Leslie Cheung - Sexual Orientation

Sexual Orientation

Cheung was bisexual and once said in an interview in Time magazine: "It's more appropriate to say I'm bisexual. I've had girlfriends. When I was 22 or so, I asked my girlfriend Teresa Mo (his colleague in ATV of the time) to marry me." Despite numerous tabloid rumors, he denied his homosexual/bi-sexual orientation for the first half of his career, until his stance relaxed considerably after emigrating to Vancouver. In the early 1990s he became one of the few Hong Kong actors who dared to play gay characters onscreen.

Cheung's first gay role was Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine (1993). Cheng Dieyi was a Beijing opera singer or Dan (male actor who plays female roles) who had fallen in love with his male singing partner. In Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together (1997), Cheung played another gay role, Ho Po-wing. He was nominated for the Best Actor Award at the Golden Horse Awards and the Hong Kong Film Awards for his role in Happy Together.

In 1995 a Hong Kong tabloid published a photo of Cheung's long-life partner, Daffy Tong Hok-Tak (唐鶴德). In a 1997 concert, Cheung openly revealed that Tong and his mother were his "most beloved". The Hong Kong media eventually accepted the two men's relationship and the tabloid gave Tong the nickname Tong Tong (in the style of Gor Gor). They had been together for twenty years. After Cheung's death, Cheung's family published a full-page obituary in a Hong Kong newspaper, in which Tong was listed as a surviving spouse (未亡人). Tong, together with Cheung's eldest sister, was also designated as the executor of Cheung's estate.