Up-and-coming singer Geoff Mabasa on the challenges of being a queer musician

M usic is one of the many ways for the LGBTQ+ community to express themselves creatively. The recent celebration of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, Love Laban 2 Everyone!: Pride PH Festival 2024, featured a concert celebrating the community at Quezon City Memorial Circle, with a mix of artists representing the community and others who openly support the community such as Bini, Denise Julia, Juan Karlos, Cup of Joe, Gloc-9, and drag queens like Marina Summers. Although the event had to be shortened due to inclement weather, there was a visible improvement in the growing support and openness for the LGBTQ+ community in our country.

In the past, representation of the LGBTQ+ community in music was not common. It was always straight musicians who acted as a voice for the community and drew inspiration from the experiences of their friends or family members.

Rapper Gloc-9 wrote “Sirena,” a shining light on the issues and struggles faced by the LGBTQ+ community and a very personal song for his son, who is part of the LGBTQ+ community, which is why he is more than open about attending the Pride concert in support of his son.

There are now more and more openly queer artists, such as Kio Priest, who is openly gay; Denise Julia, who has hinted that she is open to any gender and wrote a song about meeting a woman who gave her a feeling of love and affection she had never experienced before; and up-and-coming artist Geoff Mabasa is returning to the music scene with the aim of representing the community.

Mabasa spoke about his personal journey in the music industry and how he struggled with writing music during his teenage years as part of the LGBTQ+ community: “In Noong College (back in college), in our songwriting classes, I would write music that was aimed at ‘her’, even though I was thinking of a boy when I was writing those songs. That influenced the way I wrote. I was always reserved and scared that I would let something slip and people would find out that I was singing songs for boys. I always felt that wanting people to listen to me wouldn’t help me professionally. It was only recently that I decided to revisit the songs I wrote back then and change everything from the perspective of a gay man who likes another boy.”

He added: “And even though I’ve now decided to start again, I can say that I’m much happier, prouder and more excited when I hear people singing my songs using the pronouns I prefer to use. It’s easy to dismiss others with pronouns, but you don’t know how much these ‘little things’ impact other people’s lives.”

Mabasa believes that the representation of queer artists in the Philippine music scene has evolved over the years. He says, “The Philippine music scene is still in the early stages of its representation, but it is still more progressive than our neighbors. I know that the Philippines is quite open to LGBTQ+ artists, but I still feel that LGBTQ+ artists in this country are expected to behave in a certain way.”

He pointed out that queer musicians are still somewhat limited in their ability to express themselves, but he is happy to see the growing number of Filipino queer musicians like him breaking into the music scene and would like to see more of them in the future and would love to collaborate with some of them.

Mabasa released the song “Paramdam” on July 26. The song has nostalgic themes that remind one of the 2010s and echoes a familiar sound. He calls “Paramdam” an open love letter to the straight boy he had a crush on in college.

Mabasa mentioned that he assembled a world-class team for the song, working with members of Southborder as well as one of the best young sound engineers in the country for “Paramdam”.