The "Half-in-Half" bar can be found down a dimly-lit lane off Bar Street, the heart of Beijing night life activity. A string of coloured lights illuminate the wooden doors.
On Saturday evening, customers could be found inside sitting in little alcoves viewing new arrivals with curiosity, or standing around in a darkened bar room with loud pop music. Some of the clients were casually-attired foreigners with bronzed faces and moustaches, but most were well-dressed young Chinese in their 20s or 30s. All were men. The "Half-in-Half" is a gay bar.
In another part of the same Beijing district is the "Half Dream" bar. It is presided over by its owner, Jin Xing (31), who can be found there most evenings swathed in a velvet gown with matching purple nail varnish.
Ms Jin, once a colonel in a People's Liberation Army dance troupe, is China's most famous transsexual. A former national men's dance champion, she is a popular figure around town (I first met her at an embassy reception) and makes no secret of her past.
Official tolerance of gay and lesbian lifestyles is quietly growing in China, as the very existence of the "Half-in-Half" and the "Half Dream" bars testify. Everyone on the district knows about them, including the police who patrol the area in new American-type squad cars.
"No one bothers us here," said a young man in the "Half-in-Half" bar. "It's OK to be different today." Ms Jin, who said that from the age of six she felt she was a woman trapped in a man's body, told a reporter that "I could have been punished and put in jail," in Mao's China, but has experienced no discrimination since her sex change operation three years ago. Indeed, editors of the ultra-conservative People's Daily newspaper, where words like "crossdressing" or "gay' would seize up the presses, were spotted not long ago thoroughly enjoying a show by a group of transvestites at the "Half Dream" bar.
Same-sex eroticism was prevalent in ancient Chinese culture. The classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber, deals openly with homosexual love. Today there is no law against homosexuality in China, and in theory gay and lesbian couples enjoy some legal protection since a 1992 test case in Anhui province when two arrested lesbians won a ruling that they were doing nothing illegal by setting up home together. But the communist revolution 50 years ago was accompanied by intolerance of anyone who was "different" and this is only slowly changing. Homosexuality is still a taboo subject in the mainstream media and gays and lesbians mostly hide their sexual preferences from friends and families. It is not so long ago since they could expect arrest for hooliganism or disturbing public order, and be sent for electric shock treatment.
Two years ago for example Beijing restaurant manager Liu Shun was detained by police who he said beat and raped him. He emigrated to San Francisco and claimed asylum as a "gay dissident", one of a handful of Chinese men who benefited from the fact that sexual orientation is grounds for political asylum in the US. Zhou Chunsheng, a Chinese homosexual activist who also went to the US in 1996, told a gay and lesbian conference held secretly in Hong Kong last year that cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have now taken an open attitude towards homosexuals, but until recently the suicide rate among young Chinese homosexuals was nearly 10 per cent.
Chinese film director Zhang Yuan ran into trouble with the authorities when he made a movie in 1997 called East Palace, West Pal- ace about the fate of a gay man who falls in love with a policeman who arrests him. It was to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
Before Mr Zhang could attend he had his passport confiscated and Beijing pressurised the Cannes organisers not to screen the film. A friend of the director said at the time: "Zhang has a lot of gay friends, but basically he doesn't know anybody in China who has a cosy middle-class gay existence. It's not possible." But Beijing relented last year and Zhang Yuan was able to attend a showing of his film at an arts festival in Italy.
Even in more liberal and freewheeling Hong Kong intolerance of openly gay behaviour is common. This year the first gay group to be registered at a Hong Kong students' union, the Tongzhi (homosexual) Culture Society at the Chinese University, was targeted by fellow students who attacked it in posters and threw its literature into bins.
In Beijing's night-life district at least, China's gays are at last venturing out of the closet and samesex couples are beginning to socialise openly - something which actually doesn't attract much attention as it is not uncommon for young Chinese heterosexual men and women to hold hands in public displays of friendship.
Gays and lesbians have been able to come out of the closet, said a Chinese executive, because of the new culture where people can wear what they like, do what they like, and say what they like, as long as they do not oppose the Communist Party. "Before, people had no choice, now they have many choices," said Jin Xing in a recent interview. But finding a date is a problem. "I'm too much for Chinese men," she sighed.