Many are under intense pressure from their families to marry young and have children. Some flee to the big cities where they can be relatively open about their sexuality, while others enter fake marriages to keep their parents happy. There is a common perception outside China that the conservative Communist Party and its army of censors is the main obstacle to being gay in China.
However, almost any LGBT person you meet there will say it is not the government that is the problem but their parents. China's social attitudes, which emphasise the importance of marriage and producing children, mean that people in China are under enormous pressure to start a family by the age of Combine that with the absence of a free press and a political regime that does not exactly have a reputation for embracing diversity, and many gay Chinese have a problem.
It also affects a lot of heterosexual women and Millennials who don't want to follow this track," says William Dai, who runs an underground queer film event in Shanghai once a month.
Unlike many Chinese, year-old Dai, who was born in Beijing, eventually came out to his mother but took years to talk to his father about it directly. Homosexuality was legalised in China in but few people are talking about even the possibility of gay marriage, which was legalised in Australia last year.
However, China's gay community had a big victory in April this year when when the country's most popular social media site β a Twitter-like platform called Weibo β was forced to withdraw its ban on gay content.
