Last month’s Gay Games seemed to go off well, despite getting the cold shoulder from Hong Kong’s government. Unlike in other countries, where local governments have provided financial and logistical support, the authorities refused official assistance. In the run-up to the event, a number of Hong Kong lawmakers demanded that the government ban it on the grounds of its “soft resistance” – to who knows what – and as a supposed risk to national security. Their protest revealed both the nastiness of high-level anti-gay bigotry in Hong Kong and the degree to which obsessions about wildly imagined threats to national security have permeated officialdom.