It rained the whole time. Manila’s weather had been erratic all week, and July 25 was no exception. People came anyway, filing into Midnight Dream Studio in Makati, shaking off umbrellas, for a portrait exhibition that asked something harder of its subjects than good lighting: to be looked at fully, without flinching first.

That was the premise of Malaya: Bodies Without Apology, staged by Hara Clinic in collaboration with Midnight Dream Studio and The Red Whistle. Malaya means free. Dr. Deano Reyes, the clinic’s medical director, put the concept plainly when I spoke with him that evening: the project asks its participants “to be able to present themselves as their most authentic selves, to be unapologetic about who they are, to be free, to express their truest selves. That’s the concept behind Malaya.”

Two Anniversaries, Two Different Parties

Malaya wasn’t a standalone event — it was how Hara Clinic chose to mark its second year in operation. The first anniversary, Dr. Reyes told us, was a thanksgiving party. This one was deliberately something else. “This year, we want it to be advocacy-leaning,” he said.

That shift matters more than it might sound. In two years, Hara Clinic went from a four-person staff to twenty-nine. It’s still a single branch, but Dr. Reyes is already scouting locations outside Metro Manila — specifically in areas with large LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and other sexual and gender minorities) populations that currently have limited access to the kind of care his clinic provides, “because every single Filipino deserves this type of health care: sensitive, genuine, and is willing to meet you where you are.”

The subjects photographed for Malaya weren’t models in the professional sense. “Some of them are my patients, some are friends we met along the way, literally anybody who felt malaya — free — to express themselves,” Dr. Reyes said. Among them was Drei Arias, freshly crowned Mr. Gay World Philippines 2026, who’d spent his coronation night telling a room “there’s no shame in surviving.” A few weeks later, he was back in front of a camera built around the same idea, minus the sash and the stage.

The Prints Have a Job to Do

The portraits weren’t just for looking at. Niccolo Cosme, the photographer behind the project and founder of The Red Whistle, told us the prints are available for order, with part of the proceeds going directly to the organization. “Since Hara and the Red Whistle have been working together for the past several years in several successful programs that deal with HIV-AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), gender-affirming programs as well as SOGIE (sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression), the proceeds will go to the Red Whistle,” Cosme said.

Cosme has been doing this work since 2011, when he founded The Red Whistle to mobilize the country’s creative community around HIV/AIDS awareness — an extension of Project Headshot Clinic, a campaign UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS) liked enough to replicate in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Macau. Pair that history with a clinic that’s grown sevenfold in two years, and the math behind Malaya starts to make sense: this wasn’t charity as an afterthought bolted onto an art show. It was two organizations that already fund each other’s work, using portraiture to fund it a little more.

That funding has a specific destination. Dr. Reyes was direct about it: Hara wants to build financing schemes that let more community members access health care they otherwise couldn’t afford. “Gender-affirming care is a life-saving care so everybody deserves it,” he said — and as a private clinic, Hara can’t absorb the full cost of that promise alone.

Why “Advocacy-Leaning” Wasn’t a Small Choice

That last point connects to something bigger than one clinic’s growing pains, and it’s worth pulling the thread all the way out.

Dr. Reyes pointed to the pullout of US funding as part of why this year’s anniversary needed to be about advocacy rather than celebration. He wasn’t speaking in the abstract. Since early 2025, the Trump administration’s cuts to PEPFAR — the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which for two decades has been the single largest funder of HIV programs worldwide — have rippled through community health organizations globally, and the Philippines hasn’t been spared.

A 2025 UNAIDS feature on the Philippines specifically flagged the cancellation of programs like the Free to be YOUTH HUB, a youth-focused HIV prevention initiative, as a direct casualty of the freeze. Russell Elloso of Network Plus Philippines, the umbrella group for people living with HIV in the country, put the stakes bluntly: infection rates among younger Filipinos are still climbing, with no plateau in sight, even as the tools meant to fund prevention work get pulled out from under it.

The scale internationally is hard to overstate. Congress appropriated roughly $6 billion for PEPFAR in fiscal year 2026, but health advocates say the actual amount released has run well below that, alongside an overall 30 percent cut to the program’s spending. Prevention funding specifically dropped 51 percent between fiscal years 2024 and 2025 — the steepest cut of any category — and services for key populations, including gay and bisexual men and transgender women, absorbed the heaviest impact. UNAIDS projects that if the cuts hold, the world could see millions of additional HIV infections and deaths by the end of the decade.

That’s the backdrop Dr. Reyes was naming when he said “a lot of our community members lost access to free health care.” Hara Clinic can’t replace a US federal program. What it can do is what it did on July 25: turn a room full of portraits into a small, direct financing mechanism for the community it already serves — proof that when the larger machinery of funding pulls back, the response doesn’t have to be to wait it out.

An Open Invitation

Dr. Reyes said he’s inviting people to take part in future projects built the same way. There’s no announced date yet for the next one — just the standing offer, open to anyone willing to sit for a camera and be seen without editing themselves first.

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Field Notes

Event: Malaya: Bodies Without Apology Date: July 25, 2026 (rain notwithstanding) Venue: Midnight Dream Studio, 4F Top of the Glo, K-Park, Glorietta 1, Makati · IG/FB: @midnightdreamph Organized by: Hara Clinic, Unit 201, JNCV Building, Rosemarie Lane, Pasig Blvd., Pasig City · IG: @hara_clinicph — marking its second anniversary, in collaboration with Midnight Dream Studio and The Red Whistle Led by: Dr. Deano Reyes (Medical Director, Hara Clinic) and Niccolo Cosme (photographer, founder of The Red Whistle) Prints: Available to order; proceeds benefit The Red Whistle

Related: Drei Arias, one of the evening’s participants, was crowned Mr. Gay World Philippines 2026 in June — [read that story here].