Steven Zhang, 30, with his strong jaw, looks like he could be a special forces soldier, but he is one of eight men vying to be the first Mr Gay China.

The winner of the event in Beijing Friday will represent China in the Worldwide Mr Gay Competition (Feb. 10 to 14) in Oslo.

"I signed up for the competition to break the stereotype that gays are sissy AIDS spreaders, to show that we can be decent people," Zhang says.

"I believe most people will support us though I'm ready for a storm of criticism too."

The pageant has triggered heated debate among Chinese Internet users. In a survey conducted by sohu.com, 1,113 people supported the event while 325 opposed it.

Thousands of comments were posted on sina.com and other websites. Supportive comments such as "Everyone has the right to choose" and "It shows China is more and more open" vied with vilification, such as "How disgusting! Gays are perverts" and "The gay pageant is a shame for all Chinese."

Media interest went far beyond the organizers' expectation. The phones of Ben Zhang and Niu Niu, the main organizers of Mr Gay China, have been ringing around the clock, mostly from foreign media requesting interviews. Agence France Presse, The Guardian, AP and others are covering the pageant.

However, organizers intended the pageant to be low-profile. "We wanted modest media coverage, enough to boost the pride of our contestants and peers and draw some attention from potential sponsors for future events. We did not want to create too much of a disturbance," says Ben Zhang, managing director of the Gayographic social group, which is hosting the pageant.

Gayographic had trouble raising money for the event. Companies do not want their brand names associated with gays. "We had trouble getting sponsorship and could only gather around 50,000 yuan from ourselves and our friends for the event," says Ben Zhang.

Still, the pageant is to be held at one of Beijing's most prestigious venues, Lan Club, which offered to provide its facilities for free.

Photos of the contestants spread rapidly on the Internet despite Ben Zhang and Niu Niu repeatedly asked the media not to publish them after protests from contestants.

Despite worries about their privacy, no contestants have withdrawn and organizers have felt no government pressure, Niu Niu says. "Everything is proceeding as planned. The pageant will be held as scheduled."

A HIDDEN COMMUNITY

The contestants and the organizers all agree that most of China's gay community remains hidden from mainstream society.

A survey by Zhang Beichuan, a scholar at Qingdao University, of 1,259 homosexuals showed that 8.7 percent were fired or forced to resign after revealing their sexual orientation, and 4.7 percent felt their salary and career advancement were affected. Some 62 percent kept their sexuality a secret in the work place.

Steven Zhang, a salesman, is among that majority. "There is no way I can tell my straight friends or colleagues. It will destroy everything.

"I act as if I'm straight in my daily life. I chat about hot girls with my colleagues and occasionally pop out a sex joke or two. It is natural and everyone buys it."

When his friends try to match him with a girl, he always says he's already got a girlfriend.

However, when someone asks Niu Niu, 37, if he has a wife or girlfriend, he answers, "I don't have a girlfriend, but I do have a boyfriend."

Niu Niu has been aware of his inclination and quite open about it to his friends since early childhood. Still he was very cautious in telling his family. In 2009, he compiled a nine-page document -- Q&A for My Parents, From Your Gay Son -- to explain homosexuality and that he remains their beloved son.

Niu Niu copied the materials to his parents, brother and sister-in-law. His father refused to read it.

"I knew it would be difficult for my family. That was why I had kept it a secret from them. But finally I decided that people close to me have the right to know," says Niu Niu, "and it was a great burden to keep a lie."

While Niu Niu strived to explain to people close to him that homosexuality is not abnormal, he was "deeply disappointed" to find that the Chinese expressions for gay and lesbian were filtered as pornographic terms by the Green Dam--Youth Escort, a government-backed Internet filtering software that blocks violent and pornographic content to protect minors.

Previous events to promote gay awareness have met setbacks. On June 10, 2009, a public screening of a lesbian film, part of the Shanghai PRIDE festival, was canceled after alleged interference from the local Administration Bureau for Industry and Commerce.

China saw the opening of its first government-backed gay bar on Dec. 20 in the southwestern Yunnan Province. The bar drew so much attention that it's opening was delayed by 18 days from the original date of Dec. 1, World AIDS Day.

Li Yinhe, a scholar with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has been calling for legislation on homosexual marriage.

She argues that married gays could care for each other in old age and that marriage would help contain the spread of AIDS in China as 40 percent of carriers get the disease from sexual activity.

LITERARY TOLERANCE

Records of gay love in China date back thousands of years. Historians believe the earliest recorded homosexual romance is that of King Linggong of Wei from 534 to 493 B.C., and his official and servant, Mizi Xia.

Their relationship was revealed in Records of the Grand Historian, by Sima Qian (145 to 90 B.C.). Chinese literature and historical writings are littered with gay liaisons. Most historians and novelists through history had a neutral view in their depiction of gay love.

Jia Baoyu, in A Dream in Red Mansions, one of China's four great classic novels, has two homosexual relationships, yet he remains one of the most popular characters in Chinese literature.

China abolished a law that defined homosexual activities a crime of hooliganism in 1997. Homosexuality was delisted as a mental disorder in 2001.

China has 5 million to 10 million gays according to statistics of the Ministry of Health released in 2004. Li Yinhe estimates there are 36 to 48 million homosexuals in the country.