one thing most any leftist will say about china despite supporting the country is that they’re a very traditionalist culture, and so LGBTQ issues in particular are a blight on leftist westerner’s otherwise positive view of china.
upon scrolling thru rednote, i think that’s bullshit now. i really don’t think you’re worse off being LGBTQ in china than you are in america. yeah, you can’t get married, but that right is under constant threat of being taken away in the US anyway and let’s be real- it probably will be taken away. meanwhile, china is making progress on that front, the US wants to regress.
i saw multiple LGBTQ people on rednote. i saw a lesbian couple, one of the girls even said “LGBT is completely normal in china now, especially in the cities. even the older generations who might not accept it mind their own business”. can that be said about america? how many queer people here have been accosted by some boomer who couldn’t mind their own business? i saw the gayest fucking dude i’ve ever seen in my life (that’s a compliment). he was also wearing makeup and sassily singing along with destiny’s child. completely comfortable in his skin and with his identity, and while all of the comments and his speaking were in mandarin that i couldn’t understand, you can tell by the vibe it was all positive. meanwhile in progressive america, if you’re a guy who wants to put on makeup and go live on tiktok you’re gonna face all sorts of homophobia and bigotry.
one of the few things western liberals could really say about china, that even those of us who are left wing and pro china thought to be at least somewhat true, appears to just straight up not be true.
i still see libs trying to ride on that “THEY SENT GAYS TO CAMPS!!!” first of all no they didn’t, second of all to the extent gay people were mistreated in cuba at the time, every other country was doing the same if not worse and cuban leadership is the only one to come out and say they were wrong for marginalizing gay people. and thirdly, as you pointed out, now cuba has some of if not THE best protections for lgbtq people in the world, so it’s hilarious they’re trying to smear them with half a century old propaganda
Leslie Feinberg’s book Rainbow Solidarity : in defense of Cuba, really takes all of those criticisms to pieces and points out the hypocrisy. Like the USA having to temporary suspend a ban on gay immigration to let in some Cuban exiles.
They’re doing that because it works. That’s the sad part. The propaganda is low effort because that’s all it needs to be for westerners to believe it.
See: literally anything they say about North Korea.
I love the DPRK as much as the next person, but they really need to develop a posting economy there. For all it’s faults, the internet and mass communication between countries really spoils a lot of the low hanging propaganda fruit.
Yeah seriously seeing how it’s destroyed a lot of anti Chinese propaganda makes me think you’re right. I get it though, it’s generally been used to promote anti North Korea sentiments in the west.
There used to be a couple of normal DPRK citizens who spoke some English and were twitter users.
They were visa workers who had got stranded in countries like China and Russia due to extra sanctions.
I think one got banned under flimsy pretenses and another quit because they were tired of talking to western libs.
But they went a long way to debunking a lot of myths about the DPRK.
Even weird leftist ones like about cannabis. (They do smoke mild THC ocaisonally like one drinks alcohol to unwind, but consider overindulgence bad).
The DPRK needs to have a bunch of these types through social media just to show westerners it’s just an ordinary country mostly.
Yes