China's Grindr Turns To Surrogacy

Blued, A Popular Dating App, Is Helping Pair Gay Men With Overseas Surrogates. Will The Chinese Government Mind?

- Dune Lawrence & David Ramli

THE URGE TO have a child hit Geng Le hard after age 35. A for mer cop from China’s Hebei province, he’d launched a gay dating app called Blued a couple of years earlier, in 2012, and had become something of an icon for the Chinese LGBT community. Still, he felt his life was somehow incomplete without a child and that he owed it to his parents to sire a new generation.

The next question was how to go about it. A friend had become a parent to triplets via surrogate, but that seemed sketchy because surrogacy is illegal in China. Another option was Thailand, a popular, relatively low-cost option, but by 2015 that country had banned foreign surrogacy. Geng decided on California, which offered the best legal protections for “intended parents” such as himself, excellent advanced medical care for the surrogate and the newborn, and a U.S. passport for the baby. “I thought about how the child, after it was born, might feel a lot of pressure, experience prejudice, feel insecure—‘other people have mothers, I don’t have a mother,’ ” he says. “But he’d have U.S. citizenship, so I could send the kid to study overseas.”

The surrogacy process was a long drumbeat of tests, contract signings, and administrative details. When the due date came around, Geng flew to Los Angeles for the birth and held his son for the first time. “I was just a person, I was used to that,” he says. “After you become a father, you experience this love and this responsibility.” He returned home with his son, Xiao Shu, in March 2017.

He also brought back a new idea for Blued: an overseas surrogacy service for gay men. The app was doing well, on its way to building up 40 million users and more than $130 million in venture capital; he figured many of the people on Blued would be willing to pay if the system could be made easier to navigate. A few months later, he launched Bluedbaby.