Layered Exception: LGBT Life and Survival in Pandemic-lockdown China

This article examines how Chinese LGBT individuals experienced intensified marginalisation during the Covid-19 pandemic, arguing that queer life under lockdown was shaped by what we term “layered exception” – a condition produced by the intersection of state lockdown governance and heteronormative domestic discipline. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 55 queer individuals and HIV/AIDS NGO workers, alongside online observations from various LGBT forums, the study identifies three key findings. First, under China’s stringent lockdown policies, LGBT individuals were subjected to a new regime of control – “home-as-the-rule” – in which the heteronormative family, rather than the state, became the primary site of surveillance, coercion, and moral discipline. Second, the prolonged lockdown disrupted everyday “technologies of the self,” suspending flexible identity expression, cross-border mobility and intimate autonomy. Digital intimacy practices such as textual love and flirtatious banter emerged as alternative forms of connection, amid heated online tensions between “lying flat” advocates normalising everyday risk and “zero-Covid” supporters endorsing state-imposed restraint. Third, the medical precarity faced by HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM) reveals an additional layer of exception: these individuals were not only excluded from familial and state recognition, but were also rendered invisible within China’s public health infrastructure, placing them at risk of being effectively “left to die.” Taken together, these findings demonstrate how the lockdown deepened queer precarity in China.