“Otherwise in China it would probably be considered pornography,” said Chinese AIDS activist River Wei.

BORDER COMPLICATIONS

In Hong Kong, Ricky Fan, 40, goes cruising once a week at one of the city’s many gay saunas, venues that have become increasingly popular in recent years among men looking for anonymous sex with other men.

These places are invariably pitch black. But once acclimatized to the darkness, visitors are likely to be greeted by eye-catching flyers and postcards on safe sex, HIV testing and free condoms from the locker rooms to the many tiny cubicles.

The message is certainly not lost on the more frisky members of Hong Kong’s gay population.

“I always use condoms, 100 percent of the time. Because it’s safer,” said Fan, who has visited saunas in the last five years in Hong Kong, mainland China, Thailand, Taiwan and Japan.

“I will push away anyone who doesn’t use them.”

But this attitude is far from the norm. New HIV infections among men who have sex with men have shot up in almost every big city in Asia in recent years.

Insiders attribute it to unsafe sex, made worse by a population that is relatively cash-rich and highly mobile.

“In Hong Kong, those who are unattractive and can’t find anyone go to Shenzhen (across the border in southern China) to buy ‘money boys,’” said sauna owner Ray Chong, referring to gigolos who service male clients in big Chinese cities.

“They pay more to get the boys not to use any condoms.”

MOBILE POPULATION

Activist groups, which have done much to keep new HIV infections down in Hong Kong, say their work is complicated by the rise in the commercial sex trade on the mainland, which shares an increasingly porous border with Hong Kong.

“Infection rates have gone up among men who have sex with men in Asia because the population is so mobile, so our work cannot remain so localized. We have to go where they go,” said Lau Chi-chung of AIDS Concern, a Hong Kong-based group that has promoted awareness of the disease since the mid-1990s.

“What we can do is limited. We have to collaborate with the government, other NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) in Mainland China to spread the message.”

Another problem in China is that many men who have sex with men do not identify themselves as gay or bisexual. Indeed, thanks to a lack of education and cultural taboos they are not even be aware the concept exists, activists say.

“If you’re 40, have been married all your life, have kids and live in the countryside then one day you discover your true self and have sex with a man, you aren’t going to be thinking about using a condom,” said Wei.

“But that one time could be enough to get you infected.”

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Source: Reuters