Can marrying someone of the opposite sex "straighten out" a gay person?

Decode “marriage cures homosexuality” and its real meaning surfaces: it means “marriage makes it invisible to the neighbors.” It never treats the orientation — it treats the parents’ loss of face. Orientation can’t be changed by willpower or medication (see why), and a wedding banquet or a newborn changes it no more than a pill would. What changes is only whether other people can still see it.

And that invisibility is paid for by someone else.

Who pays the bill: tongqi and tongfu

• Medically, there is nothing to cure. China’s own diagnostic standard, CCMD-3, dropped homosexuality as a disorder in 2001; the APA’s 2009 review found no rigorous evidence that orientation can be changed by any means. Marriage is no exception.
• The real-world cost is documented. Researcher Zhang Beichuan has spent years studying tongqi (同妻) — women who unknowingly married gay men — and describes a very large population in China. The recurring themes in reporting and interviews: sexless marriages, chronic emotional neglect, self-blame and depression, and an uphill battle to prove grounds when seeking divorce. Tongfu (同夫), men married to lesbians, face a mirror-image situation that is discussed even less.
• Concealment carries health risks too. In a marriage built on a secret, the spouse is denied informed choices — including about sexual health.

Deception and xinghun: neither is a clean exit

Mainland China offers no legal recognition of same-sex marriage, while the pressure to continue the family line remains intense. That combination makes “just marry someone to satisfy the family” look like an exit. Some men and women marry unknowing opposite-sex partners; others enter a xinghun (形式婚姻), a “cooperative marriage” between a gay man and a lesbian who both know the arrangement.

Two things are worth saying plainly. Marrying someone who doesn’t know is a harm done to an innocent person — morally indefensible, and a source of years of emotional and legal entanglement in divorce. And xinghun, though consensual, entangles property, childbearing decisions and two extended families for decades; it is far more complicated than the “elegant workaround” it’s often sold as. For more on the term tongqi, see our glossary entry.

If you’re being pressured to marry

• The pressure on you is real. But pulling an innocent person into the middle of it doesn’t dissolve the pressure — it schedules a much worse explosion years down the line.
• There are more sustainable ways to handle family expectations than a marriage of appearances; we’ve collected them in our guide to family pressure.
• You don’t owe anyone a confrontation. Whether and when to come out to family is a decision where safety comes first — it can wait until you’re ready and the environment is safe enough. And when it gets heavy, support resources are here.