Chinese Fans Blast Censors For Editing LGBTQ Themes From ‘Friends’
Los Angeles, Feb 15: The 90s classic sitcom “Friends” has an enormous following in China and is now being discussed animatedly on Chinese social media, with several major Chinese streaming sites, including Tencent, IQiyi Inc, Alibaba’s Youku, and Bilibili, streaming the first season of the show on Friday, in what is its first re-release in China in several years.
However, this was not the same as the original, as it was soon noticed that there were some big changes to the script much to the dismay of long-standing fans. The superfans of the show have expressed outrage over the changes, especially to changes over some of the LGBTQ themes, such as editing out the reason of Ross’s divorce with his wife over the fact that she was a lesbian and was involved in a relationship with another woman.
Another such instance includes Joey’s suggestion of a trip to a strip club is translated in Chinese subtitles as “going out to have fun”. When Paul the Wine Guy tells Monica, “I haven’t been able to, uh, perform sexually,” the subtitle says he has been in “low spirits”. The changes have resulted in intense backlash on social media from the show’s many longstanding Chinese fans, who mocked the Chinese censor board for its actions saying that the alterations reinforced gender stereotypes.
The Chinese Communist Party holds an extremely powerful grip over entertainment and has often altered media that they find unsuitable or not fitting the party’s narrative or ideology on social themes or even remotely questioning the CCP’s ideology or actions. “Friends” is the latest example of foreign entertainment being altered to suit the narrative of the party’s high command. Before this Chinese censors edited out “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a biopic on the iconic British rock band Queen due to the fact that Freddy Mercury was gay, while in January they altered the end of “Fight Club” by a short note saying that the police won, replacing the original scene of destroyed buildings, although the original scene was restored after a huge outcry online.
