According to 45-year-old Jason Yu (this is an alias, as requested by the interviewee), who is a teacher and also a new member of the organization, the only goal of CIA is to help as many as possible gays and lesbians find their own kind, and join their own “tension-free” social circle.

“I had had enough of the isolated days, when I had to hide my sexual orientation to my colleagues, friends, family……even to myself! This is not a joke – I even tried to tell myself that I was a heterosexual and got married. You simply couldn’t imagine the torture. Eventually my marriage turned out to be a failure, yet I dare not tell my parents – or anybody else – the true reason behind the surface.

“Thanks to the Internet tools of this era, I am able to find a way to reach the group I truly belong to. – About six months ago, I learned from my student about how to surf the Internet, and accidentally ran into a gay website. There I met a nice ‘comrade’ from the CIA, who introduced to me this whole new world! I could never imagine one day I would make so many gay friends, in front of whom I need hide myself no more. And because of my painful experience, I particularly feel it is necessary I join the CIA and help out other gays and lesbians who are still struggling in the nightmare I used to be in.”

Embodied in Jason’s words is a bitter fact: although homosexuality, as a long-existing natural phenomenon, is widely understood and accepted in western countries today, sadly it is not quite the case in China, where homosexuals are still reluctantly “tolerated” in the best situation. In fact, homosexual behaviors only became arguably “legal” in the country as late as in 1992. And it was not until 2001 that the Chinese government finally crossed “Homosexuality” off the list of mental illness symptoms. And even legally gays are equal with all other citizens, due to historical prejudice and discrimination towards this group, as well as the dominating Chinese tradition of “carrying on the family line”, in real life they are still considerably marginalized by the mainstream society.

Examples are abundant. In 1999, Fang Gang, the author of the book “Homosexuality In China”, was sued, and in the first instance judgment, people saw the official statement “homosexuality is abnormal”. In December 2001, the first Chinese Homosexual Film Festival was discontinued by the government in the middle of its screening with no clear reasons. Last but not least, the 2006 Oscar-winning movie “Brokeback Mountain” was never granted permission to enter cinemas in China – while most of the other winners were quickly introduced into the market.

In short, gays and lesbians in China are never fully recognized their basic human rights, and are very likely to be humiliated once their “special” sexual inclination is discovered. According to Sociologist Li Yinhe, currently China has a homosexual population of 39 to 52 million. Among them about 38% once suffered from assault, blackmail or unfair treatment (such as separation from partners resulted in family interference, or being laid off only because their sex orientation), more than 60% constantly felt lonely and depressed, over 30% seriously considered suicide, and 10% committed attempted suicide.

“It is therefore quite understandable that Chinese gays often hide themselves carefully. However this self-containment is very likely to cause high mental pressure, which craves for an outburst. ” Jason notes.

“I am glad that we can provide an outlet. The virtual world of Internet enables everyone to maintain one’s privacy, and therefore provides us with conditions to establish our own community. On the Internet, both helpers and helped feel safe and relaxed in the community. As a helper, I never ask the real name, location or any other personal information. All I do is  leaving a message on board or in a chatroom, offering my QQ number, and encouraging anyone who has puzzles on homosexual issues contact me.”

The “QQ” Jason aforementioned is a very popular tool similar to MSN and Skype, which boasts 900 million accumulated registered users in China to date, and just realized a simultaneous online users of 91 million a few days ago. Other platforms such as Tianya Chatroom and Gay58.com are also frequently used. The grand number of base users  guarantees high demand for services Jason and his fellow members provides. According to Jason, the CIA members have helped hundreds and thousands of gays since its establishment four years ago. Jason himself has introduced over 50 lonely gays into the gay community.

“Great feeling of achievements!” Jason declares. However he also points out some shortcomings of CIA’s network mode.

“So far we can only reach people within the Internet. However statistics show that only one fifth of the population are netizens. So I am really worried about the bigger number who are left outside the web –  just like me six months ago. How can we help these people, who have no access to the Internet? What is more, what we are doing now is only hiding underground and creating a secret communities of our own, which barely has any impact on the broad mass in the mainstream society. If we ultimately seek to realize equal legal and social rights with heterosexuals, we need to do more.”

Jason is absolutely right. To gain the recognition of the majority of society, hiding at corners will never help to achieve the goal. However in my opinion, secretly uniting gays on the Internet can be a good start. Then what the CIAs need to do next is to get themselves more organized, open-up (at least partly) to  the mainstream society, and start dialogue and communication with it. Arts and performances could be good bridges between the two sides,  while other forms such as blogs, novels and movies can also make gays’ voices heard, their minds understood, and eventually their deserved rights attained.

            In September of this year, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University held an on-campus panel event with four women professors who have widely followed and respected blogs (easternblot.net, Bitch Ph.D, Tenured Radical, and Oh! Industry).  The blog topics range from science to pop culture to politics and feminism. 

            The panel, entitled “A Blog of her Own,” was advertised as a dialogue about what it’s like to be and how to become a feminist blogger.  It seemed, then, natural to expect that the event would relay the key challenges and lessons learned when blogging about feminist causes.  The reality, however, was that the audience clearly had markedly different anxieties and they were eager to have their questions answered.

            After brief presentations from the bloggers, the question and answer session began.  As more and more questions were asked, I soon realized that the students in attendance were not at all concerned about the panel’s original subject.   Rather, they were very curious to know whether blogging has made it more difficult for professors to obtain tenure at their respective universities or not.  Over and over again the students asked if remaining anonymous on one’s blog is the best way to go about it if you want tenure.            

          Margaret Soltan, a professor at George Washington University and respected blogger (University Diaries) who was not on that day’s panel says that, when asked, “I generally discourage junior faculty from blogging if they feel at all uncertain about their tenure prospects…basically I’d say the thing to do is wait until you get tenure and then let it rip.”  Accordingly, it seems like blogging does have the potential to negatively impact your future in academia.

            The writer of Bitch Ph.D. explained that she had been anonymous for three years before revealing her identity to the public.  She still did not overtly reveal it on the site itself (which is why I will respect her privacy here) because she believes that the woman on the blog has her own persona.  Yet, even though she was relieved to have made her identity public, Bitch Ph.D. claimed that she has been more careful about writing about her private life since doing it, but that it was because she did not want to hurt people.  She also said that keeping the blog has had no negative repercussions on her personal life.

            Professor Claire Potter of Wesleyan University, who already has tenure and is the author of the three-year old blog Tenured Radical, said that she came out of the closet six months into blogging because “remaining anonymous led me to make unwanted ethical compromises.”  At the panel, she described herself as a contemporary historian without rules, which she claimed threatened the university.  However, the sentiments of the university, said Potter, were not a serious professional concern of hers.   Of course Potter’s contrarian sentiments make perfect sense coming from someone who already had tenure before she began her blog.  

            Some professors, however, like Alexandra Vasquez, an associate professor at Princeton University and co-author of Oh! Industry, do not have to rebel against the university system because their blogs are openly supported by their institutions.  Due to this, Vasquez, who has yet to obtain tenure, does not let her pursuit of it bar her from expressing her opinions about academia.  Vasquez believes that her blog is “a necessary outside” from matters like promotions and career.

            Another concern non-tenured bloggers may have is that their non-academic blogs will be perceived as trivial and unsuitable for a person trying to make their career in academia.  According to Soltan, “there will always be faculty who – even with the enormous success and even prestige of many blogs these days – see blogging as trivial, dumb, self-indulgent, non-serious, non-scholarly, a waste of time, weird, etc.”  She says that “some faculty, in other words, will just be hostile,” no matter what the blog is about or how it is presented.

            So what is the answer for blogging professors? All in all, the event panelists, each of whom had different blogging stories when it came to revealing their identities, all agreed that revealing themselves to the public has actually made things easier for them in the end.  They women agreed that each blogger must make their own decision as to how their relationship will be between their blog and their career. 

            The situation for bloggers in academia is only one example of the complex challenges we all face in today’s world, with our personal lives becoming increasingly exposed to the general public online.  And while we don’t want to constantly be monitoring our online profiles because our future employers might opt to check us out on there, we also don’t want to end up jobless for that reason either.  There is no real answer for any of us, academic or not.  The only truth is that we’re all still learning about the Internet’s power on our daily lives and we’ll just have to keep playing the cards until we get it right.