Rainbow Guerrillas: Gay and Lesbian Narratives Inside the Revolutionary Movement in Mindanao

• Main Author: Briones, Jervy C.
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: Communist Party of the Philippines; LGBT; New People’s Army; recognition; social justice
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss39/24; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2003/viewcontent/KK_2039_2C_202022_2023_20Forum_20Kritika_20in_20Honor_20of_20Edel_20E._20Garcellano_20__20Briones.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

The LGBT community in the Philippines is tolerated but not accepted, as different forms of discrimination against this sector still exist. The founding of several LGBT organizations in the 1990s marked the emergence of an organized LGBT movement in the country. The same decade also witnessed the recognition of same-sex relationships and marriage by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), which was an important development for the advancement of LGBT rights within the revolutionary movement. In this paper, I argue that the significant number of LGBT members within the movement necessitated the creation of revolutionary policies that reject gender discrimination and advance LGBT rights. I mainly relied on Liberation, the official publication of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), for the narratives of eight gay and lesbian guerrillas from the New People’s Army (NPA) in Mindanao for it provides the first-person narratives of their everyday lives as 1) members of the LGBT community and as 2) guerrillas throughout the course of the fifty-three-year armed revolution in the countryside. I reviewed related works on alternative writing and the revolutionary policies of the CPP with regard to the LGBT community and utilized the theoretical ideas of Nancy Fraser on social justice and recognition. Through the narratives, the results show that the gay and lesbian guerrillas, under the guidance of the party, have integrated their struggle for recognition into the struggle for redistribution, thus avoiding cultural reification within the revolutionary movement in Mindanao.