Indecent proposal
Lesser relationships would have buckled under the pressure of a HK$500 million bounty being put on the sexuality of one of the partners by her own father, but Gigi Chao and Sean Eav appear to have taken it in their stride. Leo Lewis meets 'the most famous lesbian in Asia'
The tiny helicopter dips towards Victoria Harbour and sweeps thrillingly between two of Hong Kong’s tallest skyscrapers.
Gigi Chao – pilot, playboy’s daughter and Asia’s most famous lesbian – cannot resist a whoop of delight. The 33-year-old heiress, boldly steering the air-craft to give her passenger the best possible view, banks eagerly towards the city. The cockpit is a realm she dominates: a strangely intimate boudoir of altimeters, wind gauges and critical instruments.
On dry land, at society parties and in local gossip magazines, Chao may be the Sapphic centrepiece of perhaps the most ludicrous fairy tale of modern times – unwilling participant in a contest designed to overturn her sexuality. But in the air, with just her skill as a pilot and a perspex bubble between us and watery doom, she is control personified – one of China’s most powerful businesswomen, a poised socialite and now victor, not victim, of Daddy’s debacle.
Nine months ago, that triumph seemed unlikely. Last September, Chao’s father, 76-year-old property magnate Cecil Chao Sze-tsung, unleashed a tirade of parental stricture. His daughter’s April marriage ceremony to the woman she loved, in a Parisian church, had not taken place, he told reporters. She was not a lesbian, he said, and offered HK$500 million to the man who could wean his daughter off her preference for girls.
It was a commodification of romance that seemed both appropriate and jarring, given Cecil’s self-crafted reputation as a playboy. He claims to have bedded more than 10,000 women since 1970. That relentless pursuit of new conquests may suit him, said Gigi’s friends at the time, but his daughter was in a real relationship and her father hardly had the moral upper hand.
The timing and suddenness of Cecil’s outburst were also something of a mystery. For approaching a decade, Gigi’s lesbianism had hardly been a secret. She had appeared many times in public with Sean Eav, her partner since 2005.
In fact, confides Gigi, she had stepped out in public many times over the years with previous female lovers, but all of them had been more visually feminine than the short, puckish, 45-year-old Eav. Drooling scandal sheets had simply assumed these other beauties were just pals of the heiress. The coy phrase “same-sex friend” never appeared until it was Eav, unambiguously a lover, on Gigi’s arm.