Official life: homoerotic self-representation and theatre in Li Ciming’s Yuemantang riji

Abstract

As many have noted, homoerotic play was central to the recreational culture of theatergoing from the mid-Qing to the beginning of twentieth century, especially in Beijing. Theatergoing literati in particular played an important role in the production and reproduction of a theater-based homoerotic discourse, heavily investing themselves in maintaining a homoerotic sub-culture centred on social distinction. Though it is important not to underestimate the importance of lower-status audiences in the popularisation of jingju, the literati class 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. Drawing on the diary of the influential late-Qing scholar-official Li Ciming (1830-1894), this paper will seek to establish a way forward in interpreting the significance of this doubling of the theatergoing experience for literati men in their movement between theaters and boy-actors' private-apartments (siyu), a movement mirrored in the space created between dramatic spectatorship (stage) and literary performance (page). To that end I will focus on the question of how Li's diaries structure his presentation of romantic relationships with boy-actors within his wider experiences of the city, examining to what extent his self-representations inform us of 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.