Thursday, May 30, 2024

Which country that is more gay friendly: Indonesia, Philippines, or Thailand?

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Anonymous

The Philippines.

Not in terms of legal rights, but in terms of actual acceptance. As in how people view and treat gay people. Even in the remotest villages you can find openly gay people, and they’re treated as people, like everybody else.

The following is a map of the acceptance of homosexuality worldwide according to a 2019 survey
 by PEW.

There are multiple openly gay celebrities. There are no barriers in terms of employment, in fact, gay men tend to be in managerial positions as they tend to be better at dealing with people. Unlike Thailand, LGBT people in the Philippines are rarely associated with the sex industry. They’re more associated with creative industries like movies.

The Philippines is more than 90% Christian (~80% Catholic). While homosexuality is still seen as “immoral” by most Filipinos. It is not seen as a big apocalyptic deal like in most Protestant or Islamic countries. It’s viewed as a “sin”, but as long as you’re a good person, it doesn’t matter. This is similar to other Catholic countries, which are also usually more LGBT-tolerant like Ireland and most of Latin America and Mediterranean Europe. The main mindset is to avoid judging other people and just treat people the way you want to be treated.

It also helps that gender in the Philippines is traditionally a social role, rather than based on biological sex. Gay men in the Philippines (the bakla) have always existed openly, even before the colonial era. Most became high-status shamans (the babaylan) which was a traditionally female role, while others simply lived as women.

Legally, however, LGBT people don’t have special rights under the Philippine government. But neither are there discriminatory laws. There is no gay marriage and only a minority of Filipinos favor legalizing gay marriage (including a significant number of LGBT people, due to religious reasons). However, same-sex civil union is generally more accepted among both politicians and the populace, and as of 2019, a same-sex civil union bill is being processed by Congress.

Don’t get me wrong, there is still discrimination, but more serious orientation-related crimes are very rare.

Thailand may seem more outwardly gay-friendly because of the notoriety of kathoey among westerners and the large number of gay bars in red light districts, but Thai people are actually less accepting of LGBT-people compared to other ASEAN countries.

compares how many people in Southeast Asia would reject gay men or lesbians as neighbors. The Philippines, Vietnam, and Singapore, all have lower percentages of rejection than Thailand.

Indonesia scored the highest rejection rate in that study, as well as the lowest acceptance rate in the PEW study. It is the least accepting of gay people overall in ASEAN, largely due to their heavily Islam-influenced government and their Muslim majority.

That said, non-Muslim areas in Indonesia are more accepting than other regions. Notably Bali is quite gay-friendly.

A common mistake among responses to these types of questions seem to be that they equate the number of pro-LGBT laws/existence of gay-marriage laws in a country to LGBT acceptance. This is not always true, especially in non-western countries. Acceptance is not something you can legislate. 

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