OPINION: Before ‘Queer as Folk,’ I though gay love always came with a price 

The series showed that gay life could be many things.

I was a fresh graduate in the early 2000s when I first encountered “Queer as Folk.” At the time, my world as a young gay man was very small.

I had not read much queer literature. There was no social media feeding me stories of gay couples getting married, raising children, buying homes, fighting over groceries, or simply growing old together. I did not personally know many older gay men whose lives could show me what mine might eventually become.

What I knew about being gay came largely from what I saw in Philippine movies and television, and much of it frightened me. There were the flamboyant gay characters played for laughs on television. Then there were darker films about gay men, movies like “Macho Dancer,” “Ang Lalaki sa Buhay ni Selya,” and others where relationships between men were often complicated by money, prostitution, exploitation, or survival.

One particular idea stayed with me: the gay man who falls hopelessly in love with a straight man. The gay man pays the bills. He gives him money. He supports his family. He becomes his breadwinner. In exchange, he receives something resembling affection.

I was young enough—and my world was limited enough—to wonder: Is this it? Is this what being gay means? Would I eventually have to pay someone to stay with me? More frighteningly, could another man ever simply love me back?

Then, sometime during the great DVD piracy boom of the early 2000s, “Queer as Folk” entered my life.

The American series, which premiered on Showtime in 2000 and was based on Russell T Davies’ British original, followed a group of gay men and lesbians living in Pittsburgh. And suddenly, here were Brian, Justin, Michael, Emmett, Ted, Lindsay and Melanie.

The show was far from perfect. Looking back, some of its characters were stereotypes. It was overwhelmingly white, frequently outrageous and spectacularly hypersexual. Its version of gay life seemed to involve an almost superhuman ability to work during the day, party all night and still look fantastic the following morning.

But none of that mattered to me then. What mattered was something much simpler: these gay men loved other gay men.

They desired one another. They broke one another’s hearts. They became jealous. They had sex. They cheated. They reconciled. They made terrible decisions. They worried about careers and money. They built friendships and families. Most importantly, their relationships were not automatically premised on one man having to pay another man to love him.

That realization seems embarrassingly obvious today. Back then, it was revolutionary to me.

“Queer as Folk” eventually became something of a cultural manual for a generation of young gay men. We talked about its characters almost the way women talked about “Sex and the City.” Everyone seemed to know a Brian. Someone wanted to be Brian. Someone insisted he was Michael. There was an Emmett in practically every barkada.

And when we went out in Malate—especially to places like Bed Bar—you could almost feel the influence. There was a new confidence in the way young gay men dressed, flirted, danced and talked about sex.

Perhaps some of us were performing a version of gay liberation we had first seen on pirated DVDs. We were trying on identities, discovering how much of Brian, Michael, Justin or Emmett we wanted to become.

For all its excesses, “Queer as Folk” gave us something Philippine popular culture rarely gave young gay men at the time: possibility.

It showed me that there was no single way to be gay. Brian could reject conventional romance. Michael could want commitment. Emmett could be gloriously feminine without being reduced to a punchline. Gay people could build families. They could have friendships that lasted longer than their romances. They could survive heartbreak and begin again.

The series did not teach me what gay life was supposed to be. It taught me that gay life could be many things.

More than two decades later, queer people have infinitely more stories available to them. A young gay Filipino today can open his phone and find films, books, podcasts, creators and real couples showing him thousands of possible futures.

I didn’t have that. I had a pirated DVD of “Queer as Folk.”

And somewhere between Babylon, Brian Kinney’s loft and all those messy relationships, a frightened young gay man from the Philippines began to understand something he should never have had to learn from television: I could grow older. I could fall in love with another man. And another man could love me back.

I didn’t have to pay for it.

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