The book is a descriptive survey of popular and academic writings on and by Filipino male homosexuals, as well as a genealogy of discourses of male homosexuality and the bakla and/or gay identities that emerged in urban Philippines from the1960s to the present. This conceptual history engages recent events in the Philippines' sexually self-aware present, but also explores colonial history in showing how modernity implanted a new sexual order of "homo/hetero" and further marginalized the effeminate local identity of bakla.