Indonesia

Reimagining love and pride

Ivanka Custodio

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'Yes, we need a world that loves the LGBT people – but first, we need a world that knows how to love'

Pride is a many-splendored thing.

We claim pride, flaunt pride, feel safer because of pride, resist with pride, buy pride.

But in its naked sense, Pride is really just a plea for love. A plea for a loveless and utilitarian world to love and embrace LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people.

As with any of us who have both tried and failed at love, we know that love cannot be given if the conditions are not right – if we are not ready, if we are too selfish, or if we see the subjects of our love as mere objects.

We cannot give the love that we do not have.

It is with this hunger for love that, for 20 years now, we continue to march in the streets to call attention to the fact that we exist, and that we have as much right to all the good things in this country as the heterosexual people next to us.

First PH Pride March

The Philippines’ cultural landscape is dominated by the moral giant, the Roman Catholic Church, with its intolerance of gender transgressions.

This intolerance is a testimony of the backward and feudal society that we have.

When Fr. Richard Mickley and Oscar Atadero, together with 20 others, braved that rainy June afternoon and staged the country’s first ever Gay Pride 20 years ago, they also braved the risk of stigma so strong that only few were willing and able to come out as LGBT.

Fr. Richard recalled, “There was no movement. There was no public mention anywhere that we exist (at least not honorably).”

Because of this “invisiblizing” stigma against LGBTs, the Pride organizers “decided it was time for our country, our people to know that we existed and (that) we had a right to be and to be who we are and express our fulfilment proudly.” 

We were not alone. LGBT organizations in many countries around the world were commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots at the time. But the need for a local movement for LGBT rights was what prompted them to organize the Pride March. They read a manifesto that “mirrored and applied worldwide demands for justice for LGBT (people).”

In the succeeding years, more and more people began the join the Gay Pride. From 20 people, the lovelorn crowd expanded. Along with the flow of time came the changes in the political economy, of the cultural landscape, of the country and of the world.

New vs Old

Graphic by Jessica Lazaro/Rappler.com

Today, the Philippines is increasingly being permeated with liberal ideas as globalization pries it open and reels it into itself. As a result, the Filipino consciousness is torn apart by a tug-o-war between liberal ideas and the feudal ideas of old.

Battles are waged on the level of discourse, packaged as new versus old – the modern concepts of secularism, freedom, and human rights versus the traditional Filipino religious dogmatism and parochialism.

This has become the primary contradiction of this stage in our history as a nation. This has also become the primary contradiction of the LGBT movement.

Outside, it seems like the world has simply learned to accord people with more civil freedoms.

The growing recognition of corporations of the value of pink money has translated into LGBT-affirmative employment policies, articulations of support for LGBT rights, and even sponsorships for Pride parades. (READ: The untapped power of the ‘pink peso’)

The world outside ours

Governments of European and North American countries have also begun recognizing civil rights of LGBTs.

Because of this mirage of societal acceptance, many LGBT rights advocates here and in many parts of the world thought it strategic to drop the language and practice of “liberation” and “justice.”

Instead, they have taken up the rhetoric of “equality” and “citizenship.”

Pride events have shifted from being political demonstrations to apolitical Pride Festivals and Celebrations.

Our agenda has become assimilationist.

From wanting justice for not having been invited, we began asking, “Pretty please, can we be let in to the party?”

We want citizenship. We want non-discrimination. We want what you have.

But the world cannot give us what we want. At least, not the full extent of what we deserve.

While LGBT advocates in the North reap gains that some of us can only dream of such as marriage equality and adoption laws – plus the backing of multi-billion dollar corporations such as Google, IBM, Thomson Reuters, and Wells Fargo – LGBTs in countries like Nigeria, Russia, Brunei, Uganda and India still face cruel and inhumane treatments from the State.

LGBT people in the Global South experience a general dispossession of their devices for survival.

The forcible promotion of State laissez faire by neoliberalism through its puppeteers – the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO – makes it irrelevant, even futile, for LGBTs to assert their right to non-discrimination.

Discrimination

In this Gatsby’s party that is the Philippines, we put too much premium on the legislative agenda that will ban discrimination in schools, employment, and other social services.

We want the delicacies, mouth-watering as they seem to us who are looking in from outside the window. We stare at them much too intently that we ignore the fact that the State is slowly abandoning its responsibility to provide for the welfare of its citizens.

We ignore that these delicacies are spoilt.

And because of this desire to assimilate, we have forgotten that much of the members of the so-called LGBT community do not have – will never have – the economic means to enter the party and partake of the delicacies.

We have left them in our eagerness to get here. Our struggle has become a middle-class struggle.

With State investment in education getting thinner, the right to a non-discriminatory learning environment has become the privilege of those who can pay.

We want non-discrimination in employment, but we fail to ask ourselves how this is possible in a country with a large reserve army of labor and very few job opportunities, and where most of the population do not have the social capital to even be considered for these job opportunities.

We fail to question the fairness of labor relations within the “LGBT-friendly” multi-national companies when we know that they are here to take advantage of the inflated unemployment rate so that they can pay one-third of the salary of someone back home for more work done.

We ask for equal treatment in social protection mechanisms when we know that many of us do not have the means to earn contributions to their SSS, Philhealth and Pag-ibig.

The HIV epidemic, which is the biggest health threat for men who have sex with men, the boogeyman that steals away our gay friends, family members, comrades in the movement, has become unmanageable.

The dependence of the government on aid money continues to make it incapable of preventing the spread of the HIV epidemic and procuring life-saving ARV drugs on its own.

Now more than ever, our stakes are high for a comprehensive – social, political and economic – liberation not just for LGBTs but for the rest of the Filipino people.

United struggle

There is no such thing as single-sector liberation.

There is no liberating LGBTs without needing to simultaneously liberate the women, the peasants, the workers, the indigenous people.

Now more than ever, we need to unite with the struggle of the people against neoliberalism.

The “neoliberal world” will always see people like us as dispensable machinery for the creation of profit. Every time it finds itself in crisis, it is forced to exclude, dispossess, displace, abuse, rape, and kill some of its people.

We must re-imagine the kind of world that we wish to be part of.

The legacy of the Stonewall Riots must be reclaimed from the dusty shelves of our memory.

The Stonewall Riots, the uprising of the most transgressive – the fairies, the drag queens, the butch lesbians, queer people of color – that was the defiant fist raised against State violence, racism, patriarchy, imperialism.

The courage of the participants in the 1994 Gay Pride must continue to inspire us. 

We must be a Pride movement that is loving and caring of the most oppressed among us, those for whom all forms of oppression intersect.

Let them be the building blocks of our movement, and the starting point of our strategies for struggle.

We have always dreamt of a world that loves the LGBT people, but can that dream be realized without struggling against this world that excludes because it is unwilling to give, that hates because in order to survive it has to compete?

Yes, we need a world that loves the LGBT people – but first, we need a world that knows how to love.

Stonewall reminds us that the desire to love and be loved is the same fire that incites us to be militant. In a world that skimps on love, to love is to struggle. – Rappler.com

Ivanka Custodio is an LGBT activist. She has had involvements in various organizations, including a 3-year stint with the organizers of the annual LGBT Pride March in Manila. She now works as a coordinator of a national network working on HIV and SOGIE issues.

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