Official Life: Homoerotic Self-Representation and Theater in Li Ciming’s Yuemantang Riji

Abstract

Homoerotic play was central to the recreational culture of theatergoing from the mid-Qing to the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in Beijing. Theatergoing literati in particular played an important role in the production and reproduction of an elite, theater-based, homoerotic sub-culture, heavily investing themselves in the pursuit of social distinction. While it is important not to underestimate the importance of lower-status audiences in the popularisation of Peking opera, the literati doubtlessly considered themselves the aesthetic vanguard in terms of both the judgment of staged drama and the literary promotion of romances between themselves and the boy-actors offstage. Unlike “flower-guides” (Huapu) that circulated between friends, diaries from the period record private thoughts on the scene that would not, and could not, be expressed in public. Drawing on the diary of the influential late-Qing scholar-official Li Ciming (1830–94), I focus on the question of how an understanding of public participation entered Li’s diaries, as well as examining what his self-representations have to say about Qing literati ownership of homoerotic sensibilities and spaces, which is to say, how he saw himself as presenting to others and how that self-presentation is (re-)presented in his writing.