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Discrimination against Filipino LGBTQ people in the Philippines has various causes: culture, religion, power, or ideological differences. History plays a significant role in its development and reinforcement with the introduction of colonial beliefs into the Philippines. History has shown that they were once respected in society and had the freedom to practice their sexuality. The problem persists despite a few recent national and international milestones concerning the LGBTQ+ community. The transition of their societal status from celebrated to discriminated against raises the question: what happened? This study analyses how the problem existed and progressed by diagnosing the problem. Guided by Michel Foucault’s Genealogy, this study identifies the origins of sex and gender discrimination in Filipino culture by reviewing research on Filipino LGBTQ people and history from the pre-colonial era to the 20th century. The discussion extends to the effects of society’s prejudice, the devaluation of their once great stature, and the lack of research on Filipina lesbian people. The study discovered that homophobia in the Philippines is culturally engraved, vulnerable to western influences, and obliviously practiced. Moreover, the existence of the appropriation of the heterosexual mainstream was observed and seemed celebrated in Philippine society.

The research for this essay was funded as part of the ‘Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures’ project, financed by HERA and the European Commission. This article details the genesis, making, release and reaction to ‘Homosexuality: A Fact of Life’, an educational tape-slide kit produced by the Tyneside branch of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality in the late 1970s. The kit is situated in relation to the history of sex education in Britain and beyond, and compared to other subsequent examples of educational materials that have caused a furore: the book Jenny Lives With Eric and Martin and its connection to Section 28, and the No Outsiders programme that generated protests in 2019. It is argued that the tactics adopted by the makers of ‘Homosexuality: A Fact of Life’ could serve as a valuable toolbox for future activists. Postprint

In 2014, the movie Pride written by Stephen Beresford and directed by Matthew Warchus brought to the attention of a national and international general public the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), which had been largely forgotten within the London LGBTQ community itself. LGSM were a solidarity group active in the 1984-85 British miners’ strike. They formed in London a few months into the strike and forged a coalition with the miners based on material support, solidarity, and a shared will to resist the attacks launched by Thatcherism in the 1980s on organized labor as well as black, feminist, and gay and lesbian communities and movements. Pride was released only a few months after Stuart Hall’s passing in February 2014. Hall has been one of the key interpreters of the 1980s in Britain. His work at the time shed light on the conjunctural triangulation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the left, and the consolidation of ‘identity’ as a terrain of political struggle broken open by intersecting social movements such as feminism, black power, and lesbian and gay liberation. Despite the powerful resonances that exist between the story of LGSM and Hall’s thinking on the renewal of the left in the 1980s, Hall adopted a very skeptical position on the miners' strike and experience of feminist, black, and lesbian and gay support groups for the miners barely appeared in his analyses. In this article, I interrogate this missed encounter between Hall and LGSM.

This thesis examines the historical context men who slept with men faced in France during the emergence of HIV/AIDS during the late twentieth century. Specifically, it addresses the first and second round of state HIV/AIDS responses from 1987 to 1993. It argues that despite Michèle Barzach’s accolades as “the AIDS minister” she did not create the state response out of her own insights about disease prevention or public health. Instead, Barzach used guidelines set forth in Maurice Rapin’s report on the state of the nation’s HIV/AIDS responses, the Rapin Report. In addition, this thesis argues against Martel’s popular history, The Pink and The Black, that gay communities are to blame for the spread of HIV/AIDS into the general population because of their in inadequate action. Drawing on interviews with Health and Gay Pleasure co-founder, Gérard Pelé, this thesis demonstrates a relatively quick and pragmatic response to HIV/AIDS from the gay community for all men who slept with men. While France was slower to response to HIV/AIDS than most other western European nations at a state level, this research demonstrates that it was not because of distain for the gay men the emergent disease was associated with, but a complex interaction of factors, such as medical doctors not receiving quick or adequate funding for their initial research into the disease and gay men fearing the removal of newly won rights and further stigmatization through associations with disease. From 1980 to 1993, men who slept with men in France legally changed their status as a legally defined pathology and state scourge to a group of men targeted in campaigns designed to preserve their lives and validate their existence as legitimate French citizens.