You’re at a dinner party. You’re attracted to someone sitting across the table. You ask them out on a date. You start doing everything together. You fall in love. You’re exclusive. You move in together. You’re a couple for three years. You want to get married.
You live in Beijing. You’re American. Your partner is Chinese. You’re gay.
This is the story of Steven Hill and Bei Hai, who met in Beijing in 2010. Hill had lived there for three years, teaching math in an English immersion program at China Agricultural University before he met Hai, who worked as a retail trainer for MAC Cosmetics.
“I just wanted to be with him all the time,” says Hill, a tall, trim and tan twenty-eight-year-old with a slight beard, and never without glasses over his bright blue eyes. He’d had trouble finding a connection with Chinese guys until then, dating expats like himself, but when he met Hai there was just an instant understanding. And for Hai, a fit twenty-nine-year-old with dark coiffed hair and deep brown eyes, it felt the same, with an added bonus.
“Steven is my ideal man: handsome, sweet,” Hai says, adding, “And if I were in a relationship with a Chinese guy, there is no future, no marriage, no adoption, nothing.”
Hai, an Instagram user, takes a picture of Hill with his camera phone. Being gay in China is less taboo than many people may assume. Because China’s is not a religious society, there is no moral outrage rooted in Christian or other spiritual values. Nor is there much of a vocal, divisive political discussion over gay rights. As an issue, it is largely invisible to the public. The real cultural focus is on progeny and male children, which a gay relationship makes impossible. That is the stem of its unacceptability in China: a practical, familial consideration to end the family line.
Hill had always intended to leave Beijing in 2011, after his three-year tenure at the university was up. He is a well-educated, bilingual American and, as he approached thirty, wanted to pursue a higher-paying career back home. But once he met Hai, Hill was forced to chose between his love and his home. There was no way for Hai to easily immigrate to the U.S. since they couldn’t simply apply for a green card, move there together and get married, like heterosexual couples do.
Because immigration is a wholly federal process, it didn’t matter that Hill is from — and would return to — Maryland, a state in which gay marriage was legalized in 2012. The Defense of Marriage Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1996, barred same-sex couples from receiving federal marriage benefits, including the right to sponsor foreign partners for permanent residence.
“That’s why DOMA was so bad,” Hill says. “Even as states were changing laws, it didn’t really matter for the real things gay couples were going through.”
And so from 2011 to 2013, Hill and Hai recommitted to living in Beijing, and embarked on months of in-depth research to find out where they could move, together. They lived week-to-week, never making big plans for the future. They had many friends, including several other gay couples, and an active social life. They moved in together, sharing a great apartment in Beijing, as well as two cats, then took their first big vacation together to the Philippines. They were both out in their everyday life in the city, not hiding their relationship at work or among peers. But the couple felt they had reached a plateau, with no way to take their lives to the next level, including marriage and kids.