Xiaomingxiong

Xiaomingxiong (traditional Chinese: 小明雄; 1954–?) is the pen name of Wu XiaoMing (Ng Siuming, 吳小明), also known as Samshasha, is a veteran Hong Kong gay right activist and one of the first authors to study the history of homosexuality in China.

Biography Xiaomingxiong was born in 1954 in Hong Kong to Chinese parents emigrated from the mainland. They later recorded the first interview in Cantonese on gay liberation in 1979. There, he met with Midge Costanza, Assistant to the President for Public Liaison of President Jimmy Carter, pushing for anti-discrimination legislation and raising concerns regarding the United States immigration procedures.

Selected works

The History of Homosexuality in China (Chinese, 1984, revised 1997)

Context Xiaomingxiong first started working on his 1984 book The History of Homosexuality when he was still in New York. With references to history, fiction, folktales, official court records, legal codes, religious documents, literature and arts, accounts by foreign missionaries, and even common slang and jokes, this book aimed to comprehensively record mentions of same-sex love in China. In writing The History of Homosexuality (1984), Xiaomingxiong's main argument was to counter the belief that homosexuality was a "disease/sin brought from the West," claiming that same-sex love actually flourished in Chinese history and tradition and that it was actually homophobia that was inherited from British rule.

In the 1997 edition of The History of Homosexuality, Xiaomingxiong made several revisions. Alongside more historical documentation, Xiaomingxiong added a preface providing contextual information regarding shifts in the social and political climate of Hong Kong in the 1980-90s. He amended his original claims; instead of arguing for "homophobia is a Western import," Xiaomingxiong argued that "existing homophobia in China was being Westernized." Scholar Helen Hok-Sze Leung states that the reason for this change was: y the time the revised edition came…in 1997, the discursive relationship between homophobia, coloniality and nationalism had shifted considerably…[These] discursive shifts in Hong Kong society and the potential for nativist tendencies in tongzhi discourse to be appropriated into a newly hegemonic Chinese nationalism prompts him [Xiaomingxiong] to reframe his understanding of homophobia in Hong Kong as a Westernized rather than Western phenomenon. Xiaomingxiong goes on to claim that Chinese homophobia, before Westernization, functioned through an implicit "fuzzy-transgender-transsexual pansexualism," in which same-sex love was accepted as long as there was a "transgender feminization" of a male partner and the "coexistance of hetereosexual familial relationships." Leung further critiques this analysis, highlighting the reduction of transgender and bisexual identities into homophobic "regulatory mechanisms" of homosexuality.

Controversy After the initial publication of The History of Homosexuality (1984), Xiaomingxiong came across Bret Hinsch's book Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (1992). After reading through the publication, Xiaomingxiong believed that some of the content and organization of Hinsch's book was similar to his. Though Xiaomingxiong reached out to Hinsch's publisher, no legal action was pursued due to his limited financial resources.