The Rainbow Blog Philippines

I am happy to announce the start of EDUC8, LIBER8, CELEBR8: The 8-Campus Rainbow Tour, a free symposium on LGBT human rights (see poster above). It will have its first stop at the College of Saint Benilde (CSB) on 29 September 2010. Below is a write-up of this historical initiative. TrueColors Publishing Inc., the makers of Ketchup Magazine , the only Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Transgender (LGBT) magazine in the Philippines in keeping with its thrust to promote social awareness of LGBT issues, proudly presents Educ8, Liber8, Celebr8: The 8-Campus Rainbow Tour. This Rainbow Tour brings together noted leaders of the LGBT community to conduct a free symposium targeting students in 8 colleges and universities in the Metro Manila area in an 8-month period from September 2010 to April 2011. The symposium, which covers various issues including LGBT Politics, Spirituality and Sexuality, Gender Identity and Human Rights & Media Activism, is designed as a “crash course” on human rights and ...

The High Court in Delhi ruled that the Indian penal code outlawing consensual sex between homosexual adults violates the right to life, privacy and dignity in the Indian Constitution. The Court cited the Yogyakarta Principles. The High Court in Delhi ruled that the Indian penal code outlawing consensual sex between homosexual adults violates the right to life, privacy and dignity in the Indian Constitution. The Court cited the Yogyakarta Principles. If you would like to read the historic 105 page judgment, it is available at the Times of India website . In addition to Indian case law, the Court's judgment cited numerous international treaties and other instruments as well as case law from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Nepal. The Yogyakarta principals were referred to as follows: Paragraph 43 (citation omitted): On 26th March, 2007, a group of human rights experts launched the Yogyakarta Principles on the A...

Book Review on American English Professor Lee Edelman's book "No Future". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Be forewarned, I really didn't like American Professor of English Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (of Tufts University). He reduces the symbol of the "child" to "the linchpin of our universal politics of 'reproductive futurism.'" I found Lauren Berlant's classic Queen of America Goes to Washington City to be spot on in many instances and if you're interested in how popular American culture utilizes the symbol of the child for neocon propaganda, read her book. She predicted through her analysis of Forest Gump, George Bush II's election. If neocons could they would elect a fetus as president and Dick Cheney as vice president. And they got close with George Bush II. I am not into fetishizing children in an intellectual way or otherwise. Children are ch...

Book Review on American English Professor Judith Halberstam's book "In a Queer Time and Place". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Judith Halberstam is an American Professor of English and also has written Female Masculinity and The Drag King Book . In A Queer Time and Place discusses a number of topics involving sexuality and queer subjects. One of the topics of her book that I found interesting related to her discussion of metronormativity. Halberstam takes Michael Warner's heteronormativity ( Fear of A Queer Planet ) and reshapes it to describe the "normalizing" of urban sexual identities while abnormalizing rural sexual practices and identities. She takes the stories of several tragic FTM transgenders, like Brandon Teena to show how urban LGBT identities have allied with urbanism to create the belief that rural = homophobic. Halberstam shows how the movie Boys Don't Cry ended up changing Brandon Teena's...

Book Review on Canadian English Professor Michael Cobb's book "God Hates Fags". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Happy Labor Day! Alexandra Chasin is an American professor of literature and LGBT studies. Chasin's book is a fascinating and damning account of how market forces have fundamentally altered (and destroyed in some ways) the revolutionary potential of LGBT movements. From the beginning (if there ever was one), LGBT movements have called for a fundamental rethinking of gender, family, and eros. In the U.S., until the 1990s, these movements were local and fragmented in nature, goals were similar but local LGBT groups dealt with local communities to tackle problems of discrimination, etc.,. Local bars funded local LGBT publications. As noted in Fetner's How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism , the direction of these movements in the U.S. became unified and nationalized in the 1980s. Fetner describe...

Book Review on Literature and LGBT Studies Professor Julie Abraham's book "Metropolitan Lovers". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Julie Abraham is an American professor of literature and LGBT studies. Abraham's book is an interesting look at the connection between the idea of the "city" and homosexual identity -- lesbian and gay. I must admit up front that I found the book to be very Euro-American centric and failed to address the relation of the city and sexuality to colonialism and imperialism or test her theories of that relationship to the conscious city creating in colonized places. Because of this, I found a lot of the book boring and tedious to read. But, if you're into urban studies or European lesbian nineteenth century history or Oscar Wilde, you'll likely find this book much more interesting. That being said, the book got me thinking of Benedict Anderson's highly controversial Under Three Fla...

Book Review on American English Professor Michael Warner's book "The Trouble with Normal". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Michael Warner is a professor of English at Rutgers University. He is one of the founding thinkers in "queer theory" starting with his edited book Fear of a Queer Planet . When first published, The Trouble with Normal was seen as a response to Andrew Sullivan's book Virtually Normal and the move in sexual minority and dissident communities towards a stable LGBT identity community and same-sex marriage as the ultimate goal of such a community. Until the 1990s, the U.S. did not have a clear and stable notion of an LGBT community -- there were transgender communities, gay communities, lesbian communities and some overlap. This is still true about a global LGBT community. This unifying of different groups of people into an LGBT community produced a unified political agenda. For Warner, this polit...

Book Review on Canadian Sociology Professor Tina Fetner's 2008 book "How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Tina Fetner is a sociology professor in Canada and identified herself as a "straight woman." She reviewed documents from both the religious right and gay and lesbian sources and made a simple claim. The modern American LGBT movement was primarily shaped by the forces of the religious right. The religious right had better organization and way more money to contribute to opposing LGBT claims -- at least, how they saw those claims. This ended up, in LGBT organzing terms, putting significant resources and time into responding to that opposition, even if the area of battle was not a priority for the LGBT movement. As has been discussed at length in other scholarship, until the religious right started organizing against the mild anti-discrimination laws the LGBT movem...

It’s called 10,000 Dresses and is written and illustrated by Marcus Ewert and Rex Ray respectively. I have not read it yet but I know that it has been getting rave reviews. Below is how one site, Sevenstories.com , describes it: Every night, Bailey dreams about magical dresses: dresses made of crystals and rainbows, dresses made of flowers, dresses made of windows. . . . Unfortunately, when Bailey's awake, no one wants to hear about these beautiful dreams. Quite the contrary. "You're a BOY!" Mother and Father tell Bailey. "You shouldn’t be thinking about dresses at all." Then Bailey meets Laurel, an older girl who is touched and inspired by Bailey’s imagination and courage. In friendship, the two of them begin making dresses together. And Bailey’s dreams come true! This gorgeous picture book—a modern fairy tale about becoming the person you feel you are inside—will delight people of all ages. I already checked local bookstores here and predictably, they don...