There's an open paved area at one end of Houhai Lake in Beijing where retirees practise calligraphy with giant brushes dipped in buckets of plain water. On a sunny day their beautiful script may last just five minutes before it evaporates in the heat. Earlier this summer, a group of young people wielding a camera, whiteboard and marker pens approached one calligrapher and asked him if he would support their campaign called Tongzhi Nihao, which translates roughly as 'hello, comrade'. The elderly man was confused. 'Are you doing some kind of project to support the Red Army?' he asked. Tongzhi literally means comrade but over the past decade it has also become the slang term for homosexual. So the Tongzhi Nihao project, or 'Smile for Gay' as it's called in English, is an attempt to encourage people to show support for gays and lesbians by posing for a photo with a smile and writing a message. The man agreed and proceeded to write his message on the pavement, calling on gays to 'jiayou' or 'go for it' (literally, add oil). Tongzhi Nihao is the brainchild of Eric Hou Haiyang, a 23-year-old native of Changchun in Jilin. He launched his nationwide initiative at the end of May not only to encourage tolerance for gays and lesbians but also to give them a sense of welcome. 'Smiles usually represent kind and good intentions,' Hou says. 'This is something that our gay friends most hope for.' Although gays and lesbians on the mainland are rarely targeted in hate crimes, rural residents and older people find it hard to accept or understand their sexual preferences. After all, homosexuality was classified as a mental disease until 2001. And the tradition to marry and have children is so strong parents who say they are tolerant of homosexuality often can't accept it in their own child. Still, social mores continue to shift. For 42 days, Hou and hundreds of volunteers from Heilongjiang in the north to Yunnan in the southwest gathered images of smiling encouragement. They collected more than 4,000 photos, some of which were displayed at an exhibition at the Dutch embassy in Beijing on Saturday. The photos show an amazing diversity of participants. There's a Buddhist monk; a pair of newly-weds in Mao suits and a middle-aged man dressed in migrant worker garb: black cloth shoes and dark blue overalls. His sign simply said: 'I wish you happiness.' A rugged-looking Tibetan man presented a sign in Tibetan and Putonghua that read: 'Love is the most beautiful law.' There's also a rickshaw driver, candyfloss seller, and a bicycle park attendant who was illiterate and so copied the Tongzhi Nihao characters and the smiley face from the project's logo. Messages range from the predictable ('Love has no boundaries,' and 'We support you') to the eccentric ('Go to Denmark and get married,' and 'Love is not physics'). Hou seems an unlikely advocate of public action in a country where street campaigns on such sensitive issues are rare. Shy and softly spoken, the boyish-looking package designer is nonetheless a budding activist. As a first-year fine arts student at Chungchun Normal University four years ago, he founded the Changchun Animal Protection Association, which held several protests against the eating of dog and cat meat. Participants took to the streets brandishing posters of slaughtered pets and squeezed themselves into cages wearing animal masks. The success of his Tongzhi Nihao project (thousands applied to be volunteers, although Hou finally wound up with 698 people who brought in some 4,400 photos) perhaps stems from how it was organised. High-profile activities such as the Mr Gay China pageant held in Beijing earlier this year are all too often shut down by the police. But this photo drive is different: it is low-key, non-confrontational and has a distinct Chinese flavour. Besides bringing in street snappers, Hou ran an online component hosted on popular mainstream websites such as Sina.com and Douban.com. Almost 1,500 people posted their own photos and messages to its pages. Most were teenagers or people in their 20s, but there were a few older people, including one who described herself as a 50-year-old mother. Her message: 'Children, love well and have a good life!' 'We have a network now of dozens of gay groups across China,' Hou says. 'Next year we can do it again and make it even bigger.' Bing Lan, founder of gay news portal Aibai which co-sponsored the project, is encouraged by the response. 'I think this is a very significant event. When I first arrived in Beijing in 2002, a lot of our work [for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people] was done by individuals - scholars and so on. But today we have the internet so we can mobilise the entire society to work with us,' he says. 'I have a feeling that wheels have started turning. I couldn't imagine us running this kind of project back then.' 'Gays and lesbians have more space in the community to do things ... Now we have NGOs, we can hold more and more small events, there are more activities, there's the LGBT Centre, the Lala [lesbian] Salon, gay nights ... all different stuff,' says Wei Xiaogang, founder of podcast show Queer Comrades. A lesbian activist using the pseudonym Xian attributes changes in people's mindsets mainly to the media starting to report on gay issues and the spread of the internet. 'It's a slow process, but attitudes to gays have improved a lot especially in the past five years. 'The young generation never experienced a time when homosexuality was regarded as a mental disease; when it was bad to be gay. 'And because they are young they embrace new ideas more easily. Many have gay friends and that helps them to understand. 'For those around 40, there is a split. Many still hold stereotypes but some have seen films like Brokeback Mountain, they've read books and understand a little about homosexuality and they're largely accepting as long as it's not in their family. 'The over-60s lived through a time when to be gay was to be a hooligan, it was a crime, it was indecent. Like my parents' generation, they find it really hard to accept gay people.' And with Hou's photo project, Xian says, they can advance their cause to another level. 'Most campaigns have looked inwards to the gay crowd; this is the first to target non-gays and lesbians, to reach out to our straight friends.' One of the few disappointments, Bing says, is that they have yet to find another mainstream location to display the photos after their exhibition closed at the Dutch embassy. In the meantime, the photos will be shown at the LGBT Centre located in a residential high-rise in Chaoyang district until September. Hou, however, is gratified that they got as far as they did. 'I never imagined when I started that I would have an exhibition like this and get so many photos. In the beginning I was only aiming for 1,000.' Smile for Gay is at www.smile4gay.org . Tongzhi Nihao exhibition; Saturdays and Sundays, LGBT Centre, Rm 2108 Bldg B, Xintiandi Plaza, Xibahe Nanlu, Chaoyang, Beijing; tel: 010-64465698; for information, http://blog.sina.com.cn/bjlgbtcenter
