Then & now: pride and prejudice

In a landmark decision, Britain recently legalised equal marriage. While the same recognition has yet to reach Hong Kong, movement towards full legal protection for the city’s LGBT fellow citizens is well underway. In due course, this progression will seem as fundamentally ordinary as interracial marriage, not so long ago viewed with widespread disdain.

Vocal, politically influential campaigning by Christian bigots merely delays (but cannot stop) social progress, any more than their theologically validated justifications for the suppression of women, indigenous colonised populations, the scientifically minded and anyone else who constituted a threat to their economic and political power, ultimately prevailed over decent ethical standards in civilised, tolerant societies with plural, secular values and broad commitments to social justice.

The life of Austin Coates, whose delightful memoir Myself a Mandarin remains the city’s only English-language popular classic, epitomised the conundrum faced by an earlier generation of Hong Kong homosexuals in forging a joint life in the shadows of social oppression and legal proscription.

Genuinely cosmopolitan (his father, Eric Coates, was a popular light-music composer) and a round peg in a square hole, Coates joined the colonial service in 1949.

Hong Kong’s European society was several sizes too small for him, in every respect; while biggerminded colleagues enjoyed and appreciated his talents, Coates remained more than a bit “too much” for conventional (and often jealous) colonial stereotypes.

As W.H. Auden wrote, “those to whom evil is done, do evil in return”; perhaps inevitably, the most virulent bigots are those whose personal insecurities cause them to lash out at others more confident about themselves and their place in the world. Coates was eventually hounded into a nervous breakdown – alluded to towards the end of Myself a Mandarin – by his boss, New Territories district commissioner K.M.A Barnett.