Tongzhi (同志)

Tongzhi literally means “people who share the same aspiration” — for most of the twentieth century it was simply how communist revolutionaries addressed one another (“comrade”). In 1989, organizers of Hong Kong’s first lesbian and gay film festival deliberately reclaimed it for the queer community: it kept the sense of walking side by side while sidestepping the era’s stigmatizing clinical label tongxinglianzhe (“homosexual person”).

Over three decades the word traveled from Hong Kong to Taiwan and on to the mainland, becoming the most natural in-community self-reference across the Chinese-speaking world. Its scope also widened: today tongzhi covers the whole LGBTQ+ spectrum, as in tongzhi shequn (the tongzhi community), not just gay men.

Register note: this is a warm, community-flavored word — natural among friends, at community events, and in organization names (Taiwan’s biggest LGBTQ+ hotline is literally the “Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association”). In formal or academic mainland contexts, where the “communist comrade” double meaning lingers, media and scholars more often use xingshaoshu (sexual minorities) or the English acronym LGBTQ+.

Common misreading: taking tongzhi to mean only gay men. In contemporary usage it is an umbrella; when specificity is needed, speakers say nan tongzhi (male tongzhi) or nü tongzhi — the latter often replaced by lala.