Bakla. The creation of a Philippine gay-identity. - Alex de Jong Introduction Common sense ideas of gender and sexual identity posit these as static and determined at birth. The existence of a 'homosexual identity' is assumed to be universal and a-historical - but confrontations between different conceptions of what it means to be 'gay' destabilize such ideas. A striking example could be a conversation between two people identifying as 'gay', one from West- Europe, one from the Philippines. Both can agree on the use of the term 'gay' – the word is not uncommon in the Philippines. But differences become clear when discussing what this word means: attracted to other men for one maybe - being 'a gay', not 'a guy' for the other. For many Westerners, 'being gay' means somebody is attracted to people of the same gender. To put it in theoretical terms – gay is the name for a sexual identity, determined by sexual object choice. But for many Filipino’s, it is a gender identity; 'having a woman’s heart stuck inside a man's body' is how anthropologist Mark Johnson summarizes responses of south-Philippine gays to his question what this identity means. 1 Of course, this conception of 'gay' means the sexual object choice is nót other gays – but men. In what follows, it is tried to describe the framework that produces a Philippine (biologically male) 'gay-as-gender-identity' discourse. This discourse is of course not static, but changes according to circumstance, evolving conceptions of identity and under influence of what, for lack of a more precise term, is called 'globalization'. The evolution of different discourses of gay identity creates both new commonalities and differences, something necessary to understand to see how the Western 'gay-as-gender-identity' and the Philippine 'gay-as-sexual-identity' relate to eachother. The Philippines is particularly suited for a discussion on how identities are shaped. Because of its turbulent history the country combines many different influences; South-East Asian, Spanish, U.S. American, Catholic and Muslim, in a unique way. Looking at the evolution of the Philippine gay-as-gender-identity discourse gives an example of how these influences are combined in this country and illustrate how identities are formed. Terms and theory Before looking at these discourses, it is necessary to clarify some terms. Gay will used in the meaning of it that is predominant in Western, Christian cultures: as the the of sexual identity of 1 Mark Johnson 'Global desirings and translocal loves: transgendering and same-sex sexualities in the Southern Philippines', American ethnologist 4 (1998) 696, 697. Mark Johnson's research focuses on the Islamic population of the southern Philippines but many of his findings also apply to the Catholic parts of the country.