From a Filipino viewpoint, a gay man is perceived to be effeminate. With no closest Tagalog or Filipino translation, the term “bakla” is used to make a reference to any gay man. A “bakla” is a Filipino man who wants to become a woman because he “feels” he is a woman “trapped in a man’s body” (which such thinking is not shared by a gay man if understood from a Western point of view). To realize this desire to become a woman, the bakla emulates a woman’s actions including sounding like a woman, wears make-up, clads himself in women’s clothes, and behaves just like her. Thus, he transforms into a transvestite. To further achieve “womanhood”, he undergoes a sex change, and once this is accomplished, he “metamorphosed” into a transsexual. A “bakla” man would normally fall in love with a straight guy or a real man, owing to the fact that “he feels he is a woman”. In the Philippines, stereotyping is prevalent and society dictates that if you are gay, you have to be effeminate, to be transvestite, a notion which does not sit well with gay men.

Was Alexander the Great effeminate? He was gay but certainly not a transvestite. Were the two cowboys in the movie “Brokeback Mountain” sissy or “bakla”? Definitely not. It is just wrong and improper to call a gym-toned, manly gay man “bakla” – meaning effeminate or sissy or “babae din iyan” – and force him to be like his bakla counterpart. Just call him gay, period.

If you want to be identified as “bakla”, that is fine with me. I am gay and I am straight-acting in all aspects. However, I will address a “bakla” man and and a gay man by their given names, not by their preferred gender orientation.