ABOUT
PRIDE CHINESE STYLE
Once every month there is a Tango Queer session and milonga at the Tango school in Liede, Guangzhou.
Zhitong is an organization dedicated to give counsel and help to the LGTBQ community of Guangzhou.
Qipao is a wholly Chinese-designed dress which has become an icon of femininity in China and beyond.
Family Album are partners in touch, details of intimacy, acts of pride of whom they want to be in love and stay with in life.
In mainland China it is prohibited to make a public display of LGTBQ pride (parade, rights demonstration, gatherings without police permission). Any celebration must be in private, as it is the Tango session, or very close monitored by the government, as it is with Zhitong. Though not criminalized being a drag is considered socially unacceptable.
Pride Chinese Style is a project which I try to put together these singular manifestations of Pride in documents/portraits and performance of its fighters and my own personal Butoh interpretation: Dancing Tango, working at the LGTBQ counsel offices, a man wearing a Qipao.
They're all proud Chinese, proud also of their orientation and their personal choices. They are fighters expressing their Pride in their own style.
Gustavo Thomas