davng replied to your link: Charice Pempengco officially comes out as a lesbian.
why is this even newsworthy
Well, there are a lot of reasons that this is newsworthy in America. And even more reasons, that I won’t get into, about why this is newsworthy in the Philippines.
In America, you can look at it as though it’s just another coming out story, surely, but if you look deeper into the language usage in the article, you’ll see that there’s more depth into the social climate of the Philippines. It might seem silly to some people, but Charice actually had to apologize for being a lesbian because the Philippines is a socially conservative, predominantly catholic country. This should give an idea of how hard it was for her to come out and how brave she is for doing so.
Another good reason this should be known is because there’s another role model to other LGBT people of API descent, something we are lacking. [How many can you actually name?] Basically, the more that this is covered, the more our society and the Filipino society can have this normalized and hopefully moving toward a more progressive world. Not to mention, having people in pop culture is important for remaining visible as a minority of people and allows the younger generations of the gay API to feel like there’s even more opportunity for themselves.
