During my first visit to the United States in middle school, I attended the 2015 Pride Parade in order to celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage in the US. Walking by as a traveler from China who’s never seen a large parade before, I was amazed at the pure joy that was radiating from the crowd. After going back to China, I founded a subtitle translation group focused on the LGBT community in order to increase the public exposure of the LGBT community in China, and have been working on that till today. Being a member of the LGBT community, I was not a typical case in China, I didn’t receive any resistance from my parents nor the society, and was fortunate enough to go to the United States for school. However, many of my friends were challenged by social stigmas and family values, making them invisible in society. I’m passionate to discover the cause of this invisibility through a political and geographical spectrum and put me and my friends’ personal experiences into this examination.

Through my research, I hope to analyze the Chinese LGBT community’s social status and their invisibility through three perspectives, first political, discussing same-sex marriage legalization in Taiwan, and the mainland government’s response. Second, I will examine through the traditional cultural aspects of Chinese society’s negative response to the LGBT community; and lastly, this social report will go through historical archives and examine the media portrayal of the LGBT community in the era of PRC. Through including interviews and data collections of people of all ages, I hope to determine and identify the trend of opinions in generations, and the globalization and intersectionality of ideology. For today’s China that I’m living in, what are the obstacles that stand between reaching equality and remain “oppressed”? How do different minority groups respond to the call for equality?