“You need to fight for your place in society,” according to Jiaojiao, one of several regulars at the Lai Lai Ballroom interviewed as part of Liu Yunyi & Wei Bozhi’s documentary, Come Dance With Me (来来, lái lái). As several of them mention, the ballroom had been a refuge for the LGBTQ+ community, though times have now changed. These days, younger people prefer clubs and bars, while many of those who used to come are now elderly and don’t get out as much meaning that the ballrooms are mainly meeting places for the now middle-aged men who first frequented them 20 years earlier.
That they exist at all and this documentary could be made might be surprising given prevalent anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes from the censors’ board and wider community. It’s true enough that Lai Lai became a community hub and its partial closure for the 2016 G20 conference leaves them with no place to go. The various people that Liu & Wei interview come from various walks of life as they demonstrate in the opening sequence in which an old man visits a temple, a younger one visits a park, and Lai Lai’s manager Min walks through the neighbourhood and gets something to eat at a small cafe.
The old man from the temple best expresses the inherent contradictions both of his religion and the wider society in which he relates that Buddhist monks are supposed to overcome their desires. Young monks are forbidden from taking wives and also from touching women, but technically speaking, the same prohibitions do not exist between men and homosexual acts are not unusual in the temple. Conversely, the young man who went to the park reveals that he has been living with HIV for the last seven years and that he lost his job because of it. In despair, he tried to take his own life only for his godmother to explain to him that people with high blood pressure also need to take medication for the rest of their life so it’s no different from that.
Still, he’s convinced himself of the impossibility of having a relationship sure that no one would stay with him after finding out. He says that he once told a close friend that he had AIDS and the friend quickly distanced himself from him and effectively disappeared from his life. The film later follows him on another day out with a young man, Li Yapeng, but an ill-fated decision to take a five-hour bus trip to go see him backfires when Yapeng not only fails to come and meet him but seems less than enthusiastic about his impromptu visit before abruptly breaking up with him. Another older man relates that he once had a lover who was diagnosed with HIV but told that he could not receive treatment in Shanghai and should return to his hometown. A Shanghai native, the older man resolved that, as he was already old and it would take several years for symptoms to emerge at which point he may be dead anyway, he would deliberately contract HIV and get medicine to give to him. What he didn’t realise is that the treatment isn’t the same for anyone and the medication he was prescribed was no good for his boyfriend, who then went back to his hometown and got treated there. Unfortunately, the treatment didn’t agree with him and he elected to stop taking it, passing away not long after.
Jiaojiao, meanwhile, has been with their partner Fei Er for 26 years, though Fei Er is now having health issues. Fei Er describes their relationship as rock solid and the same as that of any heterosexual couple in that now they’ve been together so long, 26 years is effectively forever and neither of them is ever going to abandon the other no matter what may come. Nevertheless, Jiaojiao also describes an additional layer of stigmatisation in that they have breasts, a fact which it seems they still hide from extended relatives having made the original decision to get them without telling anyone first. Done in a private clinic, the procedure also left them with ongoing medical issues caused by the failure to drain the wound properly. In a later conversation, they suggest that the primary motivation for getting breast surgery was financial. They now work as a dominatrix, but do not like doing it describing some of the men as “disgusting”. Their marginalised status prevents them from gaining more mainstream employment in a still conservative society. They have all found a place for themselves at Lai Lai, but as the press notes reveal, it abruptly closed its doors in 2018 with no one sure when or if it will reopen. Nevertheless, its legacy lives on as a space of warmth and acceptance that gave each of them a place to belong and be joyful no matter the difficulties of the world outside.
Come Dance With Me screens at Centre 151 3rd May as part of this year’s Queer East.
Windows on Worlds 