自去年10月国内首条女同性恋者咨询800免费热线在上海开通后，“拉拉”群体开始引起社会的关注。这条热线全部由女同性恋志愿者接听，热线义工多数具有专业背景，所有义工都接受过专业培训。如今，中国同性恋正处于一种慢慢“浮出水面”的状态，如各大城市都有同性恋酒吧，网上则有很多同性恋网站和论坛。但是，为数不少的女同性恋者却仍然“躲在柜中”，成为社会关注的盲点。相对于男同性恋者而言，女同性恋者承受着更大的家庭和精神压力，更属于社会“边缘群体”中的“弱势群体”。

A Chinese movie on lesbians,directed by Liyu

Between 2 pm and 4 pm every Saturday, the volunteer is busy at her office desk in Xinjiang Road in Shanghai. She has to attend to all the calls from women from across the country, and advise them how to solve their personal and inter-personal problems.

She is one of two volunteers on the shift manning a hotline that was opened on October 25 last year, and has to answer five to six calls in two hours. But her job is different from others because all the callers arelesbians.

And she too, like her colleagues, is one of them. The only difference is that the volunteers have undergone thorough psychological, medical and legal training.

"We have a dozen volunteers and are recruiting more," officer-in-charge Shen Yimu said yesterday. Shen is from Hong Kong's Chi Heng Foundation, a non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to improving the lives ofhomosexualsand AIDS orphans. The NGO was started by To Chung in 1998 to provide education and care to children whose parents had died of AIDS.

The callers on the hotline can be teenagers to women in their forties. They seek counsel for their relationships,gynecological diseasesand legal matters, Shen said.

But most of the callers are desperate middle-aged women married and even withbiological childrenbeingblackmailedfor disclosing their lesbian identity.

"Lesbians are a very weak group. They are almost neglected by society," Shen said.

While male homosexuals are more daring, and demand their rights, lesbians tend to keep everything under wraps.

Shen said the greatest pressure on lesbians comes from the family. To many, homosexuals are a social malaise, and lesbians are nothing but a familystigma.

When a lesbian college student told her father about herself, he broke down and had to be admitted to hospital to be treated for shock and depression. He recovered only when his daughter swore to lead a "normal" social life.

Zhang Beichuan of the Qingdao University, said that while gays have attracted much attention and get more understanding and help, lesbians are lonely and helpless.

So far no official organization has come forward to help this group, not even the Women's Federation, Zhang said. They can only try to solve their problems by discussing them at group gatherings, nightclubs and online chatting.

A hotline can do little to change such a situation. "It's more like a garbage can in which lesbians can throw their pains," Shen said. "But it also offers an outlet where they can vent their feelings."

（China Daily）

Vocabulary:

lesbian：女同性恋

homosexual：同性恋

gynecological diseases：妇科疾病

biological children：亲生子

blackmail：诈骗、勒索

stigma：耻辱、污点

（英语点津陈蓓编辑）