About a week back, you should have seen me crapping I am not voting for Ladlad. That Ladlad is for the fags and belongs with the fags, and to please give it to them, I am not there.
Homophobic?
No, just suffering from some kind of a new strain of elections-related allergy.
In the first place, I didn’t know my account with Comelec is still active. I have stopped bothering about people’s right to vote, mine most of all, after having been robbed of my vote in the last presidential elections that put GMA in power. Other than that, for a long time I couldn’t take what had been going on, I am out of the pale. Then a housemate had this notion of checking it out with comelec.gov.ph and voila, it’s my name alright, I may cast a vote if I like!
Then I got a call from a gay friend saying Ladlad nominees are around, let us please take them around and help them to gay people we know?
I couldn’t tell him right on that, But I am not legal and I don’t even know what my citizenship is, even if he himself likes to think he lives in Gay Republic! I couldn’t tell him that I may be currently employed and can manage from time to time to iron my clothes and sit anywhere near a Wifi zone, but my legal papers are spotty and that my employment record highly suspect. Moreover, I’m lesbian, not gay and that the last party I voted was Partido ng Bayan. I had had by then enough dosage of sermons about the need for compromise and more compromises, about the fluidity of gender and the importance of an LGBT representation in Congress, about how hard the struggle for legitimacy and political representation had been, and how having someone up there speaking for us and in behalf of us means for people like us. So when I realized that the Ladlad guys were here to collect from me what they call the pink vote and to tell me further that they are doing this—running—for me and for the entire Pinoy LGBTs, I swang on my feet. Like: What’s happening around me? Could it be that I am the only lesbian voter not voting for Ladlad? And then felt contrite. Like: Am I to let them alone in this difficult part of their careers as gay advocates and if and when they win a seat and succeed in passing the anti-discrimination law, will I avail of it the next time that another macho dude search for my dick like I myself fought hard for it?
When I think of it, the harder part of the trauma was not so much being made a sack bag by those who wanted to give you a lesson in good manners and right conduct as walking alone on the street at two in the morning to find police officers to whom you may show your hurts to. Nothing as tough as going around the welfare ward of the Davao Medical Center carrying a slip of paper saying Non-VAWC case. Nothing as sad and crazy as going home alone, praying Dear God, Dear Fucking Goddess If You Are There At All, Let it not happen to another woman again please! when you felt that there was no law protecting you, when you understood that the women manning the barangay justice system who could have been your mothers were out to protect your attacker from your accusations, and not only protect him, but back his countercharges against you as well that you may shut up and stop feeling good about yourself.
Am I saying I am voting for Ladlad now so that other welfare cases lesbians like me may find succor in the anti-discrimination bill when and if the same or worse things happen to them?
I don’t know.
I still don’t like what’s going on. When I filed a case and lost, my faithlessness in the law and the kind of democratic processes that put such laws up there only grew harder. It’s defeatist, you might say, but to me it’s not.
I still cast myself as Opposition, which means that anything Establishment has to come down by all means. Which means I hate the paternalism, the relying so much on the few dubiously good old men to do the job for us, the banking so much on the law-making powers of those who cannot think far beyond getting pork barrels that they may give livelihood to aging basket cases.
I think I will go with L.G. who posted at FB that No way, she is not participating in this ugly dirty circus; she declares herself apathethically apolitical, and that she is taking her vote to her grave.
Lord, it is so refreshing. Like: hey, isn’t that the most political thing to do these days???
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