How a Beijing retiree became a go-between for gays trying to come out to their parents

Lu Rong was in her late 50s when she first met a gay man. She was surfing the internet four years ago when she stumbled across a curious blog entry: 'I'm in a real dilemma over my mother's phone call.'

'When I saw it, I thought it was very strange,' says Lu, 61, a retired market researcher. 'He obviously loved his mother very much, so why was he afraid to pick up her call? I have a son myself.'

After rereading the blog several times and examining those of his friends that were linked to the page, it dawned on her that he was a thirtysomething gay man who didn't know how to deal with his mother's eagerness to see him married. 'I left him a message. I said: 'Why don't you find a lesbian to marry and then your mother will be happy?''

He wrote back the next day, saying that he was moved and had never imagined a woman of Lu's age would be so open-minded. 'He told me my message made him cry,' she says. 'And then I made friends with him. That's the kind of person I am.'

Little did Lu know that the chance meeting would result in her publishing the mainland's first officially sanctioned book about the lives of homosexuals, their lovers and their families.

The blogger introduced her to his friends, and soon Lu went from being a retired divorcee with too much time on her hands to a surrogate mother to dozens of gay men. She organised discussion groups on sexual identity and acted as a go-between for gay men struggling to come out to their parents. The book she wrote to tell their tales, Those Gay Children of Mine, was published by Shanghai Joint Publishing this summer under her pen name, Old Ou.