Celebrating Pride: Filipino and Filipino American LGBTQ+ Stories
As we mark Pride Month, here's a piece of Filipino history worth holding onto: long before Spanish galleons arrived in the archipelago, the babaylan — spiritual leaders and healers — included feminized men known as asog or bayok, people we might recognize today as transgender women or queer men. These leaders were revered and this illustrates that queerness wasn't a foreign import to Filipino identity—rather, it was always there from the beginning.
Colonization changed that, bringing rigid ideas about gender and sexuality that have proved stubborn. The SOGIESC anti-discrimination bill has been stuck in Congress since 2000, and same-sex unions still have no legal recognition. And yet: a 2023 national survey found that 79% of Filipinos consider gays and lesbians equally trustworthy, up from 67% a decade ago. Many queer Filipinos describe their faith not as a source of shame but as a source of strength — a connection to the divine that affirms who they are. The community has never waited for institutions to catch up.
And what a community it is! In 1994, 60 people marched through Manila in what is widely considered the first gay Pride march in Asia. Thirty years later, Preview magazine's 2026 Pride cover is a gorgeous, raucous image of queer Filipino life under the banner "Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Equality" — one in a run of annual covers featuring 16 queer couples proudly in love and a cinema-themed celebration of bakla storytelling on screen. Queer Filipinos have long built community through culture, through social media, through showing up for each other, even when official protections lag behind.
That history runs through Filipino America too. Scholars like Kevin Leo Yabut Nadal have been piecing together stories of LGBTQ+ Filipina/x/o Americans who quietly shaped US history — from the founders of early community organizations to frontline HIV/AIDS advocates to leaders of the national LGBTQ+ rights movement — often without credit. These are our histories too, even when the record forgot to say so.
So this Pride, raise a glass to the babaylan, the marchers, the organizers, the lovers on magazine covers, and everyone who kept the community alive and loud across generations. They earned the celebration.
Further reading:
- Pride Is a Protest, Never Quiet — Preview, 2026
- Meet All the Lovers in Preview's Pride 2025 Cover
- The Show Must Go On: The Fight for Queer Representation — Preview, 2024
- In Fight for Equal Rights, Queer Filipinos Build Communities on Social Media — Pulitzer Center
- In the Philippines, a Survey Shows Growing Support for Gays and Lesbians — NPR
- Queering Filipino American History — FANHS Journal, Kevin Leo Yabut Nadal