On June 26, 2013, I stayed up late in Quezon City, Philippines, refreshing the blog, Twitter feed, and Google News pages for the Supreme Court of the United States over and over again. I was waiting for a ruling that was altogether too personal.

What is more elemental, after all, than the search and construction of your own loving family? For much of my life, it was a legal element of adulthood I never considered myself capable of reaching. I never dreamed it could be so close.

I was not the only one waiting, of course. Of the nearly hundreds of thousands of viewers on the SCOTUSBlog that day, there were my friends from my Catholic high school, Megan and Amanda, a young lesbian couple raising their two-year-old son in California.

There were my friends in Iowa City, Vanessa and Natalie, planning for a child of their own. There were their family and friends, LGBTQI or not, radiating out from them in a satellite of hope and affection and support. (LGBTQI – A common abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersexed community.)

There were my friends here in Manila, their eyes on their tablets and laptops, waiting for news from one of the Philippines’ former colonizers. Spain had already fully legalized my manner of marriage – what step would America take?

There was a simple, silent question behind my own anxious vigil for the news. Will I still have to be afraid?

During my adolescence in the United States, I approached the most banal settings of civic life with a palpable measure of fear. One-on-one conferences with teachers and guidance counselors at my Catholic school. Dim, loud school dances, which required us to bring male dates. Job interviews at movie theaters, thrift stores, and university offices. Every single Catholic Mass. Walking with a date down a street at night. In line to vote. I spent most interactions wrung tight with a sense of fear. What do I stand to lose, if I choose to reveal myself? How will I be hurt?

As I grew more certain in my own dignity – a terribly slow, terribly painful, years-long, still-in-progress process – I grew simultaneously aware that I was being forced to do a level of work that my non-LGBTQI counterparts were not required to do.

The word “oppression” is sometimes judged as an abstract, histrionic term. But oppression is real, and it works quietly, in a series of everyday gestures. As someone who does not identify as heterosexual, I have spent most of my days anticipating all manner of violence.

Literal physical violence, political violence, emotional violence; the violence of rejection, the violence of silencing, the violence of the threat of violence.

My adolescent sense of hyper-vigilance, the fearful calculations I still instinctively make during every new interaction, the despair I once felt, that I must have done something to deserve this daily pain – all of it exacts its own insidious emotional and physical toll.

I feel it in my musculature, when my shoulders seize with anxiety; I am still paralyzed, occasionally, by terrible tension headaches. I have been told by more than one doctor that it is a medical imperative that I find a way to relax, not some idle, optional suggestion.

But I still do the daily work of reminding myself that I deserve better.

I have had to invent my own sense of dignity. I have had to work against all of those ostensibly civic actors in American life meant to support me. The teacher who called me into her office in high school to tell me that my genitals were never meant to be compatible with women’s, that the thought was anathema to God and to everyone.

The priest who told my congregation one Sunday never to apologize to homosexuals you reject. The youth group leader who told me that something had gone wrong in the way I was raised. The coworker who demanded that I explain exactly what was wrong with anti-gay laws, since anti-gay laws obviously made perfect sense.

As I grew older, I grew stronger practicing that ironically Biblical kind of voice, when I encountered subtle and unsubtle forms of oppression. “Get behind me,” I’d imagine saying, with all the force I imagined Jesus had when he addressed a troublesome Peter. “You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God.”

It takes time to form this kind of conviction in self-love. It takes effort – conscious, daily, minute-by-minute effort. It takes the love of mentors and friends who know better. And it takes time.

I encounter stories, even now, of self-concealing LGBTQI individuals, and I feel a visceral sense of empathy and a shadow of the shame that once overwhelmed me. I spent much of my teen years and early twenties overwhelmed.

I believed for a long time that death, not change, was my only escape for my distress. When every appointment, new meeting, class, or interview feels like a potential threat, it can be hard to imagine normalcy at all, much less a future. It can be easier to imagine dying, and the relief that follows dying.

Privately, many of my LGBTQI friends and I admit to each other that we never imagined reaching the age of thirty. Much less love. Much less marriage. Much less legal marriage in the country where we were born.

I’m twenty-nine now. The determination of the Supreme Court of the United States is overdue, but welcome. In the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy, overturning the Defense of Marriage Act:

The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Our efforts remain incomplete – nationwide, legalized, same-sex marriage in the United States is still to come. It is still legal, in too many parts of America, to fire or evict a person for being LGBTQI. There are still too many homeless LGBTQI teenagers violently forced out of their families.

But the repeal of a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act – paving the way for gay marriages to be recognized in California – helps, in a significant way, to ease our fear. It helps us to anticipate our futures in love and family with the sense of safety and security we deserve.

In the many homes I shared in the United States, my LGBTQI and heterosexual friends reacted. In Iowa City, where I attended graduate school, Vanessa and Natalie cried and laughed with relief in the state where they were wed years before.

In California, my birthplace, where we were heartbroken at the anti-gay vote for Proposition 8 in 2008, Megan and Amanda hugged their little son and received happy, congratulatory calls and messages from Christian family members. Their child, they realized, would have no memory of a time before marriage equality in California.

In New York City, where I made my professional life in publishing for six years, my friends gathered at Stonewall Inn in the West Village, where the modern American gay rights movement began with LGBTQI folks pushing back, literally, against oppressive police officers.

Here in Quezon City, where I live twelve to fifteen hours ahead of my American friends, I attended the University of the Philippines Pride March.

I am not sure what will happen here, where the laws are still strangled by conservative Catholicism. I do not think the people of the Philippines will claim their full LGBTQI rights until they claim their full heterosexual rights. It is admittedly a cynical thought.

But in a society where the family is the paramount unit, all couples deserve the right to conduct the elements of adult love – their relationships, their marriages, their divorces, their preparation for safe and nurtured children – without condemnation or legal obstacle.

So we march.

At University of the Philippines on June 27, I liked how young so many of us were. There were teenagers and university students participating at an age when I was still so afraid. I liked that there were elderly men and women, too, grinning with drawn rainbows on their cheeks.

I liked that there were two young women in wedding dresses, ready for each other. I liked that there were LGBTQI folks attending from every class of society. I liked the macho-seeming male athletes who grinned when marchers called to them, “Daddy! Group hug!”

I admit that I could still feel a trace of my old fear. With the celebration of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision so close, what would the backlash look like? Will they hurt us?

There were protestors, after all, holding the predictable, mean-spirited banners. They were fewer than ten, and their numbers did not grow, though many more joined the hundreds in the march. But how many Filipinos did the protestors represent?

An activist friend murmured to me that it was good for LGBTQI young people to see the protesters, the embodiment of the opposition. They remind all of us that our work in love is far from finished.

A new gay male friend and I took a photo with one of the anti-gay protestors. “I hope you have a happy life,” my friend said to her, and the protestor replied, “Jesus saves you.”

Toward the end of the day, I sat on the hood of my friend Ging Cristobal’s slow-moving, lime-green, rainbow-bedecked, Volkswagen Beetle at the back of the march. It began to rain, so Ging’s wife handed me a giant rainbow umbrella, which I opened above me. I felt like the contented denizen of a Philippine pride parade’s lone float. Jeepney drivers and athletes and other marchers paused and smiled and took photos and cheered.

I face the same uncertainty many single folks my age face, wondering about love in my adulthood. I have no idea what will happen. I am here in the Philippines now, mixed-race, with toddling Tagalog, because I believe – perhaps foolishly, sometimes – that my presence has something to offer. Should I find the right person for me in Quezon City, I look forward to the day when I can remain at home here in my motherland, as accepted and protected as I have the right to be.

But if the time comes for me to return to my birthplace, I know now that I can return less afraid. And I can bring a loving someone with me.

The relief I feel is incalculable. It cannot fit into one essay, or twenty. I will just sit with it, for now, and hope that the sense of change truly reaches my whole body, and the bodies of my friends. – GMA News

In 2000, ten years before Carlos Celdran would don a bowler cap and burst into an ecumenical service in Manila, I sat in the pew of Saint Julie Billiart’s Church in Southern California. I was where I was every Sunday during my adolescence: next to my mother, listening to the homily.

My mother is Filipina. She grew up in a poor family the size of a basketball team. Between her and my Sicilian father, Catholicism informed my existence in a natural, everyday kind of way. I grew up knowing to say the Ateneo, steeped in her gratitude to the Jesuit university that made her a scholar, lifted her from poverty, and offered her the education and the wisdom that allowed her to thrive as a computer programmer in California. She and my father chose Saint Julie’s as their home parish in Newbury Park, California. I received my First Communion there, I watched my younger brothers squirm under the water of their baptisms, and in a year, I’d wear a red robe and be confirmed in the Church.

It was a quiet, holy, inviolable space, where I could keep up a quiet, earnest dialogue with Christ and the saints, aided by the Irish priests who spent their lives speaking to us behind the pulpit. I felt safe there.

Until that day in 2000, when the Father said the words Proposition Twenty-Two.

I had seen the signs everywhere in town: Yes on Prop 22. Protect Families. Protect Children. It was the first anti-gay measure in California, before Prop 8 eight years later.

The priest sounded angry. “The bishops say we should speak of homosexuals with compassion even as we vote for Proposition Twenty-Two, a law that protects natural families and preserves natural marriage.” He paused. “No. We should not apologize to these people. We should not support sin.”

I had the urge, for the first time in my life, to stand and shout in church. I didn’t know what I would shout. But the space I’d known all my life as somewhere safe, somewhere peaceful, somewhere prayerful, had suddenly been transformed. It was sharp with an agenda now.

And—oh, Christ, how terrifying to realize it then, alone at age 16: this Church’s sharp agenda was aimed at me. I did not know what to do with the new dimensions of my fear.

So as the priest went on, I told my mother I needed to go to the bathroom, and I walked outside.

What could I have done? I thought. How could I have objected? I sensed that I had some responsibility here, some obligation to interrupt the new political narrative the priest had presented.

I remember I spat. It was not out of disrespect, and it was not a performance of my anger. I spat because I was so upset, so suddenly vulnerable, under this unexpected attack in the church, that I thought I was going to vomit.

But, I thought: this is a place of prayer. This is a quiet place, for religious people. I should not interrupt. I knew I should not interrupt. I breathed and tried to calm myself.

That’s when I noticed the other Catholics leaving the church after me. There were two women with a baby, with one baby bag between them. There was a teenaged boy. There was a solitary middle-aged man. There was one of my former classmates, graduated from my Catholic High School.

None of us looked at each other. We looked everywhere, except at each other. None of us acknowledged that we were all on the receiving end of this wounding new reality, in the space we once considered safe. All of us chose to keep our silence.

The priest continued, uninterrupted, benefitting from our silence, mindless of our absence, and Proposition 22 passed.

This week, Carlos Celdran was convicted under article 133 of the Revised Penal Code of the Philippines. Its exact wording: “The penalty of arresto mayor in its maximum period to prision correccional in its minimum period shall be imposed upon anyone who, in a place devoted to religious worship or during the celebration of any religious ceremony shall perform acts notoriously offensive to the feelings of the faithful.”

In 2010, Celdran offended the feelings of some Filipino Catholic faithful. He donned Jose Rizal’s famous outfit: bowler cap, old-fashioned suit, and moustache. He entered an ecumenical service in Manila, shouted, and held up a sign: DAMASO. Every Filipino assigned to read Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere grows up knowing what Damaso means: someone who used the sacrosanct, public power of his holy, deified station to push forward his own wounding agendas. “Stop getting involved in politics!” Celdran shouted.

When police took him outside, he said he was speaking for the ninety percent of Filipinos who want the passage of the Reproductive Health Bill. The RH Bill passed, finally, in December 2012, despite over a decade of opposition funded by the priests of the Catholic Church.

Celdran’s public disruption garnered its inevitable detractors. Some Filipinos accused him of creating drama and playing for attention. He is, by profession, a performance artist and a tour guide, someone who builds his livelihood on attention. His work has been featured in the BBC and the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. He has been a brand ambassador for Durex, and passed out free condoms to poor community members during his tours.

Beyond his protests for the Reproductive Health Bill, Celdran is not a Filipino who keeps silent. He is not a Filipino who adheres to the spoken and unspoken requirements of pakikisama, a value that says courteous bonds should be quietly maintained at all costs. He has objected to the building of more malls. He protests against new high-rise developments in Manila’s dwindling public spaces. He declined a tourist sponsorship from a mall corporation. He sits on the board of a nonprofit helping poor women who can’t afford contraception. He names names: SM, DMCI, Robinson’s.

When he made his conviction public earlier this week, tweeting one word—Guilty.—he garnered support, a hashtag (#FreeCarlosCeldran), more eyerolls, and more scorn. Some argued that religious spaces, of all spaces in the Philippines, should be defended, by law, from offensive public disruptions by jerks. They concede that political protest and civic disobedience is fine, sometimes necessary. But keep it out of the church. The church is not the place.

Carlos, like all Filipinos, should have kept silent. He should have let churchgoers pray in peace, in the space they chose. The law might be outdated, but the law is there, and Filipino officials should follow it—jail him accordingly, perhaps. Because when Celdran shouted, he violated a sacrosanct space. A church service should be silent except for the priest leading, and the people speaking back to him in rehearsed unison. Dissent has its place elsewhere.

I feel myself in several places at once when I read this argument. I ricochet from age 16 to age 29, from my confirmation to my continued, automatic prayers to the saints and to angels. I move from my quiet California suburb to Celdran’s Metro Manila. I say: No.

Yes, the primary purpose of a house of God is to facilitate peaceful prayer. But when priests choose to push agendas that wound women, gay teenagers, families—a whole nation attempting to meet its Millennial Goals—they transform the intended space of the church. They sap it of its worshipful neutrality. They make the church a place of aggression, with an agenda aimed sharply at many of the very congregants gathered there for guidance and safe harbor.

When that transformation takes place, the intended targets of that agenda may choose to stand and break their silence.

For many of us born abroad—for those of us whose parents spent their lives warning us about the Philippines’ poverty, corruption, overcrowding, and the apparent immobility of the medieval authority structures that facilitate it all—for those of us whose parents looked at us in horror when we asked for dual citizenship—for those of us whose parents told us, Don’t you know things will never change back home?—Carlos Celdran’s act was a bowler-capped, book-referencing rebellion against the deference a nation is still expected to pay to an abnormally powerful institution. It was a rude, loud interruption of leaders who rely on their congregants’ courteous silence to maintain their five-hundred-year-old political clout. Finally.

When Celdran was charged and convicted of “offending religious feelings,” the priests were not simply following the mandate of an old, outdated law. They were not engaging a dry procedure. They were sending a clear reply: How dare you defy us. In our house.

So. I ask. Where are we allowed to object, if not in the house where the imagination for our wounding begins? In what forum are we allowed to interrupt? With what words? With what method? In what clothing? Where is our mute obedience required? And for how long?

Who benefits from our silence?

Carlos Celdran burst into a Filipino Catholic church, held up a sign, and shouted. For a moment, he interrupted its agenda. He did what I could not bring myself to do in my own birth country, where no old law would have imprisoned me. He observed the Church’s wounding agenda, and he talked back. It was an angry, defiant gesture. It was calculated, perhaps, in its recklessness. It was loud. It was literary. It was drama. I’m glad for it, and I’m glad for the noise that followed. – HS, GMA News