It's been five years since Ren Yue first visited a gay bar. Invited by a journalist-friend to take photographs for a story on gay life in Beijing, she sat in a shadowy corner, watching strangers bump and grind to thumping music. At the first camera flash, two men stopped dancing and approached her in an aggressive manner.
The bar manager was forced to intervene before she was allowed to leave.
That antagonism has since become a distant memory for the photographer, whose Love of Brothers collection earned plaudits when it was displayed at the Wuyi International Photo Week in Fujian province , and the International Photo Festival in Pingyao, Shanxi province, last year.
Her first project - a portfolio for a photography seminar sponsored by the World Press Foundation in 2001 with a theme of gender - almost came to a dead end when she found her work reinforcing the popular stereotype of gay people as an exotic, otherworldly species.
She found herself at a loss about how to fix it and put down her camera at parties.
The turning point only came when Zhang Yi, manager of Beijing gay bar On and Off, and two gay housemates invited her to move into their countryside home in the autumn of 2002.