Our group has been doing pretty well so far, and I think things will continue to go well for us moving forward. We’ve been working on research even as we’ve been pushing forward into the next steps, since my own topic hasn’t been all that generous with sources and Elise changed her topic right before we went on break. I don’t necessarily think this is a setback, though; even though there’s a bit more work to do now, it’ll probably benefit us in the end with a more substantial map and better connections between our topics.
In my case, I haven’t found much since I last wrote about having difficulty finding sources. I’ve yet to find the name or location of the gay bar in Urumqi, and I think I’m ready to accept that I likely won’t be able to find it in the time we have to finish the project. I thought I had found the owner’s name, but looking into him I learned that he was “Mr. Gay China” and lives in Beijing, so I’m not quite sure what to make of his ties to the bar.
While definitely not the most reliable method, I spent some time the other day using Google Translate to search for websites about gay Uyghurs in Chinese, and I ended up stumbling across some rather bizarre things. There was a website with a very short piece of (I’m assuming) creative writing wherein a guy was admiring a Uyghur man, but far more interesting were the comments; they ranged from relatively normal encouragement for the author to some absolutely wild accusations that Islam required Uyghur men to maintain two gay love affairs at any given time. Google Translate isn’t the most reliable translation source, so perhaps something was translated incorrectly, but I’m very much interested in where that idea originated. There were also some sexually explicit stories about Uyghur men nestled in the comments, but it was unclear whether or not the authors of the comments were Uyghur, Han, or another ethnicity. Another thing that I noticed was how most Chinese pages refer to gay guys as “comrades,” and I haven’t been able to find any explanation for this.
I’ve also been having some fun looking into gay culture in China’s eastern cities, Shanghai in particular. Plenty of websites for clubs are accessible, and it’s been interesting to look into all of that and get a sense of what clubs there are like. I’m also having a great time looking at all the posters that clubs have made to advertise their events – I’ve been sifting through page after page of attractive guys to find the perfect poster to use in the storymap. For science, y’know?

— Nathan, 10/29