Though the cinema is priced out of reach of most Filipinos, even those with reasonably good jobs, the divas were particularly keen to see the documentary Here to Stay. Its hero is a friend of theirs, Fidel Taguinod.

Made by a pair of academicscum-filmmakers at DIT, Alan Grossman and Aine O'Brien, the film follows Fidel through two years of his life in Dublin.

Fidel is a leader amongst the Filipino nursing community here.

He's a clinical coordinator at Beacon Hospital and has a number of years' experience at Beaumont under his belt. He has a master's in nursing management from UCD and is studying for a doctorate. And he's an outspoken campaigner for the rights of migrant workers in the healthcare sector.

That's by day. By night, he's simply divine.

"The pinnacle of being gay is to become a beauty queen, " he says.

"As we always say, a Filipino will always be a diva."

In both the nursing and gay Filipino communities, Fidel has become a leader: as well as agitating for migrant rights, he was instrumental in setting up Ireland's Alternative Miss Philippines competition in 2004.

Grossman and O'Brien set out to make a film about migration and migrant labour but, as Fidel became its star, the film became at least as much about his identity as a gay Filipino man in Ireland as about his role as a nurse here.

That wasn't quite what the filmmakers had expected . . . and it wasn't what Fidel's union, the Irish Nurses' Organisation, expected either.

"Somebody from the union was embarrassed that I was talking about Alternative Miss Philippines, about dressing up, and that at the same time I was acknowledged as being one of the Filipino leaders in the union, " says Fidel, over coffee in the canteen at DIT.

"I'll only be in Ireland a short time. I can't compromise the way that I am . . . enjoying myself . . . just to get on better in organisations."

The Alternative Miss Philippines came about because Fidel and his Filipino friends in Dublin missed the gay beauty pageants that were common in the Philippines, where they are mainstream events with a long tradition.

The focus for these events is traditionally a saint's feast day, or fiesta. "When we're celebrating the birthday of St Francis, or whatever saint, the culmination would be a gay beauty pageant. These are covered in the media, and shown on Filipino TV."

These aren't drag shows, he says, but beauty pageants.

"Drag queens are more identified with the Irish . . . they're tall, heavy; they still look masculine. A drag queen would still have these long eyelashes and heavy make-up . . . they're creating a different person out of themselves. A Filipino would say, this is me, I am just putting on make-up."

Fidel isn't too hung up on labels, however.

"I'm happy to be called whatever gay label they use . . . I just want to enjoy it. Transvestite, cross-dresser, ladyboy, drag queen. It's for fun, it's not really my lifestyle."

This pageantry is a critical part of Filipino gay identity . . . so much so that the word "gay" and its Filipino equivalent, "bakla", appear to be synonymous with a performative femininity.

Fidel's partner is an Irish man, John; as Fidel says, "He's not 'screaming' . . . he walks like a man." And so Fidel's friends assume John is straight. Fidel explains their logic.

"Fidel is gay, and Fidel is going out with John, so John must be straight."

Confusing? He elaborates.

"Here, gay men would go out with gay men. In the Philippines, gay men would go out with straight men.

"Gay men [in the Philippines] don't feel comfortable going out with gay men because it's not acceptable . . . it's against the 'natural' gay law that a gay man would go out with a gay man. As we say, 'As long as they don't scream' . . . as long as they behave like men, like straight men."

So, in the Philippines, gay men traditionally have relationships with straight men . . . for money. It's a form of "transactional sex", he says.

"It's changing now but that's been the culture." A friend of Fidel's in Dublin, a gay male nurse in his 30s, is supporting his twentysomething boyfriend back in the Philippines, sending monthly remittances. He's also supporting his boyfriend's wife and young child.

"It's because of poverty. The parents of this guy he's going out with in the Philippines are actually delighted . . . because of the gains [to the family]. I think genuinely they feel happy about it.

"We have this phrase in the Philippines: 'You don't want to do it, but it's better to do it than die of poverty.'

"A lot of Filipino families are like that. I call them the martyrs."

For this reason, he says, "migration has become a liberating experience for a lot of Filipino gay men. If we were in the Philippines, we wouldn't be doing a lot of this . . . I met a lot of men in the Philippines but they were straight. I can actually have a relationship with John . . . and plan for the future. If I were in the Philippines now, I'd probably be going out with a straight man who'd be dependent on me financially. It'd be a one-way relationship."

In other ways, though, the Philippines sounds like a society more open to homosexuality.

"It's very seldom that you have this 'coming out' phase or stage because parents usually know their children. If you're gay, you can't really keep it a secret. My family knew it from the very start, when I was three or four. I knew when I was four or five."

There is, he says, an ethos of "reciprocity" in families.

"It's very unusual for gay men to get married in the Philippines. A lot of parents would rely on their single children . . . in many cases it would be the gay child . . .to look after them and the family."

This makes the gay man "a hero" to his family.

Fidel came to Ireland in 2000, having trained as a nurse and spent . . . atypically . . . six years working in hospitals in the Philippines. His doctorate is on the trend that brought him to Ireland: as he puts it, "How the developed world is manipulating or controlling the Filipino nursing education for their own benefit." Though many Filipino families now aim to send their children to nursing college in order that they will emigrate . . .and send back remittances. Fidel worries about the longterm impact of this brain drain on the Philippines.

"Developed countries are trying to manipulate and control [nursing education in the Philippines] for people to migrate as early as possible. I call it the 'fasttrack' method. Rather than waiting to recruit experienced nurses, they're recruiting students."

There are programmes in partnership with American recruiters where nurses study for three years in the Philippines and do their final year in the US.

"These are the best and the brightest of the Philippines, " he says. Whereas previously, as in his case, their home country at least got the benefit of a few years of work from the nurses it trained, now there is no benefit, apart from remittances.

So will Fidel go back?

"Definitely. In spite of the hardships, I like the Philippines. I want to teach, to influence nursing education in the Philippines."

He has criticism, too, for the Irish public health system.

"They always come up with a lot of bloody reports. The way healthcare management approaches it is a fire-fighting approach . . . they don't plan strategically. If something bad happens, the minister [says], 'I'll commission this person to do an inquiry.' They're not proactive about solving problems.

"There are a lot of voluntary groups in Ireland. The government or public service will only act if they're being pressurised by a particular group. They won't do it because it's the right thing to do, they'll only do it because of pressure from groups or NGOs."

He has experienced discrimination and witnessed racism, he says, though "it's hard to pinpoint if a person is racist or not . . . the Irish people are not racist but the system is racist.

There is institutional racism." In the healthcare system, "a lot of the consultants are Irish, but most of the registrars . . . the lowerranked doctors . . . are from overseas. The system doesn't let them be consultants."

He says he has had experiences of applying for nursing positions for which he was qualified, which ultimately went to people with lesser experience or qualifications.

"I can't really say it's because I'm a Filipino, or because I'm gay."

Working on a ward once, a patient objected to being looked after by a black nurse.

Fidel told her, "If you don't want to be looked after by this black person, then nobody will look after you.

"I said to the black nurse, 'Every time you go to that patient, let's go together' . . . just to be cautious . . . I didn't want the nurse to be embarrassed because the patient might make a complaint about something."

For the filmmakers, their documentary on Fidel is "a departure from the Prime Time televisual experience". On Irish television and radio, Alan Grossman says, migrants are typically represented either in news programmes "which foreground exploitation" or in "a fairly superficial celebration of multiculturalism".

They have submitted their film to RTE but have yet to hear if the station is interested. In the meantime, it's doing the round of festivals . . . most recently in Ireland, the Dublin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and, this weekend, the Cinemanila International Film Festival in the Filipino capital. The festival version is 72 minutes but they intend to cut it to 52 minutes . . . a "television hour" . . . for TV.

It's a gentle, insightful and beautifully shot piece of work, following Fidel into the wards where he works, the apartment he shares with his partner John, the rehearsal rooms for Alternative Miss Philippines and onto the conference floor of the Irish Nurses' Organisation, where Fidel was president of the Overseas Nurses Section.

"What we're trying to do in this film is maybe complicate things a bit more, " says Grossman.

"Migrants, like all of us, are shaped by race, sex, classf There's a tendency to talk about migrants in the Irish media as being devoid of these."

"Fidel is creating integration on the ground, " adds Aine O'Brien. "This isn't a policy from the top down. This is something that's being lived."