Beware: images in this post are historical… but NSFW… be forewarned.

Before going further, it is important to lay out at the outset that fact that modern terms like homo/heterosexuality are just that – modern understandings and ideas that don’t “fit” with many cultures’ understanding of sexuality. So while we may use such terms to describe behaviors or ideas – and that can be useful – “Chinese homosexuality” (or ancient Greek, or Roman, or wherever) wouldn’t really have been thought of or understood in the same way at the time.

OK, now we’ve got that out of the way. So, first off the answer is a big fat “YES” there are many references to and accounts of homosexuality in Chinese history. I see someone has already mentioned “The Passion of the Cut Sleeve” from the Han Dynasty, but references go back even further than that. The Intrigues of the Warring States from the mid-7th c. BCE, for instance, tells of Duke Xian of Jin planting attractive young men in the courts of his enemies to distract them and give them bad advice. Similarly, later on in the Warring States Period (3rd c. BCE), historian Han Fei gives us in his eponymous work one of the “signature” tales of homosexuality that would ultimately become an idiom for the practice even in modern parlance: the relationship between Viscount Mi Zixia and Duke Ling of Wei. It is as follows:

Mizi Xia was a favorite, and a Great Master, during the reign of the duke Ling of Wei: he was the lover of the duke. According to the law of the kingdom, the use of the duke’s carriage without permission was forbidden to all, upon pain of having one’s feet cut off. One time it happened that Mizi’s mother took gravely ill, and a breathless messenger came running to the palace in the middle of the night to bring him the news. He, without a second thought, jumped into the duke’s carriage and took off. When the duke found out, instead of punishing him he praised him, saying: “What a devoted son! For his mother he risks even losing his own feet!”

Another time, on a warm summer afternoon, he was strolling with the duke through the royal orchard. A beautiful peach on a low-lying branch caught his eye and he plucked it. Biting down on it he found it sweet, so he offered the rest to the duke. The duke, touched by the intimate gesture, said: “He loves me to the point of forgetting his own mouth and giving it to me!”

Later, the beauty of the viscount began to fade, and the duke’s love also waned. When the viscount was one time accused of a crime, the duke said: “That one once hijacked my carriage, and he even gave me a half-eaten peach to eat!” Mizi Xia had not done anything unusual. If the ruler was now accusing him of a crime instead of praising him like he used to, that was because the duke’s love had now turned to hate.

Even today, gayness – especially male-male relationships – is often referred to as 分桃 (fentao, “divided peach”).

In both this case as well as that of the other “most famous” ancient reference to homosexuality – again, the “Passion of the Cut Sleeve” between Emperor Ai of Han and Dong Xian – it’s important to know that all parties were married to wives… and Emperor Ai’s case especially, possessing an entire harem of them. Did these women know the physical aspect of their husbands’ relationships? It seems likely that they would have – that aspect of life, however – markedly unlike even accepting depictions in the ancient West, we in China just mundane distractions from what was actually important. To wit, while Ai and Dong Xian were able to carry on their affair without anyone so much as batting an eye, it was when Ai – who died quite young – attempted to name Dong Xian as his heir (instead of his son) that the shit hit the fan. Dong Xian was executed in short order for such a transgression shortly after Ai’s death. Again, the ire raised wasn’t about the sexual relationship, but about the inappropriate transfer of political power. In fact of the 13 emperors of the Western Han period, 10 of them are either known or highly suspected of having taken male lovers (often obliquely referred to simply as “favorites”) in addition to their wives and concubines.

In many respects, male-male relationships were seen as being more pure/beautiful than their heterosexual counterparts. From Louis Crompton:

Clearly these normative tales, if we may so call them, show an unselfconscious acceptance of same-sex relations, an acceptance that was to persist in China for twenty-four centuries. They contrast strikingly with the myth that dominated the imagination of Western Christendom – the story of Sodom with its supernatural terrors. But they are also quite distinct from the traditions of ancient Greece. Instead of legends of heroic self-sacrifice in a warrior society, we have piquant tales of delicate consideration and tenderness. Love for the Chinese was rarely the inspiration it was for the Greeks, the Arabs, and the troubadors. Rather than being enobling experiences, male love affairs in ancient China were elegant diversions, suffused with poetic sentiment.

Writings from the Liu Song Dynasty (5th c. CE) likewise tell of the practice being not just acceptable, but positively normal:

All the gentlemen and officials esteemed it. All men in the realm followed this fashion to the extent that husbands and wives were estranged. Resentful unmarried women became jealous.

Poetry likewise shows that the idea was widespread enough that even passing reference was deem sufficient that everyone would know what was “really" being said. An example from the 6th century poet Liu Xiaozhuo:

She dawdles, not daring to move closer, / Afraid he might compare her with leftover peach.

I should be careful to note, however, that such “normalcy” was only such in the upper classes – the nobility. Typical peasantry would have neither the time, nor the opportunity to think much about cut sleeves or bitten peaches.

Nevertheless, we begin to get the first indications of mounting opposition to homosexual behaviors as early as the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE). Mostly this is thought to have been “imported” from India via the rising popularity of Buddhism – which was cold-if-not-exactly-hostile to all physical relationships, but at least saw the value of hetero-sex for their propagation of the species. Some Buddhist schools admonished homosexual behaviors for being purely pleasure-seeking, and thus distancing oneself from enlightenment and Nirvana. All the same, it was no universal condemnation; still other schools of Buddhism remained thoroughly neutral regarding homosexual relationships, as did China’s native Taoism for the most part.

It’s the Song and after that China began to experience real significant pushback against homosexuality in the forms of the first laws passed against the employment of “male prostitutes”, nevertheless that was directly much more toward the exploitative nature of young boys being used as prostitutes than any condemnation of homosexuality as a whole (or prostitution of women, for that matter). Nevertheless, these laws were effectively unenforceable, and everyone knew it. The Ming Period likewise saw widespread homosexual relationships and male prostitution among the gentry and wealthy urban merchant classes. Xie Zhaozhe (1567–1624) wrote that "from Jiangnan and Zhejiang to Beijing and Shanxi, there is none that does not know of this fondness."

Southeastern China – especially Fujian – was a notorious hotbed for homosexual acceptance – up to and including full-on gay marriage. The “adoptive older brother” would pay a “bride price” for the “adoptive younger brother” and they would live together as a family for as many as 20 years before they were expected to marry women and produce heirs. Even at that point, however, they two families would still often live together and carry on as they had before – only now with wives and kids in tow.

Nonetheless, the stodgy moralism of Indian-style Theravada Buddhism, the rise of neo-Confucianism, and the increasing influence of the West (and its Christian ethos’ horror at such “unnatural perversions”) began to take their toll on Chinese acceptance of the practice. In the waning years of the Ming, one of the great storytellers of China, Pu Songling, wrote a satirical riff on the neo-Confucians’ anti-homosexual moralistic hand-wringings:

Illicit trysts
Twixt men and women
Were once thought foul;
How much fouler reeks
The passion of Cut Sleeve,
Of Half-Eaten Peach,
Of love twixt man and man!
Only the mightiest warrior
Can penetrate that tiny bird-track!
The narrow grotto
Leads to no Peach Blossom Spring:
Surely the fisherman
Poled up it by mistake!

Continued in Pt. 2

Homosexuality was nicknamed "The Fetish of the Broken Sleeve" in ancient China as once Emperor Ai of Han who had just woken found his male lover lying on his sleeve. Not wishing to disturb his lover Emperor Ai pulled out a knife cutting the sleeve to let him continue resting.

The earliest records of Homosexuality don't mention anything much of it other then "Someone" had male lovers. For example in the Spring and Autumn Annals one prince was recorded to have male concubines for lack of a better word and they rode together into battle and died together in battle when they were invaded by the state of Qi. During their Funeral Confucious did not even mention anything of their sexuality and only praised them so it probably wasn't that big of a deal back then.

In the early Qing Dynasty famous author and playwright Li Yu also wrote a play about two women falling in love that's still acted out today.