For nearly a decade, contingents from barangays across Davao City have assembled in Roxas Avenue to mark Pride Month and annually, the local government unit (LGU) always advises them to keep the event “focused on Pride” and avoid “overt political messaging.”
Rooted in its militant tradition, the core of Pride is to bring uncomfortable yet critical issues into the light. When Pride is softened into a mere parade and a tourism promotion activity, the state gets away with its social obligation to protect and promote LGBTQIA+ rights. If queer people are prevented from calling for equality, inclusion, and concrete reforms, the event becomes an empty spectacle with no intent for social transformation.
Still, many of the reported 18,000 attendees in 2026 Duaw Davao asserted that Pride remains fundamentally an act of advocacy and protest. That insistence is warranted—there is still a lot of shaping up to do within society, as many do not truly understand the essence of this action.
Davao’s first-ever city-wide pride march was organized by the University of the Philippines (UP) Mindanao’s Mentefuwaley in March 2016, and continued by local queer organizations during global Pride Month in June 2016. Early marches called attention to the city’s 2012 Anti-Discrimination Ordinance (ADO) and demanded its full implementation. Yet its implementing rules and regulations (IRR) remain unsigned, and the dangers of prejudice continue to be a looming threat for queer people through microaggressions, name-calling, workplace inequalities, anti-trans regulations in schools and establishments, and brutal hate crimes, among others.
Beyond gender identity and sexuality, the oppression of queer people has always been a topic of politics. It is essentially taking pride in identities that are being repressed in a heteropatriarchal, macho-feudal, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic social order. To remove the political dimension of Pride is to erase the progress that the collective of marginalized and oppressed people has made. The daily realities of discrimination, exclusion, and violence against queer people are deeply connected to the same social and economic systems that marginalize other sectors of our society.
To be political is to fight back. It is the path to reclaiming the rights and liberties we have been deprived of.
This gender struggle is also inseparable from issues such as human rights, wages and taxes, and state violence, which is why it is considered a protest because it is a movement that goes against the oppressive status quo. Society is not a single segment but a diverse mesh of working-class, queer and gender non-conforming individuals, differently-abled persons, and people of colour.
Furthermore, being part of LGBTQIA+ in the Philippines adds whole new levels of struggles. Semi-colonial and semi-feudal systems that still exist in the country prevent the progress of the queer movement. Culturally, queer people are perceived as entertainment; so long as they make the people laugh, they are accepted. However, when the topics of Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Expression (SOGIE) Equality Bill, same-sex civil unions, and other demands of legal recognition come up, these are instantly shunned. So long as these problems—which are political in nature—are not resolved, the maltreatment of LGBTQIA+ people will never end.
To resist is to reclaim spaces and assert uncompromising calls. Showing solidarity for the LGBTQ+ community without substantive action, or “pinkwashing,” or worse, telling the community that the premise of Pride is apolitical, leads to the same results that colored sidewalks have—nothing but added colour.