Cover The Corporate Costume of Pride by AA Patawaran (Photo: edited by Angela Nicole Guiral)
The Corporate Costume of Pride by AA Patawaran (Photo: edited by Angela Nicole Guiral)
1 / 1
The annual June rainbow cannot hide the rigid masculinity contest playing out across our manicured financial districts
Do you remember Patrick Bateman, the perfectly groomed anti-hero of American Psycho? The ultimate creature of Wall Street, he starts his day with a multi-step skincare routine and spends a good part of it agonising over a business card font. On the surface, he presents the flawless silhouette of the supreme heterosexual yuppie, yet the entire narrative drips with murderous, not to mention homoerotic, panic.
Critics have spent decades dissecting his terror of gay culture, a defensive mechanism so fragile it shatters completely during an encounter in a restaurant bathroom. When Bateman attempts to strangle a closeted colleague, the victim mistakes the violence for a romantic advance and confesses his love. It is a moment of black comedy that leaves him frozen and fleeing, entirely undone by the sudden, terrifying mirror held up to his own repressed desires.
Author Bret Easton Ellis originally crafted the text as a biting gay satire on corporate masculinity, a world where men are entirely consumed by other men, fascinated by their physiques, their tailoring and their validation. Bateman possesses no real core, existing merely as a collection of copied behaviours. His straight identity is just another mask.
Glance around the glass towers of Bonifacio Global City or Makati and you will see this exact brand of performative identity playing out on a grand scale. Immaculate young men sprint across manicured financial districts, their designer gym bags slung over tailored shoulders, their fingers twitching over the latest smartphone. Now that the annual rainbow has been unfurled by multinational banks and tech conglomerates, true acceptance feels air-conditioned, professionalised and stripped of any real edge. In these financial sanctuaries, life operates with a terrifying, tribal rigidity, an unyielding game of aggressive ambition and conservative decorum that demands absolute emotional containment. It is a slick corporate machine that treats identity like a sophisticated luxury accessory, carefully designed to filter out the messy, unpredictable texture of actual life.
Above A rainbow flag waving proudly in front of the Montpellier City Hall, symbolising LGBTQ pride (Photo: Pexels)
A rainbow flag waving proudly in front of the Montpellier City Hall, symbolising LGBTQ pride (Photo: Pexels)
1 / 1
Beneath this polite, conflict-averse surface lies an office floor that demands brutal endurance. The modern boardroom expects iron composure. Any hint of vulnerability is dismissed as fatal weakness. Here, traditional notions of pagkalalaki are weaponised under the fluorescent lights, translating into a fierce scramble for dominance, a tight grip on power and the subtle reduction of female and queer colleagues to mere window dressing.
The good news is that generational rebellion is brewing among younger executives who are actively turning away from toxic machismo, choosing emotional intelligence over the old dog-eat-dog management style. Yet institutional progress remains agonisingly slow. While the law enters the fray by deploying the Anti-Sexual Harassment Act to curtail boardroom power-tripping, the long-promised SOGIE Equality Bill continues to languish in legislative limbo, routinely stalled by conservative anxieties.
Western capitals love to resolve these human complexities with grand, theatrical legal spectacles. Look back to June 2020 and Bostock v. Clayton County, the landmark US Supreme Court case sparked when a child welfare coordinator was dismissed simply for joining a gay softball league. The final judgment was a masterclass in corporate symmetry, declaring that an employer who fires a man for being attracted to men, while leaving a woman unpenalised for the exact same attraction, is guilty of sex discrimination. It was clean, it was sterile and it effortlessly transformed basic civil rights into a beautifully filed boardroom rule.
Manila prefers a far more passive-aggressive approach to institutional prejudice. Here, the corporate diversity checklist falls into a state of absolute panic when confronted with the fluid realities of our local landscape. Human resources directors find themselves thoroughly bewildered by the masculine gay man who would rather watch a football match at a rugged pub than attend a fashion show. They are equally paralysed by the trans woman whose sexual attraction to other women completely scrambles the standard corporate narrative of transition. These nuanced lives represent a hilarious glitch in the matrix. The institution desperately craves a predictable, easily packaged stereotype to celebrate, yet it is met with a beautiful, chaotic complexity that simply will not fit into a human resources glossary.
See also: Pride Month reads: 9 LGBTQ-themed books by Asian authors to add to your reading list
Above A rainbow flag seen inside an office (Photo: Pexels)
A rainbow flag seen inside an office (Photo: Pexels)
1 / 1
The friction becomes entirely visible when we ask whether a commercial bank would let an openly trans professional dress accordingly. While a global banking giant operating in Manila can rely on international rules to protect trans employees, the homegrown commercial landscape remains deeply fragmented. You might walk into a progressive metropolitan branch and see trans women dressing authentically, yet this relies entirely on localised tolerance. Across the wider industry, there are still no institutional guarantees. Without written legal protections, the freedom to be yourself remains highly precarious, leaving many trans professionals at the mercy of old-fashioned dress codes.
Worse still are the archaic decorum rules that continue to hide behind the majestic legal shield of management prerogative. While a conglomerate might sponsor a lavish Pride mixer on a Friday night, its security turnstile on a Monday morning tells a completely different story. Transgender professionals routinely face humiliating ultimatums from human resources, told that their gender-affirming appearance violates company grooming standards under the vague guise of professional branding. Because our national labour code remains blissfully silent on sexual orientation, the battlefield here is never a grand constitutional chamber. It is a gruelling administrative chess match inside the Department of Labor and Employment, where employees must wield the concept of constructive dismissal just to prove that an employer made their working life intentionally unbearable.
Long before global conglomerates discovered that inclusion could look good on an annual report, queer visibility in Manila thrived in a completely different, far more humid domain. The neighbourhood beauty parlour was our original epicentre of authenticity, an alternative universe where the air is thick with the sharp tang of hair dye and the delicious, rapid-fire rhythm of local gossip.
Acceptance in the local salon was never something discussed over a Zoom call or debated in a seminar room. It was a lived, breathing reality forged over the hum of hair dryers, powered by sharp wit and fierce loyalty. These neighbourhood stylists never needed a corporate memo or a sensitivity course to understand humanity. They simply commanded their space through sheer brilliance, winning clients over on their own terms. In these bright, chaotic spaces, everyone was seen for exactly who they were, valued for their talent and their genuine spirit rather than their ability to fit into an organisational chart.
This is where the real definition of pride asserts itself. It is not a corporate compliance drill, nor is it a badge of professional perfection to be paraded on LinkedIn. It is the active refusal to let an identity be scrubbed clean for the comfort of an executive suite.
More from Tatler: 11 transgender icons in the fashion industry
Above A lively crowd celebrating at a Pride parade (Photo: Pexels)
A lively crowd celebrating at a Pride parade (Photo: Pexels)
1 / 1
True pride belongs to the raw, unfiltered grit of the human spirit, rooted in the loud spaces that demanded room decades before sponsorship became a marketing strategy. Authenticity is never manufactured by a human resources department, and it certainly never requires a corporate stamp of approval to exist.
To look for it, one has to chase a ghost. Strip away the annual June rainbow, the diversity glossaries and the sterile compliance, and the modern boardroom is left staring at the ultimate creature of Wall Street, an echo chamber of calculated performances designed strictly to mirror what the institution demands.
Corporate culture in the modern age, quite simply, is Patrick Bateman, but with a rainbow lanyard this time.
NOW READ
9 things every Filipina should know about her fertility—but was never told
Drs Aivee and Z Teo on their captivating vision, bold ambitions and growing empire
Topics
