A couple months after the day in the park with Merhaba, a male Uyghur friend Hemrahjan and I decided to go to the local amusement park and walk around. It was the first day of Eid, which is the first day after Ramadan and a major holiday in Muslim communities.
As we were exiting the park, we saw two young men in their early twenties walking by in identical outfits: tight black pants and pink shirts with a hood. We had been seeing people—young and old, men and women—walking around all day wearing identical outfits. Wearing identical outfits was a local tradition for close friends and family on the first day of Eid.
“Would men in America wear matching outfits like that?” Hemrahjan asked, pointing his nose in the direction of the men with pink shirts.
“Not really, men don’t really do that too much in my country,” I answered.
“I think it’s really weird for men to wear the same outfit.”
“Oh, really? Why?”
“I just think it’s wrong. It makes them look kind of gay.”
“But it’s so common. There are a lot of men wearing matching outfits today,” I countered.
“Well. I think they look gay. There are also a lot of messages written in the men’s bathrooms in Urumchi, saying ‘Add this number for this gay chat group,’ or, ‘call this number if you’re gay.’ But there isn’t any of that in my rural hometown,” he said.
“Do you think that might be a reflection of your hometown’s prejudice that kept gay men there silent or afraid?”
“I think homosexuality is a bad influence from the city, or from Han culture maybe. Why else would those messages on the bathroom stalls be so common in Urumchi, but nonexistent in my Uyghur-majority hometown?” He was drawing causation from correlation. He didn’t see that the nonexistent messages didn’t mean that gay men didn’t exist, but rather that they were made silent by the culture.
One reason Uyghurs are discriminatory against queer people might be due to their isolation. Ever since Xinjiang was incorporated into China in 1955, Xinjiang has been relegated to China’s periphery. Before that, Xinjiang sat at the central crossroads of Turkish, Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Russian trade.
Keeping Uyghurs subjugated as “minorities” and “peripheral” peoples instead of the center of economics and trade as they once had been and as they could be, they are deemed Other, Less Than, Inferior, and Peripheral, which encourages their marginalization and isolation. As a result, Xinjiang and its people have a lack of access to the outside world, which means a limited perspective and lack of exposure and awareness of other cultures and peoples, include queer culture and people.
Xinjiang is also isolated partially because of tight state restrictions on internet and book censorship. When Uyghurs do have access to the outside world, often with the Han community, they have access to representation of queer people and are more likely to come out and be open with their sexual expression. This leads some to believe there is a causation relationship with Han people, urban life, and queer identities.
“I don’t like it when Uyghur men do stuff like dress the same,” he continued. “It freaks me out. Feeling weird about gay expression is just a kind of obsession I have.”
I felt as though I had been slapped in the face. Hemrahjan was one of my closest friends. His feminine-of-center gender expression had always made me feel comfortable with him. For a long time, I had thought maybe he was queer like me. His words hurt.
Was it possible that this was an expression of internalized homophobia? I couldn’t help but think, trying to justify his biting judgments.
Hemrahjan judged other men for dressing the same and for writing messages on bathroom stalls. In doing so, he policed other Uyghur men’s bodies. In the backdrop of a military police state, policing was not limited to the state, but enforced on bodies by the Uyghur community.
Why are many Uyghurs prejudiced against queer people? You may ask. I have one theory. Uyghurs are surrounded by a Han Chinese discourse through school textbooks, newspapers, the media, pop culture, and political propaganda. One part of this discourse states that religion is a backward and uncivilized practice. The state discourse declares that Uyghurs should forego Islam for the leadership of the Communist Party in order to embrace scientific thinking and modernized development. Uyghurs are under constant surveillance and threat of arrest for believing in and practicing Islam.
In response, they have developed reasons for why they believe practicing religion is necessary and justified. They view Han people, many of whom are atheists, as lacking a moral compass and capable of doing great evil because of it. Many Uyghurs believe that as Muslims they inherently have moral superiority over Han people. For many Uyghurs, being heterosexual, cisgender, modest, and staying chaste before marriage is a part of this imagined moral superiority over the Han vis-à-vis their Islamic faith and the tenets of that faith tradition.
Straight Uyghurs may find comfort in this idea of moral superiority. Subjugated populations often do. It’s the reverse of majority privilege. They may find refuge in a cultural distinction from an ever-increasing Han presence. With the encroaching state security presence, especially state security that threatened to eliminate their religion and language, straight Uyghurs escaped into their Islamic beliefs and held fast to the belief that a better life awaited them in death.
While Hemrahjan declared his disgust over these expressions of possible queerness, it was clear to me from his description of the “very common” messages on bathroom stalls in men’s bathrooms that the queer community was nevertheless alive and well in Urumchi.
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