ProGay Philippines fights imperialism and 
patriarchy

August 28--Edgar "Oscar" Atadero, president of 
ProGay Philippines, spoke in San Francisco about 
the history of the gay rights movement and the 
fight for social change in the Philippines. 

ProGay was founded in 1993 and is a much younger group 
than most others in the national democratic 
movement fighting against Amerikan imperialism and 
for self-determination. Oscar started his talk 
explaining that the combination of feudalism and 
patriarchy in the Philippines make it impossible 
for gay men and lesbians to be out about their 
sexual orientation. This system makes it essential 
for them to ally with the anti-feudal, anti-
imperialist movement as a whole. "ProGay links 
discrimination and homophobia with the struggle 
against feudalism and imperialism." In town for an 
international conference on gay, lesbian, bisexual 
and transgender issues, Oscar noted that in the 
united $tates there are many different 
organizations for people of different identities. 

People in the u.$. have the chance to fight a very 
narrow battle based on the specific oppression 
that they face. As he pointed out, this can go 
down to the type of man another man is interested 
in dating determining the group he joins. MIM sees 
this kind of identity politics as something of a 
luxury for both straight and queer circles in the 
First World. On the one hand, it often ignores the 
struggles of oppressed Third World people, such as 
those in the Philippines. On the other, it can 
lead to political "ghetto-ization" and impotence. 

Struggle to wrest state power from the hands of 
the warlords, imperialists and patriarchs will do 
more to end all forms of oppression than small-
circle debate over the minutiae of dating rituals. 
Just as "All issues are wimmin's issues," so are 
"all issues queer issues." 

ProGay asked what 
problems queer people in the Philippines faced and 
they learned that "gays say the problem is they 
don't have jobs, money, housing, money to support 
their brothers and sisters...not that they have a 
problem finding a date or discrimination." There 
is a problem with discrimination and harassment of 
gays in the Philippines, Oscar made clear, but 
this is secondary to issues of survival. With more 
than 50% of queers unemployed in the rural areas 
in the Philippines "queers are all united by 
class. Queer people's priorities are all very 
different in a Third World Country... For an 
average person on the street, issues like 
feminism, ecology and other new social movements 
are near useless given the survival issues." "The 
struggle for gender equality must go hand in hand 
with the struggle for land reform, for higher 
wages, to stop the government killing... Raising 
the prices of petroleum is important to us as 
faggots." This has informed the work that ProGay 
is involved in, joining the broad movement against 
imperialism to fight on many important issues. For 
instance, the first gay march in the Philippines 
demanded scrapping of the value added tax. Oscar 
also discussed the importance of the family in the 
Philippines. ProGay does not attack the family but 
instead attempts to unite with the family. "The 
solution for queers in a family is not to strike 
out on our own, but a united struggle inside the 
family and society." He went on to explain "Our 
enemy is not our homophobic fathers, or our 
churches who say faggots are going to hell...we 
try to work with progressive elements of the 
church...we say that family is important." 

MIM has said similar things about the family in the 
internal semi-colonies of the united $tates (see 
MIM Theory 2/3). There the family plays an 
important social support role. The Black Panther 
Party talked about "the fighting family," for 
example. To attack and dismember the (bourgeois) 
family now would actually set back the struggle 
for national liberation. Indeed, many of Amerika's 
social work programs cloak themselves in high-
sounding rhetoric about protecting children and 
wimmin, while in actuality they only increase the 
number of people in jail and break up oppressed 
communities. 

Alongside the legal national 
democratic movement in the Philippines, the 
revolutionary movement has stepped up its struggle 
for gay rights. The Comprehensive Agreement on 
Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law, 
signed by the revolutionary National Democratic 
Front and the Government of the Republic of the 
Philippines, includes a guarantee that all people 
have the right to marry whomever they choose. The 
Communist-led NDF has implemented these rights in 
the liberated areas of the country that it 
controls. The revolutionary movement has waged 
armed struggle for self-determination, with a 
socialist perspective, for thirty-two years. 
People living within u.s. borders have a 
responsibility to support the national democratic 
struggle in the Philippines, as the united $tates 
remains the main military and financial prop of 
the corrupt Government of the Republic of the 
Philippines. We need to raise awareness by 
carrying out education. We need to engage in 
campaigns to support the battles going on in the 
Philippines. To find out how you can get involved, 
contact MIM.