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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.

Between F* Words is an affective history of how gay liberationism persisted through its intersections with back-to-the-land movements in the 1970s Southeast. In telling an affective history, I show how liberationism is best understood as more than a reasoned political choice; rather, it crucially involves specific ways of viewing and feeling in an increasingly globalized world. Specifically, its politics complemented critiques of a divisive system with lateral strategies for staying connected. By tracing gay liberationist networks from rural Ozark and Appalachian sites to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta, I prioritize a regional analytic which, unlike models predicated on the urban “gay ghetto,” hinges on rural-urban connection. This project, then, sets gay liberation both within everyday life and in unexpected places as a way to imagine expanded LGBT political cultural maps. Employing analysis of oral history interviews, newly available archival materials, and the print culture of RFD (a rural gay serial published in the Southeast from 1978-2009), Between F* Words is a description of the subject formations of Southeastern gay liberationist collectives who felt the word gay no longer represented their political cultures. Using Felix Guattari’s concept of the refrain, I read the words and images of those in the culture to characterize the orientational, emotional, psychic, and corporeal dimensions of improvised subjectivities like the faggot, sissie, gentle man, and Radical Faerie. At the same time, I show how these regional refrains emerged in contrast to similar West Coast ones. Their Southeastern networks were acutely aware of their proximity to the fomenting Moral Majority which would become a conservative cornerstone of the Reagan-era national political economy. Galvanized by the racism, sexism, and homophobia at the heart of the conservative political culture which they saw taking root in the Jim Crow geography around them, these gay liberationist subjectivities were shaped by regional forces. Between F* Words draws upon this history not only to propose the regional as a crucial scale for any radical analysis responsive to economic development schemes but also to imagine radical LGBTQ political subjectivities to be affectively formed within the daily experience of such divisive regional development.