This article is part of Sixth Tone’s ongoing coverage of the 40th anniversary of China's ‘reform and opening-up.’ The other articles in the series can be found here.

This article has been excerpted and adapted from the book “Wo Zai Xianchang: Xing Shehui Xue Tianye Diaocha Biji” (I'm on the Spot: Field Survey Notes on the Sociology of Sex), which was published in 2017 by Shanxi People’s Publishing House.

In 1993, I was appointed by China’s Ministry of Health to carry out a multicity survey on the country’s population of men who have sex with men, usually abbreviated MSM. Although I had been researching gender studies and sexuality for eight years by that point, I remember worrying about my fitness for the job.

The survey was part of China’s then-nascent HIV/AIDS prevention work. In those days, China not only had no LGBT organizations or openly queer celebrities to speak of, but the vast majority of Chinese, whether gay or straight, had never even heard of the word “homosexual,” which was generally in use only among psychologists.

Awareness of homosexuality was so low that people could stumble right into Beijing’s busiest cruising spots and never even notice. One time, while I was carrying out fieldwork in a small wooded area popular with the MSM community, a man and a woman walked past. Staring inquisitively at all the men scattered throughout the woods, the woman asked her companion what they were doing. He gave it a moment’s thought before concluding, "They're practicing qi gong,” referring to traditional Chinese breathing exercises. Read more via Sixth Tone