Radio Free Asia are reporting that Hong Kong government broadcaster RTHK has announced it will axe the LGBTQ+ radio show 自己人 We Are Family after 17 years on air, according to the show’s anchor and producers.
“I received personal notice at the beginning of July from the director of Radio Television Hong Kong’s Chinese channel that ‘We Are Family,’ which started up in 2006, is being officially terminated in August,” the show’s anchor Brian Leung said in a July 22 post on his Facebook page.
“In Hong Kong, we are mentally prepared, as a lot of things seem to be a matter of sooner or later,” Leung wrote in an apparent reference to an ongoing crackdown on liberal media and political opposition.
“There’s little we can do. What can be done has been done.”
Activists told Radio Free Asia that the move comes as Beijing continues to tighten its grip on public speech in Hong Kong, in a bid to make the city more patriotically Chinese.
Leung thanked his listeners and said it was “dark times” for equal rights, rather than the end of the road.
The show’s producers said on its official Facebook page that it had started in 2006 on the back of a wave of regional interest in LGBTQ+ culture sparked by Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s film “Brokeback Mountain.”
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