A Chinese court has ruled against formalising the marriage of a gay couple on Wednesday, in the country’s first ever same-sex marriage case. However, Sun Wenlin, the plaintiff said he will appeal until he exhausts all legal options.
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The case comes amid growing awareness of LGBT issues in China. “As I understand it, our law does not say that same-sex marriage is illegal”.
Shi told the French news agency, AFP, he believes “there will be more gay people fighting for their rights in different ways”.
A ruling is expected later Wednesday.
A lawyer for the couple filed the lawsuit with the Changsha Furong District People’s Court on December 16.
Sun has argued that Chinese marriage law does not specifically refer to a man and a woman – but rather, a husband and a wife – and thus there isn’t actually an explicit ban on gay marriage in the law.
According to OutRight Action International, an international gay and lesbian human rights organization, China has taken a “not encouraging, not discouraging, and not promoting” stance to LGBTQ issues, as the government has remained largely silent on the subject.
One of the men, surnamed Sun, and his partner went to the marriage registration office in Changsha City in central China’s Hunan Province in June past year.
“I’m going to become active, but I’m just anxious that as a college student we have no financial power to do anything real”, Chen said.
More seasoned activists said they too had reason to be optimistic given a pickup in legal challenges, even if successes in court remained few and far between.
Exactly how many Chinese would identify themselves as gay is still unknown, as social stigma associated with homosexuality remains widespread. They said they did not spend a day apart after their first meeting.
He added that his mother was in court to support him.
The Global Times, a state-run English newspaper, interviewed Sun in January in a generally supportive article with the headline, “Man fights for right to marry boyfriend despite chance of failure”.
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The ruling Chinese Communist Party treated homosexuality as a psychological problem for decades, removing it from an official list of mental disorders only in 2001.
