Like the serendipitous circumstances of fieldwork with which I began and which lead one into the surprising and unexpected, the trope of first arrival is often, as Abu-Lughod (1993: xv) notes, part of the regular repertoire of ethnographic representations. However, I did not arrive in the Philippines as a first-time visitor. Rather I was returning to an area in the southern Philippines where I had previously lived as a child with my parents, who had, from 1968 up until the time I began fieldwork, been working there as Protestant missionaries with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. I note this here because while it is not a primary or even secondary focus of my ethnography, it is nevertheless part of the background to my interest in the culture and people living in this part of the world, and impinges on both my experiences and the locations of fieldwork.

I made an initial survey trip with my father from Manila to Zamboanga, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi in November 1990 and was joined in the Philippines the following month by my wife Heidi and our two sons Eliott (then 4) and David (then 2). Most of the research on which this book is based was carried out over an approximately eighteen-month period from January 1991 to July 1992. About the time of our arrival, my parents had been transferred to Manila, and our family moved into their flat in Zamboanga City, where I spent the first six months language- learning and doing initial surveys of household consumption practises in the small, mainly Muslim Tausug and Sama community of Paniran. More importantly, it was during this time that I became interested in transgenderally identified men, largely owing to the influence of my language assistants, who took me along to several gay beauty contests.