Date: Mar 18th 2014 11:13a.m.

Contributed by:
ktschroedes

After a prostitution ring crackdown in Dongguan, police have now focused their attention on a gay sex club run in Tianhe District.

A 37-year-old man from Chongqing surnamed Wang has started a QQ group called the “Comrades Win Club”, a sex club for homosexuals. The group was started online last December and currently has at least 2800 members, mostly middle-class males. Even though China legalized adult gay sex in 1997 and in 2001 took it off the official list of psychiatric diseases, group sex (sex with three or more individuals, male or female) is still a crime.

In February at around midnight, police organized a raid at an apartment in Tianhe District. Police arrested 13 men, 7 of which received 10 to 15 days of “administrative detention” and five were briefly “educated” before being released. China Youth International reports that up to 800 men have visited the apartment since the club started. Police first became suspicious of the apartment because of the large number of strangers visiting and at first suspected it of being a brothel.

“As far as I know, [sex] clubs for both gay and straight people are widely seen in the entire country,” said Liang Wenhui, a Guangzhou-based student activist who recently sent 3000 letters to lawmakers calling for same-sex marriage. “In China, sex has been stigmatized,” he told Gay Star News. “Whether gay or straight, such behavior is simply undesirable.” Liang believes the government should be more lenient with private sexual behavior that hurts no one.

Gay or straight, swinger or not, do you think sex clubs should be left alone?