With Pride Month having come and gone, the distinct shift of things returning to the status quo will eventually roll over. From things as mundane as the shifting back of company logos to their non-rainbow color schemes to others as noticeable as the general lessening of discourse in popular culture about being queer now that there’s less of an excuse to bring it up.
Growing pains
Pride Month is celebrated every June in remembrance of the Stonewall Riots—which is seen as the birth of the modern queer movement. It is telling that 50 years after the riots, not being straight is something that is becoming more socially acceptable, in part because of the prominent figures coming out as members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Major commercial and political powers are now also courting the LGBTQIA+ community in an active bid to gain their support—and usually their money and votes as well.
Despite all outward appearances of the Filipino culture as a whole finally acknowledging that not being heteronormative is something that exists, there is still much to say about how we as a society treat the actual members of the community in our day-to-day lives. Our culture is one trapped in the shadows of the past, where the gender norms and societal ideals that used to provide social cohesion given the circumstances of the time have since grown outdated. From a Western and binary view of gender to some using the cloakings of religion in order to divide rather than unite, our country has much fuel to feed the chaos that is public discourse.
Return to heteronormativity
With the end of every Pride month comes a certain sadness due to the lessening of public celebration of being queer, or at least the appearance of it. The rainbow stickers come off and the Pride marches stop, and it is business as usual. And yet despite that, there is also a sense of comfort in gauging the general sense of where progress is headed. There is much to draw hope from. Reasons for celebration dot the globe, some bigger than others. Notably, Taiwan and Ecuador have both legalized same-sex marriage within recent months. Locally, newly-elected Isko Moreno wants Manila to have its own Pride March by 2020 and he wants to focus on equal rights during his term as mayor. With the passing of each year, Pride continues; its legacy and the weight of its tradition grows and; its place in the Philippine cultural milieu becomes more and more entrenched, slowly but surely helping normalize being LGBTQIA+ in Philippine society.
It would be remiss to not at least touch on the tragedies that befall the community, however. From targeted hate crimes of murder and assault to things as subtle as systemic ignorance and discrimination, there is so much left to fight against. It is no secret that being straight is seen as the norm, dominating everything from popular media to our culture to the very language used in most legal and business documents. A cursory knowledge of statistics will tell you that anything that deviates from the norm stands out. And like statistics, the history of LGBTQIA+ culture in the Philippines is fraught with much obscurity and heartache.
Coming to terms with the past to secure our future
The Philippines is a deeply conservative country. It is the Catholic capital of Asia, with traditions of harshly enforced social stratification in the fields of class, race, and gender. Since the Colonial period, there has always been the looming presence of an ever present harsh cultural behemoth, there to dictate an individual’s station and their worth, based on Western, Judeo-Christian values. Despite the long paper trail left behind by those who have come and never really went, there is little mention of anything non-straight from their accounts. Seeing as how heterosexuality was seen as the standard for the longest time, anyone deviating from the norm, if noticed by their social peers at all, would likely be branded as eccentric at best, or outcasted at worst.
Things were not always like this. Indigenous mythologies paint a much more diverse picture, with mentions of same-sex attraction, intersex deities, and a much more blurred view of the lines that define gender roles. We are still in the process of rediscovering our past, and there is much to be done. Centuries of foreign rule tend to wash away quite a bit. But despite that, what we have already uncovered points the way toward a more diverse and more tolerant Philippine society. Maybe we can rebuild ourselves as a culture while acknowledging all the pain that comes with it.
There is still much to be said and much that needs to be done, but at the end of the day, what matters is that we’re here, and we’re queer.
