clipped from: travel.nytimes.com   

Gay Pride Week in Shanghai included the essential “hot body” contest.


“BRING in the boys!” an announcer howled on a recent Saturday afternoon at Cotton’s, a bar in Shanghai.


The occasion was a daylong celebration with drag shows, Chinese opera performances, mock same-sex weddings — and, yes, a “hot body” contest — to help conclude Shanghai’s first Gay Pride Week. And as seven beefcakes, including two from New York and one from Indonesia, strutted onto an outdoor stage, a crowd of hundreds erupted in whoops and hollers before awarding the hottest body title to a strapping, six-foot-tall Shanghainese who went by the name Grant. He was wearing a pink “Beware Pickpockets and Loose Women” T-shirt, until he wasn’t.