PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 24 July 2008 Issue (page F-4)
The past week began with a headline I read while randomly surfing the web for news: “Massachusetts Senate says ‘I do’ to gay marriage”.
The following day I was scheduled to watch a set of plays for Filipino class. By force of coincidence, the last play was about homosexuality, and it is interesting to note that many of my friends were traumatized by the kissing scene.
That night, I couldn’t sleep as ABS-CBN was showing a debate on gay marriage featuring Danton Remoto, the president of Ladlad.
The next day, I was asked to attend a lecture for English, and just right before I was informed that it was to be about transgender OFWs in Israel.
All of these made me think to myself, “Hey, this must be gay week.”
Whenever I told people that, they would laugh.
Most people, myself included at times, have an inconsistent attitude towards homosexuals. For example, they would say that they tolerate ‘bading’ people, but not when they dress up showily, or scream in titillated voices. Or, say, they would mind being alone with their guy best friends– but if the guy is gay, it’s different. There is a sense of discomfort, even fear, as if the person’s going to molest them or something.
Then, of course, there’s the way we laugh and joke about gay people in the same way we do racist jokes. There are so many situations where we seem to put a double standard on them that I’m beginning to wonder whether there is a valid reason for making a big deal out of gender.
But I guess it’s not really our fault that we think or feel this way. As a kid, I was a total homophobe. In school, I was taught that homosexuality was ‘unnatural’ (like God created them with some kind of disease), and that homosexual acts are ‘bad’ (meaning they are consigned to hell if they try to be true to themselves). Looking back, it sounds rather irrational. Should we point out their sexuality and therefore brand them as outcasts, instead of looking at the fact that they are, in essence, humans, just like ourselves?
It seems to me like being a homosexual, for most, would mean being consigned to a life of misery. Not only do we force them to repress their identities. We also box them into the roles they should play. We have reduced them to nothing more than caricatures, convenient images that we can laugh at, so that our image of a homosexual is of someone who looks and dresses like a clown.
And supposedly, we call ourselves ‘enlightened’.
This is why I laud developments that expand both the rights and roles of homosexuals. Like any other human being, they too deserve the right to be represented, the right to equal opportunities, and the right to be able to express and culminate their love.
But political developments are only one part of the picture. Much of the question that still needs to be answered lies in the minds of people and in the attitudes of society. But, like the struggle of the African-American movement and the feminists before them, these usually take much longer to change.
This brings back to mind the first time a friend opened up to me about his sexuality. That was back in high school, and I remember being initially shocked, even disgusted. Yet you realize that it does not change the kind of friend he was or the experiences that you shared. All that was different was that he liked guys, and that I liked girls. That was it.
And as I started to get know more and more of them, the more and more I found out that, in all the important things, like dreams and love and the pursuit of happiness, we are really all just the same.
Perhaps a question we can ask ourselves is: if the world were upside down, homosexuality was the norm, and you were the one considered as ‘queer’, would you still believe that you should be treated any differently, just because you were different?
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