They turned a number into a knife.

At first, it sounded harmless—three digits tossed around like loose change. 150. Something you could slip from your pocket without thinking, something small enough to lose, cheap enough to ignore. But numbers can bruise, too. Numbers can be learned early, memorized by the body, carved into the skin. And this one? This one learned how to cut.

I was walking through one corridor when I smelled alcohol before I felt fear. A group of guys stood to the side, bottles in their hands, laughter spilling carelessly into the air. I told myself to keep going. Head forward. Don’t look. Don’t react. That is how we are taught—to make ourselves smaller so the world won’t hurt us as much.

Then they spoke. “Pst, wampipti!”

Not my name. Never my name. Just that word, hurled like a stone. In that moment, I stopped being a person and became a price. A number. Something they could label, laugh at, and reduce into an object of desire and disgust all at once. My chest tightened, but my feet kept moving. Because for people like me, stopping can be dangerous.

As I passed them, anger followed me like spit on my back.

“Arte netong baklang ’to, kung kani-kanino ka naman nagpapatira.”

They said it as if they knew my life. As if my body belonged to their imagination, their judgment, their cruelty. With one sentence, they stripped me of dignity, painted my existence as something dirty, something public, something cheap. I wanted to turn around. I wanted to scream that I was more than their mouths could ever understand. But I didn’t. Most of us don’t. We learn early that silence is sometimes the only way to stay safe.

That is what the idea of wampipti does. It follows us home. It lingers in our minds long after the laughter has died, replaying itself in quiet moments we are supposed to feel safe. It teaches us to guard our joy, to soften our softness, to fear something as ordinary as walking down a hallway. It convinces us that loving differently makes us less human—that our lives can be reduced to rumors, prices, and numbers.

Sometimes I find myself asking, why are we always the ones hated? Belittled? Pitied? If they cannot respect us for being homosexual, the least they could do is respect us for being human. We are human. We feel pain the way they do. We carry emotions the same way they do. We get tired, we get hurt, we hope, we love. And just like them, we walk the same corridors—only ours are heavier, because we walk them while constantly being reminded that the world is watching, judging, and ready to wound.

By the time I reached the end of the corridor, my hands were shaking and my eyes burned, but I was still standing. And I know I am not alone. Somewhere, another gay man is walking faster. Somewhere, a lesbian lowers her head. Somewhere, a trans woman tightens her grip on courage just to cross a room. Different faces, same fear. Same story.

That number doesn’t define us. It never did, and it never will. Wampipti is not our name, not our worth, not the truth of our lives. It is the language of people who refuse to see us as human.

For every LGBT person who has learned to survive corridors, stares, whispers, and words meant to break us—this is not your shame. We are not jokes, not prices, not objects of lust. We are people who continue to live, to love, and to walk forward despite everything.

We are not jokes whispered over bottles. We are not rumors about bodies they will never understand. We are children to our parents, friends and lovers, people who have learned to be brave in small, quiet ways—by continuing to live, by choosing to exist in a world that keeps trying to erase us.

Wampipti tried to make us feel small, cheap, and disposable. But here we are—still breathing, still walking, still loving. And that is our resistance. That is our truth.

We are more than the words they used to hurt us. We are more than their cruelty. We are more than a number.

The Frontman