Prologue Journal

Anyone in Hong Kong for badminton… nudge, nudge, wink, wink?

• prologu5
• 09/07/202409/07/2024

Hong Kong Free Press

Teaching young teenagers about sex is a tricky matter. It has to be attempted, because otherwise curiosity will lead potential pupils to the steamy parts of the internet, where you can claim access to “adult” stuff by simply clicking on a “yes” button.

But avoiding potential pitfalls is not easy, as the Education Bureau (EDB) has recently discovered. One wishes to describe the machinery accurately, as it were, while subtly discouraging premature experiments in its use.

The EDB’s efforts came in for a good deal of criticism. One of the potential problems is that your efforts to foster celibacy will launch a fleet of risqué jokes. The new curriculum’s suggestion that people should sublimate lusty urges by playing badminton gave a harmless pursuit a new sexy edge. Inviting someone for a game will never be quite the same again.

And what will they say when they discover that the English name for that little fluffy thing they bat backwards and forwards is “the shuttlecock?”

Another danger is that the message will be sullied by well-intentioned statements which are visibly unjustified by reality. The new curriculum says that pre-marital sex is regarded in society as “deviant.” Really?

Still, if our government has problems with heterosexual sex, they are as nothing compared with its problems with the list of alphabetic alternatives.

It is understandable that in the search for patriotic placeholders very little attention was paid to candidates’ attitudes to sexual minorities. But as a result some of the newly minted public figures combined a laudable enthusiasm for national security with distinctly old-fashioned attitudes to the LGBTQ community.

See also: What is Hong Kong’s Gay Games and why has it seen so much controversy?

This was most visible in the history of the Gay Games, which followed a trajectory reminiscent of the post-SARS Harbourfest, starting with general jubilation about an event which would put Hong Kong on the map, and concluding with bitter recriminations about wasted money and foreign influence.

More surreptitiously the new puritanism is gradually affecting the parts of the government which interact, or ought to interact, with the community of people with minority sexual orientations.

For example, the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau (curiously) is in charge of an Equal Opportunities (Sexual Orientation) Fund which, since 2015, has supported NGOs working in this area.

For the current financial year its budget dropped by almost half. Many groups had funding cut or deleted altogether. The fund went from supporting 18 to 24 groups to supporting just 10. Also, among the survivors are three groups – all founded by the same person – offering “conversion therapy”, a scientifically disreputable attempt to turn gay people “straight” which is much cherished by religious groups.

Funding for AIDS prevention work, which comes from the Health Bureau, has also been cut. And the Equal Opportunities Commission has dropped its earlier enthusiasm for legislation against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Like other NGOs which do not attract official support, those working in this area find it difficult to hold events in public places or to book venues for private ones. Fundraising has withered because of the legal hazards, particularly if the funds come from overseas.

These changes are ominous for the communities concerned. No doubt government funds are shorter in these deficit-haunted times, but the fact that cash can still be found for fundamentalist nonsense suggests that something else is at work. There is also a worrying implication in all this for all of us.

After all, NGOs catering for the needs of sexual minorities are not in themselves political. Encouraging people to feel comfortable in who they partner with is not subversive. Distributing health education materials and free condoms is not a threat to national security.

Are we approaching a new reality in which any NGO not wrapped in the tentacles of the local establishment is going to be frozen gradually out of existence? Fairness, like justice, must be not just done, but seen to be done.

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https://hongkongfp.com/2024/09/07/anyone-in-hong-kong-for-badminton-nudge-nudge-wink-wink/