Join The Feminist Press and translator Scott Myers to celebrate the first English translation of Beijing Comrades. Written pseudonymously and posted on the Internet in 1998, Beijing Comrades by Bei Tong is among Mainland China’s earliest and most influential contemporary gay novels. It tells the story of Chen Handong and Lan Yu, two men from very different social classes. Handong is a wealthy businessman in his late twenties, the spoiled offspring of elite Communist Party officials with a string of male and female lovers. Lan Yu is a university student from a working-class background who has just arrived in Beijing. Naïve but by no means dim, Lan Yu finds himself in Handong’s bed when he is alone in the capital and unable to make ends meet.

Narrated by Handong, the story chronicles the joys, hardships, and no small amount of sexual bliss the men share as they navigate the uncharted terrain of a same-sex relationship at the end of the twentieth century in the People’s Republic of China. Beijing Comrades is a groundbreaking work in what has been called tongzhi or gay/queer fiction from the PRC.