Brian Wong is a DPhil in Political Theory candidate at Balliol College, Oxford, and a Rhodes Scholar from Hong Kong. They are the founder of the Oxford Political Review.

Asian critics of homosexuality have long argued that it is a Western behavior, superimposed upon Eastern cultures as a decadent, neo-colonial side effect of globalization. Even those who are not opposed to homosexuality tend to shrug their shoulders at what they believe to be a uniformly conservative continent when it comes to sexual politics. It’s just not Asian, many say. The public will never accept it.

Yet reality yields a far more complex picture. According to a 2019 Pew survey, wealthier countries tend to be more accepting of homosexuality regardless of whether they are Asian or Western. For example Japan, which has the world’s third biggest economy, is significantly more accepting of homosexuality than, say, Israel, Poland, Lithuania, or Greece. Affluent South Korea is far more accepting than Bulgaria or Ukraine.

In fact, the widespread contention that homosexuality isn’t an Asian phenomenon is gloriously false. The Kama Sutra, written over two millennia ago, has a chapter of explicit instructions on gay sex. In imperial China, many Han dynasty rulers were bisexual or homosexual. Scholars Bret Hinsch and Li Yinhe note that tales of homoerotic relationships, such as those of Long Yang and Emperor Ai of Han, were widely known and valorized throughout Chinese history. Lesbian and gay partnerships were meanwhile ubiquitous throughout the Ashikaga and Edo era Japan, even under the most repressive, feudalistic rule of its political history.

If anything, it was contact with the West that steadily chipped away at this permissiveness in Asia towards same-sex relationships. Jijian, a pejorative Chinese term for men who have sex with men, arose at a time when Christian missionaries began spreading the idea that homosexuality was sinful. Read more via Time