In the crush of bodies outside Quiapo Church—bare feet on hot asphalt, hands raised toward a dark wooden Christ—Manila’s January devotion can look like a single, undifferentiated wave of Catholic piety. But step closer and you’ll hear a more complicated chorus: baklâ (a broad, culturally specific Filipino category often associated with effeminate gay men), transpinay (Filipina trans women), queer friends, straight families, hardened deboto (devotees) and first-timers, all pressed together by the same hope that the Black Nazarene—Poong Nazareno (Lord Nazarene)—still makes room for the people who feel least “allowed” to be seen. In a country where “Catholic” is often treated as an identity before it is a belief, LGBTQ Filipinos are not just watching the Nazareno cult from the margins. Many are in the middle of it, making a claim that sounds almost radical in its simplicity: panata (a vow of devotion) does not come with a gender check.
The Black Nazarene devotion is famously physical. The annual Traslación (procession commemorating the transfer of the image to Quiapo) draws enormous crowds who try to touch the rope or the carriage, believing contact carries basbas (blessing)—a tactile theology where faith travels through skin, sweat, and the sheer stamina of pagtitiis (endurance). Government-linked reporting notes that the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines approved celebrating the feast as a “national feast” every January 9, meant to encourage devotions nationwide rather than concentrating everything in Manila. And yet Quiapo remains the magnetic center: the place where devotion becomes spectacle, spectacle becomes community, and community becomes a kind of temporary republic—one in which queer bodies are not theoretical, but present.
That presence is increasingly visible in recent reporting, including stories describing transgender women joining the Traslación as both believers and petitioners, seeking spiritual comfort and a sense of being welcomed before a suffering Christ who, in Filipino imagination, understands suffering intimately. Another widely circulated local report, headlined with the line “God loves all genders,” describes queer friends enduring long hours around Nazareno festivities to show faith to Jesús Nazareno. Put together, these snapshots point to something easy to miss if you only look for conflict: for many LGBTQ devotees, the devotion is not an argument against the Church; it is a way of surviving it without surrendering God.
A striking example sits right beside the official feast culture: pageantry. In Quiapo, devotion doesn’t only happen through processions and Masses; it also happens through community-made rituals, including LGBTQ pageants framed explicitly as panata. PhilSTAR L!fe reported that after a hiatus, “Miss Gay Quiapo” returned in early January 2024, with contestants and organizers describing the event as a devotion offered to the Nazarene—“their ‘panata’”—and as a space of “sisterhood” among queens across generations. One winner described a life shaped by discrimination and the desire to “make a statement” as a transgender person, then pivoted seamlessly into faith language: when fear rises, magdasal tayo (let us pray) for courage. It’s a very Filipino pivot—moving from the social wound to the spiritual salve in the same breath—except here the wound is explicitly queer.
To outsiders, “drag near devotion” can look like provocation. To many insiders, it looks like the Philippines doing what it has always done: turning faith into a public culture where the sacred is carried not just by clergy but by neighborhoods, barkadas, street vendors, and devotees whose theology is lived more than it is written. The Quiapo devotion is sometimes described as popular Catholicism—a form of faith that can be more elastic than official doctrine, more intimate than official language. You see it in how people talk about the Nazarene: not as an abstract redeemer but as kasama (companion), someone who walks with you through humiliation, poverty, sickness, heartbreak, and the quieter daily violence of being told you are “wrong.”
And yet the tension is real. The institutional Church’s teachings on sexuality and gender have not become broadly affirming, even as pastoral language about dignity circulates. That gap—between doctrine and the street-level reality of devotion—creates a space that queer devotees fill with action rather than permission. They queue. They pray. They risk the crowd. They offer their panata anyway. In a devotion built on the image of a battered Christ carrying a cross, many LGBTQ Catholics recognize an odd kinship: a God who is not scandalized by suffering bodies, a God whose holiness is not fragile.
If the Nazarene devotion is, at its core, about endurance and hope—about bringing the most unpolished parts of life to a suffering Jesus—then queer and transgender participation is not an anomaly. It is an extension. In Quiapo, the question is less “Who belongs?” than “Who is willing to come close?” And every January, amid the chanting, the heat, the ropes, and the relentless press of humanity, LGBTQ devotees keep answering in the only language the Nazarene cult truly requires: nandito kami (we are here).
Spicy Auntie here. Sitting with my coffee, watching the annual footage from Quiapo roll across my screen, and honestly? Every year I hear the same tired gasps: “But why are gays and trans women there?” As if the Black Nazarene has a velvet rope and a dress code. As if suffering has ever been picky about pronouns.
Let me say this slowly, for the people clutching their rosaries a little too tightly: queer Filipinos have always been Catholic. We didn’t arrive yesterday in sequins and slogans. We were altar servers, choir members, novena aunties, flower arrangers, candle sellers, and children dragged to Mass before we could spell “identity.” The only difference now is that some of us refuse to be invisible while we pray.
The devotion to the Poong Nazareno has never been about purity. It’s about kapit—holding on. Holding on when your body hurts, when your life doesn’t fit the brochure, when society tells you that love comes with conditions. So forgive me if I laugh when people act shocked that baklâ and transpinays kneel before a battered Christ. If anyone understands rejection, humiliation, and being told you’re “wrong” for existing, it’s the guy carrying the cross.
What really unsettles critics isn’t theology. It’s audacity. The audacity of queer bodies showing up without apology. The audacity of saying panata ko ‘to—this devotion is mine—without asking permission from bishops, commenters, or culture warriors. Faith, after all, is most dangerous when it refuses to stay obedient and quiet.
And yes, let’s talk about the pageants. The heels. The makeup. The laughter near Quiapo. Because Filipino Catholicism has always been theatrical. Processions, statues, sequins, candles, costumes—don’t pretend you’re scandalized now. When queer communities turn devotion into pageantry, they’re not mocking faith. They’re speaking its native language.
What I see in Quiapo isn’t blasphemy. It’s honesty. Queer devotees aren’t asking the Church to change overnight. They’re doing something far more radical: refusing to abandon God just because God’s self-appointed gatekeepers make them uncomfortable.
So to the critics, here’s Auntie’s advice: if your faith collapses at the sight of a transgender woman praying, your problem isn’t queerness—it’s fragility. The Nazarene has survived colonization, poverty, earthquakes, and political hypocrisy. I promise you: He can handle a little eyeliner.
And to my queer siblings in the crowd, sweating, praying, hoping—nandito ako. Keep showing up. Faith, like love, grows strongest when claimed by those told they don’t deserve it.