• Share:

This guest author post is by Kai Hang Cheang, author of Sideways Developments: Queer and Trans Aesthetics of Global Hong Kong. The book is now available in hardcover, paperback, and open access.

On September 10, 2025, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council voted 71 to 14, with one abstention, against recognizing same-sex partnerships, contravening the Court of Final Appeal’s decision in Sham Tsz Kit v Secretary for Justice ([2023] HKCFA 28), which called on the legislature to create a legal framework for same-sex partnership in the Special Administrative Region, and ending a run of LGBTQ+ legal victories in the city. This blog post examines the aftermath of the bill’s failure by attending to the community work of Marrz Balaoro, a trans pastor and activist whose record of persevering in the face of legal refusal offers a queer example of difference in the face of an otherwise homogenous China. Though Balaoro’s legal dispute with the government was different from Sham’s bid for same-sex marriage, his response to the legal setbacks he faced sheds light on how queer and trans people in Hong Kong and elsewhere might respond to such challenging results. Here, drawing on Balaoro’s praxis and my book, Sideways Developments: Queer and Trans Aesthetics of Global Hong Kong, I speculate on the future of queerness in the Special Administrative Region and beyond at this moment of legal defeat.

For Hong Kong LGBTQ+ advocates, the legislature’s rejection of same-sex partnership recognition was especially disappointing given the recent progress in the city: joint tax filing and spousal benefits for gay and lesbian civil servants were legalized in 2019, followed by inheritance and housing protections in 2024. Some of it was smuggled in rather than declared: a 2024 ordinance on end-of-life care, set to take effect this July, quietly extends recognition to same-sex couples through its definition of “cohabitation relationship”—two people of the same or opposite sex living together in an intimate relationship—for the purpose of co-signing a do-not-resuscitate order, without ever using the word marriage (Advance Decision on Life-sustaining Treatment Ordinance, Cap. 651, pt. 1, s. 2; pt. 3, ss. 25, 32). What makes the legislature’s decision all the more striking is its defiance of the Court of Final Appeal. In Sham Tsz Kit v Secretary for Justice, the court found that the refusal violated Sham’s right to equality: since opposite-sex couples enjoy a constitutionally guaranteed right to marry under Article 37 of the Basic Law, equality requires the same access for same-sex couples. Reasoning from Article 14 of the Bill of Rights, itself drawn from the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, the majority arrived at an expansive holding: the government is obliged to safeguard the privacy and dignity of same-sex couples. The court issued an order directing the government to devise an alternative framework for recognizing same-sex unions, leaving the framework’s design to the executive, and its passage to the legislature. Critics faulted the eventual bill for serving mainly those wealthy enough to marry abroad while leaving non-citizens out almost entirely, but many still expected it to pass, given the series of pro-LGBTQ+ rulings that preceded it.

Instead, on September 10, 2025, the Legislative Council voted down the Registration of Same-Sex Partnerships Bill, the government’s response to the court’s order, on the principle that marriage in Hong Kong means marriage between a man and a woman. At a press conference in July, 2025, Chief Executive John Lee said that, since “one country, two systems” rests on Hong Kong’s rule of law, defying the top court’s ruling “will bring serious consequences” (Hong Kong Free Press 2025a). Yet in September, Lee announced that he would respect the legislative council’s decision. Perhaps this is because the rule of law that matters most to the city’s leaders is not primarily about marriage; it’s a different rule of law: the one that keeps a Hong Konger’s whole life on schedule, aligned with the city’s own schedule of integration into the cisgender heteronormativity of China: marrying, reproducing, inheriting, caring for parents and being cared for, timed not just to capitalism’s clock but to the mainland’s. Same-sex marriage, then, was only partly the activists’ ask. The deeper question was always whose timeline it answered to.

That timeline question is what my own book has been circling. I wrote about exactly this kind of queer moment, before the Sham case had reached even this provisional end. Sideways Developments argues that the city’s law and culture have been shaped by developmentalist narratives imposed by a succession of superpowers—colonial Britain, twentieth-century America, and now a rising China—each insisting on its own straight and linear story of progress, and following the timing of its own clock. The version currently in force I call Chinese chrononormativity: a schedule in which a Hong Konger’s own developmental timeline is bound up with the city’s political timeline of assimilating into China ahead of the 2047 deadline on its promised high degree of autonomy. To fall out of step with one is, in some sense, to fall out of step with the other. The spatiotemporal dimension of global cultural LGBTQ+ productions from and about the Special Administrative Region works as a running commentary on that schedule—sometimes diverging with it, and other times converging with it. The bill’s defeat at the legislative council is a rare moment that represents the Special Administrative Region’s explicit reinforcement of cisgender heteronormativity in its governance; it is rare given it is neoliberalism’s dictum to be inclusive of queer differences, and even rarer because the executive branch, as my book has chronicled, has been adhering to court’s past progressive LGBTQ+ rulings until this vote that ended in the legislative council. Though this failure is an outlier, one that my book was not able to discuss given its recency, the book’s sideways analysis remains relevant to this recent example of state-based neoliberal homophobia, instead of the more familiar form of homo-capitalism (the type of inclusion that I will have to keep noting is exclusive to privileged subjects like citizens and those who can afford to get married abroad).

As I think about this challenging ruling, one that has disappointed so many queer Hong Kongers, I keep returning to Jack Halberstam’s reading of failure. In a 2014 talk, “On Behalf of Failure,” delivered at IPAK Centar’s Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics in Belgrade, he recalled that after the publication of his 2011 monograph, people often found it strange that he would write about queer people reclaiming failure. After all, minorities spend their lives striving for success specifically to dissociate themselves from the failure the system so often associates them with. Clarifying an argument from The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam 2011), he said that in a world where success is measured by profit or relayed through heteronormative marriage, “failure is not a bad place to start for a critique of capitalism and heteronormativity” (IPAK.Centar 2014, 7:40–7:46). Rather than re-capitulate my book’s argument, I want to do what it does, once more, live on this blog: perform an act of sideways reading on someone the law has already failed, to see what that failure still makes visible.

That person is Marrz Balaoro, who brought a bid for marriage recognition of his own, by a roundabout route, years before Sham did. Balaoro is a Filipino domestic worker who moved to Hong Kong in 1981 and has lived as a man since the age of twelve. For much of his adulthood, he has served as a trans pastor performing same-sex marriages the city’s government has never recognized. Balaoro is part of the LGBTS Christian Church, whose doctrine draws on queer theology to define marriage in the Bible and which cites Ruth’s clinging to Naomi in Ruth 1:14 as a scriptural precedent for queer family-making. The church began in Quezon City and was extended to Hong Kong, where Balaoro was ordained in 2014. He was arrested in 2017 on suspicion of violating the city’s marriage laws for officiating Holy Unions there. The charges were dropped, but, like Sham, Balaoro pushed further, filing his own application for judicial review, asking the High Court to declare in advance that performing such ceremonies could never expose him to prosecution. The court’s nuanced answer, in 2020 (Balaoro Marietta S. v Secretary for Justice [2020] HKCFI 348), failed to provide him with full legal satisfaction while also affording him a degree of protection. It was, in short, the kind of loss that was almost a win. The judge agreed there was, in his words, “in fact no dispute between the parties” that the ceremonies broke no law, since the Marriage Ordinance only criminalizes celebrating a “marriage”—and a same-sex ceremony, by the statute’s own one-man-one-woman definition, could never legally be one. What the court declined to do was something narrower and more procedural: grant an advance declaration of non-criminality, a kind of relief civil courts only give in rare, exceptional cases. Balaoro has kept performing Holy Unions ever since. This is where reading sideways offers insights into alternative temporalities for queer survival and flourishing. Read straight, Balaoro is just a footnote to a procedural ruling the courts have already settled. Read sideways, however, his careful navigation of what the ruling does and does not allow models how queer and trans people might respond to legal setbacks that seek to curtail their way of life.

Balaoro has continued to perform his marriage ceremonies, without any guarantee that his behavior is “non-criminal,” but buttressed by the court’s finding that there is “no dispute between the parties.” And he has continued his activism on behalf of queer and trans people within the Christian tradition. In a May 19, 2019 episode of Philippines Tonight Show on MetroPlus 1044, he argues, against his own church’s critics, that it’s theological conservatism rather than the Bible that’s homophobic. “What’s written in the Bible—in Genesis, in the original language—doesn’t actually say [that marriage should be between a man and a woman],” he says of Genesis 2:18. “It says you’ll be given a ‘helper.’ It doesn’t say it had to be a female partner that Adam was given.” He turns the same logic on Leviticus: the same book also forbids eating shellfish, a literalism nobody applies at dinner today even as the same-sex prohibition right next to it gets treated as absolute (PTS 2019, 11:58–12:50). There is also a turn toward the visual: As part of Pride Month celebration at Hong Kong’s Eaton Hotel, the photography exhibition Pride in Rainbow features profiles of Pinoys and Pinays in a carnivalesque fashion show organized by Balaoro’s organization FilGuys in observance of its eighteenth anniversary. The participants were shown wearing Pride-rainbow-themed costumes made from recycled materials. These images are displayed alongside the food hall’s everyday customers, thereby placing queer and trans domestic workers in the same visual field as a city that depends on them and rarely sees them as anything more than help around the house (Eaton Food Hall 2025). And there is the safe house FilGuys runs in Lantau for domestic workers in crisis, started after a fellow helper was sent home for coming out as lesbian, funded mostly out of whatever Balaoro can scrape together himself, and at one point in need of donations just to stay open. None of that shows up in a casebook. All of it is part of how Balaoro has actually answered the question the bill never got to: What does Hong Kong’s LGBTQ+ community need beyond the recognition of same-sex partnership?

This is also, not incidentally, the kind of move the American legal scholar Robert M. Cover provides language for: law made by the lived experience of religious communities—from the Mormons to the Mennonites—which he calls jurisgenerative, a bottom-up perspective on the law that communities create new meanings of law by interpreting it anew—all against the jurispathic, or the more top-down practice of law-killing, which is often done by judges and legislators who hold narrow visions of the law and find comfort in precedent instead (Cover 1983). Balaoro’s ceremonies carry no legal weight, but they are jurisgenerative in that they acknowledge marriage as more expansive than that dictated by the 1970 Marriage Ordinance, as that between a man and a woman at the expense of others. Balaoro’s celebration of same-sex couples—often domestic workers—in community spaces in Hong Kong offers us a sideways example of something intersectional that same-sex marriage bills will always miss.

Under this reading, the court’s injunction to devise a same-sex partnership model as an alternative to marriage—and the legislature’s subsequent rejection—together function as an arm of temporal governance. This mechanism manages who counts as family in law while keeping two cisgender heteronormative timelines—the citizen’s personal clock and the city’s political clock—running in sync. I do not wish to understate the importance of legal victories; same-sex marriage is an important right. At the same time, I want to hold onto the long-standing value of alternative queer and trans temporalities. Balaoro’s Holy Unions, FilGuys’ safe house, and the Eaton Hotel’s photo display of queer and trans Pinoys and Pinays are vital projects of trans sacralization and visibility. They do not change the straight schedule. Instead, they enact a queer spatio-temporality that creates productive contradictions and offers reprieve from the straight capitalist mandates of cis-heteronormative production and reproduction. That visibility feels all the more urgent now that the Registration of Same-Sex Partnerships Bill has failed, especially with little momentum for further discussion after performance artist Holok Chen—staging a protest outside Hong Kong’s marriage registry—described the legislators’ remarks as “homophobic slurs” during the debate (Hong Kong Free Press 2025b).

The courts and the legislature have, for now, finished talking to each other about who counts as family. In the meantime, both non-citizens and citizens in queer and trans Hong Kong will continue to build community in defense of LGBTQ+ rights. Balaoro’s activism and community work—including his marriage ceremonies, radio appearances, and FilGuys’ exhibition—offer sideways pointers on where else to look and listen for lessons amid the fight for, and beyond, same-sex legal recognition.

References

Advance Decision on Life-sustaining Treatment Ordinance. 2024. Cap. 651, Laws of Hong Kong.

Agbayani, Crescencio, Jr. 2024. “My Biblical Basis for Same-Sex Marriage.” LGBTS Christian Church Inc. (blog), April 24, 2024. https://lgbtschristianchurch.wordpress.com/2024/04/24/my-biblical-basis-for-same-sex-marriage-rev-crescencio-agbayani-jr-mdiv/.

Balaoro Marietta S. v Secretary for Justice [2020] HKCFI 348.

Cover, Robert M. 1983. “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term — Foreword: Nomos and Narrative.” Harvard Law Review 97 (1): 4–68.

Eaton Food Hall (@eatonfoodhall). 2025. Instagram post, July 2, 2025. https://www.instagram.com/p/DLpEUjzSCRr/.

Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hong Kong Free Press. 2025a. “Hong Kong Leader Backs Bill Granting Same-Sex Couples Limited Legal Rights.” By James Lee. July 15, 2025. https://hongkongfp.com/2025/07/15/hong-kong-leader-backs-bill-granting-same-sex-couples-limited-legal-rights/.

Hong Kong Free Press. 2025b. “Performance Artist Calls Out Lawmakers for ‘Homophobic Slurs,’ Says LGBTQ Community ‘Not Something to Fear.’” By Hillary Leung. July 28, 2025. https://hongkongfp.com/2025/07/28/performance-artist-calls-out-lawmakers-for-homophobic-slurs-says-lgbtq-community-not-something-to-fear/.

IPAK Centar. 2014. “Jack Halberstam: On Behalf of Failure.” YouTube video. Lecture delivered August 20, 2014, Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics, Belgrade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP086r_d4fc.

Planet Ally. 2017. “Save the FilGuys — LGBTI Migrant Worker Rescue Centre.” YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ3oh0ZrxF4.

PTS (Philippines Tonight Show). 2019. Episode aired May 19, 2019, on MetroPlus 1044, Hong Kong. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV2HZ3CEb3w.

Sham Tsz Kit v Secretary for Justice [2023] HKCFA 28.