A queer party on the ballot
Onto the ballot by court order: Ang Ladlad stands for election as the Philippines' first LGBT party.
On 10 May 2010, the Philippines elected a new parliament, and for the first time a party was on the ballot that explicitly championed lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people. It was called Ang Ladlad. The word comes from Tagalog and means something like "unfurl". It refers to coming out.
The party had been founded by the writer Danton Remoto in 2003. It wanted to give a voice to a minority that until then had simply not been represented in parliament. Its route into parliament was to be through the so-called party lists, through which social groups receive their own representation in the House of Representatives. But the election commission would have none of it. A first application failed, supposedly because of too few members. At the end of 2009 came the second refusal, this time with an open justification: the group promoted immorality, and homosexuals were a threat to young people.
Ang Ladlad went to the Supreme Court and won. In April 2010, only a few weeks before the election, the judges overturned the commission's decisions. The group met all the legal requirements. Social disapproval alone did not justify exclusion, especially since homosexual acts were not even a crime in the Philippines.
At the ballot box, success was modest. Ang Ladlad received a good 110,000 votes, just under 0.4 per cent. Two per cent would have been needed for a seat. Three years later it again fell short, and in 2015 the election commission removed the party from the list.
It did not fail, though. Ang Ladlad had shown that queer people in a strongly Catholic country may stand as a political force. If necessary, with the blessing of the highest court.