Saturday 9 August 2008

My Very First Filipino Homophobia

So today, I was walking down the street not even looking particularly gay (I was wearing a white Hanes tee-shirt and I guess my jeans were women's jeans from Express, but whatever), and these three old men start going, "hey, bakla, bakla, bakla!" which basically means, hey, queer, queer, queer! and since it wasn't particularly threatening and the term itself is less definitively hateful than the translation would imply, I just cocked an eyebrow and smiled self-deprecatingly. Surprise, it's one of the approximately five words I know in Tagalog.

Weirdly, I was kind of proud of that.

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