#Thousands of lesbians boycott film Run for Love# began trending on Chinese social network Sina Weibo after romance film Run for Love hit cinemas on Valentine's Day.

Run for Love is an anthology film featuring five romance stories each directed by a different director. Marketing for the story directed by Gao Qunshu featured two women leaning on each other with the tag line: "True love is courageous. Love crosses distance, gender and everything. Let's run for love on Valentine's Day." The trailer even included clips of erotic scenes featuring two female characters in bed together.

However, once in cinemas moviegoers discovered that the two women are actually the wife and mistress of a man who recently died and donated his heart to his wife. Instead of hating each other, the two rely on each other to get through the pain of missing the man they loved. Meanwhile the erotic scene turned out to have been scenes of the two women each having sex with the husband on different occasions that had been edited together to make it appear that the two women were having sex.

No films about same-sex love have ever been shown in cinemas on the Chinese mainland.

"The promotion team of the film used the fact that lesbians want to see a same-sex romance film in cinemas. This is taking advantage of and fooling the homosexual community," wrote feminist Li Tingting, the netizen who started the hashtag, on her Weibo.

Reporter Luo Beibei commented on her offical WeChat account Yansu Bagua that "Run for Love claims to be a lesbian story, but it turns out to be a giant narcissistic pile of 'straight man cancer.'"

Straight man cancer is a popular Internet slang word describing chauvinistic, judgemental behavior of men  who hold a narrow view of the world.

Global Times