Danton Remoto (left) and J. Neil Garcia pose with copies of their book, Ladlad 3.

Ladlad 3, the third installment to the highly successful gay writing anthology, took more than a decade to release that when UP Diliman poetry associate J. Neil Garcia, who co-edits the book with Ateneo de Manila professor Danton Remoto, read a poem from it, he quipped, “This love [that the poem refers to] is both obsolete and finished, and it’s so funny, reading it now, that I could ever have been this romantic.”

Ladlad has certainly come a long way from the first book’s publication in 1994. When Remoto and Garcia gathered submissions for the first Ladlad, “Nobody wanted to contribute because, as one famous author said to me, it will ruin their careers,” Remoto recalls.

Yet two months after the book’s release by Anvil Publishing, all 2,000 copies were sold out. Anvil continues to reprint copies of both Ladlad 1 and 2 today.

From A to Z
The book’s readers come from all walks of society. “Salesgirls at National Bookstore would tell me of gays stud-looking enough to qualify for Ginoong Pilipinas asking, in their deepest, lowest voices: ‘Miss, saan ang Ladlad?’” Remoto shares.

Candidates of Ms. Gay Baclaran have been known to quote from Ladlad. Writing classes in UP and Ateneo use it as a reference material.

But of course, Ladlad’s biggest following was the lesbian-gay-transgender-bisexual sector, some of them out, others not.

It was the book that helped form the LGBT movement in the Philippines. The rest, as you know it, is history.

The political party Ang Ladlad was born in 2003. Remoto represented it in the party-list elections in 2007, but the group was dismissed because “it didn’t have enough people” for a national constituency.

Then he ran–and was weeded out as a nuisance–for the senate, after which he decided to seek a congressional position in the third district of Quezon City but lost to Matias Defensor. And now he’s announced his candidacy for the senate in 2010.

Better late than never
Garcia offers an apology for the delay but recognizes that the hiatus was good because “there was more introspection” in the third book.

The stories, poems, and essays in Ladlad 3 represent a diverse variety of homosexuals in the country and portray gay characters in a different light. The selection includes a gay children’s story, a rewriting of Alice in Wonderland into a poem, and an account of a beauty-parlor worker who is part of the underground movement.

The anthology includes more young writers whose frankness in writing about sexual exploits shocked Danton, he confesses. “During our time, we were a bit hesitant to talk about sex,” he says.

Contributors include Alex Gregorio, Ian Rosales Casocot, Honorio Bartolome de Dios, Ino Manalo, Michael Francis Andrada, R. Zamora Linmark, Paul del Rosario, Rolando Tolentino, Eugene Evasco, L. Lacambra Ypil, Ronald Baytan, and many others.

Listen to Ronald Baytan read “La Puta del Mundo,” from Ladlad 3.