June arrives every year dressed in color—rainbow flags catching the breeze, laughter spilling into the streets, and voices rising not just in celebration, but in defiance. For those unfamiliar with or unmoved by Pride, the spectacle can seem excessive, even puzzling. Why the noise? Why the flags? Why, after all this time, the marches?
We march because the right to exist—fully, openly, and without apology—is not yet guaranteed everywhere. And where it is, it was fought for.
To understand the weight of that fight, one needs only to look at how these global ripples touch our local shores. Last Thursday, the Davao Historical Society’s Throwback Thursday forum at the Abreeza Mall turned its lens toward our recent past, unpacking the evolution of gender in pop culture to coincide with Pride Month. The goal was to trace how today’s creative landscape is slowly shattering old stereotypes, moving away from the rigid, often harmful media tropes of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to carve out spaces for authentic representation.
But history isn’t just found in old television clips; it lives in the memories of those who survived it.
Panelists Olson Rivera and Bobby Castillo, high school batchmates from the Ateneo de Davao, recalled a time when they were known as part of the “Huling Barako”—the final all-male batch before the campus went co-ed. Growing up in the 1970s and early ’80s, the local queer community was far from vibrant; social stigma was thick, heavy, and silent.
For Bobby, a deeply accepting family provided a rare shield, giving him the safety to be loud, proud, and free. Olson’s path required a different kind of armor: she had to study relentlessly and excel academically just to secure positive attention and support from her parents. Decades later, Rowen Gonzales, a Gen Z student from the University of the Philippines Mindanao, reminded the room that while the new generation stands firmly on the shoulders of these pioneers, they face entirely new anxieties in a hyper-connected digital age.
Some of those persistent challenges are structural, deeply tied to basic human rights. Jesse Madriaga, the forum’s moderator and the communication management focal for the Department of Health, noted that health remains a primary battleground.
“The conversation about health is inextricably linked to the journeys shared by the LGBT community,” Madriaga observed. As HIV education, testing, and treatment become more accessible, the community has a greater opportunity to practice holistic care. This means looking beyond medicine to nurture safe spaces, provide robust mental health support, and aggressively address gender-based violence.
“We live with joy and love with pride,” Madriaga said, “knowing that the choices to better our health are as diverse as the identities and lifestyles we celebrate.”
This local tapestry of struggle and progress mirrors a much longer global timeline. Pride began not as a party, but as a protest. On June 28, 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City—led largely by transgender women of color and gay men—fought back against a brutal police raid. That single uprising sparked a global movement. The first Pride marches the following year were acts of raw survival, a collective shout into the void: we are here, we are human, we are not going away.
More than five decades later, the landscape has fundamentally shifted. Dozens of countries have legalized same-sex unions. Public figures live openly across a spectrum of identities. In the Philippines, localized anti-discrimination ordinances protect LGBTQ+ individuals in several major cities, and queer representation in literature and media has grown exponentially. Young people today grow up with a nuanced vocabulary—queer, non-binary, pansexual, gender fluid—that simply did not exist in mainstream discourse a generation ago.
Pride, then, is less about checking a box of victories and more about a statement of presence: the struggle continues, and those who have survived deserve to be witnessed.
To understand why this resonance runs so deep, we must look at what is actually at stake in the human experience of identity. Social theorists have long argued that identity is not something we are born with, fully formed. It is something we actively construct through interaction, language, and social recognition.
Psychologist Erik Erikson’s foundational work established that a coherent sense of self is a psychological necessity. We form who we are in response to the social world around us; when that world rejects a core part of our being, the damage is existential. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall described identity as a continuous process—never fixed, never complete, but perpetually produced through lived experience.
More recently, philosopher Judith Butler’s work on performativity deepened this understanding. Butler argues that gender is not an inner essence, but a series of repeated social performances shaped by rigid cultural norms that reward conformity and punish deviation. When LGBTQ+ individuals refuse to perform the gender or sexuality assigned to them, they are not confused—they are being honest. Their visibility disrupts the comforting illusion that there is only one acceptable way to be human.
This truth was aptly captured by Bobby Castillo during the forum, who recalled a common, conditional acceptance from his youth: “You can be gay. But be a good gay.” Today, that survival mechanism is evolving into something simpler and far more profound: you can be whatever you want to be—just be a good human being.
This is precisely why representation matters. When a young person sees someone like themselves on a screen, in a book, or in a classroom—and that person is not portrayed as a villain, a punchline, or a tragedy—something shifts in their sense of possibility. Identity construction requires mirrors. Pride holds those mirrors up.
To celebrate Pride is not to declare final victory. It is to hold space for those who are still afraid to speak their truth. Until that space is safe for everyone, the colors matter. The noise matters. The march matters.
