 Hello, everyone. It is my pleasure to share this mentoring program with you all through this presentation. My name is Yutai Huang, and I am an assistant professor at the Department of Social Work and Social Administration, University of Hong Kong. Today, co-presenting with me are two of my research assistants, Mr. Liu Chao and Mr. Lao Chi Chong. The title of this project is a mentoring program for sexual minority men in Hong Kong that mentors sexual orientation. To start with, I would like to give you an introduction about this unique mentoring program for young gay men in Hong Kong. We came up with an interesting name for this program, mentorship, as we imagine that a mentorship is like for two men on a ship sailing to somewhere together. So what made us create this project? Studies from various disciplines have argued sexual minority in their daily lives are experiencing and perceiving stigma and discrimination. One theory applied here is the minority stress theory, which suggests that their minority stress, their minority status could produce additional stress to elevate the risk for mental health problems among sexual minority people. As such, professionals have been calling for a relational focus and community-based intervention to strengthen their social support and to enhance their mental health. Out of many possible interventions, mentorship demonstrates a great potential to achieve this goal. Through establishing a robust social relationship and a role model, mentorship strengthened the capacities of the mentees to face the prevalent marginalization and stigma. However, the mentorship with an aim to improve young sexual minority mental health is under research, especially in Asian contexts. We therefore conduct this study to address this research gap. Moreover, based on the notion of gay-straight alliance, we would also like to investigate the similarities and differences between straight and sexual minority mentors in playing their role for the sexual minority mentees. We position this project not only as a research study, but also as a mentoring program that is designed for young sexual minority men aged between 18 and 26 in Hong Kong. At this point of time, we have recruited 57 young self-identified gay or bisexual men. They were randomly assigned to the intervention groups, that is group A and group B, and the active control group. Within the intervention groups, 22 and 10 are matched with sexual minority mentors and a straight mentor, respectively, for a six-month mentorship. 25 were assigned to an active control group. For each diet, the mentor and the mentees will mainly conduct a one-on-one interaction. The interaction can be faced-to-face online through phone call or text messages, depending on the mutual agreements. We expect all diets to maintain at least two hours of interactions every month. While we encourage them to establish some goals for these mentorship experiences, they are also free to explore and discuss other topics and share their life experiences. In addition, the research team also holds a monthly seminar for every participant in the intervention groups. The seminars will be recorded, and the video will be sent to all participants, including those who are in control groups, as a cycle educational materials. We also organize some recreational activities for the diet to enjoy. This is to sustain a healthy bonding, not only between the mentors and mentees, but also among the mentors so as to create a supporting network for overcoming difficulties in mentoring their mentees. In this presentation, we are not going to present any findings because the research is still going on. Rather, we would like to highlight several significant components in our project in relation to the conference themes. In the coming parts, our team will present to you our thoughts in relation to social inclusion, political entanglements in the turbulent times, the cultivation of critical consciousness, and the dynamics of inequalities among mentees, mentors, and the research teams. To conclude this presentation, we will also share our reflections and our experiences during our study. To give a brief context on Hong Kong's sexual politics, I would like to start with some history. Once being a British colony, homosexuality in Hong Kong was criminalized in most of the colonial times. It was only until 1991 that it was decriminalized, and various gay organizations started to emerge to promote a more positive image about homosexuality. After the handover to China, the Hong Kong government maintains a relatively passive attitude to LGBT plus rights. While there are laws that protect discrimination based on sex, family status, disability, and race, that against sexual orientation and gender identity remains absent even in today's times. As part of the colonial legacy, neoliberalism plays a vital role in distributing social resources to the sexual minority. Welfare and social supports are largely provided by NGOs whose funding is subject to market competition. At the same time, most LGBT plus NGOs join hands in creating large-scale and new events that largely take place on the street. For example, the first Pride Parade protest was held in 2008, and the first pink dot carnival was in 2014. Although each event presents a specific theme and goal, they are generally pressuring the government to offer legal protection against discrimination. In the past decade, Hong Kong has experienced both large-scale social movements and the recent global pandemic, the signature umbrella movement in 2014, and the large-scale protests in 2019, threatened the governability of the authority. With the mission to maintain social distancing during the pandemic, street protests and assemblies become a very sensitive issue to the government. The political turmoil and the concern for public health intersect with each other, limiting the opportunity for sexual minority to engage in street politics and LGBT plus activism. Under such political context, the future of Hong Kong LGBT plus activism remains uncertain. At first, when we began our protest, we did not have a strong and direct intention to engage in contentious politics. Rather, our intention is to provide support for sexual minority men, but one incident happened and make us realize that this mentorship program could be a political site. When we attempted to recruit the participants, we sent mass emails and put up recruitment posters on the bulletin board around the campus. Soon after this, we start to receive complaints from the general public and even from the senior management at the university. We are accused of advocating sensex intimacy around the campus. This mentorship project was even seen by some people as a speed dating program. Eventually, we were pressured to take down the posters and advertisements on the campus. Based on this incident, we argued that a mentorship program is never just a passive type of activity. Rather, it could be a political site that we still need to confront the institutional power and heterosexism. This can be seen in two factors. First, we believe that distrust comes from the institutionalizations of counseling as a professional. Here, we are not challenging the professionalism. Instead, we believe that the notion of professionalism is important because it helps the professions to ensure the quality and the safety of professional services. However, mentorship is not a professional service. Mentorship functions based on the model that decentralize power. Although we provide trainings and guidelines for the mentors, mentors are given freedom to explore the best mode of interactions with their mentees. They are encouraged to be seen as peers rather than an authoritative figure. However, this model of power decentralization might pose a threat to the authority because surveillance basically is very difficult. Accountability becomes very ambiguous, which brings me to the second factor. In a mentorship relationship between a man and a woman, it is less likely to assume that they will develop any intimate relationship besides mentorship. And a guideline stating the prohibition of intimacy is usually assumed to be more than enough. However, when two male homosexuals develops a mentorship relationship, it is likely for the public and authority to associate the mentorship with the developments of romantic or even sexual relationship. What's more, sexual relationships in any forms are always presumed to be detrimental or even dangerous. And these prevalent notions of homonegativity together with the distrust against the non-professional social service program turns our mentorship program into a political site that we need to navigate carefully. The second theme is critical consciousness. It refers to raising awareness among participants through our research design in two areas. First, their own capacity as a nation of change in the context of diverse sexual orientations. Second, the interplay of dominant values and discourses underline the sexual minority community and mainstream society, which affect sexual minorities health. Next, about being an agent of change, strong evidence supports that impacts on sexual minority mentees are more likely when they are mentored by peers due to the shared identities and similar lived experiences. While we develop our program with reference to this evidence, we also fully extrapolate this model to explore another possibility. We match sexual minority mentees with heterosexual mentors. With this design, for sexual minority mentors, they will learn in practice on how they can relate their resilience from own struggles in sexual identities to their peer mentees. Indeed, many sexual minority mentors and road have indicated that they once encounter struggles and feel the eagerness to share the experience with the younger generation. For heterosexual mentors, our research is known to be the first mentoring program in Hong Kong, matching them with a sexual minority mentee. They are given an opportunity to develop a close relationship with a sexual minority and to be aware of how they can support these populations as an ally. We are fortunate that we have recruited gay positive heterosexual men. For sexual minority mentees, to be honest, we did have concern on whether they would feel comfortable with heterosexual mentor in the beginning. To respond to this worry, we promoted this study to them as an exploration, inviting them to be curious. They were encouraged to step out of the existing perceptions and conversation. To be an active recipient whose experience in the study would have significant implications on how to further promote gay-strict alliance. As of now, no mentee dropped out after they had been assigned to a heterosexual mentor. In regard to the consciousness about the interplay of dominant community and mainstream values and discourses affecting sexual minorities' health, our study applies social ecological models driving to raise participants' awareness of structural factors affecting their health. Mentorship in nature obviously aims to enhance mentee's coping abilities and mental states at the personal level and enhance their social support at the interpersonal level. Meanwhile, there could be dominant values and discourses existing within the sexual minority community, and the mainstream society affecting sexual minorities' health. Some known issues causing stress to sexual minority men are relationship orientations, masculinity, gender roles, body image, confusing Chinese values and religious beliefs. The awareness of this community and societal factors are delivered by the cycle education component. That is, the study arranges monthly sharing by sexual minority members who have demonstrated critical consciousness of the underlying dominant values and discourses and resilience about how they have navigated the evils in issues. This cycle education intends to unpack the value and discourses and facilitate reflections on various possibilities to live their life as a sexual minority instead of one single standard or a lifestyle. For example, in our recent sharing sections, there were two sexual minority men sharing their respective experiences in same sex marriage and polygamy. They both talked about the pros and cons in their own relationship orientation in light of the fact that Hong Kong LGBT communities are still fighting for same sex marriage. This sharing is cautious about not to impose monogamous relationship as the only orientation, but there are some other possibilities beyond the conventional values. That's all for the aspect of critical consciousness. The third theme is dynamic of inequality. In this presentation, dynamics of inequality refers to the power dynamics between researchers and study participants. This study strives to empower the participants to contribute their expertise and share the decision-making process by adopting community-based participatory research model, also known as CBPR model. Here, I would like to first highlight that our program is an exploratory study, not an evidence-based intervention study. There is no pre-designed model that we try to follow. Instead, we consult both the literature and the local mentoring programs to come up with the current program framework, which allows room for mentors and mentees to co-create and learn by doing. Below, I am sharing what design our research team have actually adopted to translate the CBPR into action. First, one key feature of the mentoring relationship in our program is a semi-structured nature. As an exploratory study, our designs emphasise on building a supportive relationship between mentees and mentors. Their relationship does not require a pre-identified problem to solve, and we let their chemistry lead to a positive impact organically. While goal-setting could still happen in the mentorship, we leave room for the mentors and mentees to explore various possibilities. For example, some mentors situate themselves as a role to over-companionship, while some would actively over-guidance for their mentees in tackling life issues. In line with the semi-structured design, the training of the mentors focus on their reflection rather than a prescription of certain values and skills. Mentors come with their own community knowledge, personalities and lived experiences, which are recognised as an access for the mentorship. Therefore, in the training, while we emphasise our expectations about some basic skills, such as being non-judgmental and empathetic, we also encourage them to reflect on how to capitalise their own access and experiences. The third and fourth points are about how we free as researchers are conscious in minimising the power difference between the research participants and ourselves. First, we situate ourselves as facilitators rather than supervisors in the programme. Besides our shared identity as sexual minority men, we have respective training backgrounds in social work, public health and sociology. Certainly, we hold both professional and personal views in how a mentoring relationship should work. However, we are conscious about not to excessively impose our thoughts on the participants. In the monthly meetings with the mentors, we facilitate the mentors to share and reflect on their experiences and learn skills along the way. Minimal guidance is given only when necessary. Our main role is to emphasise what have been discussed and encourage reflection so that they can learn from child and error. We as the researchers also avoid direct intervention on the development of the mentoring relationship. We establish a communication model where the mentors are the focal point. That is, the researchers will learn about the progress of each diet's relationship by mainly communicating with the mentors. This explains the design of the monthly meetings with the mentors and the written reports. The rationale here is twofold. From the research perspective, too much direct intervention with the mentee might affect the validity of their intervention. From the perspective of the programme organisers, we would also like to avoid disempowering the mentors and mentees by micromanaging them. Certain level of trust to the participant is therefore required in order to facilitate their role as an agent of change. So I would like to conclude the presentation. First, although we do not have any research findings to share yet, but throughout the process, we already see that both mentors and mentees start to develop trust and support with each other. While they are approaching the halfway of the project, some of them start to talk about the issues related to sexual identities, and the mentees start to share their personal views and challenges to live as a sexual minority man in Hong Kong. It is very likely that mentee's participation in this programme will benefit them. Second is our reflection and critical realisation that although we developed this project based on substantial evidence about the psychosocial benefits of a mentorship programme, what happened to the team also makes us realise that this well-intended programme could be contentious or even controversial for some people. This mentorship programme involves members from sexual minority communities and rely on non-professional support. Although this design is promising and community-based, it also has brought about doubts, criticism or even censorship. Third, through our projects, we also recognise that the power differentials are everywhere. Mentorship researchers have to be aware of and confront these power inequalities in order to empower the research participants. Last one, mentorship is never easy to implement because ongoing support and communications are needed for the research team to keep the mentorship process going. However, what we could see is that everyone in this project is going through some types of growth and transformation, particularly during this unprecedented time of challenge. So this is the end of our presentation and we are looking forward to hearing your feedback and questions. Thank you.