Things had been difficult from the start for the organizers of the Beijing Gay and Lesbian Culture Festival. Having originally planned to hold the Chinese capital’s first-ever public celebration of gay and lesbian art, theater, film, and academia on December 16 at an artists colony in Beijing’s Dashanzi District, their first setback had come two days earlier, when the city’s Municipal Public Security Bureau revoked its permission to use the building.

Undeterred, the festival crew quickly contacted participants and arranged a replacement venue in another part of the city. As a private establishment the On/Off Bar should have been immune to the whims of Chinese officialdom, but as 3 P.M. came and the start of the festival approached, the doors flew open and around 20 plainclothes and uniformed police officers burst into the building.

Shutting down the festival, the police tore banners and posters from the walls while filming frightened attendees with camcorders as they tried to flee. This move by local authorities was particularly disappointing, as it was a significant step backward for a country slowly but surely changing its official position on gay rights.

Despite still being classed as a “foreign disease” in the early 1990s, homosexuality is now a topic open for discussion in communist China, and state repression has been on a slow decline for almost a decade, though gay Web sites are still shut down by authorities.

The Utopia Guide to China now lists 45 major cities across the country and in its territories that have gay scenes large enough to warrant mention. Also, Fudan University in Shanghai has been offering a postgraduate course on gay health issues since 2003; a new undergraduate course on homosexuality and gay culture launched at the same faculty last year was swamped with so many applicants that hundreds had to be turned away.

So why all this official fuss about a gay festival small enough to fit into a Beijing bar? It seems that while the Chinese Communist Party is prepared to allow small changes to occur at a pace of its own choosing, it’s a completely different thing for gay and lesbian Chinese to come together and consider change themselves, no matter how unthreatening the forum might be.

It’s disappointing, because in doing so, the Chinese government is missing out on a golden opportunity: Out of all the countries in the world, it is China that has the most to gain from embracing gay rights, not out of altruism but for the sake of sheer practicality. And ironically, it is heterosexual Chinese who will benefit the most.

After decades of repressive population controls owing to the “one-child policy,” combined with a cultural preference for male children, Chinese men are beginning to significantly outnumber women. According to China's latest census, 116.9 Chinese boys were born for every 100 girls in 2000. By 2020, a large number of mainland Chinese males may have no hope of even dating a woman, let alone actually marrying one. Add to this limited aged-care services in the country (resulting in Chinese wives being expected to look after their husband’s parents in old age) and Chinese men find themselves with enormous family pressure to get married.

Put simply, embracing gay rights and promoting social acceptance of gay and bisexual men in China would greatly improve the odds of success for those exclusively heterosexual Chinese men seeking partners—by taking closeted gay and bisexual men out of the competition.