‘not him!’, ‘who?’ ‘How do you know Ah Tao?’ ‘We
started chatting when I went to Qionghai. Do you know him?’ ‘I know
him! He’s rotten! Oi, Miss Kang, you know a lot of people, you’re rotten
too!’ I pressed Beibei for how exactly she knew Ah Tao, but, as always, she
was careful not to tell me any more than she thought appropriate for me
to know. I was intrigued. I knew that Beibei had great knowledge and
experience of life in the scene from the position of a seasoned gay bar per-
former in both Sanya and Haikou. The people she knew were often con-
nected to these worlds. With Ah Tao’s offer to show me places in the scene
and the knowledge that he and Beibei were connected in some way, I
planned my return to Jiaji.
A few weeks later, I was standing in a park in the centre of Jiaji watching
middle-aged women dance in formation to music blaring from a loud-
speaker. ‘Ah Kang! Let’s go! I’ll take you to see the place where the gays
go to play mahjong’.1 I turned around to find Ah Tao hurrying towards
me, scrambling over a low hedge. His nervous excitement had the air of a
first-time tour guide keen to show off his local knowledge. We set off
heading north through the park, past a sculpture of a rotund bronze baby
suspended in a looped metallic wave. Pointing towards me, a man sat
alone on a low wall surrounding the sculpture shouted out in Hainanese,
‘Hey, Ah Tao, who’s that guy?’ ‘He’s just a friend’, Ah Tao shouted back
coyly. We carried on out of the park and through the empty stalls of a
market, the ground still strewn with blood-stained feathers and tattered
plastic bags, remnants of the day’s business. We then turned into a dark
alley, wide enough at ground level to traverse on foot, bicycle or moped;
from the second floor up, the buildings jutted out on both sides, leaving
only a grey-purple strip of darkening sky above the smell of cooking oil
descending from extractor fans.
‘When we get there, don’t say any gay stuff’, Ah Tao warned me, as we
approached a shop in the cut-out corner of a building at an intersection
with a yet-narrower alley. The floor of the small convenience store had

1
‘Ah Kang’ is my Mandarin Chinese name.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

been cleared to make room for three electric mahjong tables. Around one
table, sat four women; around another, four men; and around the last,
three women and one man. Ah Tao skirted round the tables and stopped
to rest his elbows on one of the men’s shoulders. ‘Dee la! Not your lucky
night!’ he laughed, as he looked down at the man’s mahjong pieces.
‘You’ve not been down here for a while’, said one of the women, without
raising her eyes from the line of ivory and green rectangles in front her.
‘I’ve been busy’, Ah Tao answered. ‘Busy doing what? You’ve no wife, no
children’, the woman replied. ‘Nobody wants him’, chimed one of the
men. ‘How about you introduce someone to me?’ Ah Tao retorted, as he
skirted back around the tables. Standing by my side, he nudged me with
his elbow and whispered in my ear, ‘all the men here are gay’, ‘really?’,
‘yeah, look at the guy over there, he’s so girly (niang)’, ‘do the others
know?’ ‘No, they…’ Before he could finish, one of the women inter-
rupted, ‘Why don’t you have your foreign friend introduce a Western girl
to you?’—less as a genuine question than an intrusion into our whisper-
ing. Sensing her suspicion, Ah Tao said his goodbyes and we left the store.
As we walked away, Ah Tao continued, ‘They don’t know; the owner of
the shop doesn’t know either, maybe he suspects something; when those
gays get together, they’re pretty obvious, but he’s not going to say any-
thing, it’s good for his business’.
We continued our walking tour, coming out of the alley and onto a
main road. ‘An anchang lives in there’, Ah Tao explained, as he pointed
down a stairway that descended from the side of the road into the dark-
ness of a basement. I had heard people talk about anchang in Sanya; these
were men who maintained a phantom presence in the scene: they may be
present online, but few people had ever met them face-to-face, for those
who had, it had been only a fleeting encounter. I asked Ah Tao if he knew
the man, ‘I saw him once’ he replied. We continued walking until Ah Tao
nudged me again and tilted his head in the direction of two young men on
the other side of the road, ‘Those two are in high school; they’re a cou-
ple’. ‘You know so many people’, I said with astonishment, ‘I know every-
one in Qionghai’, Ah Tao laughed.
We stopped for dinner a few hundred metres up the road. I asked Ah
Tao how it was that he knew Beibei. He explained that he had worked as
a waiter at Yinhe, a gay bar that existed in Haikou from 2010 to 2013, and
that Beibei had performed there. At the request of his parents, Ah Tao had
returned to Qionghai in 2013 to assist his family with farm work. It was
then that I realised that I was in fact meeting Ah Tao for the second time.
18 J. CUMMINGS

I had been in Haikou in 2013 and had visited Yinhe several times; I
recalled talking and drinking with a waiter who I now recognised as Ah Tao.
‘Shall we go back to the park? They should be there now. I’ll take you
to drink tea with them’. We walked back along the main road, past the
home of the anchang, back through the alley, past the store ‘where the
gays go to play mahjong’, and arrived at the park. Rather than enter the
park, we walked along its western boundary, skirting scores of parked
motorbikes that made the pavement almost impassable. We then stopped
outside a laoba (old dad) teahouses. ‘This is also a meeting place, but it
doesn’t look like anyone’s here today’, Ah Tao noted. There was nothing
about the teahouse that marked it as different from others; an open front,
white tile walls, the floor a sea of scattered peanut shells, patrons typical
laoba, men in their forties, fifties and sixties, some alone, some in groups,
some with their wives, all carefully scanning white slips of paper printed
with red numbers, searching for their lucky six as they sipped green tea
and coffee with condensed milk. ‘Let’s go back to the park; we can come
to drink tea tomorrow night.’ We then turned around to head back to
where our tour had begun.
Testimony to Ah Tao’s skill as my guide, the evening we spent together
touring the Jiaji scene encapsulated so many of the themes that have
become the subject matter of this book in its orientation towards the
everyday. What concepts were at work as ways of making sense of the
people we met and the places we visited? Who came to count as gay, as
tongzhi, as homosexual, as in the scene, or as anchang? How were such cat-
egorisations made and how did they shape the ways in which people
related to one another and experienced the world around them? How
were such processes of sense-making contoured by the spatial and material
contexts in which they occurred and the frames of time along which they
played out? And why was it that as much as our activities centred on Ah
Tao’s illumination of the Jiaji scene, sharing his knowledge as a veritable
gay genius, they were also characterised by interruptions, omissions and
contradictions, by a pervasive sense that there was always something left
unsaid or beyond the realm of the sayable?
This is only one example of one particular evening. Granted, given the
fact that I was being taken on a tour of the scene, this vignette condenses
various people, places and practices which, under other circumstances,
may not appear as cohesive as they did under Ah Tao’s skilled guidance.
Nonetheless, gay men in Jiaji, as they likely do elsewhere in Hainan, do use
their phones in quotidian moments of boredom to find one another, do
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

meet most nights of the week to play mahjong in the cut-out corner of a
building along a dark alley, do move through the streets taking note of
other men and plotting their positions on maps of social and sexual rela-
tions and do gather in teahouses and parks to share stories and various
forms of bodily contact. The very fact that Ah Tao was able to put together
this tour points to the ways in which, through sharing and repetition, such
everyday practices coalesce into connected aspects of a collective imagina-
tion, a shared understanding of the places frequented, people known and
things done by gay men. Through repetition too, it would appear that
these everyday practices support not only social and spatial orientations,
but also ways of planning for the future; as Ah Tao noted, it did not matter
that there was no one to drink tea with on the particular evening of our
tour, we could always ‘come to drink tea tomorrow night’.
‘The everyday’, in this sense, is not only about the immediacies of
embodied experience but is also part of temporal perception, a matter of
the things that have happened or will happen that give content to both the
past and the future. To what extent, then, do such everyday practices
become the basis for the imagination of a certain kind of life? And, beyond
the finite scales of a day, a week or a month, to what extend can such tem-
poral orientations extend into an indefinite future? This latter question is
particularly urgent given that, as Ah Tao’s tour demonstrated, everyday
moments of gay life are also pervaded by interruptive heteronormativity;
these can come as mundane and aggressive remainders that ‘you’ve no
wife and no children’ or they may be more fundamentally disruptive, such
as Ah Tao’s parents request that he return to Jiaji. These questions con-
cern patterns of interaction between men who understand themselves as
gay, tongzhi, homosexual and/or in the scene, interactions within which
those same categorisations are established, mobilised and contested. They
concern how such patterns of interaction and the forms of self-­
understanding that they sustain make possible the imagination and prac-
tice of ways of living outside of the spaces, times and social relations of
heteronormativity. They also concern the ways in which heteronormativity
persists as a pervasive and powerful threat to such lives.
It is processes such as these that I refer to through the rubric of the
everyday and towards which I direct analytical attention in this book.
Given the complexity and multiplicity of these processes, however, I focus
specifically on three areas that were of particular concern to the men I
spent time with and interviewed in Hainan. These are: (1) the concept of
being in the scene and processes of coming into the scene; (2) the uses of
20 J. CUMMINGS

internet and mobile technologies and their relations to the embodiment

and spatial performance of sexual categories; and (3) how gay men imag-
ine and take up orientations towards the future in the face of pervasive
pressures to marry and have children. These appeared to be key concerns
given the extent to which they pervaded gay men’s everyday social interac-
tions and conversations and were discussed passionately in each of the
thirty semi-structured interviews I conducted with men in Hainan who
referred to themselves as gay, homosexual, tongzhi, bisexual and in the
scene. This book is an exploratory account of these everyday concepts and
contexts through which gay men in Hainan articulate understandings of
themselves as particular kinds of people living and not living particular
kinds of lives.
Openness to a range of issues that may come into view through an ori-
entation towards the everyday means that this book does not adopt a defi-
nite theoretical perspective. Instead, I draw variously from a wide range of
conceptual work that enables critical attention to questions of sexuality,
being and living from multiple aspects and cross-culturally. Conceptually,
this book is shaped by symbolic interactionist, Foucauldian, queer, femi-
nist and phenomenological perspectives, as well as recent methodological
discussions of ontology within anthropological literatures. With the pos-
sible exception of the latter (a point I will return to), these perspectives
suggest an overall alignment with constructionist understandings of gen-
der and sexuality. As will be seen over the chapters of this book, more than
a clearly articulated theoretical framework, a fragmented, multiple, con-
flictual and contradictory set of theoretical perspectives may be the most
appropriate toolkit for exploring lives that are themselves characterised by
fragmentation, multiplicity, conflict and contradiction. However, as well
as drawing upon these conceptual currents, I place them in dialogue with
one another, take advantage of their strengths and seeking to overcome
their limitations in enabling deep, multifaceted and powerful understand-
ings of the lives of gay men in Hainan. In doing so, this book provides
useful insights into the available conceptual tools for cross-cultural sexuali-
ties research and presents possibilities for their synthesis that might be
taken forward in future research. The following sections summarise key
aspects of the conceptual literatures that have shaped this book, with par-
ticular emphasis on the ways in which these literatures have opened up
sexuality to multiple lines of sociological and anthropological critique. I
also highlight the ways in which this book contributes to social theory and
methodological practice in gender and sexuality studies. Detailed discus-
sion of PRC-specific literatures is saved for Chap. 2. While the focus of
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

that chapter is ostensibly on ‘contexts’, I also attend to conceptual debates

on the social construction of sexuality and sexual identities in the PRC and
earlier periods of Chinese history and highlight the contributions this
book makes to these debates. Attuned to this blurring of the lines between
concepts and contexts, below, I outline key conceptual literatures in terms
of their historical development.

Sexual Meanings in Everyday Life

The everyday approach to sexuality that I have begun to sketch out above
takes inspiration from early work in the 1960s and 1970s by American and
British sociologists (Gagnon & Simon, 1973; Goffman, 1963; Jackson,
1978). This work was informed by symbolic interactionism and formed
part of a broader shift within sociology toward qualitative analyses of
everyday life. This shift also entailed a questioning of psychological/psy-
choanalytical paradigms of human behaviours and a turn of attention
towards the social determinants of individual self-understandings and
interpersonal interactions. Early sociological work on sexuality was also
motivated by the findings of the Kinsey Reports (Kinsey et al., 1948,
1953), which highlighted incongruities between the supposed mutually
exclusive sexual categories ‘homosexual’, ‘heterosexual’ and ‘bisexual’ and
people’s actual sexual desires and practices. These finding provided an
empirical impetus for rethinking dominant modes of sexual categorisation
as modes of social categorisation.
Symbolic interactionism, as developed by George Herbert Mead (1934)
and Herbert Blumer (1969), provided a theoretical perspective from
which sociologists could question notions of ‘innate drives’ that had been
the dominant framing of sexuality from both medical and psychoanalytical
perspectives (Richardson, 1984). While symbolic interactionism encom-
passes a broad range of theoretical orientations, it is premised on the guid-
ing assumption that humans interact with the world and each other on the
basis of the meanings that are invested in objects, people, places and activi-
ties and these meanings are, themselves, under constant negotiation within
social interaction (Plummer, 2000) From this perspective, sociologists
reconceptualised sexuality as a social phenomenon—a matter of the pro-
duction of meanings and the negotiation of self-understandings through
interactional processes of categorisation and narrative ordering (Jackson
& Scott, 2010a).
22 J. CUMMINGS

The notion of ‘sexual scripting’ introduced by Gagnon and Simon

(1973) was influential in providing a framework for conceptualising the
social construction of sexuality from an interactionist perspective. Gagnon
and Simon posited that this ‘construction’ takes place across three inter-
related scales: ‘the agentic individual, the interactional situation, and the
surrounding sociocultural order’ (Gagnon, 2004, p. 276). Upon this
basis, the notion of ‘sexual scripting’ offers an understanding of sexuality
that is social ‘all the way down’: from broad socio-cultural narratives that
define certain practices and bodily regions as ‘sexual’ and label some ‘nor-
mal’ and others ‘deviant’, to situated and embodied interactions between
individuals, to the internalisation of sexual categories and the provocation
of desires (ibid.).
While Gagnon and Simon explored a broad range of desires, practices
and identities under the rubric of ‘sexuality’, including heterosexuality,
much early sociological, interactionist work focused on (mostly male)
‘homosexuality’ (Richardson, 1984). Departing from psycho-medical
concerns for the ‘aetiology of homosexuality’, sociological approaches
were more ‘concerned with the transition to a homosexual identity […]
and determining what conditions permit a person to say ‘I am a homo-
sexual’ (Dank, 1971, p. 180). Mary McIntosh’s (1968) discussion of ‘the
homosexual role’ was an early attempt to theorise ‘being homosexual’ not
as an essential state but as an assigned and adopted label. McIntosh noted
that empirical evidence of people’s diverse sexual practices and desires
belied their exclusive categorisation as either ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosex-
ual’. As such, she suggested that practices of sexual categorisation served
to establish ‘a clear-cut, publicised and recognisable threshold between
permissible and impermissible behaviour’ (ibid., p. 183). McIntosh also
recognised that such categorisation, as much as serving to define ‘the
homosexual’ as ‘deviant’, also enabled resistance to such definition. The
capacity to articulate ‘deviant’ desires and practices through a collective
identity category was seen to provide the grounds upon which such ‘devi-
ance’ could be legitimised as ‘natural’ and ‘appropriate’ for someone
belonging to said category.
As Gayle Rubin (2002, p. 37) has noted, McIntosh’s greatest contribu-
tion was to historicize this ‘homosexual role’, recognising it as the product
of a specific historical, political and socio-cultural context. This move gave
rise to forms of historical analysis that took ‘homosexuality’ and ‘homo-
sexuals’ not as the latest iterations of an essential, transhistorical ‘same-sex
desire’, but as cultural phenomena and objects of knowledge specific to
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

their time and place. Following these insights, much sociological work on
sexuality has explored the ways in which shifting historical contexts give
rise to new sexual categories and modes of self-understanding (Weeks,
2010). Importantly, however, while sociological, interactionist approaches
foreground the historical specificity of sexual categories, identities, desires
and practices, the primary focus remains on the ‘obdurate empirical world’
(Plummer, 2003, p. 520). As such, while sensitive to broad historical con-
text, by centring on the production of meaning in situated, everyday inter-
actions, symbolic interactionism remains ‘a way of examining sexuality as
it is understood and practised by individuals in their everyday social lives
and interaction’ (Coleman-Fountain, 2014, p. 11).
In analysing the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, I take from the
interactionist tradition an emphasis on meaning and the ways in which it
is produced and put to work as people talk about themselves, about oth-
ers, interact and assume relational positions. This is evident in the atten-
tion I pay to self-understandings, how these are produced, articulated and
what roles they serve in establishing frameworks for making sense of the
world, one’s place in it and relationships within others. This interactionist
perspective brings into view the ways in which notions of being a particu-
lar kind of sexual person, similar to and distinct from others, can serve as
blueprints for the living of a particular kind of life, but, as we shall see, may
also call into questions other kinds of life or the notion of a life altogether
under certain conditions of power. At the same time, having emerged
from the Euro-American contexts noted above, interactionist lines of
inquiry cannot be taken up in a straightforward fashion but must be
reworked in light of historical, social, cultural and material specificities of
gay lives in Hainan. This requires consideration of specific Chinese histo-
ries of ‘homosexuality/tongxinglian’ and a critique of interactionism’s
investments in ‘sexuality’ as a circumscribable field of experience, in the
human as the author of meaning and in sense making, as opposed to illogic
and uncertainty. These latter concerns are explored below; the former is
returned to in the following chapter.

The Problem of ‘Sexuality’

Interactionism’s attentiveness to the everyday has been recognised as an
advantage of the approach over a more often-adopted focus on ‘the dis-
cursive construction of sexuality’ developed by Foucault (1978). While
Foucault’s work similarly posits the historical specificity of sexual desires,
24 J. CUMMINGS

practices and identities, it has been critiqued for its exclusive focus on the
institutional production of sexual discourses and for having little to say
about how such discourses are engaged and negotiated in everyday inter-
actions (Jackson & Scott, 2010b). The relationship between symbolic
interactionist and Foucauldian understandings of sexuality is worth fur-
ther consideration, especially as this will provide a useful preface to recent
anthropological discussion of ontology, addressed shortly.
There is considerable crossover between Foucauldian and interactionist
insights. In common with interactionists, Foucault (1978, pp. 105–106)
recognised sexuality as broadly encompassing ‘the stimulation of bodies,
the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation
of special knowledges, [and] the strengthening of controls and resistance’.
Both interactionist and Foucauldian perspectives reject notions of innate
sexual desires, potentials, or energies that are variously expressed or
repressed. Echoing McIntosh (1968), Foucault (1978, pp. 43–44) sug-
gested that sexual categories produced the subjects they claimed to name.
Such categorisation was seen as, at once, an act of incorporation into a
field of power and, by virtue of that incorporation, a pre-condition for acts
of resistance. Despite these similarities, there are subtle, though impor-
tant, differences between interactionist and Foucauldian notions of the
social construction of sexuality. These concern the disparate disciplinary
locations and contrasting motivations of these theoretical paradigms and,
consequently, the ontological status they afford to sexuality in relation to
the notion of social construction.
As noted above, for interactionist sociologists, the impetus for develop-
ing a sociological critique of sexuality was evident discrepancy between
essentialist sexual categories (homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual) and the
ways in which people experienced and reported their sexual desires, prac-
tices and self-understandings. As such, the interactionist understanding of
the social construction of sexuality emerged as a framework for explaining
inconsistencies within a field of human experience defined as ‘sexuality’.
Foucault, on the other hand, as both a historian and poststructuralist phi-
losopher, was primarily concerned with the emergence of the conceptual
category ‘sexuality’ itself. Foucault understood ‘sexuality’ not as an empir-
ical reality manifest in desires, practices and identities but as a power-laden
field of knowledge. He sought to explicate the emergence of ‘sexuality’ as
an object of medical, psychological and moral concern in nineteenth-­
century Europe. Foucault understood the emergence of ‘sexuality’ to be
part of wider shifts in the operations of state power from the regulation of
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

subjects through the threat of death to regulation through the administra-

tion of life, a mode of power he termed ‘bio-politics’ (1978, pp. 134–159).
What Foucault offers, then, is not an empirical theory of sexuality per se
but a theory of power as operating through the production of human
fields of concern and activity. ‘Sexuality’ is but one such field that Foucault
recognised alongside ‘health’, ‘sanity’ and ‘criminality’ (Foucault, 1963,
1967, 1977, respectively), as central to the production of governable, and
largely self-governing, subjects in modern nation-states.
From this Foucauldian perspective, to assert an empirical field of prac-
tice and experience that can be defined as ‘sexuality’ and offer an explana-
tory theory of its constitution is to be complicit in the regulatory
production and maintenance of that same field, regardless of whether
‘sexuality’ is conceived as a biological/essential phenomenon or as the
product of social interaction. This subtle distinction becomes important
when debates concerning the social construction of sexuality are translated
or, indeed, fail to translate into non-Anglophone cultural contexts. As
such, while I do not adopt a Foucauldian approach in this book, which
would entail much greater attention to macro-scale power dynamics and
the role of the state and other powerful institutions in mobilising certain
discourses towards the production of governable subjects (see Rofel, 2007
for such an analysis), Foucault’s account of sexuality is nonetheless pivotal.
I take from Foucault not a particular vantage point from which to approach
sexuality but an injunction to recognise ‘sexuality’ as the product of a spe-
cifically European history and to ask whether the object of analysis, here,
is in fact ‘sexuality’ at all. I return to this question shortly in light of rele-
vant anthropological literatures. First, thought, I turn to queer theory as
a possible source of conceptual resources for redressing interactionism’s
emphasis on sense making, at the expense of attention to the social func-
tions of illogic and uncertainty, and its centring of the human in meaning
making processes.

Queer Indeterminacies and Powerful Matter

Foucault’s work has been foundational to a range of constructivist or,
more aptly, deconstructivist critiques of sexuality since the early 1990s
working under the rubric of queer theory. Queer theory emerged from
critiques of unitary notions of sexual identity that came to circulate in the
gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements in the US and critiques of
the relationship between feminist politics and the category ‘woman’
26 J. CUMMINGS

(Seidman, 1994). Both of these issues were framed by a wider ‘postmod-

ern turn’ in continental philosophy characterised by increasing scepticism
of definitional certainty. Aspects of these critiques were initially mounted
by Black and ethnic minority activists and scholars who questioned the
assumed primacy of sexual and gender identities, as sites of unity and
oppression, over racialised and classed forms of belonging and exclusion
(Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983; Lorde, 1984). These concerns were devel-
oped into a general critique of the normative function of sexual and gen-
der identities.
Queer theorists have followed Foucault in recognising knowledge as a
site of power and in seeing power as producing subjects through the
deployment of discourses (Sprago, 1999). However, departing from
Foucault’s general critique of ‘sexuality’, queer theorists have largely
explored the regulatory function of binary logics of gender and sexual
identities. For Judith Butler (1990, p. 24), human subjects are formed
within a ‘matrix of intelligibility’ structured around the binary, interre-
lated pairs ‘man/woman’ and ‘homosexual/heterosexual’. For Butler, to
be an intelligible human subject is to be recognised as either ‘man’ or
‘woman’ and for this division to be reflected in both sexual desire and
sexual identity (ibid.). This normative relationship between gender and
sexuality is seen as instituted by ‘heteronormativity’: the naturalised
assumption that there are two genders, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and that these
‘opposite’ genders are ‘naturally’ attracted to one another (Butler, 1990,
1993). Within some queer work, ‘homosexuality’ is seen as a challenge to
heteronormativity (Edelman, 2004). However, given that the notion of
‘same sex desire’ reiterates the assumption that there are such things as
‘same’ and ‘opposite’ sexes/genders, concepts of ‘homosexuality’, ‘bisex-
uality’ and ‘heterosexuality’ are also seen to remain within a heteronorma-
tive ordering of gender and sexuality (Butler, 1993, p. 74).
Influenced by both Foucault’s conception of ‘discursive fields’ (1978)
and Jacques Lacan’s notion of ‘symbolic order’ (1977), ‘heteronormativ-
ity’ has largely been conceptualised within queer work as a cultural ideol-
ogy instituted through language and representation. In this respect, queer
approaches have been critiqued, especially by feminist and materialist soci-
ologists, for their inattention to the role of material inequalities in the
construction and regulation of gender and sexuality (Jackson, 2001). At
the same time, however, queer work has addressed material concerns that
may be beyond the remit of conventional sociological approaches, limited
by their emphasis on the production of meaning in human interaction and
 1 INTRODUCTION 27

by a conception of ‘the material’ that is limited to a critique of capitalism

and the gendered division of labour (Rahman & Witz, 2003). The notion
of heteronormativity as a pervasive symbolic structure that antecedes and
shapes our own constitution as human subjects has allowed some queer
theorists to go beyond humanist concerns to consider the ways in which
gendered and sexual subjectivities are instituted at ‘metaphysical’ levels.
This can be seen in queer work on the materialisation of bodies (Butler,
1993) the production of space (Halberstam, 2005) and the perception of
time (Edelman, 2004; Freeman, 2010). Together, these perspectives can
be considered as constituting a ‘queer phenomenology’ that explores the
production of gendered and sexual subjects as entangled with the produc-
tion of bodies and their orientation in space and time (Ahmed, 2006b).
While heteronormativity is figured as a symbolic structure within queer
work, the categories through which subjects become intelligible—‘man’,
‘woman’, ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, ‘individual’, ‘human’, amongst
others—are seen as unattainable ideals (Butler, 1990, pp. 43–44). Here,
the influence of Jacques Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism’ (1974) is evident,
as queer work questions the possibility of final, fixed and self-referential
meaning. Within queer theory, being (a man, a woman, gay, lesbian, an
individual, a human etc.) and identity are seen as matters of the citation of
normative ideals (Namaste, 1994). They are seen as always matters of per-
formance, never final actualisations. Following this logic, much queer
work has focused on cultural practices that are seen to expose the fragility
of being through performances of identities or non-identarian embodi-
ments of gender and sexuality that resist definitive categorisation within
the terms of gender, sexuality, race and humanity (Halberstam, 2011).
This emphasis on indeterminacy has been highlighted as distinguishing
queer work from interactionist accounts of the social construction of sexu-
ality (Green, 2007). Whereas interactionism has been seen to account for
social processes whereby people do align themselves with, and come to
embody, sexual and gendered meanings, from a queer perspective, such
alignment is an impossible, normative ideal. This line of thinking has led
some queer theorists to celebrate failure, nonsense and negativity as prac-
tices of resistance to the normative ideal of fully realised selves and identi-
ties (Edelman, 2004; Halberstam, 2011). At the same time, this tendency
in queer theory has been critiqued for its abstraction of everyday lived
realities and its potential to disempower individuals and groups for whom
stable constructions of self and identity may be vital frameworks through
which to contest inequality (McLaughlin, 2006).
28 J. CUMMINGS

I draw upon queer insights to counter-balance interactionism’s vision

of a world that turns on the production of intelligible meanings. As will
become evident in Chaps. 3, 4 and 5, as much as through the production
of meaningful frameworks for self-understanding, gay lives in Hainan are
lived through multiple and powerful forms of uncertainty and ambiguity.
Queer theory provides standpoints from which to recognise the ­productive
roles of such uncertainty as a possible source of empowerment, enabling
open-ended claims to modes of being and belonging that evade reduction
to codified and logical identities; this is especially clear in Chap. 3’s
­exploration of what it means for gay men in Hainan to come into and be
in ‘the scene’. At the same time, I heed and advance critiques of queer
celebrations of indeterminacy, showing that although indeterminacy can
at times serve to affirm and empower non-definitional modes of being and
solidarity, it can also be a source of intense anguish and serve to limit pos-
sibilities for living to those most certain, imaginable and materially practi-
cable; this is most clear in Chap. 5. Similarly, queer work moves beyond
interactionism’s humanist tendencies by taking the human not as the ori-
gin of social activity but as produced therein. This turns my attention to
the ways in which gay men in Hainan come to understand themselves a
embodied subjects through dynamic relationships with and between peo-
ple, technologies, environments and various material resources that under-
pin being and living both in the everyday and over life-courses. As others
have argued, queer theory’s open-endedness and its critique of the human
as pre-given resonate with anthropological work on gender and sexuality
and leave queer approaches well suited to cross-cultural enquiry (Boyce
et al., 2017). I turn to these literatures below.

Thinking Sexuality Cross-culturally

Anthropology, with its conceptual concerns for cultural specificity and
methodological orientation towards the embodiment of culture in every-
day practices, has been a key field for the theorisation sexuality as a socio-­
cultural phenomenon manifest in everyday interaction. Early studies of
sexuality within anthropology advanced the lines of inquiry established by
interactionist sociologists, who, according to Rubin (2002, p. 39):

discovered a mutable homosexuality that had discontinuities sufficient

enough to make problematic even the application of labels such as “les-
bian,” “gay,” or “homosexual” to persons of other historical periods or
 1 INTRODUCTION 29

c­ ultural contexts. That which we might be tempted to identify as “homo-

sexual” might refer to an assemblage of institutional elements and social
relations alien to a modern notion of sexual, much less “homosex-
ual,” conduct.

Such insights have generated debate around the relationship between

sexual desires, practices and identities, as anthropologists have explored
cultural contexts in which sex between men or between women is not
recognised as constitutive of particular sexual identities (Adam, 1993).
Research has also shown that age and sex-roles may be more central to
understandings of sexual identities than the gender of a sexual partner
(Lancaster, 1992). It has also been noted that practices involving bodily
regions considered ‘sexual’ within certain cultural contexts may, in fact,
have more to do with age-related or religious rituals (Herdt, 1993).
Anthropologists have debated the translatability of sexual categories
and have critiqued the uncritical use of the terms ‘homosexual’, ‘gay’ and
‘lesbian’ in reference to non-Anglophone contexts (Leap & Boellstorff,
2004). Instead, it has become common practice to centre analyses on
terms and categories as they appear within the socio-cultural context
under enquiry. There have been similar debates around the application of
the term ‘transgender’ to diverse gender identities and embodiments in
disparate cultural contexts (Valentine, 2007). As such, anthropologists
have produced ethnographic accounts of Indian hijra (Reddy, 2005), Thai
kathoey and tom/dee (Jackson, 2000), Brazilian travesti (Vartabedian,
2018), Indonesian tombois and waria (Blackwood, 1989), Navajo nadleehi
(Epple, 1998) and Chinese tongzhi (Chou, 2001), to list but a few exam-
ples, and have explored a range of gender and sexual identities and
embodiments within Anglophone cultural contexts that cannot be assimi-
lated into the rubric ‘LGBT’ (Blackwood, 2012).2 These terms are, to
varying degrees, understood not as culturally specific variants of ‘homo-
sexual’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘transgender’ identities, but as gender and sexual
identities or subject positions that cannot be figured within ‘Western’

2
This is not to say that constructionist theorising of gender and sexuality in anthropology
has only been the concern of scholars working on ‘non-normative’ genders and sexualities.
Feminist anthropologists have also recognised the cultural specificity, and questioned the
universal applicability, of the categories ‘heterosexual’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ (Mascia-Lees &
Black, 2017).
30 J. CUMMINGS

conceptual categories.3 At the same time, however, Kath Weston (1993,

p. 348) has cautioned against the rush to claim cultural ‘specificity’. As she
puts it, ‘the use of “foreign” terms constructs the subject of inquiry as
always already Other’; this may constitute ‘a renewed form of Orientalism
in which linguistic terms subtly reify differences and buttress ethnographic
authority’ (ibid.).
More recently, there has been significant attention within anthropology
to the interrelations of globalisation and sexuality. The fact that people in
‘non-Western’ settings have begun using the terms ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and
‘queer’ (or variants, such as ‘les’ and ‘kuer’ in the PRC or ‘lesbi’ in
Indonesia; see Engebretsen, 2014; Bao, 2018; Boellstorff, 2005 respec-
tively) evidences the global reach of ‘Western’ sexual discourses. For some
scholars, the use of such terms in ‘non-Western’ settings is a matter of
Euro-American cultural hegemony (Altman, 1997); for others is a matter
of agentic engagement of ostensibly ‘Western’ categories and their refor-
mulation within diverse cultural and political contexts (Boellstorff, 2005;
Martin, 2003; Rofel, 2007). More detailed discussion of globalisation and
the emergence of ‘gay’ identities in the PRC is saved for the following
chapter.
There are two primary ways in which questions of cultural ‘specificity’
have been framed within anthropological work on sexuality: firstly, in
terms of the need to distinguish between sexual practices and sexual iden-
tities (Herdt, 1994); secondly, in terms of the relationship between sexual-
ity and gender (Jackson, 2000; Sinnot, 2004). The first of these framings
has been critiqued as premised on a false dichotomy that figures sexual
‘desires’ and ‘practices’ as pre-discursive, positioned outside of fields of
culture and meaning to which ‘identities’ are seen to belong (Elliston,
1995). Seeking to circumvent arbitrary distinctions between desires, prac-
tices and identities, Brown et al. (2010) advocate research on ‘sexualities’,
as specific arrangements of desire, practice and/or identity, singularly or in
complex entanglement, within particular cultural settings. ‘Sexualities’,
therefore, rejects the dichotomy of ‘practice/identity’ and the ways in
which this has implicitly reiterated the dichotomies of ‘West/East’, ‘self/
other’ and ‘modern/traditional’ (Berry, 1996). Moreover, in terms of the
relationship between gender and sexuality, the plural notion of

3
While full discussion is beyond the purview of this book, I use the terms ‘Western’ and
‘non-Western’ in quotation marks to signal their problematic nature (see Degnen, 2018,
pp. 11–16 for discussion).
 1 INTRODUCTION 31

‘sexualities’ allows for diverse, culturally and contextually specific points of

intersection, as well as divergence between these connected fields of expe-
rience. In his work on the proliferation of ‘sex/gender categories’ in
Thailand between 1960 and 1980, Peter Jackson (2000) uses a similar
strategy of pluralisation, however, he questions the relevance of the con-
cept of ‘sexuality’ and, instead, offers an account of myriad ‘eroticised
genders’ (2000). It has been suggested that these anthropological efforts
to reconsider relationships between sexuality and gender and to conceptu-
alise sexuality against the grain of clear distinctions between sexual desires,
practices and identities have given contemporary anthropology an inher-
ently ‘queer sensibility’ (Boyce et al., 2017).
The influence of these anthropological literatures is pervasive through-
out this book. It is most evident in my commitment to understanding the
lives of gay men in Hainan on their own terms through close analysis of
the ways in which my interview participants spoke about themselves, oth-
ers and their lives. It is also clear, especially in Chap. 3, in the care that I
take to unpack specific patterns of relation between sexual desires, sexual
practices, social intimacies, practices of knowing and modes of being and
living. This contributes anthropological concerns to understand culturally
specific relationships, distinctions and blurred boundaries between sexual
desires, practices and identities and how these reconfigure the meanings of
gender and sexuality in cross-cultural research.
At the same time, it is important to note that the above-described strat-
egies of pluralisation, whether of genders or sexualities, while useful in
acknowledging multiplicity and complexity within the categories of gen-
der and sexuality in disparate cultural contexts, do not necessarily question
the authority of these analytical categories themselves. Here, an anthropo-
logical concern for cultural ‘difference’ intersects with earlier-discussed
Foucauldian concerns for the regulatory production of ‘sexuality’ as a field
of knowledge. It becomes necessary to ask to what extent the maintenance
of ‘sexuality’ as an analytical category, even when pluralised and abstracted
as ‘sexualities’, presupposes a corresponding empirical field of experience,
thereby imposing such an analytical framework upon socio-cultural
dynamics that may be more usefully conceptualised in other ways.
This question is particularly salient in the case of research on ‘sexuality’
in Sinophone settings, since no term/concept equivalent to ‘sexuality’ can
be found in Mandarin Chinese. As Jackson, Liu and Woo (2008, p. 2) note:
32 J. CUMMINGS

All East Asian languages have words for sex but the concept of sexuality […]
has proved particularly difficult […] In Chinese, a language based on ideo-
graphic representation of concepts (as opposed to sounds) the problem is
more intractable. Here ‘sexuality’ has been variously translated simply as
xing (sex), in Taiwan xing-zhi (‘the nature of sex’) or, in China, as xing
cunzai (‘the existence of sex’). None of these terms is very satisfactory.

These difficulties surrounding the translation of ‘sexuality’ are telling.

They may be taken to point to alternative cultural logics of sexuality and
the need to rethink the concept, particularly, as discussed above, the inter-
relations of gender and sexuality. However, they may also suggest the limi-
tations of ‘sexuality’ as a conceptual framework for understandings cultural
logics and lived realities in diverse cultural contexts. This line of thought
moves from the question of how best to translate ‘sexuality’ into other
cultural-linguistic contexts to the question of how best to engage with the
concepts and lived realities of other cultural contexts when ‘sexuality’ is a
potentially problematic framework. These issues point to the ‘cognitive
injustice’ that may be at work when a specifically ‘Western’ category of
experience and analysis is given the status of an abstract universal (Ho
et al., 2018, p. 515). As Henrietta Moore (2012, p. 11) suggests, this
requires questioning ‘the ontological status of sexuality’. I develop this
consideration further below.

Thinking Sexuality Ontologically

A still-emergent perspective within anthropology, described as ‘the onto-
logical turn’, is exploring the implications of such issues concerning the
(in)translatability of analytical categories (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017).
For proponents of the ontological turn, such failures of translation do not
demand the rethinking of an existent concept; rather, they occasion the
formulation of alternative conceptual categories altogether (Descola,
2013, p. 477). In this sense, ‘the epistemological problem of how one sees
things is turned into the ontological question of what there is to be seen
in the first place’ (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017, p. 5). From this perspec-
tive, it may not be the case that ‘genders’ and ‘sexualities’ are constructed,
experienced and interrelated in different ways in different socio-cultural
contexts, but that something altogether different may be constructed and
experienced that may be elided by categorisation as ‘gender’ or ‘sexuality’,
or some combination of the two. Those engaged in the ontological turn
 1 INTRODUCTION 33

argue that in order to avoid the imposition of inappropriate ontological

categories, primacy must be given to the conceptual-ontological catego-
ries that are evident in the sociocultural context under enquiry; these
should not be conceptualised as variants of a wider, abstract concept such
as ‘sexuality’. Methodologically, this means ‘that we need to approach our
ethnographic data without presuming that they signify, represent, or stand
for something other than what they purport to be’ (Vigh & Sausdal,
2014, p. 51).
These forms of ontological thinking have been used to critique the
concepts of nature, culture (and their binary separation), kinship, truth,
humanity and morality as inherently Eurocentric (Holbraad & Pedersen,
2017; Viveros de Castro, 2014). While a number of scholars have noted
the need for critical ontological thinking (and unthinking) about sexuality
(Boellstorff, 2012; Moore, 2012), little grounded ethnographic work has
been done in this direction (Hendriks, 2017 and Seely, 2020 are rare
examples). Specifically, despite the recognised difficulties of translating
‘sexuality’ into Chinese contexts (Jackson et al., 2008, p. 2; Chiang, 2018,
p. 3), these issues have not been considered from the standpoint of ontol-
ogy. One possible example of such work, although not framed in the terms
of an ontological turn or even from an anthropological perspective, is the
writing of sociologist Pan Suiming (2006a, 2006b). Pan has proposed the
notion of ‘the primary life cycle’ (chuji shenghuo quan) as a potential alter-
native to researching ‘sexuality’ in Chinese cultural-linguistic contexts.
There is an affinity between this proposal and the ontological turn as
described above.
Pan’s notion of ‘the primary life cycle’ refers to the interrelation and
inseparability of ‘sex, reproduction, support/sustenance relations (gong-
yang), love, the management of sexual relations (chuli xing guanxi) and
social gender (shehui xingbie)’ (2006a, online, my translation).4 Pan (ibid.)

4
Pan’s notion of ‘the primary life cycle’ is translated in Jeffreys (2006, p. 26). In the
English text, ‘sex’ (xing) and ‘the management of sexual relations’ (chuli xing guanxi), as
they appear in a Chinese article by Pan on the same topic (2006a), are translated singularly
as ‘sexuality’. My concern with such translation practices is that much nuance and specificity
are lost. ‘Xing’ can be modified as ‘xingbie’ (sex difference/gender) but also as ‘xingjiao’
(sex connection/sexual intercourse) and ‘xing’ai’ (sexual love/sex and love). It also operates
as a suffix that changes a noun into an adjective, for example ‘shehui’ (society) becomes ‘she-
huixing’ (social). Sang (1999) offers a limited genealogical discussion of xing, which she
traces back to the philosopher Mencius’ conception of human nature (renxing). The use of
xingbie (sex difference/gender) was established in China only in the 1920s, when ‘xing was
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Requiem
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: Requiem

Author: Edmond Hamilton

Illustrator: Leo Summers

Release date: November 20, 2023 [eBook #72180]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing

Company, 1962

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REQUIEM ***

 REQUIEM

By EDMOND HAMILTON

Illustrated by SUMMERS

All during its lifetime Earth had been deluged ...

overwhelmed ... submerged in an endless torrent
of words. Was even its death to be stripped
of dignity by the cackling of the mass media?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories April 1962
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Kellon thought sourly that he wasn't commanding a star-ship, he was
running a travelling circus. He had aboard telaudio men with tons of
equipment, pontifical commentators who knew the answer to
anything, beautiful females who were experts on the woman's angle,
pompous bureaucrats after publicity, and entertainment stars who
had come along for the same reason.
He had had a good ship and crew, one of the best in the Survey. Had
had. They weren't any more. They had been taken off their proper
job of pushing astrographical knowledge ever further into the remote
regions of the galaxy, and had been sent off with this cargo of costly
people on a totally unnecessary mission.
He said bitterly to himself, "Damn all sentimentalists."
He said aloud, "Does its position check with your calculated orbit, Mr.
Riney?"
Riney, the Second, a young and serious man who had been fussing
with instruments in the astrogation room, came out and said,
"Yes. Right on the nose. Shall we go in and land now?"
Kellon didn't answer for a moment, standing there in the front of the
bridge, a middle-aged man, stocky, square-shouldered, and with his
tanned, plain face showing none of the resentment he felt. He hated
to give the order but he had to.
"All right, take her in."
He looked gloomily through the filter-windows as they went in. In this
fringe-spiral of the galaxy, stars were relatively infrequent, and there
were only ragged drifts of them across the darkness. Full ahead
shone a small, compact sun like a diamond. It was a white dwarf and
had been so for two thousand years, giving forth so little warmth that
the planets which circled it had been frozen and ice-locked all that
time. They still were, all except the innermost world.

Kellon stared at that planet, a tawny blob. The ice that had sheathed
it ever since its primary collapsed into a white dwarf, had now
melted. Months before, a dark wandering body had passed very
close to this lifeless system. Its passing had perturbed the planetary
orbits and the inner planets had started to spiral slowly in toward
their sun, and the ice had begun to go.
Viresson, one of the junior officers, came into the bridge looking
harassed. He said to Kellon,
"They want to see you down below, sir. Especially Mr. Borrodale. He
says it's urgent."
Kellon thought wearily, "Well, I might as well go down and face the
pack of them. Here's where they really begin."
He nodded to Viresson, and went down below to the main cabin. The
sight of it revolted him. Instead of his own men in it, relaxing or
chinning, it held a small and noisy mob of over-dressed, overloud
men and women, all of whom seemed to be talking at once and
uttering brittle, nervous laughter.
"Captain Kellon, I want to ask you—"
"Captain, if you please—"
He patiently nodded and smiled and plowed through them to
Borrodale. He had been given particular instructions to cooperate
with Borrodale, the most famous telaudio commentator in the
Federation.
Borrodale was a slightly plump man with a round pink face and
incongruously large and solemn black eyes. When he spoke, one
recognized at once that deep, incredibly rich and meaningful voice.
"My first broadcast is set for thirty minutes from now, Captain. I shall
want a view as we go in. If my men could take a mobile up to the
bridge—"
Kellon nodded. "Of course. Mr. Viresson is up there and will assist
them in any way."
"Thank you, Captain. Would you like to see the broadcast?"
"I would, yes, but—"
He was interrupted by Lorri Lee, whose glitteringly handsome face
and figure and sophisticated drawl made her the idol of all female
telaudio reporters.
"My broadcast is to be right after landing—remember? I'd like to do it
alone, with just the emptiness of that world as background. Can you
keep the others from spoiling the effect? Please?"
"We'll do what we can," Kellon mumbled. And as the rest of the pack
converged on him he added hastily, "I'll talk to you later. Mr.
Borrodale's broadcast—"

He got through them, following after Borrodale toward the cabin that
had been set up as a telaudio-transmitter room. It had, Kellon
thought bitterly, once served an honest purpose, holding the racks of
soil and water and other samples from far worlds. But that had been
when they were doing an honest Survey job, not chaperoning
chattering fools on this sentimental pilgrimage.
The broadcasting set-up was beyond Kellon. He didn't want to hear
this but it was better than the mob in the main cabin. He watched as
Borrodale made a signal. The monitor-screen came alive.
It showed a dun-colored globe spinning in space, growing visibly
larger as they swept toward it. Now straggling seas were identifiable
upon it. Moments passed and Borrodale did not speak, just letting
that picture go out. Then his deep voice spoke over the picture, with
dramatic simplicity.
"You are looking at the Earth," he said.
Silence again, and the spinning brownish ball was bigger now, with
white clouds ragged upon it. And then Borrodale spoke again.
"You who watch from many worlds in the galaxy—this is the
homeland of our race. Speak its name to yourselves. The Earth."
Kellon felt a deepening distaste. This was all true, but still it was
phony. What was Earth now to him, or to Borrodale, or his billions of
listeners? But it was a story, a sentimental occasion, so they had to
pump it up into something big.
"Some thirty-five hundred years ago," Borrodale was saying, "our
ancestors lived on this world alone. That was when they first went
into space. To these other planets first—but very soon, to other stars.
And so our Federation began, our community of human civilization
on many stars and worlds."
Now, in the monitor, the view of Earth's dun globe had been replaced
by the face of Borrodale in close-up. He paused dramatically.
"Then, over two thousand years ago, it was discovered that the sun
of Earth was about to collapse into a white dwarf. So those people
who still remained on Earth left it forever and when the solar change
came, it and the other planets became mantled in eternal ice. And
now, within months, the final end of the old planet of our origin is at
hand. It is slowly spiralling toward the sun and soon it will plunge into
it as Mercury and Venus have already done. And when that occurs,
the world of man's origin will be gone forever."
Again the pause, for just the right length of time, and then Borrodale
continued in a voice expertly pitched in a lower key.
"We on this ship—we humble reporters and servants of the vast
telaudio audience on all the worlds—have come here so that in
these next weeks we can give you this last look at our ancestral
world. We think—we hope—that you'll find interest in recalling a past
that is almost legend."
And Kellon thought, "The bastard has no more interest in this old
planet than I have, but he surely is smooth."

As soon as the broadcast ended, Kellon found himself besieged

once more by the clamoring crowd in the main cabin. He held up his
hand in protest.
"Please, now—now we have a landing to make first. Will you come
with me, Doctor Darnow?"
Darnow was from Historical Bureau, and was the titular head of the
whole expedition, although no one paid him much attention. He was
a sparrowy, elderly man who babbled excitedly as he went with
Kellon to the bridge.
He at least, was sincere in his interest, Kellon thought. For that
matter, so were all the dozen-odd scientists who were aboard. But
they were far out-numbered by the fat cats and big brass out for
publicity, the professional enthusers and sentimentalist. A real hell of
a job the Survey had given him!
In the bridge, he glanced through the window at the dun-colored
planet and its satellite. Then he asked Darnow, "You said something
about a particular place where you wanted to land?"
The historiographer bobbed his head, and began unfolding a big,
old-fashioned chart.
"See this continent here? Along its eastern coast were a lot of the
biggest cities, like New York."
Kellon remembered that name, he'd learned it in school history, a
long time ago.
Darnow's finger stabbed the chart. "If you could land there, right on
the island—"
Kellon studied the relief features, then shook his head. "Too low.
There'll be great tides as time goes on and we can't take chances.
That higher ground back inland a bit should be all right, though."
Darnow looked disappointed. "Well, I suppose you're right."
Kellon told Riney to set up the landing-pattern. Then he asked
Darnow skeptically,
"You surely don't expect to find much in those old cities now—not
after they've had all that ice on them for two thousand years?"
"They'll be badly damaged, of course," Darnow admitted. "But there
should be a vast number of relics. I could study here for years—"
"We haven't got years, we've got only a few months before this
planet gets too close to the Sun," said Kellon. And he added
mentally, "Thank God."

The ship went into its landing-pattern. Atmosphere whined outside its
hull and then thick gray clouds boiled and raced around it. It went
down through the cloud layer and moved above a dull brown
landscape that had flecks of white in its deeper valleys. Far ahead
there was the glint of a gray ocean. But the ship came down toward
a rolling brown plain and settled there, and then there was the
expected thunderclap of silence that always followed the shutting off
of all machinery.
Kellon looked at Riney, who turned in a moment from the test-panel
with a slight surprise on his face. "Pressure, oxygen, humidity,
everything—all optimum." And then he said, "But of course. This
place was optimum."
Kellon nodded. He said, "Doctor Darnow and I will have a look out
first. Viresson, you keep our passengers in."
When he and Darnow went to the lower airlock he heard a buzzing
clamor from the main cabin and he judged that Viresson was having
his hands full. The people in there were not used to being said no to,
and he could imagine their resentment.
Cold, damp air struck a chill in Kellon when they stepped down out of
the airlock. They stood on muddy, gravelly ground that squashed a
little under their boots as they trudged away from the ship. They
stopped and looked around, shivering.
Under the low gray cloudy sky there stretched a sad, sunless brown
landscape. Nothing broke the drab color of raw soil, except the
shards of ice still lingering in low places. A heavy desultory wind
stirred the raw air, and then was still. There was not a sound except
the clinkclinking of the ship's skin cooling and contracting, behind
them. Kellon thought that no amount of sentimentality could make
this anything but a dreary world.
But Darnow's eyes were shining. "We'll have to make every minute
of the time count," he muttered. "Every minute."
Within two hours, the heavy broadcast equipment was being
trundled away from the ship on two motor-tracs that headed
eastward. On one of the tracs rode Lorri Lee, resplendent in lilac-
colored costume of synthesilk.
Kellon, worried about the possibility of quicksands, went along for
that first broadcast from the cliffs that looked down on the ruins of
New York. He wished he hadn't, when it got under way.
For Lorri Lee, her blonde head bright even in the dull light, turned
loose all her practised charming gestures for the broadcast cameras,
as she gestured with pretty excitement down toward the ruins.
"It's so unbelievable!" she cried to a thousand worlds. "To be here on
Earth, to see the old places again—it does something to you!"
It did something to Kellon. It made him feel sick at his stomach. He
turned and went back to the ship, feeling at that moment that if Lorri
Lee went into a quicksand on the way back, it would be no great
loss.

But that first day was only the beginning. The big ship quickly
became the center of multifarious and continuous broadcasts. It had
been especially equipped to beam strongly to the nearest station in
the Federation network, and its transmitters were seldom quiet.
Kellon found that Darnow, who was supposed to coordinate all this
programming, was completely useless. The little historian was living
in a seventh heaven on this old planet which had been uncovered to
view for the first time in millennia, and he was away most of the time
on field trips of his own. It fell to his assistant, an earnest and worried
and harassed young man, to try to reconcile the clashing claims and
demands of the highly temperamental broadcasting stars.
Kellon felt an increasing boredom at having to stand around while all
this tosh went out over the ether. These people were having a field-
day but he didn't think much of them and of their broadcasts. Roy
Quayle, the young male fashion designer, put on a semi-humorous,
semi-nostalgic display of the old Earth fashions, with the prettier girls
wearing some of the ridiculous old costumes he had had duplicated.
Barden, the famous teleplay producer, ran off ancient films of the old
Earth dramas that had everyone in stitches. Jay Maxson, a rising
politician in Federation Congress, discussed with Borrodale the
governmental systems of the old days, in a way calculated to give
his own Wide-Galaxy Party none the worst of it. The Arcturus
Players, that brilliant group of young stage-folk, did readings of old
Earth dramas and poems.
It was, Kellon thought disgustedly, just playing. Grown people,
famous people, seizing the opportunity given by the accidental end
of a forgotten planet to posture in the spotlight like smart-aleck
children. There was real work to do in the galaxy, the work of the
Survey, the endless and wearying but always-fascinating job of
charting the wild systems and worlds. And instead of doing that job,
he was condemned to spend weeks and months here with these
phonies.
The scientists and historians he respected. They did few broadcasts
and they did not fake their interest. It was one of them, Haller, the
biologist, who excitedly showed Kellon a handful of damp soil a week
after their arrival.

"Look at that!" he said proudly.

Kellon stared. "What?"
"Those seeds—they're common weed-grass seeds. Look at them."
Kellon looked, and now he saw that from each of the tiny seeds
projected a new-looking hairlike tendril.
"They're sprouting?" he said unbelievingly.
Haller nodded happily. "I was hoping for it. You see, it was almost
spring in the northern hemisphere, according to the records, when
Sol collapsed suddenly into a white dwarf. Within hours the
temperature plunged and the hydrosphere and atmosphere began to
freeze."
"But surely that would kill all plant-life?"
"No," said Haller. "The larger plants, trees, perennial shrubs, and so
on, yes. But the seeds of the smaller annuals just froze into
suspended animation. Now the warmth that melted them is causing
germination."
"Then we'll have grass—small plants?"
"Very soon, the way the warmth is increasing."
It was, indeed, getting a little warmer all the time as these first weeks
went by. The clouds lifted one day and there was brilliant, thin white
sunshine from the little diamond sun. And there came a morning
when they found the rolling landscape flushed with a pale tint of
green.
Grass grew. Weeds grew, vines grew, all of them seeming to rush
their growth as though they knew that this, their last season, would
not be long. Soon the raw brown mud of the hills and valleys had
been replaced by a green carpet, and everywhere taller growths
were shooting up, and flowers beginning to appear. Hepaticas,
bluebells, dandelions, violets, bloomed once more.
Kellon took a long walk, now that he did not have to plow through
mud. The chattering people around the ship, the constant tug and
pull of clashing temperaments, the brittle, febrile voices, got him
down. He felt better to get away by himself.
The grass and the flowers had come back but otherwise this was still
an empty world. Yet there was a certain peace of mind in tramping
up and down the long green rolling slopes. The sun was bright and
cheerful now, and white clouds dotted the sky, and the warm wind
whispered as he sat upon a ridge and looked away westward where
nobody was, or would ever be again.
"Damned dull," he thought. "But at least it's better than back with the
gabblers."
He sat for a long time in the slanting sunshine, feeling his bristling
nerves relax. The grass stirred about him, rippling in long waves, and
the taller flowers nodded.
No other movement, no other life. A pity, he thought, that there were
no birds for this last spring of the old planet—not even a butterfly.
Well, it made no difference, all this wouldn't last long.
As Kellon tramped back through the deepening dusk, he suddenly
became aware of a shining bubble in the darkening sky. He stopped
and stared up at it and then remembered. Of course, it was the old
planet's moon—during the cloudy nights he had forgotten all about it.
He went on, with its vague light about him.

When he stepped back into the lighted main cabin of the ship, he
was abruptly jarred out of his relaxed mood. A first-class squabble
was going on, and everybody was either contributing to it or
commenting on it. Lorri Lee, looking like a pretty child complaining of
a hurt, was maintaining that she should have broadcast time next
day for her special woman's-interest feature, and somebody else
disputed her claim, and young Vallely, Darnow's assistant, looked
harried and upset. Kellon got by them without being noticed, locked
the door of his cabin and poured himself a long drink, and damned
Survey all over again for this assignment.
He took good care to get out of the ship early in the morning, before
the storm of temperament blew up again. He left Viresson in charge
of the ship, there being nothing for any of them to do now anyway,
and legged it away over the green slopes before anyone could call
him back.
They had five more weeks of this, Kellon thought. Then, thank God,
Earth would be getting so near the Sun that they must take the ship
back into its proper element of space. Until that wished-for day
arrived, he would stay out of sight as much as possible.
He walked miles each day. He stayed carefully away from the east
and the ruins of old New York, where the others so often were. But
he went north and west and south, over the grassy, flowering slopes
of the empty world. At least it was peaceful, even though there was
nothing at all to see.
But after a while, Kellon found that there were things to see if you
looked for them. There was the way the sky changed, never seeming
to look the same twice. Sometimes it was deep blue and white
clouds sailed it like mighty ships. And then it would suddenly turn
gray and miserable, and rain would drizzle on him, to be ended when
a lance of sunlight shot through the clouds and slashed them to
flying ribbons. And there was a time when, upon a ridge, he watched
vast thunder-heads boil up and darken in the west and black storm
marched across the land like an army with banners of lightning and
drums of thunder.
The winds and the sunshine, the sweetness of the air and the look of
the moonlight and the feel of the yielding grass under his feet, all
seemed oddly right. Kellon had walked on many worlds under the
glare of many-colored suns, and some of them he had liked much
better than this one and some of them he had not liked at all, but
never had he found a world that seemed so exactly attuned to his
body as this outworn, empty planet.
He wondered vaguely what it had been like when there were trees
and birds, and animals of many kinds, and roads and cities. He
borrowed film-books from the reference library Darnow and the
others had brought, and looked at them in his cabin of nights. He did
not really care very much but at least it kept him out of the broils and
quarrels, and it had a certain interest.

Thereafter in his wandering strolls, Kellon tried to see the place as it

would have been in the long ago. There would have been robins and
bluebirds, and yellow-and-black bumblebees nosing the flowers, and
tall trees with names that were equally strange to him, elms and
willows and sycamores. And small furred animals, and humming
clouds of insects, and fish and frogs in the pools and streams, a
whole vast complex symphony of life, long gone, long forgotten.
But were all the men and women and children who had lived here
less forgotten? Borrodale and the others talked much on their
broadcasts about the people of old Earth, but that was just a
faceless name, a term that meant nothing. Not one of those millions,
surely, had ever thought of himself as part of a numberless
multitude. Each one had been to himself, and to those close to him
or her, an individual, unique and never to be exactly repeated, and
what did the glib talkers know of all those individuals, what could
anyone know?
Kellon found traces of them here and there, bits of flotsam that even
the crush of the ice had spared. A twisted piece of steel, a girder or
rail that someone had labored to make. A quarry with the tool-marks
still on the rocks, where surely men had once sweated in the sun.
The broken shards of concrete that stretched away in a ragged line
to make a road upon which men and women had once travelled,
hurrying upon missions of love or ambition, greed or fear.
He found more than that, a startling find that he made by purest
chance. He followed a brook that ran down a very narrow valley, and
at one point he leaped across it and as he landed he looked up and
saw that there was a house.
Kellon thought at first that it was miraculously preserved whole and
unbroken, and surely that could not be. But when he went closer he
saw that this was only illusion and that destruction had been at work
upon it too. Still, it remained, incredibly, a recognizable house.
It was a rambling stone cottage with low walls and a slate roof, set
close against the steep green wall of the valley. One gable-end was
smashed in, and part of that end wall. Studying the way it was
embayed in the wall, Kellon decided that a chance natural arch of ice
must have preserved it from the grinding pressure that had shattered
almost all other structures.
The windows and doors were only gaping openings. He went inside
and looked around the cold shadows of what had once been a room.
There were some wrecked pieces of rotting furniture, and dried mud
banked along one wall contained unrecognizable bits of rusted junk,
but there was not much else. It was chill and oppressive in there,
and he went out and sat on the little terrace in the sunshine.
He looked at the house. It could have been built no later than the
Twentieth Century, he thought. A good many different people must
have lived in it during the hundreds of years before the evacuation of
Earth.
Kellon thought that it was strange that the airphoto surveys that
Darnow's men had made in quest of relics had not discovered the
place. But then it was not so strange, the stone walls were so grayly
inconspicuous and it was set so deeply into the sheltering bay of the
valley wall.
His eye fell on eroded lettering on the cement side of the terrace,
and he went and brushed the soil off that place. The words were
time-eaten and faint but he could read them.
"Ross and Jennie—Their House."
Kellon smiled. Well, at least he knew now who once had lived here,
who probably had built the place. He could imagine two young
people happily scratching the words in the wet cement, exuberant
with achievement. And who had Ross and Jennie been, and where
were they now?
He walked around the place. To his surprise, there was a ragged
flower-garden at one side. A half-dozen kinds of brilliant little flowers,
unlike the wild ones of the slopes, grew in patchy disorder here.
Seeds of an old garden had been ready to germinate when the long
winter of Earth came down, and had slept in suspended animation
until the ice melted and the warm blooming time came at last. He did
not know what kinds of flowers these were, but there was a brave
jauntiness about them that he liked.
Starting back across the green land in the soft twilight, Kellon
thought that he should tell Darnow about the place. But if he did, the
gabbling pack in the ship would certainly stampede toward it. He
could imagine the solemn and cute and precious broadcasts that
Borrodale and the Lee woman and rest of them would stage from the
old house.
"No," he thought. "The devil with them."
He didn't care anything himself about the old house, it was just that it
was a refuge of quiet he had found and he didn't want to draw to it
the noisy horde he was trying to escape.

Kellon was glad in the following days that he had not told. The house
gave him a place to go to, to poke around and investigate, a focus
for his interest in this waiting time. He spent hours there, and never
told anyone at all.
Haller, the biologist, lent him a book on the flowers of Earth, and he
brought it with him and used it to identify those in the ragged garden.
Verbenas, pinks, morning glories, and the bold red and yellow ones
called nasturtiums. Many of these, he read, did not do well on other
worlds and had never been successfully transplanted. If that was so,
this would be their last blooming anywhere at all.
He rooted around the interior of the house, trying to figure out how
people had lived in it. It was strange, not at all like a modern metalloy
house. Even the interior walls were thick beyond belief, and the
windows seemed small and pokey. The biggest room was obviously
where they had lived most, and its window-openings looked out on
the little garden and the green valley and brook beyond.
Kellon wondered what they had been like, the Ross and Jennie who
had once sat here together and looked out these windows. What
things had been important to them? What had hurt them, what had
made them laugh? He himself had never married, the far-ranging
captains of the Survey seldom did. But he wondered about this