Mess up the empire: Deploying and disrupting homonationalism

Abstract

Homonationalism refers to how the West folded LGBTQ rights into the nation through neoliberal economies, intervention, and surveillance of racialized communities. This shift relied on the exceptionalist narrative that reveres Western sexual liberation—liberal, bureaucratic, visible, and consumerist—while silencing queer narratives from Southern, racialized, and migrant communities. The literature found that some LGBTQ (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, and queers) organizations deployed this imperial narrative, yet accounts on the social conditions facilitating such deployments remain scant. To expand the current discussions, my paper situates the Philippine LGBTQ movement’s affinity with homonationalism within the political, material, and ideological exigencies that confronted activists.

Keywords

Queer messiness homonationalism exceptionalism LGBTQ movement

Introduction

Talking about marriage equality during a visit in Myanmar last 19 March 2017, President Rodrigo Duterte declared that, “That’s for them. That can’t apply to us because we are Catholics” (Villamor, 2017). This statement not only rejected LGBTQ rights but also implied that they, referring to Western nations, cannot impose their culture into the Philippines. It willingly accepted Catholicism as native while locating the queer as foreign. This proclamation ironically denounced what it understood as imperial concept of rights in exchange for what it failed to recognize as imperial morality.

In the 16th century, Spain colonized the Philippines carrying Catholicism, feudalism, and monarchy (Valdez-Bubnov, 2019). After the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the Philippines was handed down to the United States who brought liberalism and other sects of Christianity to the islands (Go, 1999). In 1942, Japan who was at war against the United States invaded the country. With the defeat of the Axis forces, the United States officially declared the Philippines as an independent nation on 4 July 1946. The country’s colonial experience inculcated conservative Christian values, intensified its integration into the world system, and instituted landed elites as the dominant force in politics (Hutchcroft, 2000).

This colonial legacy encrypted Christian morality into Philippine politics, thus hindering progressive legislations concerning gender and sexuality (Ruiz-Austria, 2004). This historical context is useful to understand opposition to LGBTQ rights. The SOGIE Equality Bill, which seeks to punish discrimination, was passed in the lower house during the 17th Congress but failed in the senate. Manny Pacquiao, a boxer and a senator, was one of those who opposed the bill. He claimed that the Bible prohibits “crossdressing” (Alvarez, 2017). Here, we see colonial morality yet again used against queer rights.

Faced with these odds, many Filipino activists argue on the basis of liberal values such as civil liberties, secularism, and human rights. Reliance on these values could hastily portray the movement as complicit to the contemporary imperial project. For Massad (2015), Western liberalism is an imperial regime hiding behind discourses of representative democracy, civil liberties, rationality, secularism, and human rights. It assembles these values into an “apparatus of knowledge-power” to justify imperialistic intervention and control that further subjugated racialized others (Massad, 2015: 19).

To further enrich this imperial justification, the West shifted to homonationalism, which is the folding in of queer identities within the liberal nation to reproduce colonial hierarchies (Puar, 2007, 2013). This paper arrested any perfunctory notion that labelled the Philippine LGBTQ movement as essentially complicit to the Western liberal empire. It excavated the movements’ messy affinity with homonationalism and situated this relationship within the political, ideological, and material conditions that faced activists.

The homonationalist narrative

Homonationalism is, sometimes, deployed as “an accusation, an identity, a bad politics” (Puar, 2013: 337). It is used as a tool to assess what politics is radical, not to mention, queer enough (Zanghellini, 2012). Puar (2013) arrested this judgmental distinction by denouncing the notion that homonationalism is a political persuasion. The concept refers to a “state formation and a structure of modernity” and not to a criterion of judging activism (Puar, 2013: 337).

Alongside the intensification of the war on terror, the West began treating LGBTQ identities as tolerable others facilitating their entry into the nation (Puar, 2007). The recognition of some LGBTQ rights compatible with the imperial project allows the West not only to proclaim itself as the bastion of sexual liberation (Puar, 2007). In doing so, it also further justifies interventionist foreign policies directed at Islamic and Southern civilizations assumed to be essentially homophobic (Puar, 2007).

Homonationalism works within the clash of civilizations logic (Puar, 2007). The West fantasizes itself as a modernity that cuddles LGBTQ identities while caricaturing Islamic and Southern nations as uncivilized societies incapable of protecting LGBTQ individuals (Cherry, 2018; Jungar and Peltonen, 2017; Llewellyn, 2017; Meyer, 2020; Swimelar, 2019). As a self-proclaimed “avatar of freedom and modernity” (Butler, 2008: 4), it presents itself as the savior of queers victimized by the homophobia reeking from Southern civilizations (Llewellyn, 2017).

Alongside this savior image is a homonormative politics conscripting LGBTQ recognition within privatized, secularized, liberal, and consumerist lifestyles (Duggan, 2002, 2003; Puar, 2007, 2013). This recognition is deployed to exorcise the West of its records of violence i.e. pink washing (Puar, 2013; Smith, 2020). Homophobia is generally blamed on the South and on migrant communities while Western prejudice is managed either as part of ancient history or as an act of lone-wolf conservatives (Cherry, 2018; Jungar and Peltonen, 2017; Kehl, 2018).

Some LGBTQ organizations are perceived as complicit to homonationalism (Kehl, 2018; Meyer, 2020; Puar, 2007, 2013). The appropriation of the liberal language within the movement establishes what identities are ‘respectable’, hence, marginalizing sexualized, racialized, and classified queers (Hartal, 2019; Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2017; Savci, 2016). These exclusions seep through organizations in ways that bar some identities from meaningful participation (Brown-Saracino and Ghaziani, 2009; Ward, 2003).

These exclusions operate alongside the shift from social justice frame anchored on radical systemic transformation to homonormative politics based on civil liberties (Duggan, 2002, 2003). This turn pries queer lives open to profiteering as self-expression is moored on consumerism (Hartal, 2019). Profit motivation not only feasts over discretely legible identities and predictably consumerist events like Pride (Ward, 2003). It also delegitimizes radical claims meant to criticize neoliberal arrangements (Hartal, 2019; Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2017; Travers and Shearman, 2017; Savci, 2016). Homonationalism excludes identities as much as subversive claims.

However, radical positions questioning the incorporation of queer identities within imperial interests are recently re-articulated (Fischer, 2016). Western sexual epistemologies are exposed as the source of class and racial hierarchies (Savci, 2016). Queer narratives from the South are exhumed to expose the artificiality of Western exceptionalism (Charania, 2017). And arguments linking the spread of homophobia to Western colonization are deployed to impeach the savior image (Gosine, 2015). These expositions directly assault Western sexual exceptionalism by queering the South and blaming colonial morality for homophobia.

Queer as messy

The usual queer approach to homonationalism interrogates the liberation template constructed within Western liberalism. This implies the articulation of queer narratives from South (Charania, 2017; Gosine, 2015; Savci, 2016). Proceeding from this task, I excavate the Philippine LGBTQ movement’s relationship with homonationalism using the queer as mess approach. Reacting to the valorization of the exceptionally anti-normative, this approach locates queerness in the everyday where transgression and normativity are constantly “colliding, clashing, intersecting, and reconstituting” (Manalansan, 2014, 2015, 2018: 1288). This approach focuses on “the mess—its violence, ambivalence, and its productive possibilities” (Manalansan, 2018: 1288).

Queer as mess has been used to understand lived experiences and discourses to show the ambivalent, violent, and productive dimensions of the intersections among race, gender, sexuality, class, and coloniality (Adjepong, 2019; Dadas, 2016; Horton, 2018; Jones, 2015; Manalansan, 2014, 2015, 2018). This positions this approach as a fertile analytical lens for homonationalism. Approaching social movement as mess, however, might appear unorthodox since the focus of such approach has been the quotidian, not the messianic. I refuse this essential location by expanding mess as also the oscillation between the exceptional and the everyday. Social movements illustrate such vacillation because they usually proceed from ordinary experiences to orchestrate their claims (Snow et al.,2014).

Substantial works queered exceptionalism but accounts on agentic ways activists navigate these “homonationalist times” remain scarce (Yildiz, 2017: 1). LGBTQ activists wade through political opportunities, resources, and ideologies (Chua, 2014; Coloma, 2013; Prado and Machado, 2014; Soriano, 2014). Political opportunities refer to openings for participation (Tarrow, 2011). Resources denote material and non-material means necessary for organizing (Edwards and McCarthy, 2007). Frames are ideologically consistent interpretations of social problems and solutions (Snow et al.,2014). These conditions, I assert, influenced the agentic ways adherents deployed and/or disrupted homonationalist notions.

Method

By hastily assuming its presence, some deployments of homonationalism rashly criticize texts, discourses and practices (Zanghellini, 2012). To avoid this danger, my work relies on narratives from movement leaders I gathered for my master’s thesis (Evangelista, 2017b). Using oral history interviews (Batty, 2009), I collected stories valuable to activists. I deem it vital that their voices be vindicated. Interviews effectively unraveled their understandings of claims, tactics, and decisions, which I deem fertile grounds to understand how they navigate these homonationalist times.

I gained access to the movement in 2015 when I became an active organizer of the Metro Manila Pride March (MMPM). From February to May of 2017, I conducted interviews with three founding members of PROGAY, four members of UP Babaylan, three members of lesbian organizations, the former director of Reach Out Foundation, and eight members of other LGBTQ organizations. All 17 narrators have organized the annual MMPM at different times. Interviews were held in coffee shops and lasted for about an hour and a half each. With the participants’ consent, our conversations were digitally recorded to aid transcriptions.

I was both a passive listener and an active conversant during different parts of the interviews. I asked open-ended questions and listened passively as participants narrate their stories of activism, but I also actively discussed specific social issues with them. From these interviews, I selected four narratives: stories of lesbian organizers; the experiences of Babaylan; the 1994 March; and the trajectory of MMPM. Decisions concerning these events revealed how activists responded to political opportunities and resource demands while our discussions about LGBTQ issues illustrated various ideologies. These included socialism, anti-colonialism, lesbian feminism, liberalism, and local notions of gender and sexuality. I analyzed how the deployment of these ideological frames contained and/or criticized homonationalist undertones.

Messy conditions

The resurgence of legal civil society after the demise of the Marcos dictatorial regime in 1986 encouraged the emergence of organizations carrying various advocacies (Encarnacion Tadem, 2005; Quimpo, 2008). Among LGBTQ activists, this meant the possibility of exploring issues of gender and sexuality (Evangelista, 2017a, 2017b). As Endik (PROGAY member) recalled, “There was a level of tolerance”. No longer preoccupied with toppling the Marcos dictatorship, activists began to explore other social issues including gender and sexuality (Evangelista, 2017a, 2017b).

Accompanying this political openness was an ideological split in the Left (Encarnacion Tadem, 2005; Quimpo, 2008). As Ferdie (The Library Foundation, member) described, “You now have two sides in the left—the reaffirmist and the rejectionist”. The former maintained that the Philippines is still feudal and colonial while the latter sensed democratic openings. As Murphy (PROGAY member) argued, “Nothing has changed. We are still colonial and feudal”. In contrast, Ferdie asserted a shift in the political climate after the Marcos regime, thus hastening the utility of deliberative and electoral politics.

The persistence of the women’s movement, socialist struggles, and human rights advocacies after 1986 exposed LGBTQ activists to various ideological constructs (Evangelista, 2017a, 2017b). Reaffirmists foregrounded the socialist revolution to address homophobia while rejectionists anchored LGBTQ welfare on formal legislation on the basis of human rights. Feminism also provided important ideological tools to articulate LGBTQ issues. Finally, anti-colonial sentiments informed the framing of gender and sexuality issues. Informed by these constructs, LGBTQ organizations started to form since the early 1990s within the backdrop post-Marcos regime civil society.

Lesbian limit

A group of eight to nine self-identified lesbians that became known as The Lesbian Collective (TLC) started to conduct regular discussions on gender and sexual issues in the early 1990s. Emerging through networks in the women’s movement, TLC valued feminism as an ideological position. Initial discussions crystallized the absence of local lesbian writings. In Giney’s (The Lesbian Collective, member) words:

It was very interesting because there are no Filipino lesbian literature that you can read … So all of us we’re just citing all these lesbian feminist writers in the United States … and working our way around and trying to see how we fit in or it fits to our experience.

The domestication of lesbian feminism confirmed the travel of Western articulations of sexuality in contested ways. Intense debates inside TLC revolved around the assertion that lesbianism is the quintessential result of being a feminist (see Rich, 1980). Some agreed with this while some reoriented it by arguing that their lesbian identities led them to feminism, not the other way around. To accommodate these differences, TLC used the logo consisting of two overlapping female signs with the words ‘feminist-lesbian’ forming the circles during the 1992 Women’s March. This resolution sat in the messy articulations of lesbian identities.

Marxist feminism anchored on analyzing class and gender intersections also became accessible to lesbian organizations because of their overlap with the left (Evangelista, 2017a, 2017b). The intersection of class, gender, and sexual identities surfaced during the First National Lesbian Rights Conference (FNLRC) spearheaded by Womyn Supporting Womyn Committee (WSWC) and Lesbians for National Democracy (LESBOND) on 7–9 December 1996. During the conference, the use of lesbian became a contention. Giney (The Lesbian Collective, member) recalled:

Participants would rarely use lesbian because it sounded kind of alien to some of them. Some of them view the lesbians as people who has two-way desires [for men and women] and tomboy is manly and attracted only to women. Some think the term is for the affluent. If you are poor, tomboy is more appropriate.

Distinctions were made between tomboy and lesbian along the lines of gender and class. In the everyday usage of the term, the former connoted masculinity and/or poverty while the latter implied femininity and/or affluence. Unlike the Western notion of lesbian as mere desire, these local articulations emphasized the gendered and class dimensions of the lesbian and tomboy identities. Cognizant of these various understandings, participants agreed to release the document, “Statement of the First National Lesbian Rights Conference” (Solidarity Philippines Australia Network, 1997):

1.) We have the right to express our sexuality; 2.) We have the right to form families; 3.) We have the right to self–determination; 4.) We have the right to participate in political discourse and action; 5.) We have the right to just wages, benefits and job security.

The quotidian experiences of lesbian and tomboy identities and the accessibility of Marxist feminism allowed lesbian activists to detect not just class and gender hierarchies but also the limits of Western lesbian feminism. This compelled them to design assertions that contained civil, social, political, and economic rights. These articulated claims combined Western notions of individual rights and local experiences of gender and class identities. Thus, lesbian activists refused total homonationalist cooptation while tactically deploying some of its language.

Excavating egalitarianism

Babaylan was formed at the University of the Philippines (UP) in the early 1990s. Patterned after American universities, UP was designed to train future leaders through liberal and professional education (Casambre, 1982). This educational scheme centered both on developing technical skills and imposing liberal ideas like civil liberties, representative democracy, and rational bureaucracy to stifle dissent from American rule (Constantino, 1982). These colonial legacies have been contested as scholarships rooted on local experiences and anti-imperial ideas emerged in the 1970s (Banzon-Bautista, 2000).

The focus on liberal notions created a certain perception about UP. One Babaylan member described, “UP is perceived as a liberal space”. When asked what this meant, the narrator clarified, “We think of UP as a place where it does not matter if you are gay. We respect each other’s identity.” Because UP is perceived to value civil liberties, i.e. “respect for others’ identity”, then it is also seen as a space where LGBTQ people are tolerated, if not accepted. This perception demonstrates the assumed affinity between liberalism and homonationalism. Despite this, Telly (Babaylan member) recalled experiences of homophobia inside the campus:

UP was not safe for gays to be in. There was serious discrimination happening in dorms and Arts and Science Hall. Gays are treated with disrespect. When I arrived at UP, I also experienced a few of these discriminatory practices.

Determined to address campus discrimination, Babaylan highlighted LGBTQ issues through its various protest events. To legitimize these claims, the organization could not escape the vestiges of liberalism implanted by the colonizers. Garnering the respect of the administration and other organizations demanded proof of intellectual worthiness. Joel (Babaylan member) shared how other students treated Babaylan members:

Even the religious groups didn’t say something about Babaylan … They saw how these student advocates—16 or 17 years old—are fighting for their rights. And these are intellectual people. These are intellectual gays. Yes, they are studying. There was a level of respect.

Babaylan members established their intellectual reputation by harnessing the liberal language and skills necessary to navigate campus politics. Organizations are required to submit their respective constitutions and by-laws. This demanded a certain bureaucratic thinking. As Joel recounted:

I read in the Philippine Collegian [student-run campus newspaper] a feature about Babaylan that even the Office of the Student Affairs said it has the most comprehensive organizational constitution at that time.

Harnessing student electoral politics, the organization also helped elect one of its members as the first openly gay council chairperson in 1997. Operating in a space coded with liberalism, Babaylan members proved their intellectual capacity by writing a rationalized constitution and navigating electoral politics. While there is focus on the contemporary link of queer politics with liberalism, Babaylan’s politics is situated within a liberal space encoded through centuries of colonization.

The appropriation of liberal values in the case of Babaylan was messily conjugated with local articulations of identities. The name choice itself deviated from Western sexual exceptionalism. It refers to spiritual leaders in some early Philippine communities. Babaylan is traditionally occupied by women because these communities believed femininity is the conduit between the material and spiritual worlds (Garcia, 2013). Bayoguins—assigned male individuals who identified with and performed femininity—were also allowed to assume this role (Garcia, 2013). The centrality of the babaylan as a symbol departed from Western queer liberalism. It is a religious emblem of egalitarianism—something, perhaps, unintelligible within the lens of Western secularism.

When the Spanish colonizers came, the bayoguin was rendered immoral and when the Americans came, it was deemed a psychological pathology (Garcia, 2013). Alongside these discourses, the bayoguin transformed to bakla, a Tagalog word for tentative and weak (Garcia, 2013). Western colonization, within this argument, is blamed for the loss of egalitarianism. Babaylan recovered this lost queer from the Global South. As Telly expressed:

We need to revisit the conversation about more indigenous sexual epistemologies that we do not just embrace terms like lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender … I am not saying we should not use the word gay, but I think we need to be critical about it.

Drawing a stark contrast between bakla and gay, some activists identified with the former rather than the latter. Despite pejorative use of the term, many still associated bakla with their joyful experiences. As one of them said, “Bakla feels more natural to me, to us”. During events, Babaylan members wore shirts with the caption, “Bakla ako! May Angal?” (“I am bakla. Got a problem?”) to disrupt campus machismo. Bakla connoted being weak in the culture of fraternities (Gutierrez, 2018), which is consistent with colonial machismo. The phrase, “May angal?” (Got a problem?) is usually understood as a masculine phrase to initiate rumbles. Attaching this phrase with the bakla drew a messy encounter between the queer and the macho.

Babaylan’s mess is the combination of the macho, the queer, and the liberal. Combining a violent phrase with the bakla and invoking an egalitarian past assaulted not just machismo but also the colonial legacy. Situated in UP, members found utility in the homonationalist language. They used colonially implanted liberal ideas to argue for LGBTQ concerns, but also assaulted Western exceptionalism by indicting colonizers for implanting homophobia in the country. Thus, the organization refused to be completely coopted within the homonationalist paradigm while also finding some utility in it.

Queer and radical

In the 1990s, Progressive Organization of Gays Philippines (PROGAY Philippines) emerged from the youth sector of the reaffirmist left. As such, its members carried nationalist and socialist reading of Philippine society as they criticized the collusion between colonization and feudalism (Evangelista, 2017a, 2017b). Within PROGAY’s reading, the feudal and colonial system maintained the inequitable distribution of wealth. They charged the political economy of Philippine society as the root of discrimination and homophobia: As Murphy asserted:

We should educate the base that we are not up against our feelings towards each other but that we are up against a prevalent patriarchal and feudal system that is hard to identify. This system perpetuates poverty and a social system bearing no hope for a better future.

PROGAY members posited the crucial role of educating people about the structural roots of homophobia. The current economic system, for them, keeps the masses poor, thus, leaving them with no time and resources to understand the diversity around them. As Endik maintained, “You have to address the basic needs so that people will have time to understand those who are different from them”. Allan (PROGAY, member) also contended:

We believe that the emancipation of gays and lesbians in the Philippines goes with the emancipation of the Filipino people. This will [Pride] transform the patriarchal and feudal systems that continuously exploit the masses.

Within this lens, the struggle of the LGBTQ community is positioned as part of the socialist revolution. As Endik avowed, “The system profited from us through the fashion industries”. This assertion positioned the LGBTQ community parallel with peasants and laborers. Similar to these sectors, LGBTQ individuals are commodified and objectified for the sake of wealth accumulation. Carrying this position, PROGAY members criticized the colonial political-economic structure that, within their assertion, produced homophobia.

PROGAY and the Metropolitan Community Church organized a march held on 27 June 1994. Some activists deemed this as the “first” Pride March in the country (see Evangelista, 2017a). The march protested the pernicious effect of fiscal policies to poor gay men. They carried placards saying, “Ang Value Added Tax ay salot sa parloristang bakla” (The Value Added Tax pesters the bakla salon workers). It ended at the heart of the Quezon City Memorial Circle, a park named after Manuel L. Quezon, the first nationally elected president of the Philippine Commonwealth under the United States’ rule. As Allan explained, the park messily contained the colonial, the feudal, the patriarch, and the queer:

We chose Quezon Memorial Circle … Why Circle? Circle is one of the centers of gay hooking up. Secondly, the Quezon Monument symbolizes the legalization of a semi-colonial and semi-feudal system under American empire. Who put Quezon as president? It was the American government, right? Then, we have a joke. The tower is like a phallus.

Beyond positioning the bakla as an emblem of gendered and sexualized experiences, PROGAY gave it a certain class—a salon worker. The bakla, then, is placed as part of the broader Filipino working class exploited by the current economic system. Thus, the queer is imagined as a potential revolutionary force exposing an exploitative economic and colonial order. This assertion not only assaulted Western exceptionalism. Its radical edge also resisted the political and economic infrastructure that undergirded the imperial project.

PROGAY refused to appropriate the homonationalist language. Instead, it directly prosecuted the West for violently implanting economic and political arrangements that exacerbated inequalities in the country. The deployment of the parlorista as the queer laborer stood as an emblem of this radical critique. Positioned as a member of the proletariat class, this image symbolized suffering under the intersecting systems of colonialism, feudalism, consumerism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. Hence, this radical positioning of the queer rejected homonationalist cooptation.

Consumerist and legislative alignment

By 1996, organizations started to coalesce as attendance during Pride increased. Marchers wore festive costumes as they rode colorful floats during the parade usually held in June. Reach Out Foundation (ROF), an HIV-AIDS advocacy group formed in 1990, was the lead convener from 1996 to 1998. Significant amount of funding capacitated ROF to mount carnivalesque parades around Malate, Manila, home to bars and restaurants catering to LGBTQ clients.

One of the proudest moments for ROF members is when an LGBTQ contingent joined the People’s Parade. This parade was held a day after the Centennial Parade on 12 June 1998 in celebration of the country’s one hundred years of independence from Spain. As Jomar (ROF, former executive director) recalled:

Our float was a beautiful Spanish galleon ship. We had an official Mother Nation image who wore a costume inspired by the national flag, but many gay men showed up in the same Mother Nation costumes. We were packed on the float. We had muscle boys who were wearing traditional G-string costumes.

It took several negotiations with organizers to allow the LGBTQ contingent at the parade. This, for ROF, was a landmark event since it insisted the place of the community in the nation. The sartorial performances of historical emblems like the flag, the galleon, and G strings playfully asserted the place of the queer in the celebration of the country’s independence from Western colonizers. This recasting of the queer, however, was made possible within the lens of consumerism. As Jomar nostalgically remembered:

We got people from the Department of Tourism to support us. They were our sponsor at that time … We made it as far as putting it [Pride] into the Department of Tourism Calendar of “15 Festivals to Watch for Every Month”.

ROF exploited the tourism industry to garner state and corporate support. The carnivalesque ambiance of Pride rendered it accessible for the entry of government agencies and private establishments. Organizers designed celebratory Prides to resonate with businesses that saw the parade as a way to market products and services. This shift towards consumerist practices sported the entry of homonormative politics.

With declining funds, ROF relinquished its role as the lead organizer of the annual Pride after the 1998 parade. Around the same time, the first party-list election was held. This facilitated the congressional entry of progressive and allied organizations with strong civil society roots like Akbayan Party (literally to put one’s arm around another’s shoulder). The party, partially owing its electoral success to LGBTQ organizations, had to fulfill its campaign promise to legislate for the community. As Ferdie reminisced:

Akbayan won in Congress … We consciously went to individuals to solicit the support of the LGBT community. We had a press conference to talk about LGBT rights and for the LGBT community to declare its support to Akbayan because of its LGBT agenda. This is one of the milestones of the organization. When it won, Akbayan has to follow through its agenda.

This legislative opening inspired the creation of two coalitions, Lagablab (literally, fervor) and Task Force Pride (TFP). Although with significant campaign overlaps, the two networks worked in two separate fields. The former engaged in lobbying through congressional hearings while the latter organized the annual Pride March to provide recruitment ground for potential adherents. Aside from relying on allies, Ang Ladlad (literally, The Unfurled), a party carrying LGBTQ rights and welfare, also ran for two consecutive elections (2010 and 2013). Although unable to penetrate congress, the party helped draw legislative attention to LGBTQ issues (Coloma, 2013).

Within this political context, the celebratory ambiance of the Pride March perpetuated. Consumerist practices like partying and advertising became tools to motivate movement participation. For many organizers, recruiting new advocates will aid the legislative agenda. As Bemz (Ang Ladlad, former chair) asserted, “we need to show our numbers”. Another organizer reiterated, “The march needs to be a party because being too political might turn off others”. To a certain extent, these practices motivated wider participation. The crowd during the 2019 Metro Manila Pride unprecedentedly peeked at approximately 75,000.

The legislative trajectory also necessitated frames that will appeal to the state. Translating claims to actual policies required a vernacular legible within the parliament. To do this, activists anchored their claims on liberal principles like civil liberties, human rights, and secularism. It is within this context that frameworks like SOGIE (sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression) gained currency. As one lesbian activist foregrounded:

We have educational discussions. Before you become a member, you need to undergo educational discussions. Your membership will be useless if you do not understand SOGIE or LGBT. I mean, you have to equip yourself.

Almost all local organizations center their campaigns around SOGIE and human rights. The foreign provenance of such frames is obvious. The relationship between human rights and SOGIE was first highlighted in The Yogyakarta Principles (The Refworld Organization, 2007), a document produced to integrate various international agreements that underscore the rights of people with diverse SOGIE. Filipino activists value the international character of these principles because, as one said, “This is our international commitment”.

The currency of the SOGIE framework is further predicated on its liberal deployment. Liberal frames dominated the movement for at least two decades. As one socialist gay activist described, “The liberals dominated the movement for some time now”. The use of this framework hastened the rational treatment of diverse identities. As one said, “It made things clearer”. SOGIE, then, shared some affinity with homonationalism since it foregrounded discrete, legible and visible identities, which is seen as crucial for arguing legal protection.

Also, the use of these liberal terms flourished within the entry of funding. Many local LGBTQ organizations relied on funding from the foreign agencies. As one lesbian activist mentioned, “Now, we have [foreign] funding agencies.” Another said, “We solicit from LGBT businesses like business process outsource companies for Pride.” Most of these international non-governmental agencies reiterated the need for legislation to guarantee LGBTQ civil liberties. LGBTQ-friendly businesses saw the profitability of legal diversity. As one advocate observed, “Some businesses saw that they could earn more if they accept LGBTQ employees”.

The deployment of the liberal language indicated the movement’s closer shift to homonormative and homonationalist politics. This tendency could be understood in light of the movement’s legislative trajectory and resource demands. The former requires legible frames that increased LGBTQ visibility while the latter motivated efforts to accommodate funding agencies’ economic and political interests. However, radical groups challenged this form of politics. A former PROGAY member argued:

It’s reduced to a celebration. It’s just a parade like Mardi Gras. What do they call it? Pride Parade? It’s no longer a march. It has become a parade. We see that it [Pride] has become hallow. The revolutionary form of the LGBT movement was lost.

While some activists valued consumerist practices as legislative and recruitment tactics, radical activists criticized them. Carrying socialist ideologies, they interrogated identity politics inherent in the liberalism. As one lesbian activist insisted:

We need to broaden our understanding of oppression that LGBTs are facing. It is not one dimension. It is not only based on sexual orientation and gender identity. I mean our society is very classed. Naturally, LGBT experiences are also very classed.

In this sense, the pitfall of SOGIE lies in its affinity with identity politics. It overshadowed other facets of LGBTQ oppression. As an antidote to this limitation, progressive activists prescribed an intersectional analysis that integrated class into the reading of LGBTQ issues. As another activist contended:

SOGIE is identity politics … It separates LGBT from the broader struggle of the masses. The LGBT should be part of the masses. We should not advance an identity politics. We need to struggle for the liberation of the LGBT and the masses from imperialism. That is the only time when we will truly be emancipated and not just when your human rights are recognized in the law.

Legislation, within this frame, is an ephemeral solution to deeply structural problems. From the radical standpoint, emancipation requires a systemic shift towards welfare, which is only possible with the demise of imperialism and capitalism. Carrying this frame, organizations like Kapederasyon (Federation), Bahaghari (Rainbow), and Camp Queer utilized Pride as a venue to protest economic exploitation. In 2015, Kapederasyon marched with contractual workers who were illegally dismissed by a manufacturing company. Camp Queer and Bahaghari marched for workers’ tenure in 2019.

The political and material conditions facing activists necessitated the use of liberal ideas and consumerist practices and laid the ground for the movements’ closer shift towards homonationalism and homonormativity. However, socialist ideologies still facilitated critiques against colonialist and capitalist hierarchies. Radical adherents exposed how liberal identity politics served as a veneer that hid class politics based on social justice. While some activists found utility in homonationalism as they engaged in legislation, some still subverted such paradigm to resist and disrupt imperial cooptation.

Conclusion

The messy deployment of liberal ideas in the Philippine LGBTQ movement could not essentially be indexed as homonationalist. Adherents used liberal ideas that undergirded imperialism, but there are also criticisms against Western notions on the account of quotidian experiences of identities. Conjuring historical figures (babaylan), local identities (bakla and tomboy), and class positions (tomboy and parlorista), activists reclaimed the Southern queer and indicted the West for its political and economic repression. These critiques exposed not only the limits but also the violence of sexual exceptionalism, which erased the possibility of queer living in the South. The presence of the appropriation of Western liberal notions and critique of its violence constituted the mess within the movement.

The movement’s ambivalent affinity with homonationalism was tactical. That is, it outlined productive possibilities for the movement to fight for LGBTQ welfare. Activists deployed Western liberal language and consumerist practices when they engaged in fields that required them. Political opportunities and resource demands created an environment where legislation became the primary ground of struggle, hence, increasing the currency of a homonationalist politics. However, radical and anti-colonial ideologies facilitated critiques of such politics. Therefore, the ambivalence, the critique of imperial violence, and the productive possibilities embedded in the mess within the movement are situated within the political, material, and ideological exigencies that confronted movement agents.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my thesis supervisor, Professor Filomin Candaliza Gutierrez.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The UP Diliman Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Development provided partial funding under the MA Thesis Grant.

John Andrew G Evangelista is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He finished Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences, major in Social Anthropology at the University of the Philippines Baguio and Master of Arts in Sociology at the University of the Philippines Diliman. His research interests include queer politics, social movements, and Global South studies.

ORCID iD

John Andrew G Evangelista

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