Li did not know that her marriage was based on a lie.

The 35-year-old officer worker from Qinghuangdao, in eastern China’s Hebei province, found out she was a “tongqi” six months after marriage. That term, which can be loosely translated into English as “gay-person’s wife,” is used to describe millions of Chinese straight women who unknowingly marry gay men.

China has around 20 million gay men, and about 80 percent of them marry a woman, according to an estimatefrom Zhang Beichuan, a prominent Chinese scholar who studies sexuality.  Being an openly gay man is socially unacceptable outside of large cities in China, and homosexuality is often still viewed as a medical condition even though the government no longer recognizes it as an illness.

And in a country where the one-child policy was the law of the land for decades, closeted gay men face enormous pressure to marry and start a family–even if they have no interest in women.

That leads many gay men to deceive women like Li, who asked that her full name not be used, into marrying them. The results of these marriages are often unhappy, and sometimes lead to physical and emotional abuse and the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. In one widely reported incident, an instructor at Sichuan University jumped off a 13-floor building and died after discovering that her husband was gay.

Li’s marriage ended in divorce after she used a popular Chinese gay dating app known as “Blued” to learn the truth about her husband – and confronted him. “The more women know about my experience, the less chance they will end up with the same tragedy,” she says.

Li has sought help from other women who have had similar experiences through “tongqi” support groups. Still struggling with the aftermath of her divorce, Li, who posted about her experience on a ‘tongqi’ bulletin board on the Chinese site Baidu, shared her story with Global Journalist’s Weimeng Bao. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic, Global Journalist could not independently verify all aspects of her story.

Global Journalist: How did you meet your ex-husband? Did you notice anything unusual?

Li: We were introduced via an acquaintance at the end of 2015. My ex-husband was then 38 and had a six-month marriage in 2008. According to him, the previous divorce was because a health condition of his ex-wife’s made it hard for them to have sex.

We then started a relationship. We dated almost everyday, but he never took the initiative to contact me. After a few months, our parents got involved. Each were happy with the other family. My ex-husband soon proposed to me, and I said yes. We got married at the end of May.

We never had sex before marriage. Even a kiss was rare. But I thought this showed that he is a conservative, well-mannered guy. I did not think too much about it.

GJ: When did you start to suspect your husband was gay?

Li: After marriage, we rarely had sex. At the end of June, I accidentally overheard a phone call. My ex-husband was driving at the time and I was sitting by him. He put the call on speaker and a man asked him whether he was busy.

My ex-husband suddenly became furious, and started shouting into the phone: “I’m busy, I’m busy!”

He didn’t give the other man a chance to talk. The other man replied sadly, “OK.” Then my ex-husband immediately hung up the call.

I started to be suspicious after that incident. On the advice of a gay friend, I installed Blued on my phone. The app shows basic personal information of gay men around you, including their exact location [via GPS], age, height, weight and sexual orientation.

When my ex-husband was with me, I failed to find anybody like him on Blued. However soon after he left home, the app showed that there was a gay man 10 centimeters from me a half an hour ago. That is how I confirmed that my ex-husband is truly gay.

GJ: Did you talk to your ex-husband after discovering this?

Li: I talked to him almost right away. I showed him the Blued page, but he just explained that other gay men registered for him and he merely used the app to make friends. Nothing happened. He convinced me that he loved me and he only needed time to overcome his disgust for the female body. I believed him.

I tried several means in an attempt to convert him. I even tried my best to bear his child. He was still indifferent, refusing conversations with me. He hated me. Once I was mopping the floor while he was playing computer games. I hugged his right leg to act cute, but he hit me with his left slipper in response.

GJ: When did you decide to divorce him?

Li: One month after our talk, I decided to end the marriage. There was one night that my ex-husband decided he would sleep on the couch instead of sharing the bed with me. I was angry, and I said we have to divorce.

His face was distorted. He began to madly hit my head against the couch, punching my face over and over again. My glasses were sent flying and my right eye hurt so much that I could barely see anything. I was later diagnosed with posterior vitreous detachment [a condition caused by the retina separating from a membrane in the eye]. Even now, my right eye still has complications.

That is the night that I became determined to divorce him.

I then told his father that he is gay. His father did not seem surprised, and asked about my plan. I told him I wanted a divorce.

A few days later his mother, who was undergoing chemotherapy, came to me and begged me not to divorce her son. She said she would take my ex-husband to see doctors and cure the “disease.” She went to a fortune-teller for help, who told her that the “disease” could only be cured when he turns 42-years-old. His mother decided she didn’t want to hold me back, and approved the divorce.

As for my parents, they did not believe my ex-husband was gay. But they agreed to the divorce due to his abuse. I completed all the divorce paperwork within one month.

GJ: Did you feel better after the divorce?

Li: Not really. The pain tormented me for nearly three months.

Before finalizing the divorce proceedings, I was conflicted—I felt I could not live without him, but at the same time I was afraid of him refusing to divorce me.

Nearly no one knows that I have divorced. I didn’t want friends or colleagues around me to know about my divorce, let alone that my ex-husband is gay. For a time, I even changed the WeChat [a popular Chinese messaging app] name of a friend who often contacted me to “Husband.”

Two months after the divorce, a friend of mine who knew the real reason for my divorce pursued me. He is kind and warm, but I can’t bear any kind of intimacy – even hugs. Once, I could not help but kick him when he tried to kiss me.

When I was collecting evidence to verify that my husband is gay, I joined many QQ [a popular online chatting app] groups he was in. I saw too many hardcore pornographic images. Now I feel disgusted with men’s bodies.

GJ: Did all the ‘tongqi’ you know choose to get a divorce like you?

Li: Not every gay man’s wife will divorce. It mainly depends on personality and financial situation. Almost everyone struggled and suffered after they realized the truth. For some, their gay husbands may deceive them and tell them they are bisexual and like women as well as men, so the wives may hesitate to get a divorce. Their suffering could be short or long, even endless.

The financial condition matters, especially for those with children. I know an unemployed ‘tongqi’ with twins. She could just barely take care of one on her own, but could not endure having to separate them. So she stays in the marriage. But she always sends messages to the ‘tongqi’ QQ chat group at midnight, saying she woke up crying again.

GJ: Why do you think your husband married you in the first place? 

Li: I think he did this because he wants a child. Before we got divorced, I created a fake account to chat with him on a gay QQ group. He told me that a gay man must marry a straight woman as soon as he can, because otherwise siblings are the only people he can count on when he gets old. And if a gay man does not get married and has no child, he will disappoint his parents.

I asked him why doesn’t he marry a lesbian so he can also have children. He said this is weird and unacceptable.

GJ: Do you still take part in online support groups for women with gay husbands?

Li: Yes, I still chat in these groups every day. I used to just complain to the other ‘tongqi,’ but now I try to persuade them to get divorced as soon as possible. They are really vulnerable. For instance, one of the wives told me that she felt consoled after her husband showed her flirtatious messages he exchanged with other women in an effort to prove that he’s straight. It may sound weird, but these were her real thoughts.

with translation assistance from Xiaosheng Yin

 

The story was published at The Global Journalist. 

It might be strange to say, but in a way the Australian soil led scientist Michael Petris to where he is now.

In certain areas of Australia, soils suffer from extremely low level of copper bioavailability, resulting in poor growth and neurological problems on sheep.

Petris, a Bond LSC investigator and professor of biochemistry who was born in Australia, now spends his time studying how copper, an essential mineral in human body, works in cells to build and maintain essential functions.

Recently published work from his lab focuses on how the ATP7A protein, one of the major proteins, cycles within the cell.

“Copper is solely acquired from diet. The absorption of copper from the intestine in the blood needs ATP7A,” Vinit Shanbhag, a Ph.D. biochemistry student at Petris’ lab and an author of the study, said. “It transports copper to different copper dependent enzymes and exports free copper from the cell to the outside.”

After exporting copper at the cell membrane, ATP7A needs to come back to its steady-state location within the Golgi apparatus of cells – via a process called retrograde trafficking. But one question baffled scientists: what are the key elements that lead ATP7A coming back?

Back in the late 90s, Petris discovered the importance of one single di-leucine in retrograde trafficking of ATP7A. For those of you wondering, leucine is an amino acid that forms the building blocks of proteins like ATP7A, while di-leucine consists of two of them connected via a peptide bond.

His team wished to identify other signals for retrograde trafficking, but one technical hurdle stood in the way— the ATP7A gene is unstable when grown in bacterial plasmids, the traditional way of amplifying genes in the lab.

Commercial DNA synthesis was the answer. This method could create artificial genes in the laboratory.

“We reasoned that if we introduced enough silent mutations into a DNA sequence, we could avoid or change the region of instability in the native sequence without affecting the encoded protein,” Petris said.

To stabilize the gene, they changed more than 1,000 nucleotides within a 3,000 nucleotides segment, and thus solving the problem of instability of the ATP7A gene. In doing so, they subsequently found that in fact multiple di-leucines that are required for retrograde trafficking of ATP7A. This approach could be used by other laboratories whose gene of interest is also unstable.

An overlooked mineral 

“If you ask [people], is it important to understand iron nutrition? Is it important to understand calcium nutrition? Most people would say of course! … But, perhaps you would not get the same answer for copper, despite the fact there is a little dispute that copper is important,” Petris said.

As an essential micronutrient, copper performs central functions to develop and maintain human skin, bones, brains and other organs.

“If you don’t have enough copper in your body, you cannot use oxygen to make energy,” Petris said. “If you don’t have copper, you would not survive.”

Pregnant women who carry a mutated ATP7A gene on their X chromosome can pass it on to their children in the form of Menkes disease.

Menkes disease is a genetic disorder that results in poor uptake and distribution of copper to cells. The incidence of this disease is estimated to be one in 100,000 newborns, according to U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Infants with Menkes disease typically begin to develop symptoms during infancy and rarely live past the first few years of life. Abnormally high accumulation of copper in kidneys and low-level accumulation in the liver and brain, cause visible symptoms like sparse hair, loose skin and failure to grow.

Despite copper’s importance, it also can be a potentially toxic nutrient.

“Copper deficiency can be a problem but too much copper is also a problem. There should be a balance,” Shanbhag explained.

The liver normally stores excessive copper and excretes it into bile to release it out of the body. Yet people with genetic disorders that preventing copper excretion might suffer Wilson’s disease, leading to life-threatening organ damage.

Shanbhag said people with Wilson’s disease accumulate toxic amounts of copper in liver and other organs, causing Kayser–Fleischer rings that encircle the pigmented regions of the eye, a hue caused by copper deposits in the cornea.

Its clinical consequences differ from chornic liver failure to neurological sysmptoms like tremors, dystonia, ataxia and cognitive deteriortation.

About one in 30,000 people have Wilson disease, according to National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Starving tumors

In 2013, Petris’ lab published the first direct evidence suggesting ATP7A is essential for the dietary absorption of copper. Since then they have dug deeper into this copper transporter, and his lab now sets their sights on a greater enemy of human health — cancer.

Tumor growth requires access to large amounts of nutrients. Without an adequate supply of oxygen and nutrients, tumors fail to grow and survive. Scientists have identified that by preventing access to nutrients—for example by blocking the growth of new blood vessels—they could starve the tumor of nutrients.

Copper is a key nutrient for tumor growth. With the new-introduced system CRISPR-Cas9 — a genome editing tool to knock out specfic genes — his lab has explored how to exploit understanding of copper metabolic pathways to withhold copper from cancer cells.

“Copper starvation might be a good approach as an anti-cancer strategy,” Petris said.

Weapon of the immune system

Currently, four members study in Petris’ lab to tackle the relationship between copper and various diseases. Petris plans to expand his research to another area: the role of copper in innate immunity against bacterial pathogens.

This is the topic of Petris’ next grant. Nutritional immunity, which describes how the mammalian host withholds nutrients from the invading bacteria during infection, is very well-described for iron and zinc.

Yet copper performs differently.

During infection, the level of copper in blood actually goes up instead of going down. The immune system concentrates copper at sites of infection and within regions where the bacteria are engulfed.

“We speculate that copper is being used as weapon by the host to kill the bacteria,” Petris said. “That is the area we are trying to develop further.”

Michael Petris is a Bond LSC investigator and a professor of biochemistry. The study “Multiple di-leucines in the ATP7A copper transporter are required for retrograde trafficking to the trans-Golgi network” was published by The Royal Society of Chemistry in September 2016.

 

The story was published on Decoding Science.