Gay Filipinos
I’ve encountered many gays in my lifetime. Many of them you wouldn’t even know were gay if they didn’t reveal it to you. That was in the USA where the gay culture blends in quite well with the greater society. I once had a co-worker with whom I often interacted at work as well as in meetings related to our union activity. We were friends as well and sometimes met socially. It was only many months after the friendship began that I discovered he was gay. By that time it didn’t matter to me and I was not repulsed by it, and we remained friends. Just friends, okay?
But gays in machista cultures like Mexico and the Philippines really tend to be flamboyant and do everything they can to stand out in the crowd. It might be due to their rejection by society and so they feel the need to lash back. In American society they are accepted without too much disdain and therefore feel part of the greater society itself. Not so here in the Philippines.
Many of the gays I’ve seen here are just plain nasty. They seem to have a need to be obnoxious in public places, as if they want to give us good reason to reject them. And while they dress in feminine clothing they are not exactly cross-dressers in the true sense of the term. They don’t dress to trick us into thinking they are in fact women; they dress in feminine clothing in part but it’s nearly always obvious that they are in fact men. It’s as if they define themselves as a third sex, neither fully male nor fully female. I asked one who had been taking hormones so he’d have breasts why he didn’t shave his legs as well to augment the aura of femininity. He replied “Oh no, we gays don’t do that; it’s a matter of pride to have hairy legs in a race where men are less hairy than Caucasians. If you have enough hair to display, then you show it.” I simply shut up at that point, seeing that his fuzzy logic was not going to change by anything I could add to the argument.
I wrote in a previous entry about how deceitful Filipinas are and this trait is apparently amplified in the baklas, the pseudo Filipinas. If the women here are deceitful then the baklas are even worse. When chatting with one of them it’s so obvious that he (she?) has no intention of being honest and straightforward with you. It’s as if lying is a compulsion for them.
I try to be egalitarian and accept people of all races and cultures and ideas but I must say that I have no patience with the baklas here in the Philippines. And to illustrate my point that they, as well as the real Filipinas, are deceitful by nature, here’s a news item about how one of them actually married a foreigner while pretending to be a woman. Ugh!
opass 