CLOBAN, Philippines (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When Filipino hotel manager Jerick Florano used to open Grindr on his smartphone, the same four or five faces always greeted him on the dating app for gay and bisexual men.There was practically no gay scene in Tacloban, a provincial city of 220,000 people in the Eastern Visayas region of the Philippines, where Florano lives.
"There wasn't much going on, but all that changed when lots of foreigners came to Tacloban to help with the reconstruction after the typhoon," the 27-year-old said, referring to Super Typhoon Haiyan which devastated the city two years ago.
"Suddenly, my Grindr became the United Nations," Florano said in an interview at the trendy city centre hotel he has been managing since 2012, when he moved to Tacloban from the capital Manila.