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Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Yet, what exactly feminist and queer activist-research is and what it entails are questions open for debate. Charles Hale describes activist-research as aiming for more than understanding or describing social phenomena. Activist-research is politically and socially engaged in dismantling hierarchical and exploitative relations of power Nygreen, ; Janesick, Activist-researchers cannot be detached from the communities they work with if they want to disrupt colonial-like power relationships and challenge systems of oppression Marfleet, ; North, Challenging power relations means working with communities to uncover structures of power and unpack relationships and causalities that structure injustice 56"" Freire, ; It involves interrogating essentialisms around activist, researcher, and community that may obscure common agendas and opportunities for consciousness-raising and empowerment Tuhiwai Smith, Activist-research, like all kinds of research, can reproduce as well as challenge power relations and inequalities.
Unequal relations of power between activist-researchers and the communities they work with can reproduce hierarchical relationships within which feminist and queer activist-researchers occupy multiple positions of privilege in relation to their informants, especially in terms of citizenship, education, and employment. Research participants may see their stories advancing the careers of activist-researchers, while they and their communities remain marginalized. Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins write that activist-research must be committed to an ongoing dialectical relationship between activist-researchers and the communities they work with so that power relations within and outside of the research can be confronted.
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Activist-researchers must look for ways to do quality, useful research that challenges power relations while also empowering people to share their experiences and be seen as authoritative knowledge producers Best, ; Greenwood, Activism and scholarship have never been separate fields for me. My commitment to LGBT rights led me to pursue higher education in order to better articulate the oppression I experienced and witnessed as a queer woman. Throughout my studies, I continued to work with various LGBT community groups and non-profit organizations as a volunteer and community organizer.
I was able to use the knowledge I gained in academia to help queer community 57""organizations write policy briefs and media reports as well as apply for much-needed funding. As I advanced into my Masters and PhD programs, my position as a graduate student allowed me to tap into additional funding resources. I was able to redirect some structural and economic resources from universities and research foundations to support community-based initiatives and arts projects. Aziz Choudry writes that the relationships activist-researchers have with their participants are multiple and constantly evolving.
I assume a responsibility to make sure that my work provides avenues for community mobilization, peer-to-peer support, and social justice advocacy. My academic and activist roles blend into and inform one another with difficulty and uncertainty. It is an uncomfortable position, and one in which I try as much as possible not to exhibit hubris or entitlement.
My commitment to LGBT refugee rights does not remove the entitlement and privilege I have as a white, Western, queer, cisgender, American settler-researcher. It also does not remove me from the power inequalities embedded between my research participants and me. As much as my volunteerism and research influence and affect the people I work with, their stories, actions, and authority affect me and influence my outlook on the world. The borders between research and activism are sometimes blurred as I work with LGBT refugees in community support and arts-based research. It is a dialectic relationship that requires a commitment to ongoing discussion and shared authority over the research.
I served as a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee from fall to summer Rainbow Refugee is a Vancouver-based community group that supports and advocates for people seeking refugee protection because of persecution based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status. I presented the Rainbow Refugee board of directors with my research prospectus in the fall of Rainbow Refugee board members Chris Morrissey and Sharalyn Jordan provided helpful commentary on my research prospectus.
Rainbow Refugee agreed to be a community advisor to my project and provided commentary on the finished dissertation. My experience as a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee gave me valuable insight into not only the in-land asylum process, but also the everyday challenges LGBT refugees face in Metro Vancouver. As a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee, I contributed to the Rainbow Refugee board of directors and helped facilitate weekly drop-in advisory and counselling meetings for in-land refugee claimants. I worked with in-land refugee claimants to answer their questions about the refugee process.
I supported LGBT refugee members connect to service providers. I provided assistance to them in obtaining housing by talking with landlords and working with Inland Refugee Society and BC Housing when housing emergencies occurred. One of the reasons for this is that there are limited resources in Metro Vancouver to help in-land refugee claimants access information and resources. Rainbow Refugee fills a vital niche, providing LGBT refugee claimants not only emotional and informational support, but also vital social assistance.
It is incredible to see how many resources Rainbow Refugee is able to provide to LGBT refugees as a volunteer-only organization.
Photograph taken by Melanie Schambach, 60"" In addition to the on-the-ground support I provided to LGBT refugees, I worked with Rainbow Refugee to create community resources and public advocacy initiatives. My position as a graduate student afforded me the opportunity to organize community events to discuss asylum legislation, violence against LGBT refugees, and the cutting of social services for in-land refugees. Rainbow Refugee members spoke at these events and were able to connect with policymakers and other academics to engage in combating legislation, policies, and public sentiment harmful to LGBT refugees.
I was also able to apply for several small research-based grants that went to funding community arts projects. These events included a participatory theatre performance by LGBT refugees on the International Day against Homophobia and several public performances by queer refugee artists.
The Painted Stories project brought together 15 LGBT refugees to train each other in group facilitation, storytelling, anti-oppression education, painting, and filmmaking. Through a series of five workshops, the participants created a large mural in which they shared their messages and personal experiences of violence and hope. Their stories and messages produced a strong counter-narrative to national anti-refugee sentiments and increasing restrictions against asylum-seekers. I participated in the workshops as a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee and provided support to the LGBT refugee facilitators.
At the opening of the show, we held a public roundtable of activists, scholars, 62""and academics to discuss the rise of arbitrary detentions of incoming asylum-seekers and the human rights abuses of detention and deportation of refugees in Metro Vancouver. The art show included a public art campaign in which participants wrote messages of hope and resistance related to migration and asylum on images of the Monarch butterfly. These butterflies were movable art pieces that have been used in several protests and campaigns in Metro Vancouver to highlight anti-immigration, racism, and homophobia.
The butterflies were most recently used at the Pride Parade. The participatory theatre workshop, the Painted Stories Project, and the Busting Borders art show were just some of the projects through which I created opportunities for public dialogue. These projects not only produced critical knowledge and critique of larger systems of inequality surrounding asylum in Canada, but were also opportunities for LGBT refugees to share their knowledge and creativity with a wide audience. My experience working on these projects gave me new understandings of the emotional and relational weight of LGBT refugee settlement.
My work as a volunteer and arts facilitator allowed me to expand my research outside the bounds of the research project and before I began to write about my findings. The experiences I gained through volunteering shaped my approach to the research methodology and the final analysis of the collected data. They encouraged me to continue expanding my research outside the boundaries of academia and into projects that advocate for and empower LGBT refugees.
Through talking with Rainbow Refugee board members, I initially shaped my project around the settlement stories and participatory photography of in-land LGBT refugee claimants and what happens to them after their hearings. Jim Thomas describes critical ethnography as ethnography with a political purpose , that is, using ethnography not only to describe the social world, but also to challenge larger systems of inequality.
Critical ethnographers unsettle both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions about the role of researchers as the unspoken authority over social reality and knowledge. Critical ethnographers interrogate power within their research and how systems of power not only determine the relationships researchers have with the participants, but also how knowledge is produced and disseminated. Researchers must be 64""reflexive and challenge themselves to think beyond the traditional confines of qualitative research, moving to a space of possibility, dialogue, and social change Carspecken, Ethnographers must be open, present themselves as research participants, and reflect on their roles.
They need to be mindful of where their theories and paradigms come from and ask what voices, representations, and experiences are excluded or too quickly universalized Madison, My participatory observations as a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee provided much-needed context to the everyday barriers that LGBT refugees face in Metro Vancouver. I chose oral history as a complimentary methodology to critical ethnography in order to explore the particular experiences of LGBT refugees and to engage with them in dialogue about home and belonging.
Oral history is also a social construction that has been and continues to be a central way of knowing the world and transmitting knowledge for many 65""communities around the world. Stories and the meanings attached to them change as they are shared and retold. Oral history is therefore not just a methodology but an epistemology, a way to understand how knowledge is transferred and transformed.
Oral history as a methodology has a long history in refugee and diaspora studies Marsh, ; North, ; Trower, ; Thomson, By doing this, the oral histories of migrants challenge monocausal theories of migration and provide a counter-narrative to the ways in which migration and migrants are understood Thomson, , Refugee oral history confronts misconceptions and one-sided or dehumanizing portrayals of refugees and addresses the imbalance of the under-representation of refugees in public discourse on asylum and migration. In doing so, oral history not only confronts harmful stereotypes, but also challenges the misappropriation of refugee issues and experiences in harmful nationalistic and imperialist agendas Hickey, ; Hopkins, ; Liam, ; Marfleet, ; Razack, Some oral history projects may pathologized or depicted the narrators as one-dimensional.
Likewise, some oral history projects may silence groups or individuals by not recognizing their agency and authority in the research. In my approach to oral history, I draw upon the insights provided by feminist oral historians and Indigenous feminist researchers. Because feminist research was founded on the ideal of tearing down exploitative and hierarchal systems of power and knowledge production, the search for finding alternative and empowering research practices is still pressing. The poststructuralist turn in feminist scholarship during the s changed conceptions of power dynamics between researchers and participants, painting them as neither monolithic nor stagnant, but rather a discursive process that flows from shifting negotiations, positions, and outcomes.
The feminist oral historian Sherna Gluck writes that oral history is always partial history in which the interviewer will get different partial truths based on positionality. In constantly interrogating power dynamics and my role as an oral historian, I drew heavily on the writings of Indigenous feminist authors.
In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues that researchers must go further than simply recognizing the effect personal beliefs and assumptions have when interacting with people. Researchers must understand their underlying assumptions, motivations, and values, and the psychological, discursive, and material effects that their research will have Tuhiwai Smith, , This allows the validity of the 68""research to be defined, reconstituted, and re-authored by the power of the margins.
Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins argue that the hyphen is often softened when researchers seek mutual understanding in cross-cultural engagement, but that this brings an end to empathetic collaboration. In trying to gain a shared perspective, structural power differences, as well as other differences in perspective and history, are downplayed. Instead of being softened, the hyphen should remain nonnegotiable as a positive site for productive and empowering methodological work. Empowering collaboration between the researcher and the participants can be achieved through hard-worked dialogue and commitment to understanding difference.
This involves not only a significant time commitment involving multiple of meetings, but a willingness on the researcher to not reach a simple conclusion. The difference between me, as a non-refugee white queer settler, and my participants is always present. Instead of seeing this as a disadvantage or something to be smoothed over, I take the hyphen as an opportunity to poke at and ultimately unsettle my position of power to speak next to LGBT refugees in the final text.
I see working the hyphen as challenge for me to expand my research beyond the text to other works of social justice through volunteering and collaboration with the LGBT refugee community in Metro Vancouver. In designing this project, I wanted another avenue for LGBT refugee participants to express their meanings of home and belonging outside the confines of a sit-down interview and a written text.
Freire stressed that everyone, regardless of their circumstances, was capable of looking critically at the world and engaging in dialogue with others: Freire argued that the visual image was one tool that could be used to enable people to think critically about their community. Participatory photography can be a mechanism through which the participants can further express themselves and articulate their experiences.
Andrew Irving writes that visual methodologies like participatory photography are another means of performance in which participants selectively engage with different subjects, memories, and meanings and decide what to document with their cameras. The camera is the tool used to take pictures, but it is the participants who frame the images through certain lenses of experiences and intentions Irving, It is through conversation with the researcher that the participants share their interpretations of not only the pictures, but also the larger social phenomena affecting them.
This process can deepen understanding for both the researcher and the participants. Karin Hannes and Oskana Parylo write that participatory photography promotes trust and a sense of ownership of the research for the participants: Simply handing a camera to an individual, having that person take pictures, and then asking about the pictures does not necessarily imply that the participant has authority over the research and its consequences: Karin Hannes and Oskana Parylo write that research participants may be inadequately equipped or trained to judge the potential ethical risks involved in collecting images and disseminating them for research purposes.
Discussion before, during, and after the photo-taking process is one way for the researcher and the participants to not only address questions and concerns that may come up, but also work together to understand their conceptual frameworks. Researchers should be familiar with the visual material used, the manner in which it was obtained, and the possibilities for interpretation of the finished photographs. However, as in many other research experiences, everything changed in the thick of the process. I found myself facing much more complicated aspects, situations, and challenges than were touched on in the methodology and theoretical literature.
These complicated situations arose from the specifics of the research and my participation in it. Structured interviews with ten refugee settlement workers. Participatory observation as a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee. Extended and multiple oral history interviews with fifteen successful in-land refugee claimants. Participatory photography with ten of the LGBT refugee oral history participants. The first step in the research involved understanding the political, economic, and social environment LGBT refugees navigate as they go through the refugee process and settle in Metro Vancouver.
Before conducting formal interviews with refugee settlement workers, I met with immigration lawyers and refugee settlement workers informally to talk about the refugee process and the challenges in-land refugee claimants face during and after their refugee hearings. I attended several workshops on refugee asylum, as well as training and information classes on immigration housing.
These experiences informed me of the complex social, political, and economic situations in which LGBT refugees find themselves once they make refugee claims in Metro Vancouver. I conducted formal interviews with ten refugee settlement and immigration workers based in the Metro Vancouver area. The purpose of the interviews was to gain knowledge and understanding of the institutional and practical aspects of the housing situation in Metro Vancouver for in-land refugee claimants and what happens to refugees after their refugee hearings.
I contacted each organization directly by email and telephone and requested an interview with one of their settlement workers.
Heterosexual and Gay Love Stories in the Philippine Literature
I emailed the organizations a copy of the consent 75""form so that they could familiarize themselves with my research and the interview process. Each of the workers signed the consent form at the start of their interview. The formal interviews lasted approximately an hour each and were voice-recorded. My interaction with LGBT refugee claimants as a volunteer and my personal experiences navigating various social services and institutions gave me practical and grounded knowledge about the everyday realities of LGBT refugees in Metro Vancouver. Because I was working very intimately with LGBT refugees as a volunteer, I felt that it was important to make sure the people I engaged with knew about my dual position as a volunteer and researcher.
As a volunteer for Rainbow Refugee, I signed a confidentiality form that prohibited me from directly talking to anyone or writing about specific stories I heard or I encountered as I assisted LGBT refugees. Every volunteer for Rainbow Refugee signs this confidentiality form. However, I was allowed to write down my personal experiences and any general or personal insights I gained about the refugee process and LGBT refugee settlement. I kept my observations and insights in a notebook that I would write in when I was at home.
This notebook was only accessed by me. I did not take notes or directly recruit participants during Rainbow Refugee drop-in meetings or at any other engagement with LGBT refugee members. During my time at Rainbow Refugee, I was serving in the role of a volunteer. LGBT refugee claimants were coming for assistance, and I felt that writing down my thoughts and personal insights at our meetings would not make the space safe """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" """"""""""""""""""""23 For example: I also felt that it would be a violation of trust.
When I was volunteering, my attention was primarily directed at assisting persons in the moment. However, my position as a researcher was never removed. When I came home, I would reflect on my experiences and insights in my notebook. I would provide more details about the project if prompted. If someone expressed interested in the project, I would arrange a separate introductory meeting to talk about the research and their participation in it.
The oral history interviews and participatory photography started in the spring of and continued through the spring of Potential participants could contact me by phone or email. Once participants contacted me, I emailed them a copy of the consent form and an introductory letter about the research project.
We then met at a nearby coffee shop or a convenient location for them. At this meeting, I explained the project. I covered what would be expected of them and answered any questions they had about my research or about me. There were three criteria for participation in the oral history interviews and participatory photography: The first was that the participant made an in-land refugee claim based on sexual orientation or gender identity and received Convention Refugee status. The second was that our """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" """"""""""""""""""""24 Qmunity is an LGBT community centre located on Davie Street in downtown Vancouver.
The third was that the participant had to be living in the Metro Vancouver area. My reason for the first criterion was that the in-land and out-of-state refugee processes were too different to combine in my research. The second criterion was to ensure that I could talk to participants about what happened after their refugee hearings. I imposed the last criterion because I wanted the research to be site specific. My experience in volunteering with Rainbow Refugee taught me that refugee settlement experiences varied dramatically across Canada depending on the location.
Focusing on individuals who live in one geographical area would allow me to situate their settlement experiences and connect them to the particular settler history and social, political, and economic landscape of Metro Vancouver. In addition to these three criteria, I decided to limit participants based on sexual orientation and gender identity because I wanted to hear from underrepresented groups in the LGBT refugee population, namely lesbian women and trans persons. However, the majority of the participants in this research identified as gay cisgender men.
One reason for this is that the majority of refugee claimants in Canada are cisgender men. This speaks to the gendered nature of migration, which privileges cisgender male bodies Pessar, Individuals are given temporary status and receive restricted work permits and reduced healthcare benefits, and are not able to access the majority of resources available to landed immigrants.
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Out-of-state refugee claimants or government-assisted refugees are individuals who make claims outside of their countries of origin but not in Canada and receive refugee status. Once they arrive in Canada, they receive permanent residency and are able to access the full array of resources that landed immigrants receive. As much as possible, I tried to have a diverse representation of persons coming from different geographical areas. The selected group of participants is reflective of the dominant geographical areas people come from to claim asylum and settle in Metro Vancouver.
One reason for this is the particular settler history of Metro Vancouver: There is a long and well-established history of migration and settlement between Metro Vancouver and South and East Asia.
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Vancouver also has a well-established migratory relationship with Central and South American states, in particular for temporary farm workers. Within the last twenty years, Metro Vancouver has become a major settlement area for people coming from the Middle East, especially Iran and Turkey. Because I originally wanted to know the settlement stories of LGBT refugees after their refugee hearings, I planned to work with a population that had already carefully crafted and told their stories in order to receive refugee protection.
They would have told their stories multiple times in a multitude of settings to a wide array of persons in positions of authority. I would not be the first person to whom they would tell their stories, and I most likely would not be the last. It also became apparent early on in my volunteering with Rainbow Refugee that the only thing the LGBT refugees that accessed their services had in common was that they went through the in-land refugee process in Metro Vancouver. Their experiences in their countries of origin, their means of migration to Canada, and even their experiences of being refugee claimants were remarkably different.
To talk about LGBT refugees as a united community would be misleading and would ignore the shifting and ever-changing landscape of a diverse group of people who are connected to multiple social worlds Appadurai, I was open to changing the way I conducted interviews and the questions I asked if needed. Thank you so much for sitting down with me to talk about your experiences after your refugee hearing. First, I would like to start off from the time period when you got your positive refugee decision and then go on to what happened after. Okay, sure… But, I need to start from the beginning first.
When I was in my country. Let me start there. It will make more sense. Interview with Tavo, August Very early on in the process of interviewing the participants, I realized how much their previous experiences in their countries of origin and their experiences migrating to Canada and going through the refugee process affected their experiences after their refugee hearings. The excerpt above comes from one of the first interviews I conducted. Tavo is a gay cisgender male refugee from Central America and one of the participants included in this dissertation.
His request to start his story when he was still living in his home country speaks to how much the experiences before coming to Canada and through the refugee process play a role in not only what happened to the participants after their hearings, but also how they situate their stories in a much longer timeline than I had originally intended.
What happened after the hearing had to be placed in context with what happened previously and what the participants expected in the 80""future. This made me broaden my scope of analysis. Instead of planning to start their interviews from the point of getting their positive decisions, I let the participants decide in what time period to start their stories.
This timeline was always shifting and was not always in chronological order. Some of the participants spoke in detail about what happened to them in their countries of origin, while other participants did not want to revisit past experiences and said very little. It was up to the participants to decide how much they wanted to talk about their experiences in their home countries and before their refugee hearings.
The oral history interviews were semi-structured in order to provide a few opening questions, but flexible enough so that the participants could direct the interviews. The interviews were designed to be conversational. The first interview with each participant provided a general timeline of their experiences in their country of origin, their migration to Canada, the refugee process, and what happened after. This interview was usually the longest, lasting two to three hours.
These conversations often followed a timeline of the various houses, apartments, and shelters the participants stayed in. The interview then addressed any questions I had from the first interview or from our conversation about housing. The final interview was the least structured: At a final concluding meeting, we reviewed the third transcript and addressed any follow-up questions if needed.
Heterosexual and Gay Love Stories in the Philippine Literature | Shyne17's Weblog
The first is reading the text and looking for meta-narratives. Meta-narratives are points at which the interviewee reflects critically upon what they said, indicating to the listener that this is an issue involving conflicting aspects or special meanings. The next reading involved looking at the logic of the narrative. This involves looking at repeated themes in the text and how they are related to one another.
The last reading is looking at the moral language, arguments, or conclusions the person is expressing in their story. Throughout the interviews, the participants and I engaged in conversations about topics or ideas raised. I asked the participants how they felt about my research. I also asked them for their opinions on any theories, arguments, or conclusions I was making as I read and reread their interviews. Fifteen LGBT refugees participated in the oral history portion of the project. The participants were interviewed three to four times, with each interview lasting two to three hours.
After each interview, I transcribed the voice recording and emailed the participant a copy of the transcript. I brought a printed copy of the transcript to the subsequent interview for review with the participant. Participants had final approval of the transcripts and were encouraged to edit the transcripts. On the consent form, the introductory letter, and in my initial meetings with """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" """"""""""""""""""""28 Except for one participant, whom I was able to interview only once.
Pseudonyms and general geographical regions are used to refer to the participants. The participants determined how I refer to them in the transcripts in regards to their gender identity, sexual orientation, age, class, and ethnicity. All of the interviews but one were conducted in English. Translators were available if needed. However, most of the participants felt comfortable conversing in English and wanted to conduct the interviews in English. What kind of pictures do you want me to take? Well, that depends on you. I am more interested in what you come up with.
What kind of photographs would show home and belonging for you? I think it would be good to show my story. What are you thinking about? Yeah, because home is like connected to my story. And I think I could take pictures of things that represent my story. What I felt in my country and what happened to me here. I want to show the hopes I had and all the unwelcomeness I experienced as a refugee. I have a couple ideas for images.
Like flowers and green grass showing my hopes for a better future and garbage or a person sleeping on the street for what happened…" Interview with John, April The excerpt above comes from a photography-planning meeting I had with John, one of the oral history and photography participants. In designing the photography portion of the research, I wanted the participants to dictate what photographs were produced and the meanings behind them. At the introductory meeting and throughout the picture-taking period, I talked with the participants about how they would go about taking pictures around the themes of home and belonging.
I was interested in how the participants approached home and belonging and how they then interpreted these themes through their choice and design of pictures. I made sure not to provide too much concrete direction on what the participants should take photographs of.
Instead, I would listen to the participants talk about their ideas for pictures and what they wanted to convey in their pictures. What came out of these conversations was a wide array of different approaches to and reflections on home and belonging. The participatory photography allowed the participants to express their conflicting and complex experiences of home through personal and subjective visual accounts. In doing so, the participants were able to express their agency in constructing and sharing their experiences of settlement as well as their feelings related to home and belonging Datta, The participants were asked to take a minimum of 15 pictures.
Participants were given access to a camera or had the option of using their own cameras. They had six weeks to take pictures. I emailed or sent text messages to the participants throughout the weeks to check in with them and see how they were progressing, letting them know that I was happy to meet with them to talk about the assignment and answer any questions.
I received a copy of the photographs to be used in the research, and the participants kept the original photographs. The meetings to go over the photographs were voice-recorded. We met for a follow-up meeting to go over the transcription to remove errors or points of confusion. Participants had final approval of the transcriptions. As mentioned previously, the LGBT refugee participants in """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" """"""""""""""""""""29 Two other oral history participants wanted to participate in the photography portion, but had to cancel part way through because of time constraints.
Participants came to this project for many reasons based on multiple personal and public desires. These desires informed their narratives and creative output and shaped the research and our relationship within and outside of the research. What are you hoping to get out of this project?
Well, for me, I am not really expecting anything personally. I just wanted to tell my story. Maybe my story will help other transwomen refugees like me. However, a strong gay and lesbian literature emerged in the Philippines in the last two decades of the twentieth century. While the early Filipino poets struggles with the the new language, Filipinos seemed to have taken easily to the modern short story as published in the Philippines Free Press, the College Folio and Philippines Herald.
Later on, Arturo B. Rotor and Manuel E. Arguilla showed exceptional skills in writing short stories in English. It is not surprising then that as Philippine literature has emerged, gay Philippine literature has emerged as well. Writers Danton Remoto and J. Garcia were two of the first published, and have emerged as two of the most outstanding gay poets and essayists in the Philippines. In , Remoto and Garcia teamed up to edit Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. It was a great move for this genre and literary critics in the Philippines began to take notice.
Because of its popularity Ladlad 2 soon followed. A seeming response in this may be seen in the opening of the first gay literature course in the University of the Philippines. The first time the course was offered at the UP in June , both local and international press thought it fresh. Certainly, this novelty tended to the facetious for certain media practitioners. Oral tradition was the start of literature: Before the printing press was invented, these scholarly texts were hand-printed and literacy was exclusive only to church and court.