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Posts Tagged ‘LAGABLAB’

Here’s an article I wrote for Sunday Magazine of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Since I haven’t posted anything for the last two weeks (?), I thought I’d just share this article. Many thanks to jaefever and her mom for facilitating this opportunity.

Gay, Pregnant and Marked for Harassment
By Jonas Bagas
Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA, Philippines – Remember the “flower platoon”?

Back when the Reserve Officers Training Course (ROTC) was still mandatory for male college students, it symbolized discrimination against gay students. Real men marched in real platoons; gay students were with their pansy fellows in the flower platoon. Their only duty was to cheer for their manly counterparts or run errands for them.

Well, the “flower platoon” disappeared with the abolition of compulsory ROTC in 2001, but the underlying biases that created it still persist. They come in the form of unwritten rules or the ubiquitous “morality clause” in the student manual. They are meant to crack the whip on what some sectors still describe as “moral deviants”—lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders (LGBT), as well as unmarried pregnant students. Read the rest of this entry »

The most controversial part came from the questions raised by Prof. Gary Dowsett of Latrobe University in Melbourne. To sum up the presentations and discussions during the Rainbow Conversations, a human rights conference held from January 28-31, 2008 in conjunction with the first Asia-Pacific Outgames, Prof. Dowsett asked why words like activism and oppression were conspicuously absent in the language that we use. We resorted, instead, to words like advocacy, which implies working within the system to push for reforms, and homophobia, a psychosocial attitude, a type of fear.

And if we indeed learned anything from the Rainbow Conversations, a gathering of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) from Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Singapore, India and the Philippines to talk about the situation of LGBTIQ individuals and communities in the region and the struggle for equality, it is this: we are not facing a mere phobia, we are facing oppression, a systematic exclusion of LGBTIQs and their persecution. And we can’t afford to be mere advocates working within the system, we have to be activists resisting the status quo and imagining a different world. Read the rest of this entry »