There’s a lot you can say about President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte, and you would probably start with the thousands of extrajudicial killings he has been carrying out for decades and the killings that he himself claims to have personally done. While not quite as noteworthy (or important) as the violent and bloody way he has decided to tackle the illegal drug trade in the Philippines (which has mostly had drug users, petty criminals, and street children as casualties), Duterte also has a reputation for saying things that range from wildly offensive to patently batshit.
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This week he’s making headlines for claiming that he used to be gay, until he was cured by meeting his former wife. According to an Agence France-Presse report, Duterte made the comments during a speech he gave in Tokyo last week to members of the city’s Filipino community.
In the speech, Duterte said that a vocal critic of his, Senator Antonio Trillanes, was gay, and that “any gay person who sees [him] move, [will] say he’s gay“. Duterte followed this up by saying that, in that way, he and Trillanes were “similar“, but that unlike Trillanes he had “cured” himself with the help of beautiful women. Duterte claimed that starting a relationship with his now ex-wife, Elizabeth Zimmerman, made him “a man again“.
US president Donald Trump has been vocally supportive of Duterte’s approach to drug crime and in November of 2017… well, this happened:
