Coming from the land of the free (for better or worse) and the home of the ACLU, there are few things more irksome than being told that you can’t run a story. No one was sure how running an LGBT column would go over in Shanghai, even in this relatively socially liberal city. We’d run a LGBT issue in the past and there were minimal problems then, but that’s once a year versus a biweekly column. As Issue 2 was going to press, we got the email there was a problem. We won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but our friends the censors have to OK all CW content to protect our loyal readers.

After all edits were said and done though, and an editor or two had smoke coming out of their ears at the thought of having to censor a column, with very minimal changes the column was able to pass and go to print. Below is the original column. Check out a copy is Issue 2, which comes out today (Thursday, Jan. 24), and compare them to see what things tripped the censorship wire and what got passed, it’s actually pretty interesting.

Having to change a column will always be irksome, but not being able to represent vibrant and grown community in Shanghai would be worse, so in the end it seemed like we chose the lesser of two evils. Let us know what you think.

( We also had to change the image we wanted to run with the column as well. To check the original one out, flip through the images on this blog )

The Comrade You Never Knew: The LGBT crash course in the language of love

If you've ever learned a language before, you know that vocabulary is extremely important. And when it comes to the language of all things sexual, well then, it's even more important to know what to say and how to say it. For the LGBT community, our vocabulary is dear to our hearts and keeps us together like a family.

So what are we anyway? In Shanghai, the name for people like us is more complicated that it appears. While the term 同性恋 ( tongxinglian ) is often used in China to describe gay people in newspaper articles and other official publications, the term isn't so popular among Shanghai gay circles. It's a bit too technical, perhaps even too clinical of a term. The closest English translation to the term is more along the lines of "homosexual" in English.

A few years ago, academics adopted the more informal 同志( tongzhi ), or comrade, to refer to gay people (女同志, nutongzhi for lesbians). Quickly, it became Chinese slang for gay people. Since it's still a relatively popular term in mainstream Chinese society, the slang term gives new meaning to some of the class revolutionary propaganda and Chinese language textbooks. However, one usually doesn't hear 同性恋 or 同志in any of Shanghai's gay or gay-friendly locations. The word you'll hear most often when describing their sexual preference is "gay" (in English) for men, and 拉拉 ( lala ) for women.

At a bar, you might hear two comrades who are about to seal the deal ask, "One or zero?" More than speaking in binary code, what the inquirer really wants to know is, "Top (one) or bottom (zero)?" Without going into much detail, a "top" is typically the more dominant one in bed and prefers to "give it" to the "bottom." These terms, however, should not be confused with masculinity or femininity. After all, we have a term for a masculine bottom who likes to take control, called a "power bottom," a rarity in Shanghai for sure.

Finally, if you are at a club and a cute, attractive man introduces himself as a "MB," you might be his next client. In big cities like Shanghai, these guys (sometimes teenage boys, yuck) are known as money boys or MB, for short. They are fairly common, friendly and bilingual, making them fast friends for visiting tourists. Some of them make even house calls and advertise online … or so I've heard.