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This article was first published in 2021 and is being republished as part of A Little Bit Human’s recognition for Pride Month. Any inaccuracies in phrasing from the interviewee are his choice of words. We have chosen to stay true to what the interviewee has shared with us.
“You aren’t out yet, right? You can pick a name we can use for you,” I offered to him.
“Call me Subpoena. Get it, get it?” He laughed from the other end of the call.
“You’re ridiculous. What if no one takes this seriously?”
“Then they won’t. Hmm, how about AffiDavid.”
Okay, fine, I thought. I give up. He’s AffiDavid now and whether you take him seriously or not is up to you. Not my fault he insisted on this ridiculous name.
AffiDavid is heavily involved with the queer community. Him being a gay man, I often see him connecting with other gay men and trans women either over issues of queer rights or fun stuff like fashion, stanning Mariah Carrey, or, even better, pageants. AffiDavid loves pageants.
Seeing him get excited over pageants is like watching a child make a beeline for the tree on Christmas morning. He’s all about it — the glitz, the glamor, the fact that it’s like, at least, according to him, femme holiday season.
He is an avid fan of both cisgender and transgender pageants, Miss Universe and Miss International Queen, respectively.
“They’re the Super Bowl of pageants,” he tells me. “But Miss International Queen isn’t as popular. It’s really all about Miss U.”
What made it even more exciting when Kataluna Enriquez, a Filipino-American woman, became the first openly trans woman to compete for Miss USA after winning the Miss Nevada pageant. At first, it looked like she was going to win.
“Watch the video I sent you! She speaks so well, too. She was fire,” AffiDavid’s voice dripped with admiration. “She even designed her own dress!”
She had a killer story, too.
“I didn’t have the easiest journey in life. It was a struggle for a moment. I struggled with physical and sexual abuse. I struggled with mental health,” Enriquez said in an interview. “I didn’t have much growing up. I didn’t have support. But I’m still able to thrive, and I’m still able to survive and become a trailblazer for man.”
Kataluna Enriquez was following in the footsteps of Angela Ponce. Ponce was the first transwoman to join the Miss Universe competition in 2018. She went up against contestants from pageant powerhouses like Colombia, Venezuela, Thailand, and the Philippines. After beating 22 women in Miss Spain, Angela Ponce had bigger problems.
How was a transwoman like her going to win a pageant that had both its organizers and fans working against her?
“I think I remember her saying she was just happy to be there. Or something like that,” AffiDavid laughs. “Aren’t we all, hun?’
When news of Ponce being trans reached pageant fans, all hell broke loose. The stream of hate comments she got, many of them not holding back from calling her a tr*nny and a freak, made it clear that Miss U fans, who often busied themselves with slandering other countries’ candidates, were now ganging up on her.
But Ponce wasn’t fazed. She had been waiting to compete in a major pageant since 2015, when she learned that Miss World didn’t allow transwomen to enter their competition. She instead joined Miss Universe which had lifted the ban on trans competitors in 2012.
Ponce didn’t make it past the first round. Enriquez didn’t make it to Miss Universe at all.
AffiDavid was disappointed, but not surprised.
“They’re just there to be ‘represented,’ but they won’t win. They allow transwomen to be there, but they’ll never give them the same fighting chance that they would to a natural-born woman,” he tells me. “Enriquez…I mean, she was really good yet she didn’t make it to the top 16. They just won’t evaluate her the same way.”
AffiDavid lets me in on a rarely-talked-about issue within the queer community: It’s still heavily segregated. The arguments about whether Ponce should be allowed to compete in Miss U 2018 or whether transwomen should be allowed to join the competition at all largely occurred between members of the queer community who are heavily invested in pageant culture.
Transgender beauty queen Kevin Balot, one of the darlings of the queer pageant community, is just one of the many women who believe transwomen shouldn’t be allowed in cisgender pageants. She was the winner of Miss International Queen 2012 and a known LGBTQ+ rights advocate. In an online show, she would go on to say:
“We transwomen always ask for equality. And I believe us transgender women joining Miss Universe isn’t equality anymore. I don’t agree with that because we have our own pageant. We have the Miss International Queen pageant which is the most prestigious transgender beauty pageant,” Balot explained. “It’s not equality anymore, it’s asking too much.”
The trans community itself is split between pushing for acceptance into spaces traditionally reserved for natural-born women. You’ve seen the same fights go down when gender-neutral bathrooms became trending news.
On one hand, many transwomen want to be accepted into roles and spaces dominated by cisgender women. On the other, you have transwomen who have reservations about this because they see it as an invasion of cisgender women’s space, a space that belongs to another group that they recognize as also being marginalized. Sisters, if you will, in the spirit of women supporting women.
“TBH, I don’t get why pageants have such a grip on us femme gays and transwomen,” AffiDavid continues. At this point, it’s really become more of me taking notes on his monologue about queer pageant culture than me interviewing him. “But I think it has something to do with pageants being one of the only places where gayness and transness are celebrated.”
He has a point. Many of the pageant contestants who make it into the list of top finalists come from countries with a strongly anti-queer culture. Aside from Thailand, Puerto Rico, and the U.S., the countries that dominate Miss U are typically way more conservative with regard to queer rights and trans acceptance. The countries that duke it out on the final round are mostly from Southeast Asia and Latin America, regions not typically known for being pro-queer rights.
“Sexual and gender minorities rights in Latin America and the Caribbean: a multi-country evaluation” is a study on the status of queer rights in the Western half of the southern hemisphere. The study used 88 eligible documents spanning two key measures of the strength of LGBTQ+ rights in a country.
The first one is legal protections afforded to same-sex couples, which include decriminalization, legal recognition of same-sex unions, same-sex marriage, and adoption by same-sex couples. The second is anti-discrimination laws that allow queer people to serve in the military as well as other protections for sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression in other public spheres.
What they found was a widespread lack of legal protections and acknowledgment. Most Caribbean countries outright banned same-sex acts between consenting adults and many nations in Mesoamerica did not allow same-sex couples to marry or adopt as a couple.
The status of queer rights in Southeast Asia isn’t much better. For one, the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration does not specify its stance on LGBTQ+ rights. The Singapore Court still upholds the constitutionality of criminalizing consensual same-sex acts. Thailand, despite being seen as the transgender capital of the world, still won’t grant the LGBTQ+ community equal marriage rights.
Meanwhile, in the Philippines, where Kevin Balot comes from, queer legal protections remain largely non-existent. An equality bill has gone through several readings in Congress but still hasn’t been passed into law and, though the local supreme court has been sympathetic to the cause for marriage equality, such rights remain a distant dream in a country where public officials have no qualms with openly calling gay men “worse than animals.”
When asked about the personal reasons behind why he likes pageants, AffiDavid had this to say:
“It’s inspiring to see a queer woman, or any queer person for that matter, be so loud and proud. We’re always told to suppress our homosexuality because we wouldn’t be tolerated otherwise,” his voice swells with pride. “Everywhere else, the only time you see a gay man or transwoman is when they’re used for comedic relief or as a leading lady’s sidekick who helps her get her man.”
He points to TV and film’s long love affair with using the Gay Best Friend™ trope — a cheap form of representation that really only exists to highlight the more conventionally desirable straight, cisgender female lead.
In Clueless, Cher Horowitz is shown crushing on Christian who the movie depicts with all the stereotypical hallmarks of gayhood. The movie turns the queer catfish around by making Christian a Gay Best Friend™ who makes Josh realize that he reciprocates Cher’s feelings.
“Pageantry puts us in the spotlight. It’s defiance. It’s somewhere you can be celebrated not reviled or treated as second best,” he says.
AffiDavid is something of an activist and, as I’ve found with other activists, has quite the silver tongue. “I — we get a community around it where we’re allowed to be ourselves and do queer stuff that typically makes people raise their eyebrows.”
I pointed out that it seems paradoxical. A lot of homophobes complain about gay and trans people being queer in their presence.
But as with many things in the queer and female experience, it’s a double-edged sword.
“Fun, flamboyant gays are entertaining and people like to be entertained.” He brings up RuPaul’s Drag Race as his case in point. “Flamboyant gays and transwomen have made us visible. The crossdressers, drag queens, femmes — they’ve won us acceptance, or idk, tolerance ig because they’re funny, friendly, and non-threatening.”
“Glamor can be armor,” he tells me.
Entertainment is one of the only places where transwomen and gay men are allowed to be openly queer in most parts of the world and while it isn’t perfect, it’s the most representation they get.
“As a queer person, I don’t really fit the mold of how men and women should act. Being a pageant fan is a more accepted way to explore femininity. It’s inspiring for me as a queer person to see a queer person live honestly and it’s kind of a way to live vicariously, especially if you wanna be out or you’re a transwoman who can’t afford to transition.”
“Ultimately,” AffiDavid says, “I think the trans and gay obsession with pageants is an obsession with being seen.”
As ridiculous as the name he chose to go by sounds, it’s something worth taking seriously.
