Cecil Chao’s offer of a huge dowry of HK$500 million to the man who succeeds in tempting his beautiful daughter Gigi back onto the heterosexual straight and narrow is one of those little stories that contains the entire age. Money can’t buy you love – but can it buy you a son-in-law?
ecil, who boasts of having bedded 10,000 women, must in his 76 gilded years have acquired a pretty shrewd idea of what money can do. But I would mildly suggest that in this case he is probably barking up the wrong tree. By turning his daughter’s sexual preferences into a global joke, by arrogating to himself the right to dictate how she lives her life, above all by bringing a vast fortune into the equation, he will have achieved little else than earn Gigi’s bitter resentment. “Gigi, go find dad and slap him,” one wise soul tweeted. I second that emotion.And yet, and yet…Cecil was only putting into crude money terms what the conservative parents of many children who turned out gay must have said in their hearts. And Gigi herself indicated why her old man thinks she still – at 33, with motherhood still beckoning! – could be wooed. “I had boyfriends in the past,” she said, “but never labelled myself as gay or straight or whatever. I’m true to my heart as to what I found attractive.” It reminds me of the words of the recently deceased Gore Vidal: “There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person,” he growled. “There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses, if not practices.”
That is a truth more commonly acknowledged these days in Asia: where being discreetly gay on the side is barely a matter for comment, while being out-and-out OUT plays merry hell with the family system.
