Event Summary
On 18 October 2025, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA) cancelled the scheduled November 28-December 4 performances of “We Are Gay” at the Xiqu Centre, approximately two hours before tickets were to go on sale at 11am on Saturday. WKCDA stated it had received “a large number of complaints” alleging the play “promotes confrontation and defames Hong Kong,” and that the cancellation decision was made “following consultation with the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau” with their “support and consent.” The same day, pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po published a 1,000-word opinion piece attacking playwright Candace Chong Mui-ngam for “building her happiness on Hongkongers’ pain” and criticizing the play for “cultural subversion,” claiming it was “brimming with malice, utterly devoid of morals, detrimental to public decency and poisonous to society.” These actions represent an escalation within an established pattern of systematic cultural blacklisting targeting Candace Chong.
The play, which premiered at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in 2022 and won multiple awards including best performance, script/playwright and director of the year at the 2023 International Association of Theatre Critics Awards, explores a love triangle between three gay men and themes of discrimination and lack of equality for the LGBTQ community. Lead actor Anthony Wong Chau-sang condemned the “layman decision” and compared the cancellations and blacklisting since the 2020 National Security Law as “a haunting that makes practitioners afraid.”
This cancellation represents escalation of systematic blacklisting targeting Chong, following her September 9 public revelation of being blacklisted by major cultural institutions and the September 26 cancellation of her Chinese University lecture. The play had experienced an off-on-off trajectory: advance bookings started August 16, were halted September 9 with hints of cancellation, were reactivated September 24 after receiving “the green light,” only to be definitively cancelled October 18. The cancellation demonstrates unprecedented escalation in cultural censorship through explicit government bureau involvement in programming decisions at nominally independent cultural venues.