We maybe a little premature but we are sensing potential baby steps for one LGBTQ Community in the Far East. And we don’t mean Oregon.
In China there have just had their very first Twitter video advertisement that actually featured a gay man taking his boyfriend to meet his parents for Chinese New Year “Mom, this is Kelvin,” the man tells his shocked mother as she opens the door. If that is not enough as the family sit down for dinner, much to the amusement of its younger members, Kelvin insists on calling the father ‘Dad’.
This was all the work of Tmall, which is one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the Asian nation and is owned by Alibaba,. The ad went viral on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, where it has been viewed millions of time. In the caption. And so far the world has not ended.
China is enormously homophobic, very controlling and heavily censor LGBTQ content and just recently they made filmmakers cut the gay kiss out of Rockeman. Maybe they overlooked this ad, or it is a baby step .
Even so, things are changing, however slowly. The National People’s Congress — the country’s rubber-stamp parliament — publicly acknowledged proposals to legalize same-sex marriage last month. While that doesn’t bring the country anywhere close to legalization, it does show that the government is willing to recognize the topic.
