This essay explores the resilience of the Beijing Queer Film Festival (BJQFF) amid intensified cultural regulation and LGBTQIA+ repression in China. Using insider ethnography and recent scholarship, it contends that the BJQFF’s survival relies not on visibility or institutional expansion, but on adaptive organising strategies, guerilla tactics, decentralisation, and a minoritarian ethic of care. The festival embraces failure as a collective resource, transforming vulnerability into solidarity and creativity. Through disidentification and continuous improvisation, the BJQFF redefines what constitutes queer success, presenting an alternative model of endurance for grassroots activism under restrictions.

A tenacious heteropatriarchal logic of gender normativity continues to script the behaviour of Chinese gay men. It was a decade ago when Tiantian Zheng (2015) made the anthropological observation that the kind of gay sex that Chinese homosexuals were having was, essentially, not about sex. The bottoms she interviewed confessed to a lack of sexual […]