A former Philippines dictator forced his generals to perform a drag queen show during a birthday party, according to Wikileaks.

Ferdinand Marcos, who was in office from 1965 to 1986 and died in 1989, allegedly had a ‘two-day blast’ party in the early 70s.

US ambassador William Sullivan wrote a series of criticisms of the dictator and his wife Imelda Marcos in secret cables that have since been declassified, Agence France Presse reports.

Filipino LGBT rights group ProGay Philippines has spoken about its hopes for the new Pope.

The group welcomed the sudden resignation of Pope Benedict XVI saying the new Pope presents the possibility for the Catholic church to 'modify its anti-gay and anti-women doctrines'.

'Because our country is 80 per cent Roman Catholic, most of government policies have been heavily influenced by bishops, which made it so stifling for the lives of millions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender citizens,' said Jomar Amores, spokesperson for ProGay Philippines.

Local authorities in Angeles, a city north of Manila in the Philippines, passed a historic law yesterday that bans discrimination against LGBT residents.

'I want Angeles City to be the most sensitive city and local government in the Philippines to gender equality and gay rights,' said Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan in 2011.

The world's only political party solely dedicated to LGBT issues, Ladlad in the Philippines, launched its election campaign yesterday.

The first day of campaigning started with a blessing at 7am from Rev Ceejay Agbayani from LGBTS community church and continued with canvassing in two markets in Manila and visits to the Home for the Golden Gays elderly care home for LGBT people and beauty salons where many Filipino trans women work.

A gay rights group in the Philippines has responded to Congress finally passing the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill.

After a 10 year battle between Catholic conservatives and modern pragmatists desperate to tackle the Philippines' high birthrate and poverty, Congress passed the RH Bill at the end of December.

ProGay Philippines lauded the passage of the bill, but said that impoverished LGBT people will continue to suffer.

Twelve regional and family court judges from all over the Philippines learnt how to better protect the rights of LGBT citizens at a roundtable discussion sponsored by the US Department of Justice last week in Manila

During the one-day seminar titled Roundtable Discussion: Knowledge Sharing on the Protection of the Rights of the LGBT Sector, community activists and experts spoke about the human rights of sexual orientation and gender identity (sogi) minorities in the Philippines.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) announced on Saturday that its manual would no longer list 'Gender Identity Disorder'.

But the new, fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V) will include 'Gender Dysphoria', which it describes as 'a marked incongruence between one's experienced/ expressed gender and assigned gender'.

The party-list system in the Philippines aims to give marginalized people a voice in government. LGBT people are certainly marginalized in the Catholic-dominated country - where transgender women are routinely denied service in restaurants and over-qualified gay men are denied jobs - but they are not represented in government.

It’s said that creativity happens when two worlds collide: jazz was born from African and European music; the chicken tikka sandwich from Indian and British cuisine.

When Visconte Carlo Vergara collided the world of comic books with gay Filipino culture he unwittingly created a huge hit the force of which he is still recovering from.

Five Filipino LGBT writers took part in a panel discussion about their work as part of the Philippine International Literary Festival in Manila last Friday.

Writers Ian Casocot, Nerisa del Carmen Guevara, Ralph Semino Galan and Johanna Lynn Cruz answered questions about their work.

The panel was facilitated by J. Neil. C. Garcia, director of the University of Philippines Press, poet and author of Philippine Gay Culture (1996, republished by Hong Kong University Press 2009), which has become a classic of queer scholarship in Asia.

Transgender women are nearly as visible in the Philippines as they are in Thailand, but does that mean the have a full bill of rights? Far from it, says Naomi Fontanos, founder of transgender rights group GANDA (Gender and Development Advocates) Filipinas. She talks to Gay Star News about health and legal advocacy, using contraceptives as hormones, the Catholic church and beauty pageants.

Why did you decide to form GANDA Filipinas?

The council of the second city in the Philippines approved an anti-discrimination law yesterday - the first of its kind in the country.