What’s It Like To Be Gay In China? with Dr. Travis S. K. Kong

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06/21/23 • 73 min

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What do 90 young, gay men in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have in common? They’ve all spent years sharing their stories with this week’s guest: Dr. Travis S. K. Kong. He joins Jonathan as part of our Pride Beyond Borders series to discuss what it’s like to be queer in each of these places—and share his interviewees’ coming out stories, their experiences with sex and dating, and their senses of intergenerational queer community.

Travis S. K. Kong is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy (Routledge 2011), Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 2019) and Sexuality and the Rise of China: The Post-1990s Gay Generation in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China (Duke University Press 2023).

Curious for more? Check out the rest of our Pride Beyond Borders series:

Is Queerness Divine? (Part One) with Dr. Eziaku Nwokocha

Is Queerness Divine? (Part Two) with Dr. Eziaku Nwokocha

What Are The Global Politics of Drag? with Professor Kareem Khubchandani

And learn about Early China in parts one and two of our conversation with Professor Jue Guo.

Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com.

Find books from past Getting Curious guests at bookshop.org/shop/curiouswithjvn.

Our executive producer is Erica Getto. Our producer is Chris McClure. Production support from Julie Carrillo and Emily Bossak.

Our theme music is “Freak” by QUIÑ; for more, head to TheQuinCat.com.

Curious about bringing your brand to life on the show? Email [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Curious for more? Check out the rest of our Pride Beyond Borders series:

Is Queerness Divine? (Part One) with Dr. Eziaku Nwokocha

Is Queerness Divine? (Part Two) with Dr. Eziaku Nwokocha

What Are The Global Politics of Drag? with Professor Kareem Khubchandani

And learn about Early China in parts one and two of our conversation with Professor Jue Guo.

Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com.

Find books from past Getting Curious guests at bookshop.org/shop/curiouswithjvn.

Our executive producer is Erica Getto. Our producer is Chris McClure. Production support from Julie Carrillo and Emily Bossak.

Our theme music is “Freak” by QUIÑ; for more, head to TheQuinCat.com.

Curious about bringing your brand to life on the show? Email [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Previous Episode

What's Haitian Vodou? (Part Two) with Professor Eziaku Nwokocha

What’s it like to enter a religious or spiritual space as a queer person? In Haitian Vodou, the divinities are ready to accept LGBTQIA+ practitioners—and are arguably queer themselves. In part two of our Pride Beyond Borders episode about this African diasporic religion, Professor Eziaku Nwokocha takes us into one of Manbo Maude’s temples to better understand this spiritual practice, and how its practitioners navigate questions of race, gender, and sexuality.

Curious for more?

Check out part one of our conversation with Professor Nwokocha, where we get down to basics on Haitian Vodou and Haitian history.

Revisit the first episode from our Pride Beyond Borders series, all about global drag cultures, with Professor Kareem Khubchandani.

And learn all about New Orleans history in parts one and two of our episode with Dr. Kathryn Olivarius!

Eziaku Nwokocha is an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami. She is a scholar of Africana religions with expertise in the ethnographic study of Vodou in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. Her research is grounded in a thorough understanding of religions in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, in gender and sexuality studies, visual and material culture and Africana Studies generally.

She is the author of Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), which is an ethnographic study of fashion, spirit possession, and gender and sexuality in contemporary Haitian Vodou, exploring Black religious communities through their innovative ceremonial practices. This book is featured within the series Where Religion Lives.

You can follow Professor Nwokocha on Twitter and Instagram at @dr_zaku, and at eziakunwokocha.com.

Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com.

Find books from past Getting Curious guests at bookshop.org/shop/curiouswithjvn.

Our executive producer is Erica Getto. Our producer is Chris McClure. Our editor is Andrew Carson. Production support from Julie Carrillo and Emily Bossak.

Curious about bringing your brand to life on the show? Email [email protected].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Next Episode

How Does The Universe Get It On? with Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Is life one big cosmic orgy? To wrap up our Pride Beyond Borders series, we’re going big... with an episode all about our universe! Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein joins Jonathan to discuss why spacetime isn’t straight, what quantum spin can teach us about gender expression, and why the key to understanding the cosmos may just be (wait for it) the world’s biggest dental dam.

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Core Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is a researcher in particle cosmology and author of the award-winning book for general audiences, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. She is working on her next book, The Edge of Space-Time.

You can follow Dr. Prescod-Weinstein on Twitter @IBJIYONGI, on Instagram and TikTok @chanda.prescod.weinstein, on Bluesky and Substack @chanda, and at cprescodweinstein.com.

Curious for more? Here are some resources Dr. Prescod-Weinstein recommends:

lgbt+physicists

Astronomy and Astrophysics Outlist

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

The Dialogues: Conversations about the Nature of the Universe by Clifford V. Johnson

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack

Risa Wechsler: The search for dark matter -- and what we've found so far | TED Talk

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: The search for the invisible matter that shapes the universe | TED Talk

You can find more episodes about space (including one with Dr. Moiya McTier!), and the rest of our Pride Beyond Borders series, here.

Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com.

Find books from Getting Curious guests at bookshop.org/shop/curiouswithjvn.

Our executive producer is Erica Getto. Our producer is Chris McClure. Production support from Julie Carrillo and Emily Bossak.