Shared Spaces of Transnational Transit: Filipino Gay Tourists, Labour Migrants, and the Borders of Class Difference

Between 2006 and 2008, I conducted autoethnographic research in what I refer to as Manila's "bright lights" gay scene. As part of that research, I collected travel stories from young, urban, middle and upper-class gay men, in an attempt to draw out the relationship between transnational mobility, urban gay life, and dreams of global belonging. This article comes out of those stories as well as out of my own stories of living in, leaving, and returning to Manila. Starting with the international airport as a trope for the shifting boundaries that exist between kinds of travellers based on class identity, the essay moves on to describe the nationalised, gendered and class-specific divisions that cut across the transnational flows of gay Filipino culture globally. © 2009 Asian Studies Association of Australia.