ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two kinds of adaptations of a homosexual murder case taking place in Tianjin before a moment critical to the Sinophone communities the year 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was established. Homosexuality was seldom mentioned in socialist mass media, but recent studies showed that homosexual men during the socialist period actively pursued their homosexual desires despite political persecution. The burgeoning psychiatric reasoning also strengthened the traditional linkage between same-sex behaviors and dirty things, further stigmatizing homosexuality. The heterosexual afterlife of Ren Likui’s story witnessed a shift in the discursive regulation of the homosexual body from combining recognition and reproach to enforcing invisibility. However, the visualizing but stigmatizing representation model in the Republican Chinese mass media found an echo in the Sinophone world after 1949, in different stories represented by different forms.
