SHANGHAI, Jan.23 - Between 2 pm and 4 pm every Saturday, the volunteer is busy at her office desk in Xinjiang Road in Shanghai. She has to attend to all the calls from women from across the country, and advise them how to solve their personal and inter-personal problems.

 

She is one of two volunteers on the shift manning a hotline that was opened on October 25 last year, and has to answer five to six calls in two hours. But her job is different from others because all the callers are lesbians.

 

And she too, like her colleagues, is one of them. The only difference is that the volunteers have undergone thorough psychological, medical and legal training.

 

"We have a dozen volunteers and are recruiting more," officer-in-charge Shen Yimu said yesterday. Shen is from Hong Kong's Chi Heng Foundation, a non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to improving the lives of homosexuals and AIDS orphans. The NGO was started by To Chung in 1998 to provide education and care to children whose parents had died of AIDS.

 

The callers on the hotline can be teenagers to women in their forties. They seek counsel for their relationships, gynecological diseases and legal matters, Shen said.

 

But most of the callers are desperate middle-aged women married and even with biological children being blackmailed for disclosing their lesbian identity.

 

"Lesbians are a very weak group. They are almost neglected by society," Shen said.

 

While male homosexuals are more daring, and demand their rights, lesbians tend to keep everything under wraps.

 

Shen said the greatest pressure on lesbians comes from the family. To many, homosexuals are a social malaise, and lesbians are nothing but a family stigma.

 

When a lesbian college student told her father about herself, he broke down and had to be admitted to hospital to be treated for shock and depression. He recovered only when his daughter swore to lead a "normal" social life.

 

Zhang Beichuan of the Qingdao University, said that while gays have attracted much attention and get more understanding and help, lesbians are lonely and helpless.

 

So far no official organization has come forward to help this group, not even the Women's Federation, Zhang said. They can only try to solve their problems by discussing them at group gatherings, nightclubs and online chatting.

 

A hotline can do little to change such a situation. "It's more like a garbage can in which lesbians can throw their pains," Shen said. "But it also offers an outlet where they can vent their feelings."