Violence Against Filipino GLBTQIs
The Years of Living Dangerously
By M.D. dela Cruz Tan
PUBLISHED: MARCH 2010

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In November 2006 (as reported by the Pilipino Star Ngayon, philstar.com), Ilocos Norte Rep. Imelda Josefa Remedios, a.k.a. Imee, Marcos suggested for the government to develop a program that will teach gays “Kung Fu or other forms of martial arts or self-defense for them to be able to defend themselves,” she was quoted as saying, with the urgency stressed with the noting of the “sunud-sunod na pagpatay sa mga bakla (murder of gays one after another)”, or, possibly, “gumagalang gay killer (gay killer on the loose).”

Gays need this, Marcos said, “upang maipagtanggol ang kanilang mga sarili (so they can defend themselves).”

The proposal may have been laughable for many, but the bigger issue was no laughing matter – it was, in fact, so dead serious, as the cliché goes, that many died (and continue dying) because of it.

The issue at hand is gay hate crimes.

HATE IS HATE

Hate crimes, also known as bias-motivated crimes, “occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his/her perceived membership in a certain social group, e.g. racial group, religion, sexual orientation, nationality, gender/gender identity, political affiliation, et cetera, states Rebecca L. Stotzer, writing Comparison of Hate Crime Rates Across Protected and Unprotected Groups for the Williams Institute (law.ucla.edu). Incidents involved include: physical assault, damage to property, harassment/bullying, verbal abuse, and, yes, murder.

While only recently getting more of much-needed attention, hate crimes are nothing new. When the Romans fed the early Christians to the lions, that was motivated by hate (and fear, too). When White American members of the Ku Klux Clan burned Black Americans on crosses or hanged them on trees, this was done out of spite.  When the early European settlers of the New World (16th to 17th centuries) targeted the Native Americans/American Indians, they were driven by hate (among others).  When Adolf Hitler wanted to rid the world of Jews (World War II), hate was the driver.
And hate drove the crimes against the likes of Matthew Shepard (tied on a fence and left to die by men who targeted him for being gay in 1998), transgender man Brandon Teena (raped before he was murdered in 1993), Sakia Gunn (the 15-year-old Newark, N.J., teen fatally stabbed in May 2003 after she rebuffed the advances of a man who told him she was a lesbian), and Elvys Perez (also known as Bella Evangelista, the Washington, D.C. transgender woman killed in August 2003 after a man, who had paid Evangelista for a sex act, discovered she was biologically a man).

The “freedom” card, e.g. free speech, is often used to defend biases, but for the US Supreme Court, penalties against hate crimes “do not conflict with free speech rights because they do not punish an individual for exercising freedom of expression; rather, they allow courts to consider motive when sentencing a criminal.”
A crime may be a crime, even if tagged differently; but why the special attention given to hate crimes?

When it enacted the Hate Crimes Act of 2000, the New York State (http://criminaljustice.state.ny.us) Legislature found that:

“Hate crimes do more than threaten the safety and welfare of all citizens. They inflict on victims incalculable physical and emotional damage and tear at the very fabric of free society. Crimes motivated by invidious hatred toward particular groups not only harm individual victims but send a powerful message of intolerance and discrimination to all members of the group to which the victim belongs. Hate crimes can and do intimidate and disrupt entire communities and vitiate the civility that is essential to healthy democratic processes. In a democratic society, citizens cannot be required to approve of the beliefs and practices of others, but must never commit criminal acts on account of them.”

Unfortunately, “current law does not adequately recognize the harm to public order and individual safety that hate crimes cause. Therefore, our laws must be strengthened to provide clear recognition of the gravity of hate crimes and the compelling importance of preventing their recurrence. Accordingly, hate crimes should be prosecuted and punished with appropriate severity.”

IFTAS elder Marlon Toldeo Lacsamana agrees. 

“According to Stotzer, hate crimes or bias-motivated crimes occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, or political affiliation.  I think based from the definition of what is a hate crime, we as a community can call it as such,” Lacsamana says.  “But as a country we do not have laws or policies recognizing it, thus most of the cases were filed under robbery with homicide or possible homicide.”

There were, of course, attempts in the past to come up with documentation on violence committed against GLBTQIs. The most definitive so far was a research done in 2004 by Lesbian Advocates Philippines on documenting instances of discrimination against Filipino lesbians, which had 10 case studies and many other instances coming from testimonies in small group discussions. “Were the instances cited in that study hate-related? Yes: hate-related, fear-related,” Angie Umbac of R-Rights says.  Sadly, among the “identified perpetrators were family members, employers, co-employees, et cetera.”

Umbac adds: “Because the term ‘crime’ is vague and can include non-violent instances like estafa or theft, there is need to gather data on acts of violence.”

CRIME AFTER CRIME

For GLBTQI Filipinos, the counting of seemingly hate-related cases hasn’t halted, and has, in fact, been going on and on and on and…

According to Umbac, while there are efforts of women’s human rights activists in the Philippines to gather data affected by crimes, the available data is sex-disaggregated data (meaning data is determined according to boys/girls), so that “the concept of orientation or identity is not a factor in the data-gathering and recording, making GLBTQIs fall through the cracks, so to speak.”

Start the counting.

In November 2006, the same month that Marcos commented on the gay killings, Joselito SierVo, 38, executive producer ng Pinoy Dream Academy (PDA) of ABS-CBN was found dead in his house in Quezon City – an occurrence that actually triggered Marcos to speak, because two other ABS-CBN gay employees were killed seemingly on the same manner: i.e. on May 26, 2005, Eli "Mama Elay" Formaran, 52, an entertainment writer, was also found dead in his house; and on August 8, 2005, the decaying body of Larry Estandarte, 27, ABS-CBN program researcher, was found inside the room he rented in UP Village, Brgy. Krus na Ligas, Quezon City.

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