This is for the thousands of children who were taught that they are nothing but abominations, for the kids who are disowned by their parents, for the students kicked out of schools, for young people harassed in the streets. Pride Pride2022
“Act like a man.” That was the motto of my high school. Growing up, I was surrounded by boys who were always eager to prove their masculinity. Some ended up in fights, others in sports, others in parties, but almost all seemed to loathe one thing: Being gay. I studied in a school where being labeled a faggot was an attack on your masculinity, whereI was forced to go through this every single year, with a religion teacher that read us the same bible verse that said homosexuals were an.
I studied in a school where being anything but straight made you afraid of whether or not you were going to be allowed to stay. I heard the story of a girl in our sister school who had to transfer because she was caught making out with another girl on campus, stories of students who got kicked out because people found out they were gay. Some of them weren’t true. A lot of them were. But to us it didn’t matter because the only thing we knew to be true was that we were afraid.
While many say the Philippines is one of the most LGBT-friendly countries in the world, I feel that it just isn’t. Fighting for this bill is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. Whenever I go online, all I see are people calling young LGBT people disordered, against the will of God, and part of the destruction of the moral fabric Philippine society; sometimes I feel like I’m back in that school.