Doing research and fieldwork in Asia's queer communities is, much of the time, a fashion. Professors and students, NGOs and social workers, and now even the influencers of YouTube, Instagram, and RedNote crowd into queer bars, parks, bathhouses, and mahjong parlors, gazing at our lives, touring our joys and sorrows, and molding our suffering into cultural, political, and academic symbols. Over these years, as “one of the last” to have lived through China's queer movement firsthand, I have witnessed many studies so absurd they made all of us laugh: from the local Chinese researcher who walked into a gay bathhouse in Hangzhou and scooped up a beaker of water to test the detection rate of STDs and HIV, to the white “human rights tourists” who turned up at drag balls in Chengdu and grabbed people at random, “What do you think about China's discrimination against sexual minorities?” Some of these methods and approaches have been criticized, yet a great many such studies persist to this day in the queer communities of China and Asia.

And then change began to happen. Research ethics arrived. More and more institutions and individual researchers insist that one must obtain ethical review before entering the field or doing work within community. In China the quality of that review is wildly uneven, because the country has no mandatory ethics procedure for many of non-medical research. Some researchers go to a medical school or their home institution and file an ethnical report on their project. Others secure ethical review overseas, or have it conducted by researchers trained in the West. Even though these people are white and heterosexual, many of them without any training in the social sciences or any cross-cultural experience, and wholly ignorant of local conditions, they remain qualified to make demand after demand of the researcher: “Your questions are too sensitive,” “How will you protect your data,” “How will you anonymize it.” Every study that arrives in or returns to Asia from abroad seems to carry layer upon layer of moral halo and ethical shackle, and everyone claims to serve the best interests of the community. But has any of this truly, truly changed anything on the ground?

I once conducted long-term fieldwork at a queer cruising ground in a city in eastern China. In a stretch of parkland among the trees, there were a great many people who were marginal, drifting, merely surviving: elderly gay men, queers drifting between city and countryside, homeless queers, the sick, and, as one might expect, many sex workers. At first my research focused more on the elderly gay men, for whom this patch of woods was a place of pleasure and play. Some of those grandpas would, mid-conversation, stroke my hand, rest their heads on my shoulder, ask me to hold them, and even, while we talked, sidle up beside me and squeeze my chest and my backside. One gay grandpa, nearly seventy years my senior, once reached for my crotch at a later meeting: “Let me inspect the goods.”

Before our researcher frowns at these grandpas and cries “Stop the sexual harassment,” let us pause. Yes, these acts are harassment, and when I first entered the field I too was a little tense at some of them, but most of the time I did not feel uncomfortable. When I told my younger queer friends about all this, most of them treated it as a joke with good reasons.

Many understood at once. “Old gays are all like that.” For them, I had nothing to explain; they already knew what these grandpas' lives were like: lonely, cast out, lacking any sense of boundaries. This place was their space for socializing, for pursuing desire, for being queer at all, and we who came here were the intruders; we ought to learn their rules. It is precisely through this harassment, this coarse language, these in some sense inappropriate sexual jokes, that elderly gay men build their ramparts.

Elderly queers in China have no way to protect themselves. They are marginal within the family, hated by their heterosexual children and spouses, and many face a crisis of old-age care. They are marginal within the community, where younger queers pity them on one hand and fear them on the other, “We are queer, but we are not the same kind of people (as grandpas).” And they are marginal within society, where China's pension and social support systems do not regard them as elderly people in need of care.

Among young, urban, middle-class Chinese queers there circulates a joke with a distinctly queer-apocalyptic flavor: “Our comeuppance will be this: enjoy youth now, and when we are old, the straight nursing-home aides will beat us to death.” The truth is that most elderly queers are desperately poor, cannot afford a nursing home, and have no insurance, and these gay gathering grounds are their last refuge; the state and the community will only push them back into the heterosexual family that has already rejected them.

Making others uncomfortable is their last line of defense. In practice I had many simple ways both to stop their harassment and to fold myself into their conversation. I could turn and hold the grandpa in his nineties, asking how his health had been lately. I could take their hands in return, joking with them and cursing their sworn enemies alongside them. Sometimes I would joke, half in warning, “Touch me again and I won't come talk to you anymore,” and it seemed that, just like that, a boundary was negotiated between us.

But in the face of the real queer world, holding fast to so-called research ethics and to distance is, much of the time, simply impossible. To put it another way: as a researcher, please, when necessary, abandon the boundary, stop being the observer, stop doing research. There is another experience I often mention to other researchers of queerness, one that also looks ethically terrible. To put it plainly, money changed hands between me and a male sex worker.

Flower was that male sex worker I met at another field site. He was young, with no steady job, living off the support of his “daddies,” support that often came at a price, and intermittently offering sexual services at the gathering grounds. He loved mahjong and lived one day at a time, owed money to many people, his mouth full of curses and lies, and had even sold his ID card to illegal lending outfits. Many people warned me not to believe a word he said, and not to lend him a cent. I was deeply interested in the bankrupt condition of “queers at the (social) bottom”, so I asked him several times whether he would talk with me. He was not much impressed by my interview stipend of fifty RMB an hour, about eight US dollars, and so he kept refusing; he even turned the question around and asked whether I wanted sexual services, which I quickly declined. Then, a month or two after we first met, he suddenly called me over the internet one day, asking whether we could meet right then, and after making sure this meeting would count as a formal interview, not any kinds of a service, I agreed to go.

He looked utterly haggard, with a hole torn in his shirt. That time we talked unusually deeply: about his family, his life between countryside and city, the fraud rings and criminal groups that prey on queers at the social bottom. I am sorry that I cannot share the details, because research ethics forbid me from using them after later things. Throughout the interview he kept asking whether I could lend him money, and once or twice I fobbed him off with the standard professional manner, trying to steer the conversation back to his life.

Until, in a great surge of agitation, he pulled down his trousers then and there: “Boss, I need money to get treated.”
Flower's genitals were ulcerated.

I had long tried to document and understand the violence, discrimination, injury, and disease that sex workers like him encounter, but with the trousers down, face to face with this cruelty, face to face with Flower and with a life he himself called “one rotten life,” I did not know what to do; my mind went blank. Beyond shock, sympathy, and grief, I have to admit that the emotion that dominated me in that instant was, of all things, fear. Yes, I had thought myself “senior” enough in Chinese queer field, and yet I still flinched before the suffering Flower had lived through.

I gave up the aim of research, I gave up my distance, and I gave up that purpose I had always thought “noble,” of finding, for him and for many like him, some “solution to life.” Money was the most direct sympathy I could offer him. Over two transfers I sent him more than a thousand US dollars, some seven thousand RMB; the first time he insisted it was “borrowing from me.” The second time I said, “Both of these are gifts from me. Please, you must use them to get treatment.... I can introduce you to a doctor and to volunteers. Let me know what else I can do to help.”

Did you think this story would have a tender ending? I am sorry to say it does not. By the second time he came to me for money, I already knew that, as ever, he had spent it on mahjong, beer, and fun. He did not go to the doctor I had found for him, and when the volunteers sought him out he still would not go to the hospital. Like millions of others in the gay and queer underclass, he did not live for tomorrow; his life held no space for hope.
For a long time afterward I sank into a low mood, with many things churning inside me. Was lending him the money the right decision? Could I help him? How could I help him? What more could I do? I shared these questions with many people. Some felt I should not have lent him money; most felt I had done nothing wrong. Faced with Flower, I could not bear it, and that alone could be the reason for everything I did. And a senior lawyer for sexual minorities, an elder in the field, told me that not everyone wishes to climb out of the mire, but that this does not mean we stop throwing them the rope.

After I introduced the volunteers to him, Flower deleted my contact himself. When I returned to the field site I did not find him, and the grandpas said he had vanished one winter, just like his own mocking summation of his life: “I am a little flower fairy come down from heaven.” I have never used Flower's story in any of my later research, except in this poem dedicated to him, and every experience in that poem can be found, in similar form, in someone else. Perhaps if I did not tell his story he would soon be forgotten, but he is part of the collective memory of this era's queer world.

After Flower, I met many, many more people, and many scenes brought him back to me. In the face of this cruel and beautiful queer world, I think Flower would say:
Understand us, make a connection, become a friend, do something for us. And if you will not, then please do not break into our world.