The Internet was able to change everything. Single lesbians and gays could communicate with others all over the state and look for people in their hometowns who were also living secretly – creating friendships and communities in reality. The Internet also permitted for the emergence of a new way to act like heterosexual.

China was known as a country where gays were classified as mentally ill people till 2001 and as criminals until 1997. But quite recently lesbians and gays have found new ways to act like straight people. In China where the pressure to start a family is strong and begins early, it has long been usual for gay guys to marry straight girls. Nowadays, some are finding what they think to be a better substitution. Gay guys and lesbian girls increasingly marry each other, often aided by the Internet. These marriages are known as cooperative, fake or ritual.

Xiaojiong has a long successful online dating experience. She met not only her husband on a Chinese matchmaking forum, but also a girlfriend. She was born in Shenyang, a city located in the northeastern district of Liaoning. Xiaojiong grew up without knowing another lesbian. As a teen looking for love, or for some friends, she sometimes traveled to Beijing but felt unsure in the city’s rowdy female bars. Xiaojiong, actually, was one of the first to found out an Internet forum for lesbians and gays to look for marriage partners. At the same time, she was motivated to find herself a husband.

She says she was 25 when her parents were pressuring her permanently to get married. That’s why she began her project in 2007. Xiaojiong couldn’t find an Internet site for fake marriages so she started her own. People who join her forum have to give an answer to the next questions to fill their profiles: ‘Do you want to live with your husband/wife together or apart?’, ‘Would you like to have kids or not?’, ‘Do you want to have a marriage certificate or the ceremony itself?’, ‘Do you want to get divorced?’

When lesbians and gays marry each other, they can agree on terms of marriage, so they are able to keep living in a way they want to. She says it’s unfair for heterosexual persons to get stuck in marriages with miserable gays. Her forum is popular and Xiaojiong sets up regional meetings for participants to share experiences and support each other. It happened at one of those meetings that Xiaojiong got acquainted with her girlfriend. In the local lingo, Xiaojiong is a tomboy, while her girlfriend named Xiaopu is a feminine-style. They live in a big flat sharing it with another lesbian couple.

Their family gets larger. When they moved in together 3 years ago, all 4 girls were looking for gay husbands. Past autumn they all found a guy and got married throwing lavish weddings that successfully deceived their friends, co-workers and families. The girls still live together as they did, accidentally attending family meetings with their husbands. They are a very happy family with their two tomboys, two feminine-style, two cats and two dogs. They still keep in secret their affair. But lots of others find it too hard to live in the same city with their parents, so they move away from home to reach some freedom.

Beijing possesses the biggest gay scene in China. But even being too far from home, the pressure to get married doesn’t disappear. The director of Beijing LGBT Center, Stephen Leonelli, reports he constantly gets calls from individuals looking for advice on fake marriages – an often divisive topic. Fake marriages are most accessible for the elites. People have very high criteria for marriage partners. They look for somebody with a high salary, a good apartment, and household registration. Other people report that fake marriages are more egalitarian than traditional straight relationships.

Brian, 34, an engineer in Beijing who prefers not open his real name, says he is happy to be in a healthy relationship with his lesbian wife and to have found her on the Internet in only several months when usually it takes others years to find the proper match. Brian likes his wife’s independence and the fact they’ve got similar career achievements. They live apart and share family expenses equally. They have a son, and Brian confesses they will face some difficult challenges and solutions. The couple is going to raise their son in a family, so they need to live together and discuss how to divide the responsibilities. They also think over how to tell their son about them when he gets older.

Fake marriage is such a new thing that there is a lack of investigation available. A yet-to-be-published research provided by Common Language, reported about 19 individuals who look for fake marriages across China. The research showed that the majority of people use Internet forums for meeting future partners and that gays take a more active part in pursuing lesbian wives. Lucetta Kam is a sociologist at Baptist University (Hong Kong). She is the author of Shanghai Lalas, the first study that explores fake marriage from the view of lesbians in Shanghai. She says a cooperative marriage is a sad thing. It happens because gays are repressed to keep their orientation in secret. But anyway, it’s still a sort of resistance. It mocks common marriage and creates new forms of families.

The stories of Xiaojing and Xiaopu will be the base for a new documentary produced by the Pink Space Sexually Research Center (Beijing). Xiaojiong says she hopes fake marriages will be a temporary phenomenon. If more homosexual guys come out, then probably it will be like something new that the society finds first inappropriate. But if more and more people will come out, then the public might become more tolerate to it. China may have an old culture but it has lots of things to change. Xiaojing ends her story by her lifetime dream to marry Xiaopu someday.