“I figured they already knew,” said Jeremy about coming out to his family. A middle-aged academic living in Manila, Jeremy (not his real name) had the physique Filipinos called “batak” (ripped). His students joked that with his dark complexion and taut face, he looked more like a “cargador” or dock porter than a professor. Nothing about him signaled gay.
But this borrowed word “gay” best described him. In the Filipino language, it stood for a man who appears manly but is attracted to other men. The indigenous “baklâ” classification did not apply. Baklâ is often mistranslated as “trans” because it refers not only to those with effeminate mannerisms but also those who present themselves as women. A Filipino baklâ, however, does not always identify as a transgender requiring gender-affirming surgeries. Also, the label baklâ encompasses economic standing. It is often associated with working-class “parlorista” or aesthetician rather than a white-collar professional.
Older generations would classify Jeremy as “silahis.” That is someone discreet who lives in both the heteronormative realm, perhaps with a wife, and the “tolerated” but derided same-sex world. In fact, Jeremy is out to his friends and co-workers. But behind his back, they call him “bading,” the more ambiguous and less pejorative moniker. He could pass for straight. Why did he come out?
“I did not come out until 2014, in my 40s,” Jeremy said. “And I did it in writing. My mother was living in LA, and so were my two sisters and a brother. I lived far enough from them to live how I chose. Still, I wrote everyone in the family… except my father, who had died in 2000, and my brother, who had mental health problems. I wanted to tell them in person, but I did not want to make it a crying scene. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it face-to-face. But I had to let them know so they would stop badgering me to find a wife. We never discussed any of these topics in the open.”
“I wanted my coming out to be taken seriously. I feared it would end up becoming a time for jokes. Of course, I thought they already knew. But we had a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy on uncomfortable issues. And I convinced myself that the real reason why I remained unmarried to a woman at my age was still a mystery to them. I needed to come out, but without the drama, because I wanted to tell them exactly how I felt inside. The frustration was getting to me… I felt that being gay should not just be swept under the rug.”
Price He Paid
Why did Jeremy wait this long? He said, “Well, I was also practicing my faith as a Jehovah’s Witness. I even attempted to marry in my 20s– some girl from another country– just to meet everybody’s expectations.”
“I knew I had better be prepared when I came out to the church’s council of elders after writing my family. I needed to come clean. (After coming out to them) I felt relieved, like some heavy weight on my shoulders had been lifted. I also felt sad. The last thing I wanted to do was embarrass my family.”
The church elders told Jeremy what he expected them to say: “This is a decision you have made, knowing what standards the bible (had) set.” Apparently, they did not sound judgmental, which softened the blow. Then they said, “You know what this means…” And brought up the bible parable of the Prodigal Son. It meant that following his disclosure, Jeremy had to be “removed” from the church, designating his relationship with them as “disfellowship.”
After chatting with the elders, Jeremy spoke on the phone with his mother. She was a non-practicing member of the same church he attended. She said, “Okay….” followed by a long pause. Then she added, “If that’s what you want…” And after prolonged silence, said, “I want you to be happy.”
Since Jeremy considers himself “spiritual,” to this day, he attends his church’s services online. Because of his status, other congregants in attendance are not allowed to speak or interact with him as a “removed” former church member.
Where did Jeremy get the idea of Coming Out?
Today, Pride Parades have become universally accessible like Netflix and Coca Cola. In the same way that “deterritorialized” cultural products shed their geographic origin and context, Pride too has been repackaged as it got consumed. What started as a commemoration of the LGBTQ community’s fight for equality a year after the 1969 Stonewall uprising, Pride is now a celebration of self-identity. Worldwide, it offers permission for “sanctioned” visibility, at least once a year, for the otherwise marginalized, or worse, still criminalized in some 66 countries.
The notion of “Coming Out” has also turned into a global vernacular. It has been exported from its original context and superimposed on existing cultural landscapes, thanks to social media. Its utility is in meeting individual needs– far from the call for gays and lesbians to come out to their families to increase the community’s visibility back in the ‘70s.
In 1978, inspired by Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign, California State Senator John Briggs sought to ban openly gay and lesbian individuals, or anyone advocating for gay rights, from working in California public schools. If the Briggs Initiative, also known as California Proposition 6, were to pass, gays and lesbians would have been barred from teaching or counselling school children in the State.
Meanwhile, Harvey Milk (1939 -1978), a veteran U.S. Navy Serviceman, former Wall Street investment banker, and a small business owner in 1973 ran as an openly gay candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He failed. After three attempts, he won in 1977 before the Briggs Initiative was certified for the November 1978 ballot. He campaigned against the discrimination of gays and lesbian by calling on the community to become more visible.
Milk urged gays and lesbians to muster the courage to reveal their sexual orientation to their families. He claimed that everyone would know someone who was gay or lesbian. He had faith that no one in the State would willfully vote to discriminate against loved ones. The Briggs Initiative was rejected by around 58% of voters.
Milk was assassinated November 27, 1978, twenty days after the Briggs Initiative was defeated. Without polling, it is hard to gauge if the youth of today know him or what he did. Despite the biographical movie, “Milk,” in 2008, a California declaration of a “Harvey Milk Day,” and an SFO airport Terminal named after him in 2019, global celebrity RuPaul is likely more familiar to today’s LGBTQ.
Call to “Come Out” Still Echoes
The LGBT movement in the U.S. spent decades fighting for visibility and the right to name oneself. Today’s LGBTQIA+ categories encompass the West’s recognition of variants to the heteronormative binary gender system. But the Filipino LGBTQIA+ culture stretches back further than American history. Those categories already existed.
The idea behind baklâ pre-dated the binary system Spaniards brought with them in the 1500s. Baklâ represented a pre-colonial recognition of a third gender that is neither man nor woman but one with both the masculine and feminine in equal measure.
Colonization supplanted the notion that those who embody male and female energies were special. Instead, replaced it with the Christian dictum that deviation from “normal” was a sin.
Pre-colonial Indian cultures, akin to Filipinos, treated their “hijra” as spiritually elevated. In the same way, native Hawaiians deeply respected their “māhū” precisely because they were liminal and sacred. Filipinos, who sit geographically in the middle of the two, also held their mediators, the “babaylan” (shaman), in high regard. Filipinos assigned the babaylan role to women, but men who took a feminine identity also qualified.
This is not surprising. The Philippines is said to be the staging ground for Austronesian Expansion out of Taiwan to the Pacific. So, despite Spaniards and Americans overlaying social architectures on pre-existing cultural landscapes, long-held Austronesian “transcripts” remained and got reframed. Gender categories may have been “officially” collapsed to two, but baklâ (like māhū) never went away. Reverence has gone several notches down. But collective moral bracketing allows multiple gender norms to exist.
Filipinos simply compartmentalize. They separate the “normative” or officially endorsed (e.g. church teachings) from the “operational” or day-to-day registers to live relatively friction-free within a “halo-halo” (mix-mix) society. Joking or humor is the pressure release valve used to avoid confrontation and collectively reduce cognitive dissonance. Gossip or talking behind a gay person’s back is a way of letting everyone in on the secret– the not-so-hidden transcript: “We all know, and we don’t care for as long as you stay in your place.”
So, did Jeremy have to come out at all?
