Philippine Gay Culture: J. Neil C. Garcia

Philippine
Gay Culture
Binabae to Bakla
Silahis to MSM
J. Neil C. Garcia
in association with
The University of the Philippines Press
Hong Kong University Press
14/F Hing Wai Centre
7 Tin Wan Praya Rd
Aberdeen
Hong Kong
© J. Neil C. Garcia 1996, 2008, 2009
First published by The University of the Philippines Press in 1996,

with a second edition in 2008
This edition published by Hong Kong University Press
in association with The University of the Philippines Press in 2009
ISBN 978-962-209-985-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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Contents
A Transgressive Reinscription ix
Author’s Note for the Second Edition xi
Preface xv
Introduction 1
Part One
Philippine Gay Culture 39
Chapter One 61
The Sixties
Chapter Two 82
The Seventies
Chapter Three 151
Precolonial Gender-Crossing
and the Babaylan Chronicles
Chapter Four 198
The Eighties
Chapter Five 223
The Nineties
Chapter Six 246
Prologue
vii
viii | Philippine Gay Culture
Part Two
The Early Gay Writers: Montano, Nadres, Perez 276
Chapter One 287
Where We Have Been:
Severino Montano’s “The Lion and the Faun”
Chapter Two 334
Orlando Nadres and the
Politics of Homosexual Identity
Chapter Three 361
Tony Perez’s Cubao 1980:
The Tragedy of Homosexuality
Conclusion 387
Philippine Gay Culture: 420

An Update and a Postcolonial Autocritique
Notes 457
Bibliography 507
Index 527
Introduction
That Philippine gay culture exists is an insight not very difficult to arrive at.
In our country, gays may be found virtually everywhere, and what’s strange
is they have a distinct quality about them which is sometimes unnerving,
sometimes welcome if only that it’s funny. Gays speak funnily, swish their hips,
and wave their broken wrists as though by doing so they are already movie
stars. They claim to know one another with the help of their noses, which
are especially keen in ferreting out “fishy uteruses” (malalansang matris) from
up to five miles away. They need this skill because they say one just cannot
trust appearances these days: some macho men are actually nelly little girls
once the lights go out. They also have their “haunts,” or places in which they
gather—in loud and flaming clusters inside malls, on campuses, and in the
beauty parlors which are their privileged locales because they invariably work
there. Randy and misguided boys go to these parlors a lot, for free haircuts,
ready cash, and something unspeakable. Gays are very vain. They try to look
like women when they know they really aren’t, like those impersonators that
compete with each other on “Super SiReyna,” a gaudy cross-dressing contest
on the top-rating noontime variety show, Eat Bulaga. It is plain to see that all
gays are pathetically fascinated with becoming real women, and with having
real men as lovers and lifetime partners. Of course, they’ll never be women,
and they’ll never find men who’ll love them for who they are—which is to say,
without some kind of monetary exchange or other.
Honestly, however, what everybody wants to ask is: Why are gays that way,
and what on earth do they talk about when they speak in the gratingly shrill
and punningly raucous way that they do?
1
2 | Philippine Gay Culture
The spirit or “intent” of this question, though perhaps honestly curious

and inquisitive, is as suspect as the preceding paragraph because it is just as
impertinent and viciously condescending: And why shouldn’t gays be that
way, and why do other people have to know? This study wants to avoid the self-
righteousness and condescension propelling nearly all academic inquires into
the topic of gays and their “culture,” primarily by making sure the dichotomy
They/Us does not become operative and thereby detract from its simultaneously
academic and testimonial goal. In many ways, and to all intents and purposes,
I am the loud and pathetic creature who wants to be a woman, and to have a
real man as a lover, and I am undertaking this study because I want to know
who I am, and why I am different from all those people I have been taught as a
child are good and beautiful and true. Certainly, I make this identification—I
am the loud …—despite the fact that I am not really all that loud or pathetic,
and neither am I that interested in having straight lovers and subjecting myself
to sexual reassignment surgery. The only reason I can perfectly identify with
the “garden variety” gay stereotype is that there is an undeniable sameness
between us: we both are homosexuals. I am different in this difference, then,
but it doesn’t quite matter because I am just as oppressed for it.
What, in the first place, is Philippine gay culture? A simple and
straightforward definition is that it is the intriguing systems of signification,
of “making sense of the world,” common to the majority of Filipino gays living
in our country who cannot be entirely free in carrying out such a significative
task. For culture may be and almost always is a response to domination,
although to say that it necessarily becomes subversive and “clandestine”
would not be very accurate either. Especially not in the case of our local gay
culture, which is arguably a response to the dominant heterosexual and macho
dispensation, but is not for this reason necessarily driven underground to
become completely ulterior or subaltern, for indeed, just a cursory look reveals
that it is pretty flagrant and mainstream hereabouts! That transvestites and
female impersonators can become stand-up comics and entertainers in our
country, and can walk the streets relatively freely without getting killed, and
that we all know or have known at least one bakla manicurista, market vendor,
or couturier in our clean, quiet, and pleasantly ordinary lives, quite easily
prove the point that gays are not exactly a “submerged” group of people in our
society. In fact, we may even venture to say that Philippine gay culture is, for
Introduction | 3
the most part, self-expression rather the societal ascription. This is something
I can confidently say, as a matter of both personal and theoretical conviction,
then: if oppression and normalization were truly total, then there would be no
philosophical position from which we could conclude that oppression exists.
It would in fact be impossible for any of us to recognize it. Nonetheless, in
the case of Filipino gays, it’s undeniable that oppression does exist, and its
existence bids us now to study it assiduously, in order to uncover the intricacy
of its inner mechanisms, and to unpack these from the inside out, up to the
point of critically “voiding” them.
Gay Culture
In the first part of this book, I will trace the history of Philippine gay culture
in the last four decades. This history will be by turns empirical and conceptual,
for as I pursue the meanings of homosexuality that circulate in metropolitan
culture through the sixties and up to the nineties, I will invariably be needing
to go beyond this spatial/temporal plane, and into the “epistemological field”
from which these very same meanings and definitions emanate. As I discuss
the dominant pattern of male homosexuality as a psychosexual inversion (a
view that takes homosexual males to be psychologically “inverted” females),
for example, I will have to come face-to-face with a model of local subjectivity
which is the Tagalog-Filipino binarized self: loob/labas (literally: “inside/
outside”). As I attempt to explain the cultural allowance for male-to-female
transvestism and effeminacy, I will be led back to narratives of precolonial
and early colonial gender-crossing, as they may be inferred from the babaylan
chronicles. Needless to say, the history of Philippine gay culture is hardly a
purely indigenous narrative, as should be clear when we wade into the heady
waters of the 1970s, the time when the Philippines adopted its own versions
of what had been raging as a kind of “Sexual Revolution” in the United States
and other parts of the West in the previous decade. Hence, we will have to
implicate such neocolonial “implantations” in this study as well.
Suffice it to say that the conceptual boundaries between gay and mainstream
cultures are hardly impermeable. As should be obvious to the cultural critic or
“student,” there is always just as much evidence that cultures are distinct as
evidence that they are the same, and what probably makes a culture unique in
the final analysis is its differently permeable ability to disappear and reappear
as a separate object of scrutiny against a variegated backdrop, depending on
the optic through which one sees—which is to say, depending on the questions
and assumptions one wishes to “see” it from.
Nonetheless, it is not true that just because my main interest is to elucidate
the organizing structures underwriting gay culture (and therefore to employ
a “knowledge/power” model in a discussion of its history) then it is no longer
possible for me to designate to it certain empirically-arrived-at truths. For
instance, the realization that most popular writings on homosexuality are
actually homophobic and dismissive of it makes no necessary nullifying claim
to the fact that certain fabulous events did happen and certain fabulous things
did get done—for example, this or that beauty pageant for gays did take place,
with this or that famous person in attendance, etc. I maintain that the empirical
project of tracing gay history remains a most feasible one, especially when
it is complemented by the kind of critical inquiry that seeks not universally
immanent but only specifically situated “truths.”
At this point in our local and national histories, I am altogether convinced
that an empirical rendering of gay culture is necessary, especially since most
Filipino gays know very little about “their past.” It would indeed be nice if
more and more gay researchers were to put their minds to documenting all
the beauty contests, plays, parties, and all the other performances that seem
to have constituted and defined Philippine gay life for the past three decades.
While such a project can be dismissed for being a purely empiricist one, it
nevertheless answers to the twin needs for remembrance and posterity. (It is
my hope, then, that some way or other the “notes” and “bibliography” sections
at the end of this book provide rewardingly in this direction.) In any case,
the imperative for representation which I succumb to in this study may be
said to moot the admittedly academic, albeit legitimate, concern regarding the
reliability of so-called ill- or newly documented facts—“things” an otherwise
purely empirical project could scarcely care about. With respect to this issue,
my conviction is that most of the effeminate or bakla homosexuals whose
articulations have come to constitute the more visibly documented aspects
of Philippine gay culture may all be reasonably assumed to be capable of
representing themselves.
Introduction | 5
The questions I will be attempting to answer in the first part of this study
are as follows:
1. What are the male homosexual identities that constitute Philippine gay
culture?
2. Why is there no gay liberation movement in the Philippines?
Actually, the second question should precede the former, if only because I
initially posed them that way. As a gay academic and advocate, I had been one
to wonder why no unified, continuous effort to organize might be observed
among the gays of my generation. This query led me to inquire into just who
the gays were who comprised my generation, and it serendipitously dawned
on me that a kind of “conflict” exists among the ranks of urban-dwelling gays
in the Philippines, who are really a variegated, noisy, and helplessly provisional
“conglomeration” of people, whose inability to liberate themselves from
homophobic oppression is not only because they have internalized it, but also
because real forces in their lives, almost indistinguishable from who they think
they are, make such alliances and “allo-identifications” difficult if not virtually
impossible. When I began work on this project, it was clear to me that this has
been the situation for quite a while now.
The second part of this book is my attempt to come up with a specific
literary strategy to recuperate, read, and radicalize the gay writings of Severino
Montano, Orlando Nadres, and Tony Perez, whom I consider as three of the
Philippines’ first—“early”—gay writers. It’s interesting to realize that these
three male homosexual writers all lived through the harshest years of the
Marcos dictatorship, which was when they experienced a productive period in
their artistic lives. It goes without saying that in interpreting the production of
Filipino writers and artists from this time, we must “read” their works against
the backdrop of the political and ideological circumstances that could only
have informed them. To be sure, these gay writers were not alone in this, for
while the Martial Law regime was characterized by the generalized repression
of “progressive” discourses, contrary to what might have been expected, it
also bore witness to the efflorescence of urban gay culture in what was then a
militaristically manacled Philippines.
Problematique
This study will unabashedly begin from the assumption that it is virtually
impossible to adequately represent an abject political position without
occupying this position in the first place. In other words, one of the founding
premises of this work is the conviction that a history of Filipino gays will not
only be politically incorrect, but also profoundly inaccurate and distorted, to
the degree that it is told from the point of view of somebody who is not gay.
It should, however, be added that such insistence on “authenticity” and
“subject-positionality,” though admittedly smacking of academic correctness,
means only to address the ostensibly political absence of gay scholars in the
veritable field of research in which they should logically be found. Although
it is never completely the case that knowledge—finally—turns inutile every
time its provenance lies “outside” its purported object of inquiry, I maintain
that my being intimately indissociable from the very topic I am discussing can
only increase rather than diminish its “usefulness,” in the end. If anything, the
uniquely intriguing synthesis of the personal and the history that both haunts
and overtakes it will render this particular version of Philippine gay culture
somewhat relevant in—and revealing of—some other things which another
less reflexive study may not even be remotely aware of.
For the purposes of this introduction, the word “gay” may be regarded
as the signifier for the collective identity of genitally male individuals whose
love objects are other “genital males.” It is really more than just a synonym for
“male homosexual,” however, as it is simultaneously a given and an imagined
category of being and becoming, which signifies a certain teleology of identity
that eventuates in its liberation from the shackles of homophobia. As we know,
homophobia is the socially endorsed, prejudiced hatred and persecution of gays
and lesbians (homosexual women), because of their same-sexual orientation.
Homophobia may be institutional or personal: the first is borne out by the
hypocritical and untenable belief that sexual behavior should always be yoked
onto procreation, which in turn assures the existence of the conjugal family;
the second is largely the product of ignorance of and noncontact with “avowed
homosexuals.”1 Obviously, the institutional fear of “purely pleasurable” or
“unprocreative” sexuality privileges heterosexual unions at the same time that it
reduces the bodies of women to their reproductive capacity; thus homophobia
Introduction | 7
and misogyny are intimately linked to one another. And the discourse and
practice of “gay liberation” are both the end and the means (in other words, the
theory) to dismantle homophobia in what, globally speaking, predominates as
a masculine-ascendant, heteronormative, and patriarchal culture.
Because this study is pioneering in that it is the first to academically
inquire into the history and writings of Philippine gay culture from the avowed
perspective of one who is gay, it is necessary to explain several other assumptions
out of which it is coming. These include the problem of “depersonalized,” so-
called scholarly “objectivity,” as opposed to intersubjective research, issues of
containment, and the question of a Philippine gay theory, given the preexistent
fact of cultural and historical incongruity: the Philippines is not the West,
and therefore, abstractions that are specific to the West may not so easily
be employed in our cultures, especially not when it comes to experiences as
distinct and as culturally malleable as sex and gender relations.
Likewise, the dominant literary modes and the canon need to be
interrogated, as obviously the gay writings of Montano, Nadres, and Perez
are all positioned in contradistinction to them. A strategy of literary reading
that is specifically gay can only be beneficial to any study of Philippine gay
culture, and, as with the latter, it needs to be culled from Philippine gay texts
themselves.
History from Within and Containment Theory
When I first conceived of this project, it was of a totally different form from
what it has herein finally assumed: a narrativization of gay culture, identities,
and politics more personal than I would have preferred. In other words, I had
not planned on writing a “history from within,” insofar as any history that
is told in the present tense and from the first-person (plural or singular, the
difference is moot) point of view may be so called. My somewhat paranoid
complaint against this brand of scholarship was that it was “not very scholarly,”
precisely. In hindsight, however, and after having begun the actual writing of
this study, the distance that I thought would be necessary for a project like
this proved to be chillingly tokenist and noncommittal, especially when faced
with the reality of oppression to which both I and this particular work of mine
aspired to offer something of a curative.
In many different ways, and for many different reasons, the history from
which I very much wanted to detach myself was “my self,” precisely. The section
in the first part of this work about the gay culture of the eighties, for instance,
could only include me, because I was there. Boy George, Fanny Serrano, Roda.
These were the “models” for being gay that, evidently or not, have helped shape
me, determine me. In other words, I have, in timely enough fashion, come to
realize how it is not so convincing—not to mention wise and fair to myself—to
appeal to objectivity, when my very survival is at stake. “History from within” is
therefore necessarily prejudiced against the very idea of objectivity, inasmuch
as objectivity has, for the longest time, been deployed to suppress and destroy
the individuals who people such a history. In this study, gays get to have their
say about what they want, who they are, and what, in their book, defines the
world, love, happiness, and whatever “other” reality they have intimate and
powerful investments in.
The perspective on gay cultural history which I endorse here views it as
being, at heart, a story of resistance. Although the cultural critique to which
my methodology is indebted takes dominant and subordinate cultures as
mutually exclusive and antagonistic forces always in a state of struggle, my
chosen perspective will be from the subordinate’s coign of vantage. This critical
decision professes, to be sure, certain strengths as well as certain weaknesses.
The strengths include, among other things, the granting of point of view and
the investiture of a distinct identity, to gays, as well as the concomitant agency
such moves entail. One weakness is that in so focusing on the homosexual
minority’s positive projection of itself—its subjectivity and reactive agency—I
may be overlooking the chances that, and eliding the actual instances wherein,
such gestures and strategies are themselves contained and/or relegitimated by
the dominant ideology. In other words, just because gays have been able to
textualize themselves, it does not necessarily mean such textualizations are
ultimately “good” for them. The theoretical concern over the violent dynamics
of subversion and containment has been expressed by various oppositional
intellectuals all over the world, and the implications of this so-called
“containment theory” are intriguingly relevant to this project, too; hence, they
can only deserve some discussion of their own.
Increasingly in the West, “containment” has understandably become an
important issue among a number of postmodernist critics, since they deem the
Introduction | 9
unified Self of humanism to have all but disappeared in contemporary times.

Armed with this presupposition, they engage in critiques of modernist texts
and declare the instances of transgression, if at all, within them to be contained,
because premised on a self-deceived notion of the autonomous subject. At
an earlier period in European history, this freely determining subject, or
essential Self—originator and agent of change and site of otherness/radical
difference itself—had been seen by radical humanists as being characterized
by authenticity and integrity. In particular, early Western homosexual writers
like André Gide and Marguerite Radclyffe Hall (the lesbian author of The Well
of Loneliness) wrote about the homosexual as a naturally good individual who
had a lot to contribute to humanity, given the compassionate opportunity to do
so.2 Subjectivity, in this specifically humanist construction, was still predicated
on a model of interior selfhood, of identity as psychic depth, and these writers
invariably appealed to it when they justified their declarations of their own
homosexuality as “a search for authenticity.”
However, more recent cultural critiques, drawing from the massive
revisionings by such anti-humanist movements as structuralism and
poststructuralism, Marxism, Freudianism, and feminism of the foundational
doctrines of Western modernity, have all come to conclude that in the
postmodern (in Marxist terminology, “late capitalist”) period, subjectivity
has become fragmentary, groundless, multiple, and nomadic. According
to postmodern theories of the incoherent subject, discursive formations so
interpellate subjects in overlapping and discrete ways, that finally there is no
longer any transcendental and foundational Self, only “networks of libidinal
attachments.”3 Consequently, any revolutionary project grounded on the telos
of essential and universal Selfhood will only end up, after a much protracted
and harrowing search, with the selfsame power from which it has so wanted
to take flight. Discursive formations through which power is exercised are also
the very formations constituting subjectivity.
The other version of containment theory applies to the radical project of
reversing the terms of a binary opposition. According to containment theory,
the end result of such an inversion is simply the theoretical containment within,
and the actual reproduction of the structure of, binarity. Thus, the transgressive
aesthetic of writers like Jean Genet, although critical of the privileging of the
Self in a politically charged project such as gay liberation, to the degree that
they merely invert the hierarchies of logocentric thought, in this light is seen
merely to be yet another instance of containment.
But containment presumes that subversion is ever only an effect of the
exercise of power. The view that I will take in this project is that this is not
necessarily so. Via what Jonathan Dollimore calls “transgressive reinscription,”
the very instance of subversion may be traced back to the power which has
ironically produced it, but rather than becoming contained, subversion may
then be seen to possibly transvaluate and therefore modify the repressiveness
of power itself, chiefly by exemplifying how resistance is always capable of
producing dissidence—and likely to do so. By demonstrating the inherent
contradictions within and the very instability of hegemonic control itself,
transgressive reinscription makes it possible to see reversals of the binaries
natural/unnatural, heterosexual/homosexual, masculine/feminine, and depth/
surface to be in fact revolutionary undertakings.4 We must remember that
these binaries describe the violent hierarchies which have policed social
and epistemological life in the West; hence, they have been the targets of the
initial deconstructive projects of feminism, gay and lesbian discourse, and
postmodernism itself.
Therefore, any history that articulates the subjectivity of an abject group
in society is always potentially dangerous to the dominant culture. The catch is
that, as is basically the case with any kind of social struggle, inversion will also
most likely engender a violent counterreaction, as inversion does not reveal
only those contradictions within the particular binary that has been inverted,
but also contradictions within the other elements of the social formation in
general which gather around the privileged term of the binary. Any project
whose end result is the production of dangerous knowledge is potentially
dangerous to everybody, but it is most acutely dangerous to the subordinate
culture which has called the fixity of the specific metaphysical binary into
question. By the mere act of calling more attention to themselves, subordinate
groups/individuals already risk further marginalization, if not demonization,
by the dominant dispensation. As we know, demonization is the process
whereby all other conflicts that have been festering within the dominant get
displaced onto the subordinate, as a form of psychosocial projection. These
conflicts, in the case of homosexuals, are not simply about sexuality alone, but
also about gender, class, race, and ethnicity.
Introduction | 11
Which is why, ultimately, this project can do either of two things: circulate
meanings of homosexuality which will prove helpful to the homosexuals
themselves; or court a conservative backlash that will bear witness to a more
sustained and comprehensive persecution of gays and lesbians. Either way,
transgressive knowledge is produced, and though essentialist in many respects,
the assumptions of Philippine gay culture, as well as the many different
assertions made by the male homosexual personalities and authors I have
chosen to study here, may just prove an indispensable stage in what could later
turn out to be a more constructionist and transgressive project. Nonetheless,
the thought of the second scenario—that of a backlash—though daunting
enough, has not really dissuaded me, precisely because between remaining
silent and expressing myself, it is silence that is always the less livable way
to live—and love. The analogy for this can only properly be a personal one,
again: “coming out” with a history from within gay culture is always better
than dying in the musty depths of the closet of nonexistence. The personal
connects inextricably with the public once seen in the light of the annihilating
experience of oppression.
In other words: the closet of Philippine gay history is my closet, and this
is my own liberation. Likewise, my hope is that our national history’s closet
will empty a little with this work, and at the very least allow a booster of air
and light into the breathless inanimation and dolor to which closetedness
reduces everyone. Should much more persecution follow this declaration of
gayness within the many imaginative and “historic” spaces where there used
to be none, I am only sorry for not being able to fight fire with a much shriller,
eerier, and more discomfiting backfire. After all, the shout of transgression that
writes itself back on the page of conformity is one of dissident and troubling
identification, both familiar and rebellious: I am like you—we are alike—but
not quite!
Moreover, this present work may be understood as partaking of what
Dollimore calls the characteristically modern imperative of the Nosce Te
Ipsum (“Know thyself ”), although this time it is less one’s “self ” one begins to
know by reading one’s own histories and narratives than the different forces
which have shaped this self, the many different definitions coming from many
different books and many different minds about who one is/“are.” This task
is as necessary now as it was to anybody who ever wanted to escape from
oppression, who ever wanted to transform the “world/nature” (now seen to

be, in fact, discursive formations) in order to better him/herself. With this
work, I also hope to make available to other Filipino gays a model for self-
criticism, especially since, for the longest time in our nation’s history, our lives
have largely been inaccessible to ourselves.
The Question of a Philippine Gay Theory
The AIDS pandemic and its initial homosexualization have seen the
revitalizing of gay communities in the West, where the already difficult problem
of homophobic discrimination has joined forces with, and found legitimation
in, the identification, early in the pandemic, of AIDS with male homosexuality.
AIDS, the so-called gay plague, has admittedly diminished the ranks of gays
literally, but it has not diminished their morale nor dampened the spirit of
the Gay Movement in general. On the contrary, the bitter loss of lives and the
persecution spurred by this horrific disease have spawned a new radicalism
among gays (and even lesbians). Perhaps nowhere has this progressive reaction
been more unmistakably felt than in academe, where the prevailing spirit of
political correctness has proven nourishing of, and become the new haven
for, the recently inaugurated field of knowledge and interdisciplinal research
called Gay and Lesbian Studies.
Although there has not been any evidence that AIDS will become
homosexualized anytime soon in the Philippines—as it was in the United States
and Europe—the need to open an academic clearing for homosexual issues has
long been overdue.5 More than in any other place in the world, homosexuality
in the Philippines would seem to have largely been “humorized”—that is,
obsessively rendered into an unsuitable topic for serious discussion—ever
since it started becoming a reality in the lives of city-dwelling Filipinos from
the second half of this century onward.
Such humorous dismissal of homosexuality has generally been the case
in the last three decades, even as it is becoming more and more apparent
to everyone that homosexual men and women constitute an important
minority in Philippine society. We need only turn on the television or read
the tabloids to discover the palpability of the “bakla sensibility” permeating
the very texture of our lives. Swardspeak and the notably gay affectations
Introduction | 13
which many women are now seen to be deploying, as well as the recent
resurgence of gay and lesbian organizing within several Manila campuses and
nongovernment organizations (NGOs), only point to the intransigence of
homosexuality and the growing awareness among many gays and lesbians of
their homosexual identity. Should we not also cite the increasing visibility of
gays and lesbians within the hallowed spaces of our lives? A gay father, brother,
uncle, cousin, nephew or son; a lesbian friend; a homosexual professor. No
wonder the West has seen our society, in particular, to be “tolerant” of the
tomboy and the bakla: it indeed appears, to all intents and purposes, that
we are everywhere! Such exoticizing notwithstanding, we must nonetheless
acknowledge that the immensely underhanded concept of “tolerance” is
hardly the case with our culture’s attitude toward homosexuality. In fact, as
this study of Philippine gay culture’s last thirty years indicates, the rhetorical
pronouncements of “tolerance” have been precisely just that: rhetoric. And it
is this rhetoric—as well as its concrete enactments—which has been used to
legitimate the countless instances of discrimination against homosexuals, in
terms of employment and career specification, political (mis)representation,
and symbolic ghettoization.
Gays do apparently exist in our society, but they have been either
minoritized in their occupation, or silenced (that is, closeted) about their
identities in case they are not. Among the urban poor, it may be noticed that
a marked increase in wife beatings has gone hand in hand with gay bashing,
as machismo has somehow institutionalized such forms of behavior. It isn’t
any less strange for husbands to batter their wives than for fathers and uncles
to beat up effeminate boys in an often vain, albeit shamelessly inhumane,
attempt to masculinize them. In terms of textual production, homosexuals
have also not been given an equal chance to explore, invent, and reproduce
their subjectivities in their writings or whatever mode of expression they want,
which is why the dominant representation of the homosexual has continually
been a ridiculously funny one. A joke. Stereotypes of the loud and funny faggot,
as well as of the darkly moody and vengeful tomboy are, for a long time now,
the only images heterosexuals have had of homosexuals; and more tragically,
the only images homosexuals have had of themselves.
It becomes clear, therefore, that a theory specifically attuned to the local
homosexual’s situation is needed, as long as theory may still be looked upon
as a frame of values, a battle plan or map for lives whose abjection may still
be helped if not eliminated. It may be useful to summarize the most essential
features of such a theory, even as this project cannot really pursue each of these
at length. They are as follows:
1. Gay theory in the Philippines will have to address the most basic problem
of cultural incongruity: seeing as how there are no native counterparts to
the homo/hetero distinction, in what manner may it prove illuminating to
utilize the obviously Western terms and concepts gay, homosexual, lesbian,
heterosexual? Consequently, how are these different from or similar to the
indigenous concepts binabae, binalake, bakla, lakin-on, babay-on, agi, etc.?
This part of the theory must therefore necessarily include a postcolonial
critique of the genealogy of gender and sexuality in our country, as well as
an archeological movement toward precoloniality.
2. Gay theory will have to establish sites for intervention within the dominant
macho culture, and map out the points at which issues of sexuality overlap
issues of gender oppression. This part of the theory must take cognizance of
feminism and of the local and translocal struggles for women’s liberation.
3. Gay theory should include a local and materialist critique of the class system,
as issues of homosexual prostitution, discrimination, and oppression in
general are intimately linked to class-supremacist ideologies.
In order to carry out the first function of a Philippine-specific gay theory,

it would be necessary to adopt a certain historiographic stance as regards the
question of sexuality. Or more fundamentally, a theory of sexuality needs to
be formulated, before a history of gayness/homosexuality can be coherently
postulated. There are two current “schools” of thought on the matter, and I
will now summarize each of their contentions, after which I will adopt my own
position which will become operative in this work.
Sexual orientation, or the potential/inclination of human beings to erotically
desire and pursue the desire of members of the same or the opposite sex, may
be seen in two distinct ways: (1) as a biological or psychological property to
be observed in all human populations, and (2) as an invention/label specific
only to those cultures which have deemed it an important distinction. In other
Introduction | 15
words, the first perspective sees sexuality (here functioning as another term for
sexual orientation) to be an essential, transcultural quality (like height, blood
type, skin color, etc.) which people either may choose to or cannot help but
demonstrate; while the second looks at sexuality as not culture-independent,
but simply as a social construction or socially enforced label or role ascribed
by certain cultures to what are clearly malleable human desires or behaviors.
Consequently homosexuality—which is the erotic orientation toward same-
sexual partners—may be seen either as an objectively real category that
remains essentially the same across histories and cultures, or as a category
of being which is, according to Foucault’s axiomatic study, peculiar to mid-
nineteenth-century Europe up to present-day Western civilization.6
This arguably bifurcated situation may still be complicated further by
implicating other debates: nature vs. nurture and determinism vs. voluntarism.
These debates pertain to the controversy behind conflicting theories on the
origin of homosexuality. With the first pair, the issue being raised is whether
homosexuality is inborn, or socialized. We must realize that an essentialist
theory can assert both, because what is required by it is only that homosexuality
remain a “transculturally valid” and objective category. An example of an
essentialist theory of nature is the genetic theory, which attempts to explain
people’s sexual orientations as predetermined, by hypothesizing how certain
factors already transcribe one’s sexual orientation in the genes even before
birth. An example of an essentialist theory of nurture is the “first pleasurable
experience” theory, which basically claims that the psychological inclination
toward a certain kind of sexual partner is determined—or rather, “fixed”—by
one’s first sexually pleasurable experience. It isn’t very accurate to say, then,
that all essentialist theories are necessarily determinist, because as the theory
of “first pleasurable experience” proves, it is possible to think of homosexuality
as an essential and transcultural property and yet maintain that people can
choose to have it or not (inasmuch as they can choose the gender of their first
sexual partners). On the other hand, constructionism can only (obviously)
advance a “nurture” hypothesis on the origin of sexual orientation, even as
it does not necessarily claim that the kind of socialization—as homosexuals,
bisexuals, or heterosexuals—a person goes through may be so easily chosen or
avoided (as in the case when to belong to a certain sexual orientation is pretty
much like being born into a certain socioeconomic class).7
Although seemingly contradictory, essentialist and constructionist

accounts of sexuality can actually be simultaneously assumed: to say that
societies historically invent their own sexual meanings need not foreclose
the question of whether certain properties of sexual orientation underlie
such meanings. In other words, the essentialist/constructionist debate on the
issue of sexuality need not be conflated with the profoundly confounding and
epistemological impasse between realism and nominalism. Nonetheless, to the
degree that the phylogenic inquiry on sexuality (“how human beings become
sexual”) often becomes confused with questions of sexual ontogeny (“how
a particular individual thinks he or she turns out homo- or heterosexual”),
the stakes in the debate between essentialism and constructionism remain
clearly very high. It remains most alarmingly so to the precise degree that
an asymmetrical investment of energies seems to oversee the whole issue:
both camps have simply failed to realize that any theory of the origin of
homosexuality remains dubious (and unscientific) if it can-/will not deign
to explain the genesis of heterosexuality. Scientific inquiry requires that one
develop a theory for all sexual orientations, or else one is merely paying lip
service to heteronormativity, whose debatable assumption is precisely that
heterosexuality is the natural form of desire, and therefore it needs no further
explication.
For this project, the more important theoretical issue has less to do
with adjudicating between or among competing models of sexual phylo-
or ontogenesis, than with articulating a historiography that would not be
completely essentialist by positing the existence of a universal gayness/
homosexuality across Philippine histories and cultures, and yet that would
not erase the reality of homosexuals—and consequently, of homosexual
oppression—by deeming homosexuality a pure “construction,” which is to say,
unreal (this extremism being one notable tendency in constructionism). In
other words, for the former project I will adopt a moderate constructionist
position which allows for the positing of the homosexual act as an objective
category that may be studied across histories and cultures, but for which the
homosexual person remains a specifically psychiatric and therefore a colonial
implantation into the Philippines, from at least the middle of this century
onward. For the latter, I shall make use of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s markers
on the issue of homosexuality, which plainly situates all theoretical positions
Introduction | 17
on this issue along two intersecting, finally political axes: the act/identity axis,
and the gender axis.8
Sodomy is an example of a discourse of sexual acts, more specifically
“unnatural” sexual acts, which became ascendant in Europe and its colonies—
including the Philippines—before the consolidation of the discourse of
homosexuality in the West as a form of psychopathology in the mid-nineteenth
century. Sodomy did not presume that the sodomite was a certain kind of
person who was distinct from all other people, for it could refer to all sorts
of sexual activities, and most often these were heterosexual ones. The only
requirement for a sexual act to become sodomitic was that it be not missionary
(the position), or procreative and/or conjugal, even. Hence, to read references
to sodomy in the Philippine archives would not necessarily be to read the
homosexual act—and most certainly not the homosexual person—within
our early colonial history. It would be necessary, first of all, to determine
just what kind of sodomy was being alluded to, before one could employ the
moderate constructionist perspective with regard to historical references to
the homosexual act.
By referring to the homosexual act instead of the homosexual person, I am
accomplishing two things: the assumption, mainly for heuristic purposes, of
the cross-cultural presence of distinctions of genitally marked bodies; and the
preclusion of the myth-making project of looking for gay “affectional ancestors”
(or famous homosexual personages) in our history as an oft-colonized people.
Hence, even if it can be empirically shown that this certain eighteenth-century
indio personage manifested extensively homosexual behavior in his lifetime, it
is not correct to call him gay or homosexual because this self-identification was
not possible at the time. Simply put, the abstractions of homo/hetero and gay/
straight were precisely, during such presexological periods in our history, not
available. As one of the more famous early social constructionist researchers
of human sexuality, Robert Padgug, writes:
“Homosexual” and “heterosexual” behavior may be universal: homosexual

identity and consciousness are modern realities. These identities are not
inherent in the individual … To commit a homosexual act is one thing: to be
a homosexual is something entirely different.9
Padgug further specifies that the concept of sexuality as a “private truth”

that defines us best and yet is seemingly not as important as the more public
part of our lives—where social action and change take place—is bourgeois and
oppressive, for it necessitates the definition of sexuality as a fixed essence or
determinism. This view also effectively splits the individual from his society,
and restricts all notions of struggle to the public, collective, and nonsexual
realm. (As we know, about this last point the feminists have argued otherwise,
insisting that oppression is precisely both public and private, and that the
personal is nothing if not coincident with the political.) Likewise, Foucault
has shown us that, historically, this Western, bourgeois interpretation of
sexuality as a universal category of experience later devolved into psychosexual
biologism, which then became the basis for much of the current normative
attitude that distinguishes between those whose psychosexuality is healthy,
and those whose sexual selfhood is deviant. Suffice it to say that previous to
the nineteenth century, and outside of industrialized Europe, this kind of
medicalized distinction of persons/personalities simply did not obtain.
In sum, the constructionist approach to which I moderately subscribe is,
as a whole, a perspective which assumes that
1) the way we go about studying the world is determined by available

concepts, categories and methods; 2) the concept and categories we use
vary considerably in their meaning and connotations over time and across
cultures; 3) the persistence and popularity of a certain concept, category or
method depends more on its political usefulness for social influence and
control, than on its validity; 4) descriptions and explanations of the world are
themselves forms of action and have consequences.10
And so, sexuality as an abstraction/category of erotic experience which

may seem perfectly clear to us needs to be historicized as an abstraction/
category specific to twentieth-century, Judeo-Christian, capitalist, post-
industrialist civilization. Sexuality must not be naively seen as just an
uncomplicated product of some human, transhistorical essence, but, more
important, as a variable cultural and historical reality whose forms, contents,
and contexts can potentially differ from society to society, according to the
sexual categories—and consequently, roles—within which individuals act
and define themselves. It is only proper for the historiographer of “sexuality,”
Introduction | 19
then, to try to uncover and explain the categories appropriate to each society,
before undertaking any discussion of such extremely sensitive, and hence
consequential, “truths.”
Moreover, constructionist historiography cannot be too hasty in equating
non-Western concepts of gender and sexuality with Western ones (in other
words, the specifically Western homo/hetero dualism). Cultures are self-
sufficient signifying systems which do not evolve along any single pattern
of development. Hence, it would not be accurate to impose one culture’s
definitions on another. For this reason, I will be making clear that the
traditional Philippine concept of gender-crossing—a transitivity between
genders, paradigmatically seen in the phenomenon of the binabae—is simply
not the same as homosexuality, even as the two concepts seem to be the same
in the sense that the gender-crosser’s sexual acts are invariably same-sexual
(i.e., homo-genital).
Nonetheless, within the last three decades, and in the urbanized,
“metropolitan” spaces of Philippine life, homosexuality may be shown to have
already been implanted as a discourse, by way of the institutions of biomedicine,
church, academe, and media. And if homosexuality is to be seen as a question of
identity—because there are people who are homosexual, and they are distinct
from people who are heterosexual—then the perspective is a minoritizing one,
for it limits itself to a politics of militant difference. Consequently, gay liberation
must be seen as a simplistic issue of civil liberties, and hence, of sociopolitical
reform. If, on the other hand, homosexuality is really not a matter of people, but
of what and how people do (and feel), then the issue becomes much wider, or
universalizing, for it involves potentially anybody who has ever engaged or can
engage in homosexual sex (meaning, presumably, all of us). The consequence
of this view is that gay liberation as a political notion is false, for it is possibly
sexual revolution, or the liberation of all sexual potentialities that have been
“locked up” inside all of humanity, which will ultimately liberate the homosexual,
whose suffering will consequently disappear together with the disappearance
of sexual distinctions among all of us: polymorphously bi-, multi- or even
asexual beings.
The axis of gender delineates the opposite views toward homosexuality
as either a liminality of genders or gender exclusivity. Homosexuality can be
seen either as a transition of gender from one to the other (as for instance,
from male to female, translating into effeminacy and/or inversion) or as

gender separatism (men remaining men despite or precisely because of their
homosexual orientation). This axis will admittedly prove most important
in this study, for Philippine gay culture is almost completely peopled by
“feminine” (gender-transitive) homosexual men who are made to suffer from
minoritization by default, and by the workings of masculinist ideology. On
the other hand, non-effeminate (gender-intransitive) and so-called macho
homosexuals do exist in local gay culture too, although they are not marked as
gays or bakla precisely because they are masculine.
Sedgwick’s model of interweaving perspectives underscores the fact that
homosexuality is hardly a clearly defined, unproblematic field of knowledge
in our own time. She does, however, slant her model just a bit, for to her the
more important theoretical concern should be to empower gays by making
available to them all the critical tools with which they can undertake their
common liberations. She, for example, does not call the essentialist perspective
on the homosexual identity simply essentialist, for politically it translates into
minoritization. Hence, the essentialist view betokens a variety of minority
politics which is very important in light of the discourse of multiculturalism
and civil liberties currently ascendant in the West, particularly the United
States. To talk about gays as a kind of distinct ethnic group is admittedly to
ghettoize the issue of homosexuality, but it is also a strategic move. The other
view may be seen to derive from Kinsey’s sociological conception of sexuality
that sees homosexuality and heterosexuality as a bipolar continuum that
stretches from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality.11 Kinsey’s
report states that a great number of American men and women are neither
of the two, but may be situated along several gradations in between at any
one time in their lives. So, the terms homosexual and heterosexual are more
properly adjectives to describe acts rather than people, who shift from one
sexual activity to the other in real life without very much trouble. Sedgwick
doesn’t call this view simply constructionist; she calls it “universalizing,” as
this is what in effect it accomplishes: homosexuality becomes an issue beyond
the minority calling itself gay or lesbian, for it is an issue which concerns the
mainstream, so-called heterosexual majority, too.
For this project, both pairs of definitional perspectives are granted their
validity (and epistemic status), if only because they already operatively exist in
Introduction | 21
the field of inquiry that is contemporary Philippine gay culture. Furthermore,

the local metropolitan gay culture around which this study revolves is not
a static, superseded regime of knowing, as conflicting forces generated by
these views are themselves wrestling within it to continually configure and
reconfigure it. To strictly adhere to any one axis, or any one specific model
of the homosexual question, would be to radically simplify the situation, and
therefore to vitally miss out on an important realization that we may obtain
from the study of any culture, and of culture, in general: life, like sexuality itself,
is really quite complex, and the subterfuges of domination only require that one
complicate her critical task at each and every turn.
The second function of gay theory in the Philippines directly relates to
feminist thought, as it occurs indigenously or otherwise in the country. The
dominant macho culture in which gays and women live and rankle has indeed
efficaciously naturalized gender oppression in its categories of feminine/
masculine, effeminate/macho, virgin/whore, real/unreal, etc. These very same
binaries need to be refunctioned by gays and women as a matter of necessity, if
both groups should ever attain a kind of equality to, and a state of being that is
comparable with, the universally privileged class of the masculine, heterosexual
man.
The overlapping of gay and feminist issues in the Philippines is apparent in
the way male homosexuality as a form of deviance is largely feminized therein.
Other than this, the construction of the gay identity is clearly gender-transitive:
inverted men (that is, inward women), binabae, bakla. The possible links between
these two sets of liberation—from gender oppression and from homophobia—
therefore have to be negotiated more along the lines of the former, inasmuch as
the brute fact is that all the entry points to a radical homosexual discourse in
our case are still, pragmatically speaking, via gender. The women’s movement
has already gained some (albeit still shaky) ground in the Philippines, and to my
mind, the gay and lesbian communities can only situate themselves alongside
it. The reason for this is simply the fact that liberationist causes that involve
issues of sexuality and gender naturally come together when patriarchy is the
common power which such struggles must be waged against.
But finally, there can be no assurance that allo-identifications among
the many divergent feminist groups and the gays will come without some
degree of rancor and animosity. As in the West, where feminism has already
become internalized into the gay and lesbian struggles themselves—and is

no longer simply clearly distinct from them—local gay causes must not rely
on explicitly feminist support to begin to undertake their own fulfillments.
Gay and lesbian theory, although clearly indebted to the feminist critique
of patriarchal consciousness and culture, cannot totally rely on the tools of
feminism to launch a specifically anti-heteronormative critique or inquiry into
homophobic culture: an antihomophobic discourse. The most useful insight
feminism has given us is that gender oppression—or more accurately, gender
differences themselves—are cultural constructs and are ideologically and
institutionally set in place in all patriarchal societies. Nonetheless, feminism
cannot wholeheartedly grapple with the issue of sexual orientation inasmuch
as this does not exclusively involve gender’s distinctions of femininity and
masculinity, but more particularly, the problems and problematiques of sexual
object choice, which can and do cut across genders. How is it that male
individuals are deprived of their macho-ordained privilege as males once they
desire other males sexually? Or more tellingly, how is it that lesbians are not
exactly welcome in nearly every women’s movement all over the world?
I had to ask myself these questions—or at least, questions that were similar
to them—after an initial confusion of categories gave way to the realization,
owing largely to Sedgwick, that sexuality is already analytically separable from
gender; that more than being male or female, people are necessarily ascribed
to be either homosexual or heterosexual in contemporary times. My initial
attempts to theorize gayness in the Philippines took the form of feminist
critique: gay is a gender identity, just like man and woman, and therefore, all
the theoretical tools that are applied by the feminist woman may, I thought, be
applied by the gay critic as well. In this early phase in my theorizing, gynocritics
became a gaycritics; femininity became effemininity. In other words, during
this rather parodic and imitative period in my work, I had looked through the
concept of the bakla and not at it: he is woman-hearted all right; therefore,
he may or should be treated as a woman. I had totally become interpellated
by the discourse of inversion—perhaps because, at the time, I had not even
recognized it as a discourse—and in the process I had elided the significance
of the bakla’s physical and material reality as “still and all a man.” (Or was
this nonrecognition simply a product of male-to-female wishfulness?) Now,
however, I realize that there are many different perspectives on the question
Introduction | 23
of homosexuality, and essentialist gender transitivity (or inversion) is just one

of them. When I began to conceptualize and to work within a discourse of
bodies—which is to say, of genitally marked bodies—then the perspectives
toward homosexuality as orientation and as “acts” began to seem more
rewarding and tenable for me. And it is via the same route that gay discourse
elsewhere, I presume, finally found itself.
From the feminist concept of alterable gender, the homosexual inquiry
has moved on to the domain of sexuality where it must increasingly be made
to belong. For both the feminist sake as well as the gay: with two sets of
critiques being brought to bear on the same oppressive structure, heterosexual
patriarchy’s homophobic and misogynist categories can become critically
exhausted all the more thoroughly and all the faster.
Such a realization can only be propitious for Philippine gays, in any
case, as I am not too sure if there are any local feminist discourses which are
frankly and genuinely open to questions of sexuality. Already, it is clear that
the predominant strain of Philippine-style feminism is becoming more and
more conservative in its sexual ideology, and it is likely that there are many
Filipino feminists who are averse to effeminacy or kabaklaan, just as there are
many Filipino mothers who have never come to understand their gay sons
and have been averse to gayness all along. To this particular malaise the elixir
should be the realization that sometimes it is the feminist perspective, rather
than the feminists themselves, that is more important.
The current “blind spot” of the feminist discourse in the Philippines
is precisely its failure to undertake a locally based critique and/or theory
of sexuality. In a forum on homosexual issues held at the University of the
Philippines in 1993, radical feminist and lesbian thinker Aida Santos pointed
out that the marked increase in the number of violent crimes against women
stems from our macho culture’s denying of women their sexuality.12 In more
specific terms, local women are not supposed to enjoy their sexuality (or its
physical situs, the body), as it belongs not to them but to their husbands and/
or male partners. Wife beating and brutal rapes all emanate from the same
heterosexually sanctioned belief and practice which assume that women’s
bodies are property to be possessed and vanquished, if not kept under close
masculine surveillance—under the “gracious munificence” of the indicatively
male heterosexual Gaze.
Elizabeth Uy Eviota, in a historical materialist analysis of the Philippine

colonial and neocolonial gender systems and their relationship to the sexual
division of labor, comes up with the same conclusion:
The ideology of male sexual needs serves no purpose other than the
perpetuation of a sexual hierarchy which serves the interest of men well.
This ideology sees to it that men have much more opportunity to be sexual
and more social support for their sexuality; women remain at a particular
disadvantage in terms of their right to have sex, much less enjoy it.13
Eviota’s work, as a whole, studies the various historical transformations

which have conspired to dominate women in the Philippines—economically,
politically, and sexually. Her framework, however, does not account for sexuality
in the way it is largely understood in our contemporary times: as a matter of
the gender of one’s sexual object choice; in other words, as either homo or
hetero. Hence, she fails to take note of that other layer of oppression obtaining
not on the gender, but rather on the sexual, front. To be sure the men she
speaks of in this passage are first and foremost the machos and heterosexuals,
not the bakla and homosexuals who can enjoy neither the privilege of their
masculinity nor the birthright of heterosexuality (being both economically
marginalized and symbolically subordinate: as “deviants,” “sinners,” “unreal
men” and/or “false women”). This short history of Philippine gay culture will
somehow supplant, if not modify, Eviota’s finding that local “women who are
interested in sex are promiscuous whereas men who are sexually active are
perfectly normal,” for in this project it will be strongly suggested that there
are some Philippine women who have begun to reclaim their sexualities with
gay abandon, and they are the fag-hags. Feminists need to see that if the initial
legitimating discourse for gay issues is one grounded on gender inquiry (that
is to say, on feminism), then the feminist project of consciousness-raising as
concerns the bodily/libidinal and reproductive rights of women may best (or
should I say, solely) be done through sexuality. And with this topic, gays and
their fag-hag friends are already rather familiar.
The notion of the lewd and loose woman being the inverse of the
Christian “Virgin” archetype may now be supplanted with the paragon of
the babaeng-bakla—a freakish and fishwifely creature whose awareness of
and rights over her own sexuality are rather pungent and inalienable. And
Introduction | 25
as the peculiarly gay expression or swardspeak to which she is indebted and

of which she is a fervent believer is filled and practically bristles with terms
for self-ironic sexuality and kinkiness, then her ability to use it simply makes
available a space for her to invent herself in. And therein also to re(dis)cover
her sexuality.
In other words, it is feminism that has to begin to look beyond what is
apparently there, and to slice across the layers of lies the new snake in the
garden of patriarchy is hissing out: the snake of essentialism, which insists
that all things male are oppressive, including gay males. The lure of falling into
an essentialist concept of “woman” and, consequently, of the concept “man”
is made stronger by the allegedly diachronic existence of male and female
bodies almost universally; and feminism, in focusing exclusively on gender,
has initially been bogged down in a biologistic model of universal gender
oppression.
However, such essentialism is a trap that is harder to fall into in gay
discourse, just because the gay individual is always already an “invention”:
there are no biologically determinable gays who are as immanent and as
easily identifiable as women and men, and to a great extent “gay” is largely a
faddish label more similar to “yuppy” than anything else. Plainly and simply
put, there are, in fact, no gays or homosexuals unless they “come out” one
way or the other about their (homo)sexuality. Biographical analysis as the
desired form of gay literary criticism—to which this book wholeheartedly
subscribes—is precisely based on the assumption that self-disclosure in a
text is simultaneously an individualist affirmation and an act of community-
identification. In other words, for gay biographical critique, what is more
important is not the author’s declaration of his individuality, but on the
contrary, the “representative aspects” which are based on his homosexuality,
and which can cut across barriers, as they are all premised upon a communal
experience of homophobia-specific oppression.14 This particular form of
oppression is both the result and the source of the transgressive power which
the act of admitting one’s homosexuality mobilizes.
And so, it becomes plain that Coming Out, even before gender or sexual
theorizing, forms the indomitable crux of this whole project. This is due
to the fact that Coming Out is just about the only means gays and lesbians
have of dispelling those privately powerful fears society harbors toward
homosexuality, even as this very same act lays them open to the ravages of
institutional homophobia.
The third function of a locally based gay theory seems the hardest to
presently address, as it is common knowledge that class-conscious critiques
are mostly unconscious of and dead to other axes of oppression (and almost
everything else). In fact, it is most interesting to note that unlike the historical
developments in gay organizing in countries like Argentina, Mexico, Cuba,
and other places in the Third World, the beginnings of the “gay movement”
in the Philippines did not evince any socialist or Marxist texture.15 Quite
the opposite, in fact: the first gay liberationist calls were sounded by gay
middle-class artists and intellectuals in Metro Manila, who apparently had no
ideological linkages with any of the “people’s movements” that—it has recently
been revealed—were all extremely antigay anyway.
In a seminar on “Homophobia in the Philippine Popular Movement”
held at the University of the Philippines early in 1993, male and female
homosexuals who used to belong to the many “collectives” comprising the
“Philippine Left” bewailed the homophobia to which they were subjected
for so many years.16 The socialist dismissal of homosexuality as a form of
“bourgeois decadence” was unabashedly present among and exhibited by
the leaders of a number of progressive groups in the Philippines during the
seventies, and this is true even up to now. This was another reason, perhaps,
for the “permission” ostensibly granted by the Marcosian dispensation to local
gay discourse: because despite the fact that gay progressivism in other Third
World nations was intimately linked to revolutionary-socialist thought, the
local counterpart socialist movements practically and disgustedly disowned it.
So, the agonistic space which was granted Filipino gays for a good part of the
Martial Law period may have become the logical trade-off for the generalized
suppression of socialist discourse at the time.
In this project, this function is the least evident of the three necessary
functions of a Philippine gay theory, and I am hereby confessing that I will not
really pursue this point here. This, however, is only because my framework
is not single-mindedly Marxist-inflected, even though the assumptions and
conclusions I will be having/making as regards ideology, class, and power do
effectively gesture toward an inevitably materialist critique of gay culture as
well.
Introduction | 27
Gay Literary Criticism and the Philippine Canon
In the West, the newest and most insightful critical debates have come
to dilate upon sex and sexuality, and the dynamically multidisciplinary
field of Gay and Lesbian Studies has been responsible for the many recent
critiques of what has otherwise been long presumed dead and buried: the
lie whose name is humanism. On the contrary, as gay and lesbian scholars
have demonstrated, the oppressive criteria of humanism are still very much
alive and well within many so-called oppositional practices. First World
feminism, for instance, has suffered extremely from the attack of lesbians,
who used to be called “radical feminists,” but have now emerged from the
project that singularly aimed to criticize gender oppression, and linked arms
with gays whose homosexual orientation they have seen to be a more urgent
and real basis for movement. Together, gays and lesbians in the West have
reminded feminists that at the heart of liberal humanism is heterosexism,
an ideology (and discourse) of identity which needs to constantly demonize
and displace its own contradictions onto its logical inverse, homosexuality.
Dollimore has convincingly shown in his book, Sexual Dissidence, that
although socially marginal, homosexuality is symbolically central to Western
civilization, precisely because homosexuality is never simply about sexuality
alone, but also about race, class, and gender—contradictions the unified
Self of humanism has sought to suppress. The convergence of misogyny and
homophobia, for instance, illustrates how patriarchy itself is premised on the
denial of difference, be it in sexual or gender terms. Dollimore’s may hence be
seen as exemplifying one vein of gay literary scholarship: a cultural materialist
venture of re-reading history in a specifically homosexual way.
The project that reinstates upsetting and transgressive difference within
patriarchy is a central one for much of gay and lesbian cultural critique, and
this may best be seen in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a soft-spoken
yet headstrong gay-identified woman whose fellow-feeling for gays and
commitment to the gay cause have merited her the admiration of many other
scholars doing work in gay and lesbian studies. Her first book, Between Men:
English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire,17 for instance, explores the
male homosociality to be found in the Gothic and Victorian novels of the mid-
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental
Journey, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, and Charles

Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. She points out that there is male bonding to be
observed in so much of the “heterosexual” literature of the period: a peculiar
type of masculine bonding that needed to be suppressed in the narrative and
thenceforth found its expression in the figure of the bitterly rivaling suitors,
whose common desire for a woman is simply a detour of their proscribed
desire for each other. (This theory takes off from Rene Girard’s graphic
schema of the erotic triangle, in which the seemingly antagonistic bond that
negatively unifies the male rivals actually overpowers and supersedes the bond
between either of them and the same beloved woman.) It is precisely because
the psychiatric discourse of homosexuality had come to be invented at around
the same time these novels were being written that the erstwhile sanctioned
male bondings had to be reified in such a manner. Sedgwick achieves, through
this particular project, the radical revaluation of masculine heterosexuality,
by magnifying the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent within it—
and thus, within the patriarchy that it upholds and is upheld by—with such
scholarly vengeance and panache.
Another gay approach to literary reading has been the psychoanalytic,
taking its cue from the invidious Freudian connection between latent
homosexuality and certain kinds of male literary production. Thus, re-
readings of D.H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, and Ernest Hemingway have
become rather exciting textual enterprises for many gay literary historians
and critics. Other psychoanalytic deployments for the gay cause are premised
upon radical revisions of Freud, which pursue his thesis of bisexuality and
androgyny to extend to the culture at large. Marjorie Garber’s study of “Cross-
dressing and Cultural Anxiety” is a re-reading of the Lacanian Symbolic and
its links to transvestism. According to Garber, cross-dressing is what makes
culture possible.18
Perhaps the subspecies of gay literary production of which I am most
enamored is the autobiography. Specifically, I am interested in the study
and recuperation of avowedly homosexual texts. An archival task, in other
words. This project remains crucial, I am convinced, to Philippine gay culture
because it just may spell the difference between a gay movement and the
continued silencing and persecution of homosexuals in our country, where
the current state of affairs is still one of quietly seething crisis. Coming Out
Introduction | 29
is a process admittedly painful and difficult for many Filipino gays, whose
specifically homosexual writings remain just as closeted as their authors.
The tragic thing is that Coming Out is still an indispensable element in any
homosexual movement, and yet in the Philippines we have pretty much not
seen any other kind of male homosexuals other than the markedly bakla
ones.
The approach I shall be advocating in this study is “gay biographical
critique,” and by this I mean a critical approach to textuality which sees the
text’s representation of gender and sexuality to be indicative of the author’s own
position concerning the oppression of gays and women. Obviously, the easiest
way to guarantee the fruitfulness of this approach is to look for avowedly gay
writings from known homosexuals, and see just how their political vision of
liberation is shaped and/or limited by prevailing dominant ideologies. This
is easier said than done, however, for there are as yet quite a small number of
works that are identifiably gay. In his book, Perez declares himself to be “gay
liberationist,” although of course the critical perspective I seek, and which
will be more desirable in the final analysis, will have to develop finer tools
and methods for appreciating gay texts. In other words, gay criticism cannot
do without at least a modicum of aesthetic theorizing. Thankfully enough,
in the local scene, there is of course Ladlad, the multigenre anthology of
post-Marcosian gay writings which I coedited with another gay writer.19 All
the authors in this groundbreaking collection are unapologetically gay, and
almost all of them are thirty years old and younger. Just now I’d like to say that
it is patently not true that just because one is young one has nothing to lose.
Only now I realize that it is precisely because they are young that they have
their entire futures, their whole lives, to lose. Nonetheless, it’s quite possible
that a generational dynamic is at work here, as generations are merely nodes
for other elements and determinants of subjectivity which have admittedly
changed over the last three decades or so.
Severino Montano’s unpublished novel, “The Lion and the Faun,” is
an opus written in the roman à clef tradition. Its relative obscurity only
emblematizes the homophobia that has conspired with New Criticism—the
dominant aesthetic mode of his time and ours—in order to silence Montano
and make unavailable his radical work. Montano’s case is a particularly
problematic one, for he is a canonical writer whose “dossier” as a writer has
not included “that interesting little detail” of his homosexuality. Should it

therefore be assumed that his being gay is not important? For this study I have
had to read the novel, and so I, for one, know that this specific sin of omission
rankled. However, I must also acknowledge the radical implications of such a
fact. In effect, Montano’s novel revaluates our concept of the canon, as well as
enlightens us about the kind of sexual milieu in which he lived.
Admittedly, there are many homosexual writers to be studied, other than
Montano, Perez, and Nadres. One such writer is Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero.20
Certainly, it is true that Guerrero did not “come out” as a homosexual, or
even as a homosexual writer, but neither did Montano. After everything,
however, it becomes clear that such “worries” become irrelevant when cast
against the backdrop of their homosexual works—in Guerrero’s case, his
obviously personal homosexual play, The Clash of Cymbals. After all, the
other topic which gay literary criticism can talk about is the representation
of homosexuality in literary and/or cultural texts, and under this description
Guerrero’s play can most certainly be put. Here, too, may be placed Jose Garcia
Villa’s trilogy of autobiographical stories, “Wings and Blue Flame”; N.V.M.
Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers; Edith L. Tiempo’s stories “Dimensions of
Fear” and “Chambers of the Sea”; the early novels by Mig Alvarez Enriquez;
Jessica Hagedorn’s Dog-eaters; Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War; Gilda Cordero-
Fernando’s short story, “High Fashion”; Eric Gamalinda’s Fire Poem/Rain
Poem and Planet Waves; plays by Lito Casaje, Rene Villanueva, Bienvenido
Noriega, Anton Juan, among others. These works do not necessarily talk
about homosexuality in a politically self-conscious way; they do, however, all
offer representations of homosexuality that countenance a certain perspective
toward the homosexual identity (thus, they all purvey a kind of politics).
Certainly, however, we need to remember that nonliterary representations
may prove equally important in studying gay culture and the constructions of
gender and sexuality as they affect the life of both gays and nongays alike.
Likewise, a counterpart project to Sedgwick’s just might prove instructive
here. Already, I have been looking at a possibly homosocial angle in Jose Rizal’s
novels, where there are always males bonding with each other: for example,
Ibarra with Elias; Simoun with Basilio. Or perhaps Balagtas’s Florante at
Laura may likewise prove to be a fruitful locale for homosocial sight-seeing:
I’m not too sure if anyone has noticed it yet, but I find it a ticklishly kinky idea
Introduction | 31
that Florante’s protracted narration on the hardy lap of the darkly ravishing
Persian Aladin may be more than meets the metrical eye.
In order to come up with a Philippine homosexual canon, therefore, it
should first of all be clear to us that what will ultimately prove most useful is
the abandonment and “unburdening” of the many literary biases the past has
given us as Literature’s votive subjects. The ascendancy of New Criticism and/
or Formalism in the production and dissemination of Philippine literature—
and of literature in general—made it possible for there to be canonical
writings, but not necessarily canonical writers, within the privileged list of
literary texts which the canon is. Formalist perorations against biographical
interpretation and the so-called intentional fallacy have made it possible for
homosexual writers—the likes of Montano, Perez, and Guerrero—to become
canonical, even as their identities as homosexuals are not exactly “canon-
worthy.” (Actually, these writers’ subscribing to such heavily formalist tenets
must have been simply a means of coping.) Perhaps, the solution is to come up
with an alternative canon: one that will contain not so much texts as people.
Such a project doubtless will prove useful, as the gathering and recuperation
of those texts which did not measure up to the literary shibboleths of the New
Critical—really, uncritical—past may now be undertaken to grant these very
same texts their deserved political and interpretive space. Such a project can
doubtless only benefit gays in the long run.
In a paper l delivered at the 1992 University of the Philippines National
Writers Workshop (where I was myself a fellow), I revaluated the place writing
workshops should play in the lives of gay writers, whose works continue to
be marginalized not because of their lack of formal merit—or at least not for
that alone—but also for other, more politically charged reasons. What I ended
up saying then turned out to be most meaningful to those gay fellows whose
otherwise honest and remarkable gay plays had become the beating post of so
much of the homophobic—disguised as merely technical and/or formalist—
attack coming from certain tetchy members of the workshop panel:
As regards the project of periodizing gay texts, the gay critic’s task will be
primarily to establish a certain tradition of gay authorship: a task also known
as archival work. This can only be done through extensive “search-and-
rescue” operations that will seek to recover those gay texts which have been
institutionally forgotten, ostensibly because they have failed in the outmoded
and sadly bankrupt scientistic norms of well-writtenness and craft, which

have made them unworthy of the canon. Of course, it is less their “artistic
shortcomings” than their very radical politics which has disqualified them
from such ... Vital to the gay critic’s thinking must be a shift in emphasis: while
he does not deny that a certain degree of craft is required at a minimum—for
intelligibility—he will gladly overlook this aspect for the sake of the political
readings such “badly written” texts can afford him. He also knows that as
an alternative mode of knowledge, gay texts may well be operating under a
different aesthetics of which he may not yet be fully conscious. It is his other
duty to make this artistic process conscious.... The early feminists did not
ask whether Emily Dickinson’s “unfinished” poems were truly poems. They
studied her anyway, because she was a woman ahead of her time, because she
wrote consciously as a woman, because they chose to ...
I suppose, in the end, things become exactly that: because we want
to; because we have taken matters into our own hands, we have redefined
ourselves, since nobody else is going to do it for us. Gay plays will never
be fully accorded the greatness they deserve, unless the gay interpretive
community for whose sake they are made has been achieved.21
The separatist impulse readily evident in this early reflection of mine—

“early” because at this time I had not yet untangled some of the more
stubborn knots in the gay theoretical enterprise—is problematized by the
present insight into the canon that this study of Montano, Nadres, and Perez
has afforded me. To the extent that the many works of these authors are
widely distributed and anthologized in textbooks and continue to be taught
in many schools in the country, we can conclude that there are gays already
to be found in the Philippine canon. (I remember Montano’s romantic play
Sabina, for example, as a standard theater piece presented for the “dramafest”
in my high school each year.) But to the extent that writers like Montano
have not been recognized as gay writers, archival work is still necessary. This
project will aim to uncover “unheard-of ” texts by established writers, such
as Montano, which are explicitly homosexual in subject or politics. But then
again, it may be possible to keep to what already exists, only perhaps to come
up with a fresher, more incisive way of interpreting it.
Hence, the critical task of re-reading the canon with such a goal in
mind—which is to textually reinstate the gayness of several writers whose
works are already to be found in it—remains clearly separatist insofar as the
Introduction | 33
identity of such authors remains reducibly and identifiably homosexual. The

task of “making patriarchy paranoid,” in any case, is also another possible
form of textual bombardment which may be deployed on the monolithic
censor which is the canon, as there have yet been no such local interrogations
made along this line. This involves radically re-reading the canon—which
is to say, working within it as it is presently constituted by “apparently
heterosexual, macho texts”—but at the same time calling attention to
textual insights and observations about male homosocial bondings in the
form of friendships, jealousies, bureaucratic solidarities, etc. This kind of
textual strategy has already been employed in the West by gay critics, to
the delectation of the aware minority and the shock of the naive majority.
Homosociality, although different from homosexuality, limits the naturalized
pervasiveness of heterosexuality by pointing out its inherent dependence on
male bonding, which, call it what one pleases, remains a rather queer thing
when seen against macho culture’s effusively and exclusively heterosexual
claims. In masculinist society, males are allowed to identify with, but never
to desire, each other. Jealous males, as they are textualized in several literary
texts in the West, invariably end up erotically objectifying and desiring
their rivals, being that this tormented kind of bonding is the product of the
confusion between identification and desire. The premise behind homosocial
reading is that patriarchy’s structures are formed around the archetypal male-
to-male bond, only that females are still and always necessary to keep the
bond from “turning queer” (that is to say, becoming homosexual). And so,
misogyny and the denial of male homosexuality are, from this perspective
alone, really of the same homophobic piece.
Other similar integrative strategies may be employed, and they must all
be inferred from the texture of the very texts which have suggested them. For
instance, the knowledge that our local cultures traditionally evince “gender-
crossers” who possess transgenderal characteristics may be taken to imply
that vicarious identifications with femaleness, as they occur in the texts of
certain local male authors, are already a declaration of this “difference” (for
lack of a better term, and for obviously political purposes, I would now like
to call this difference a kind of “female-wishful sexuality”). An example
of this would be Nick Joaquin’s wanton fictional and poetic celebrations
of femininity and his mythic embellishments on some kind of incipient or
antediluvian matriarchy (to be seen in such stories as “The Summer Solstice”

and “May Day Eve,” and in his novels, The Woman Who Had Two Navels
and Cave and Shadows). It’s indeed rather telling that, read more closely, the
quality of such textual celebrations approaches the identificatory rather that
the possessive: to become—not to have—a Woman.
These, as well as other “cryptohomosexual” textual strategies, may obviously
all provide entry points into other forms of gay reading. Regardless of the
actual methodology, the ultimate goal of all such “integrative” approaches—
as opposed to the earlier mentioned separatist “biographical/archival”
approach—is the disavowal of homosexuality’s absolute difference, and the
establishment of liminal zones between gays and straights, homosexuals and
heterosexuals, women and men, evil and good, Satan and God.
Gay Culture: History and Writings
This study is divided into two parts: gay history and culture, and gay
writings. Either part may be taken by itself and not necessarily “linked” to the
other. In fact, I would prefer them to be read not sequentially but as mirror
images of each other, whereby two different text-milieus are able to come up
with relatively “same” pieces of reading. The first part implicitly talks about
how culture has produced gays and vice versa, and the second more or less
demonstrates—through modest readings of Montano’s, Nadres’s, and Perez’s
identifiably homosexual works—how gay literary texts have produced gay
culture, and how gay culture spurred the writing of such texts. My framework
in both enterprises emerges from the “contact zones” between and among
feminist and materialist cultural critiques, cultural and social anthropology,
gay and lesbian theory, historiography, deconstruction, biography and social
semiotics.22 In the process of mediation I assume I must have fashioned my
own particular versions of such “traveling theories.” The organizing principle
within each component has been thematic, but in this case, I have let the
material suggest the themes that have become the subheadings in each section.
I literally sat down and wrote the central arguments of this study in one go.
This does not necessarily commend the less deliberate and more compulsive
method of research, but it does demonstrate, I suppose, the rare and happy
coincidence between intuition and intelligence.
Introduction | 35
The questions I wish to answer in the section on Philippine gay culture

relate to popular and academic formulations of homosexuality which I feel
would shed light on the urgent issue of the gay movement (or the patent
lack thereof). Thus, here, formal definitions of the terms bakla, gay, and
homosexual are juxtaposed against the “lived” definitions and self-expressions
of gays in the urban or metropolitan cultures of the last three decades. For
the former I have relied on dictionaries and academic positivist sources, and
for the latter I have inquired into popular gay writings that were particularly
aplenty in the seventies. Both, however, are finally “supplemented” with my
own personal narratives that occasionally intrude into the history.
Although historical, this section does not strictly hew to what may appear
as clearly diachronicized divisions of the last three decades: from 1960 up to
the nineties. Actually, the division of part 1 into chapters is a mere formality
since, in truth, I so wrote this study’s first part so that it may read like one
complete chapter in itself, with only “subheadings” to mark off thematic
sectionings. I did it this way because I wished to underline the assertion that
in terms of conceptual history, these three decades could be taken as one.
Meanings regarding homosexuality and homosexual identities circulate with
and cross-refer to each other throughout the time frames in question, and the
supersession of any one model of male homosexuality, gayness, kabaklaan,
etc. does not really happen here.
Part 1 commences with an outline of relevant models of (male)
homosexuality, with a section on terminology that will become selectively
operative in the work. After this, definitions which may be traced back
to the decade of the sixties, but do not remain completely its monopoly,
are discussed. Here, I will employ the heuristic “bakla/homosexual
dynamic” to indicate the areas of equivalency and disparity between what
are fundamentally different, culturally specific terms: mainly, that bakla
denotes gender comportment and identity (effeminacy, femininity, cross-
dressing, etc.), and homosexual is obviously limited to the concept of sexual
object choice (or sexuality). This dynamic may be shown to structure much
of what follows in the history of gay culture, as a critical unawareness
of it has inadvertently minoritized homosexuality to the identity of the
bakla, and therefore institutionalized both inversion and the hierarchy
of heterosexualized (that is to say, inverted) same-sexual desire. Other
than the difference that is implied by this dynamic, bakla’s other, presexual
connotations are also considered in terms of their potential impact on the
issues of gayness and (male) homosexuality by the time the next decades
swish along.
From the sixties, the study moves on to a discussion of gay culture in
the seventies (its actual “efflorescence”). In this section, specifically gay—
hence, political—issues are discussed the way they are understood by the
purveyors and discussants of what by this time is clearly evolving as the
official Philippine urban “homosexual” script (namely, “Third Sex”), and
analyzed in terms of their actual, historically positioned significance in the
ongoing struggle by Filipino homosexuals to achieve liberation. The eighties
and the nineties are also considered in terms of the cultural themes by which
they may be seen to be most easily remembered. This analysis includes the
discussion of topics which are not strictly about gays or homosexuality, but
which nonetheless shed light on certain concepts in gay culture that either
presuppose them or are their logical extrapolations. (An example would be
a discussion of loob as a local cultural trope that connotes internal sexual
subjectivity.)
An important section that departs from the apparently diachronic
ordering of gay culture’s themes is the one about gender-crossing in pre-
and early colonial Philippines. For this section, I will rely on ethnographies,
confession manuals, and dictionaries written by Spanish chroniclers and
priests, and also on the more recent feminist scholarship that focuses on the
Philippine and regional precolonial gender systems, in order to postulate the
historiographic cogency of an institutionalized and prestigious status that was
uniformly accorded the “transgenderal,” genitally male babaylan, who were
the earliest Philippine gender-crossers—“precursors” even, in a more or less
culturally verifiable way, to the twentieth century’s bayot and bakla.
Finally, I summarize the results of the study by way of a model that
accounts for the different expressions of the homosexual identity in the
gay culture of the last three decades. For part 2, I select and look into the
identifiably homosexual writings of Montano, Nadres, and Perez (an
unpublished novel, a “cult classic” of a stage play, and a multigenre book,
respectively) and analyze them individually, in an attempt to rearticulate
their positions on the question of homosexual oppression and liberation,
Introduction | 37
and to finally relate these to their authors’ concrete “autobiographical selves.”

Hence, in these analyses, my implicit goal is to “out” them (that is, lay them
bare, raise them high for all to see), and therefore to offer up their alternative
and/or oppositional views on homosexuality to the largely orphaned,
patrimonially impoverished Filipino gays of the present.
Coming Out
I can imagine this study eventually becoming significant to Philippine

academe once the gays who are unmistakably—as strongly suggested by this
very work—in it begin to come out collectively in order to assert themselves
as openly gay individuals. Otherwise, this project and its author will simply
be just another case in point that lends further credence to the open secret of
how gays thrive in the academe because therein gayness is simply the extra
price for creativity.23 The problem with all open secrets, however, is that they
are really closed.
Nonetheless, it should please my friends to know that the primary and
most immediate significance of my work is that it has helped me to appreciate
myself better, and therefore to be less brooding about my bitter lot, and to be
more secure about my talents. They no longer have to comfort me too much
anymore. If at all, by providing them with what I believe is the best that I can
give, by way of this modest study and at this moment in my intellectual life, I
am doing them a good turn for a change.
Certainly, this project may well induct a fresher, less demonizing, and
more humane atmosphere in which to study gay culture. I’d like to believe
that much can be learned from this story of resistance and pride. Gays and
nongays (or those who think they are gays and nongays) have a lot to find
here. Lessons on how to be better people, for instance. On beauty. On justice.
Plain survival. Certainly, for the reticent gay reader and/or sympathizer, the
sheer verbosity of this work may well provide the impetus and the words
with which to articulate what she has always had on the tip of her tongue
which, once untied, will gorgeously say to all: In our world, gays comprise an
important minority sector.24 And their oppression and victories oughtn’t go
unrhapsodized any more.
Notes
Introduction
1. Gregory Herek, “Homophobia,” Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne R.
Dynes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 552-55.
2. Jonathan Dollimore, “Becoming Authentic,” in Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to
Wilde, Freud to Foucault (London: Oxford University Press, 1991), 39-63.
3. Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism,” Against the Grain
(London: Verso, 1986), 131-47.
4. Dollimore, “Early Modern: Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England,” in Sexual
Dissidence, 284-85.
5. Actually, all the current government figures on AIDS are at best tentative and
misleading. According to one particular Department of Health report, by September
of 1993, the total number of reported HIV infections has risen to 416, 75 of which
were homosexually transmitted. See Christine Avendaño, “AIDS-Related Deaths
Now 69; 8 More Pinoys Infected,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, September 18, 1993,
1, 14.
Nonetheless, it must not be ignored that the chances of Philippine gays
becoming stigmatized with AIDS are always there. In the same article, the
wording—and in a potentially explosive issue such as disease-control and the
labeling of so-called risk groups, the official wording of statistical data is always
rather crucial—the breakdown of the total number of HIV infections goes this way:
“most of the 416 HIV cases in the country or 290, however, were acquired through
sexual contacts. This involved 215 heterosexuals and 75 homosexuals.” The use
of the words homosexual and heterosexual is rather telling: the report prefers to
look at AIDS as an issue of identity rather than behavior, the more proper wording
for which should have been “homosexually/heterosexually transmitted,” and not
“homosexuals” or “heterosexuals.” (Or perhaps the best would be to simply state
that so many cases were “sexually transmitted.”) A more recent article also makes a
457
similar linkage between AIDS and gay identity: “31 percent of infected persons (of
more than 31,000 in the Western Pacific region) are homosexuals” (“AIDS Cases
Rising in Western Pacific,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, November 24, 1993, 10).
The Filipino gay communities in the United States have another story to
tell, however. They have the “highest incidence of AIDS among Asian-Pacific
immigrants in San Francisco.” See Arlene Chipongian, “AIDS Strikes Filipinos
Hard on West Coast,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 1993, 1.
6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Pantheon, 1978).
Actually, the social constructionist position was first articulated not by
Foucault but by sociologist Mary McIntosh, in her paper “The Homosexual Role.”
Here, she concludes that “homosexual” is not really a psychiatric and medical
description that is completely scientific, but rather a social category (label) which is
coercively imposed on certain people for purposes of social control. Nonetheless,
it was Foucault who historicized the subject and came out with the actual date
and context of the manufacturing of the homosexual person. See Mary McIntosh,
“The Homosexual Role,” in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social
Constructionist Controversy, ed. Edward Stein (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25-42.
7. For this whole section on the theoretical distinctions between essentialism and
social constructionism, I am much indebted to Edward Stein’s illuminating
discussion on the matter. See Stein, Forms of Desire, 325-53.
8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Regents of the
University of California Press, 1990), 49.
9. Robert Padgug, “Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History,” in
Stein, Forms of Desire, 43-67.
10. Leonore Tiefer, “Social Constructionism and the Study of Human Sexuality,” in
Stein, Forms of Desire, 297-98.
11. “Kinsey’s Report” is actually a two-part study: the first is about sexual behavior
among American males, and the second about sexual behavior among American
females. For the former, see Alfred C. Kinsey, W. B. Pomeroy, and C. E. Martin,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1948).
12. We were together in a forum on homosexual issues held on August 18, 1993,
sponsored by a student gay organization of the University of the Philippines, UP
Babaylan. The other gay and lesbian speakers and reactors all agreed that the plea
for “acceptance” which is implicit in the forum’s title, “Acceptance or Struggle:
Positioning the Homosexual in the Social Order,” is no longer to be desired.
Homosexuals are not defectors to be accepted back into proper society—the same
way that heterosexuals do not have the God-deemed right to accept anyone. In
any case, this might well be the first time Filipino gays and lesbians dialogued
Notes | 459
with each other, and we were all rather amused by the fact that some of our many
concerns, though apparently divergent, converged in rather telling and beautiful
ways.
13. Elizabeth Uy Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender: Women and the Sexual
Division of Labour in the Philippines (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1992), 170.
14. I refashion this critical method out of the redefined position of the autobiography
within the feminist movement. Feminist critic Rita Felski writes: “It is the
representative aspects of the female author’s experience rather than her unique
individuality which are important, allowing for the inclusion of fictive but
representative episodes distilled from the lives of other women.” See Rita Felski,
“On Confession,” in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 95.
In the case of Philippine gay autobiography, the “other women” can only be
the homosexual minority that already exists and that suffers from homophobic
subordination: the outwardly bakla, precisely.
15. Stephan Likosky, “New Understandings,” in Coming Out: An Anthology of
International Gay and Lesbian Writings, ed. Stephan Likosky (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1992), 119.
16. I refer here to the Lean Alejandro Lecture Series held on March 26, 1993, at
the University of the Philippines Diliman. All the speakers for the symposium
subtitled “I’m Gay. Will You Still Be My Friend and Comrade?” were members of
the different leftist collectives in the Philippines. Some of the speakers were Rody
Vera of PETA (Philippine Educational Theater Association); Ding Quejada of
Education Forum; visual artist Alex Umali; lesbian freelance writer Nini Matilac;
former League of Filipino Students member and current PRO-Gay Philippines
president Allan Tolosa; and KALAYAAN feminist Aida Santos. Soxy Topacio, the
current artistic director of PETA, reveals the same experience of oppression in the
hands of Philippine progressive movement leaders in an interview with Graphic,
sometime in February of 1993.
17. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
18. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York:
Routledge, 1992).
19. The title of the anthology, edited by poet Danton Remoto and me, is Ladlad:
An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. Published by Anvil Publishing in May
1994, the book took a little over a year to finally put out, but the interim had been
instructive. Also, the wait proved salutary, because other gays were emboldened
to have their works published in the anthology after they had won in some local
contest or other. Read from cover to cover, the anthology wonderfully reveals the
diversity of Filipino gay men, especially where individual philosophies, interests,

and obsessions are concerned.
20. Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero passed away on April 28, 1995. He was 84.
21. I read this paper as part of a discussion panel on gender at the University of the
Philippines National Writers’ Workshop in April 1992. The rest of the paper
talks about the arrogance of some creative writers in the academe who haughtily
presume that what they teach during workshops such as that one is innocent of
ideology. In that paper, I felt I had to remind everyone that precisely the formalist
apolitical attitude is ideological, and in view of the workshop’s many “incidents,”
rather homophobically suspect.
22. I am not loath to say that the general rubric for the approach that I have taken
in this study is “Cultural Materialism.” As Dollimore and Alan Sinfield put it,
contemporary cultural criticism, in order to be viable, requires that one employ a
combined strategy of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment,
and textual analysis.
See Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “Cultural Materialism,” Political
Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester University Press,
1985), vii.
23. That teaching is a feminine occupation in the Philippines is a fact acknowledged
by the education secretary himself. According to Ricardo Gloria, of the country’s
500,000 public school teachers, only 30,000 (or 6 percent) are males. To correct
the imbalance—and to provide schoolboys masculine role models—Gloria’s hare-
brained scheme is to pay “macho” teachers a higher rate as an incentive. He adds
that macho teachers are hardier—they can be sent to far-flung places with no
danger of getting raped—as well as more diligent in their attendance (since they
do not go on maternity leaves).
Of course, the man is quite simply mistaken about four things: (1) effeminacy
in children cannot be attributed to a lack of role models alone; (2) in any case,
effeminacy is not a bad thing; (3) macho teachers are in no danger of getting raped
but as the recent cases of sexual harassment filed against “masculine” teachers
show, they are in many ways predisposed to committing rape against their female
students; (4) teaching is feminine and feminizing and there is nothing anyone can
do about it short of changing our culture’s gender system. See “Macho Teachers
Wanted,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, March 31, 1995, 12.
24. I use “minority” here not so much to preempt the homosexual question upon
which this study dilates—for indeed, all the major arguments of this book strongly
gesture toward the epistemological instability of the homo/hetero binary—as to
appeal to the word’s rhetorical force. Likewise, the term minority describes less
an actual social fact (a real “minority”) than a phantasmatic structure in which
Notes | 461
a majority obsessively imagines a minority in order to constitute itself. Thus,

“minority” possesses a transgressive power mostly unbeknownst to itself.
PART ONE
Philippine Gay Culture
2. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 19-21.
“Homosexual panic” is a pseudo-psychiatric concept that is currently being
used as a legal defense in order to exculpate the perpetrators of gay bashing from
their “hate crime.” This notion admits to the possibility that men who are latently
homosexual (universalizing view) cannot be blamed for becoming violent and
“panicky” in the presence of gays (minoritizing view) because they have merely
been overcome by irrational fear. Hence, it exemplifies how the conflictual views
on homosexuality, or its “definitional crisis” (as Sedgwick puts it), can and actually
does work against gays.
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Pantheon, 1978). Cited in Sedgwick, 45.
4. A.C. Kinsey, W.B. Pomeroy, and C.E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1948). Cited in Warren Blumenfeld and Diane
Raymond, Looking at Gay and Lesbian Life (Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1988), 79.
5. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge,
1989), 16.
The passage pertaining to this goes:
The emergence of homosexuality out of inversion, the development

of sexual orientation independent of relative degrees of masculinity and
femininity, takes place during the latter part of the nineteenth century
and comes to its own only in the twentieth. Its highest expression is the
“straight-acting and -appearing gay male,” a man distinct from other men
in absolutely no other respect besides that of his “sexuality.” (Quoted in
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 8-9.)
I, like Sedgwick, agree with both the impulse and the insight of this passage,
if only as a formulation of the discourse of gender-intransitive homosexuality. I,
like Sedgwick, take issue with the unproblematic incumbency of postinversion.
Obviously, my grounding in Philippine gay culture’s “realities” tells me that
hereabout at least inversion is still the dominant pattern, and will likely stay that
way for some time more.
6. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford
University Press, 1992), 7-11.
7. Emerito Gonzales, “Homosexuality: An Ethical Appraisal,” The Thomasian
Philosopher, 1991, 28-40. University of Santo Tomas.
8. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem Is Being Written,” in Tendencies (London:
Routledge, 1994), 204.
10. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 184-86.
Sedgwick elucidates further on her idea of homosexuality by citing the works
of Claude Levi-Strauss and Heidi Hartmann, and by linking her own project with
the New Historicist readings of the Renaissance scholar, Alan Bray.
See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1969), 115; Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism
and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in Women and Revolution: A
Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent
(Boston: South End Press, 1981), 14; and Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance
England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 25.
11. Gert Hekma, “Homosociality,” in Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne R.
Dynes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 560-61.
12. Alan Bray and Michael Rey, “Friendship (Male),” in Dynes, Encyclopedia of
Homosexuality, 444.
13. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 41.
14. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 40.
15. This gay bar first opened in 1970. See Eric Catipon, “Cruising,” Sunday Times Life
Magazine, February 21, 1993, 3-6.
Chapter One: The Sixties

1. Lee Sechrest and Luis Flores, “Homosexuality in the Philippines and the
United States: The Handwriting on the Wall,” The Journal of Social Psychology,
Massachusetts, October 1969: 9.
2. University of the Philippines Professor Martin F. Manalansan IV claims bakla
comes from the first syllables of the Tagalog-Filipino words for woman and man,
babae and lalaki, respectively. Although the intervening consonant sound “k” is
not accounted for in his hypothesis, the cross-gender import of the term bakla is
Notes | 463
admittedly interesting and suggestive. See Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Tolerance or

Struggle: Male Homosexuality in the Philippines Today,” MS, 1990.
3. Sechrest and Flores, 9.
4. Jane S. Banzhaf, “Toward the Exploration of the Bakla Personality,” Master’s
thesis, Ateneo de Manila University, 1969, 1.
Bakla, for Banzhaf, is semantically similar to binabae, which for her means
“the process of making into a woman, and being like a woman” (7). She, however,
is at variance with Sechrest and Flores because she posits male homosexuality
to be a more advanced form of effeminacy with which “the masculine elements
of society cannot reconcile.” For Sechrest and Flores, with whom I will have to
agree, femininity and homosexuality are two very different behaviors that in the
bakla only happen to meet. They likewise observe that the bakla is immediately
understood to be effeminate/feminine, with the existence of his homosexuality
vaguely implicit in his person.
5. Rogelia Pe-Pua, “Ang Sikolohiyang Pilipino at ang Programang Pampopulasyon,”
Diliman Review 39, no. 4 (1991): 13-18. University of the Philippines.
If the nature of the “stumbling block” that prevents the development of a
more effective family planning program is linguistic, then may I suggest to the
Department of Health that swardspeak be used as the vehicle for the dissemination
of public health and contraceptive material to the communities? As we shall see
in the succeeding pages, swardspeak does not only involve a lexical difference, but
more important, a difference in “attitude” toward the very subject of sex as well.
I’m sure there are enough swardspeak terms to handle the basics about sex; if not,
swardspeak can always, in each and every case, invent them.
6. In the “little speech” I delivered for that occasion, I imagined how a cartographic
analogy of the Philippine gender system may actually be revealing of two distinct
axes of identity: sexuality and gender. “Superimposing the two conceptual maps
might show how in terms of sexuality all bakla are homosexual, while in terms of
gender, homosexuals are only partly bakla … And so, we need to examine how
complementary or hostile are these two terms, although ‘gay’ (a term which I
prefer to call myself and whatever it is my ‘self ’ does—this book, titled Closet
Quivers, included—may well be regarded as the points of overlap of the areas
covered by the homosexual and the bakla in this very clumsy, albeit hopefully
useful, map of sexual identities” (from J. Neil C. Garcia, “Closet Quivers: Politics
and Poetics,” Diliman Review 40, no. 2 [1992]: 5-10).
The Cine Café opened in March 1992. By the time I launched my book there,
it had become a cozy and fitting venue for gay film showings, poetry readings, and
exhibits. Recently, Nicolas Pichay’s Coming Out play, Karga Mano, was staged at
the Cine Café by Dulaang Talyer, a gay theater collective headed by actor-director
Paul Morales. For a review of Pichay’s play, see J. Neil C. Garcia, “Karga Mano: A
Gayer Kind of Love,” Manila Chronicle, January 18, 1993, 14.
7. Carmen Santiago, “Ang Kahulugan ng Pagkalalake sa mga Pilipino,” in Ulat ng
Ikalawang Pambansang Kumperensya sa Sikolohiyang Pilipino, ed. Lilia Antonio et
al. (Manila: Lathalian ng Pambansang Samahan sa Sikolohiyang Pilipino), 101-19.
8. Frederick Whitam and Robin Mathy, Male Homosexuality in Four Societies: Brazil,
Guatemala, the Philippines, and the United States (New York: Praeger Scientific,
1986).
9. Joseph Itiel, Philippine Diary: A Gay Guide to the Philippines (San Francisco:
International Wavelength Inc., 1989), 10.
10. Banzhaf, 1.
11. In any case, it doesn’t seem the practice of early American medicine in the
Philippines was very much interested in the field of psychiatry. On the contrary,
the Bureau of Science in Manila undertook a number of laboratory projects aimed
at classifying the different tropical parasites residing in native bodies in order to
protect the health of the racially superior albeit microbially vulnerable American
settlers here.
See Warwick Anderson, “‘Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man Is Vile’:
Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse,” in Discrepant Histories: Translocal
Essays on Filipino Cultures, ed. Vicente L. Rafael (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 1995),
83-103.
12. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in
Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1975), 182. Quoted in Harriet Whitehead, “The Bow and the Burdenstrap:
A New Look at Institutionalized Homosexuality in North America,” in Sexual
Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Sherry B. Ortner
and Harriet Whitehead (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 110.
13. It is to explicate the complexities of this “reality” that Sikolohiyang Pilipino, under
the charismatic leadership of Virgilio Enriquez, has sought to indigenize the study
of the psychology of Filipinos from within their own culture: this implies that the
energies of social science research should now be directed less to the uncritical
adoption of Western categories than to the culling of indigenous concepts and
research methods that will respect the cultural givenness of Filipinos. While at
first blush merely relativist, Sikolohiyang Pilipino actually remains very much
interested in the scientific project of searching for “universals.” It must however
be qualified that only a cross-indigenous model of psychologies will suffice in
carrying this out, which therefore presupposes that even Western industrialist
psychology is an ethnoscience specific to its social milieu. In this respect, the
cultural validation of psychological models and theories across different cultures
Notes | 465
is to be considered a most necessary undertaking. Enriquez calls this orientation

“universalist”: Sikolohiyang Pilipino does not assume the irreducible uniqueness
of all cultures, but insists that any attempts at understanding them must be made
from within each of these cultures. Only after such a project has been completed
can the idea of the possible “generalizability” of certain psychological properties
begin to be entertained.
See Virgilio G. Enriquez, Pagbabangong-Dangal: Indigenous Psychology and
Cultural Empowerment (Quezon City: Akademya ng Cultura at Sikolohiyang
Pilipino, 1994), 47-48.
14. Actually, this study does not wish to adjudicate among the many competing
models of Filipino personality and selfhood. In the first place, the “ensign” under
which I will operate in this project is more sociological than psychological: this
book cannot really be said to belong to sikolohiya, indigenous or otherwise. As
has already been qualified before, it is merely the performative—rather than
the interpretive—aspects of the concept of selfhood between the West and our
cultures that are to be considered in this work. Likewise, the project of ascertaining
(almost prescribing) a Filipino psychology does not and cannot take into account
the differences among the many cultural communities and groups making
up the geopolitical reality that is the Philippines; this makes such a project a
nationalistically mystifying and therefore a potentially fascistic one.
Nonetheless, loob would seem to be one of the more fertile local concepts
around which revolve a number of tropes that have hitherto been used to explain
what I would call Tagalog-Filipino “psychospirituality”: that blurred site of
significations that are both secular and religious and that relate to the inner life
of an individual or collectivity belonging to Tagalog-Filipino society. Enriquez
has sought to render this “psyche/spirit” less blurry by clarifying the object of
Sikolohiyang Pilipino as kamalayan, ulirat, isip, diwa, kalooban, and kaluluwa (the
last being the equivalent of the “psyche” itself). (See Enriquez, 3.) An alternative
model that is supposedly “less secular” than Enriquez’s schema has been forwarded
by University of the Philippines anthropologist Prospero Covar: kaluluwa, budhi,
katauhang panlabas, and katauhang panloob (Enriquez, 54-55).
15. Mark Johnson, “Cross-Gender Men and Homosexuality in the Southern Philippines:
Ethnicity, Political Violence and the Protocols of Engendered Sexualities amongst
the Muslim Tausug and Sama,” paper presented at the European Conference on
Philippine Studies in London, April 13-15, 1994.
16. One such passage in Orosman at Zafira goes like this:
Zelim: Abdalap na taksil, ang isip mo baga

Kaya di sumagot ay dahil sa bakla?
In this most recent edition, a footnote reference explains the word “bakla” to
mean manghang may takot (“fearful awe”). From Balagtas, Orosman at Zafira, ed.
B.S. Medina Jr. (Manila: De la Salle University Press, 1990), 254.
17. Jose Villa Panganiban, Diksyunaryo-Tesauro Pilipino-Ingles (Quezon City: 1972),
91.
An “obverse” of this compendium came out almost two decades later,
and it is interesting how the English word homosexual is translated—rather,
transliterated—therein as “omosekswal.” Such liberally orthographic translation
may have been a result of the newer trend emerging out of the national language
debates, which allows for direct phonetic equivalences between foreign words and
Filipino. On the other hand, however, such an exclusively orthographic way of
translating words may also effect a more conservative movement which aims to
mark off what is inherently “foreign” from what is “indigenous.” See Jose Villa
Panganiban, English-Filipino Thesaurus-Dictionary (Marikina: 1988), 372.
18. See Juan de Noceda and Pedro de Sanlucar, Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala
(Reimpreso en Manila: Imprenta de Ramirez y Giraudier, 1860), 49; Pedro Serrano
Laktaw, Diccionario Tagalog-Hispano (Manila: Imprenta v. Lit. de Santos y Bernal,
1914), 131.
19. Michael Tan, “Sickness and Sin: The Medical and Religious Stigmatization of
Homosexuality in the Philippines,” MS (1992).
20. Donn V. Hart, “Homosexuality and Transvestism in the Philippines: The Cebuano
Filipino Bayot and Lakin-on,” Behavior Science Notes 3 (1968): 211-48.
21. James Weinrich, “Reality or Social Construction,” Forms of Desire: Sexual
Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, ed. Edward Stein (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 175-208.
Weinrich identifies three patterns of homosexuality that supposedly exist all
over the world: the age-biased pattern (exemplified by the Greek and New Guinea
models), the inversion pattern (exemplified by the Amerindian berdache, the
Indian hijra, and may I now add, the Philippine bakla/bayot), and the role-playing
pattern (to be seen in some Latin American and Middle Eastern cultures).
Of course, the most insightful work on Melanesia and New Guinea was
undertaken by Gilbert H. Herdt. See for instance his Ritualized Homosexuality in
Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
22. Stephen O. Murray, Latin American Male Homosexualities (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1995).
23. Whitehead, 97.
On the centrality of homo/sexuality in the matter of defining gender in
contemporary Western civilization, Whitehead argues: “Homosexual activity has
Notes | 467
been so strongly definitive of an enduring, gender-anomalous condition that it

has long been impossible to engage in it casually.”
24. Lina Espina, “Homosexuals Are a Major Police Problem,” This Week Magazine,
July 31, 1960, 34.
She explains the etymology of the word biniboy thus: “Homosexuals are
called bakla in Tagalog. But since terms, like people, take on the mestizo quality,
this has developed into biniboy, which is said to be a combination of the words
binibini which means maiden in Tagalog, and boy which is, well, boy. Other terms
are sioke and sister.”
Though unformulated, this passage manages to foreshadow the future
efflorescence of the highly generative language of swardspeak.
25. Ma. Simeona Ponteñila, “An Ethnographic Study of the Overt Bayots in Dumaguete
City” (master’s thesis, Silliman University, March 1975). In a master’s thesis in
psychology, a researcher concludes that transvestites in Antipolo are “significantly
unfavored” by his respondents. See Praxedes S. de la Rosa, “The Attitude of the
Professionals of Antipolo, Rizal toward Effeminates and Transvestites,” Philippine
Education Quarterly, March 1979, 23.
Chapter Two: The Seventies

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See especially his section on “The
Paradoxical Perverse,” 103-30.
2. Angie Santiago, “Gay Manila: A Panel on Homosexuality,” Manila Paper, May
1975.* References with the asterisk may also be found in Diana Julao, “Gay
Philippines: Pagkatao, Suliranin at Wika ng Sward,” unpublished compilation,
Institute of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines (1980).
3. Aida Sevilla Mendoza, “A Peek into Private Lives of People Who Swing and Love
Both Ways,” Philippine Panorama, June 17, 1979, 6.
4. Bibsy Carballo, “Second Thoughts on the Third Sex,” Mirror Magazine, April 5,
1969.
5. Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the
Social Constructionist Controversy, ed. Edward Stein (New York: Routledge, 1992),
69-88.
6. Nick Joaquin, Gloria Diaz and Other Delineations (Manila: National Book Store,
1977), 203.
7. Josie Darang, “How About a Third Force?” People, July 8, 1979, 16.
8. Rosalia de Leon, “Filipino Attitudes Towards Homosexuality” (term paper

submitted to Professor Joseph Regalado for Psychology 11, Department of
Psychology, University of the Philippines, August 1979).*
9. Jane S. Banzhaf, “Toward the Exploration of the Bakla Personality” (master’s thesis,
Ateneo de Manila University, 1969), 1.
10. Banzhaf, 3.
11. Gerry N. Zaragoza, “Save Fofonggay!” Campus Journal, March 13, 1975.
12. Ma. Simeona Ponteñila, “An Ethnographic Study of the Overt Bayots in Dumaguete
City” (master’s thesis, Silliman University, March 1975).
13. Santiago, “Gay Manila.”
14. M. L. Maniquiz, “Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Salamat,” in Cultural
Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, vol. 7, ed. Nicanor G.
Tiongson (Manila: CCP, 1994), 196.
15. Fely Luz Marcos, “A Case Study on the Language of the Homosexuals Based on
the Play Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Salamat” (undergraduate thesis,
Institute of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines, March 1976).*
16. Santiago, “Gay Manila.”
17. Ponteñila, 87.
18. R.H. Desuasido, “A Second Time for Boys in the Band,” Parade, October 28,
1979.
19. Nestor B. Fernandez, “Madam I’m Adam,” Philippine Panorama, July 20, 1980, 18.
The “Jade Vine” pageants later gave rise to the biggest gay beauty contest so
far, “Tala ng Kalighatian.” See A. C. Florendo, “A Gay Reality,” Expressweek, July
22, 1976.
20. Mario Taguiwalo, “The Pursuit of Happiness at Coco Banana,” Who?, August 2,
1980, 18.
21. Taguiwalo, 18.
22. Juan Birion, “Intellectual, Social, and Emotional Adjustments and Sexual Behavior
of Homosexual College Students,” Manuel L. Quezon University Graduate Journal,
first semester, 1981-1982, 38-46.
23. Warren Johansson, “Transsexualism,” Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne
R. Dynes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 1310.
24. Elena Patron, “Ako si Emma … Babae,” Liwayway (September 23, 1974–April 21,
1975).
25. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), 49.
26. Lee Sechrest and Luis Flores, “Homosexuality in the Philippines and the United
States: The Handwriting on the Wall,” Journal of Social Psychology, October 1969,
9. Massachusetts.
Notes | 469
27. Princesita Buma-at et al., The Misunderstood: An Attempted Study on Homosexuality

(Manila: United Publishing House Co., 1974).
28. Ponteñila, 41.
29. Laura Samson et al., “Ang Pagkilala at Pagbabansag ng mga Alanganin,” Diwa 5,
Journal of Psychology, nos. 1-2 (1976). University of the Philippines.*
30. According to recent sociological studies, in the United States, heterosexual males
who cross-dress may actually outnumber homosexual transvestites. See Lawrence
Senelick, “Transvestism,” in Dynes, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, 1313.
31. Carballo, 6.
32. Jimmy Rimonte, “Are We Breeding a Generation of Badaf Forever?” Parade,
November 2, 1980, 9.
An incomplete chronological listing of published articles that offer a variety
of homosexual “etiologies” includes the following:
1. C. Alvarez, “Sexual Mixups,” Mirror Magazine, January 17, 1968, 6.
2. Carballo.
3. Pace Newsmagazine, “Why Homosexuals Are That Way” and “The Freudian
Theory,” January 21, 1972, 44-45.
4. Ponteñila, 114. She suggests that, judging from the case studies she conducted
for the bayots (sic) of Dumaguete City, there is a very strong mother-causation
in the genesis of male homosexuality.
5. Ma. Corazon Amansec, “Ang Transekswalismo,” Tao at Lipunan (Journal of
the Social Sciences, University of the Philippines, Diliman), 1974?*
6. Jose Meily, “Homosexuality,” Philippine Panorama, Ju1y 6, 1975, Ju1y 13,
1975.
Other Meily (Jose and Anita) columns that tackle homosexuality and its
roots came out in the following dates: “God didn’t create the gay,” August 4,
1985; “Homosexual Love,” November 16, 1986; “Coping with a Gay Child,”
August 9, 1987; “Frustrating Relationships,” October 1, 1989.
7. Birion, 116.
8. Greg Laconsay, “Gay Power Did It,” Who?, August 18, 1982.
9. M. Guerrero, “Homosexuality: A Hormonal Problem?” Women’s Journal,
November 1984, 20.
10. “Questions You’ve Always Wanted to Ask about Homosexuality But Were
Afraid to Ask,” Campus Magazine, August 1987, 15.
11. Belinda Nera Gallamos, “Sociocultural and Psychological Variables Related
to Adolescent Homosexuality among Male University of Santo Tomas High
School Students” (master’s thesis in Psychology, University of Santo Tomas,
(March 1988).
12. Noel de Pano, “Yes, Homosexuals Can Be Cured,” Mr & Ms, June 28. 1988.
13. Tomas Q. Andres, “Homosexuality: A Third Normal Sex?” Philippine Values

Digest 4 (1989): 64-74.
14. George Nava True, “Facts and Fallacies about Homosexuality,” from the
biweekly column, Health Frontiers, Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 7,
1993, 9.
I have deliberately left the columns of Margarita Go-Singco Holmes out
from this listing because they do not, first and foremost, treat homosexuality
as a pathological state. It is notable, however, that save for Ponteñila, Birion,
and Gallamos, all the authors of these papers and/or magazine articles merely
summarize the state of the art in theories of homosexuality.
Amansec’s paper, on the other hand, ventures to explain that the Oedipal
drama, whose nonresolution leads to homosexuality, hardly plays itself out
in the Philippine home: the father is absent, but it’s because of some slowly
encroaching matriarchy to be observed in the Filipino family:
Nagkakaroon ng bakla ngayon dahil sa dumarami ang mga

lalaking bumibitiw sa kanilang posisyon bilang mga pinuno ng kani-
kanilang pamilya … sa pangkaraniwang pamilya ngayon, ang babae
ang humahawak ng isang posisyon na hindi katulad ng kanilang
kalarangan sa Asya … Ang Pilipinong ina ang humahawak ng pera ng
pamilya … gumagawa ng halos lahat ng malalaking desisyon ukol sa
paggastos … Kaya tuloy ang karaniwang lalaki ay lumalaki sa ilalim
ng impluwensiya ng babae … hindi siya lumalaki na may kinikilalang
matatag na ama ng tahanan. Mabigat ang kanyang loob sa babae (7).
[There is an increase in the number of gays because there is also
an increase in the number of men who do not live up to their role as
the head of the family … the woman in the contemporary Filipino
home holds a position not enjoyed by her counterparts in the rest of
Asia … The Filipino mother keeps the family finances … makes all
the important decisions regarding spending … All this is responsible
for the fact that the typical Filipino male grows up extremely under
the influence of the female. He ends up without a strong male role
model in the home. He holds a grudge against women.]
Banzhaf echoes the same theory of “feminized masculinity.” I think all
these congruent interpretations that lay the blame for the existence of male
homosexuality on women may be traced to the misogyny which Freudian
theory itself reproduces. Sexual deviance is also demonized, together with
women, because women are the markers of difference, the “unknown,” in a
patriarchal system.
Notes | 471
33. Denise Chou Alas, “Four on the Third Sex,” Celebrity, May 31, 1980, 18-23.
34. Darang, 16.
35. Sedgwick, 87.
This is the classic Christine Jorgensen one-liner: A woman trapped inside a
man’s body.
36. That “manly women” are better indulged by a society than “womanly men”
probably reflects that society’s belief that “it is degrading for a man to be reduced
to the status of a woman, while it is a step up for a woman to be credited with the
qualities of a man.” See Wayne R. Dynes, “Effeminacy (Semantics),” in Dynes,
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, 349.
37. Santiago, “Gay Manila:”*
38. Ponteñila, 45.
Ponteñila’s work, sadly, only mentions briefly the lakin-on of Dumaguete
City. Nonetheless, for researchers who may be interested in carrying out “lesbian
studies,” the following materials are available in the libraries of UP Diliman:
Edna Aceveda et al., “Paraan ng Panliligaw ng mga Babaeng Homosekswal,”
panel na inihanda para sa klase ni Propesor Mita Jimenez, Departamento ng
Sikolohiya, Unibersidad ng Pilipinas, Diliman.*
Josefina Cacnio, “A Study of the Female Homosexual in the University of the
Philippines” (undergraduate thesis, Institute of Mass Communication, University
of the Philippines Diliman, 1973).
The De La Salle University Library also keeps a couple of undergraduate
theses on female homosexuals in the campus:
Sheila Cardiel and others, “Ang Pakikipag-ugnayan ng mga Binalake, o
Ganda Babae: Pusong-lalake.”
Christy Catanghal and others, “Like Poles Attract: Female homosexuality in
De La Salle University.”
39. Victor Gamboa and Henry Feenstra, “Deviant Stereotypes: Call Girls, Male
Homosexuals, and Lesbians,” Philippine Sociological Review 17, nos. 3-4 (July-
October 1969): 136-48.
40. “Prostitution Report,” prepared by the Special Squad of the Manila Police
Department, Philippines Free Press, April 14, 1962, 3.
41. Wayne R. Dynes, “Third Sex,” in Dynes, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, 1306.
42. Manila Paper, “Three Boys in the Band,” May 1975.*
43. Manila Paper.
44. Manila Paper.
45. Ponteñila, 118.
She adds that most of the terms of bayotspeak (my coinage, not hers) are
disguised; some less disguised, particularly the sex terms; others are universally
used and understood by both homosexuals and heterosexuals.
46. Ponteñila, 128.

Ponteñila includes eight such songs in her Appendix “as ethnographic
material.” Most of the songs deal with themes of alienation, love, and happiness,
but always flavored with that unique mockery and funniness associated with the
bayot. The existence of such songs (which were performed and/or composed
mostly by Visayan artists-singers the likes of Yoyoy Villame, R. Guadalupe, P.
Sunga, and Bebeng Samson) awakened me to the realization that “gay culture”
in the Philippines has indeed been around for a long time now, and that archival
work is quite vital in assuring that these precious legacies and texts do not fall by
the wayside of institutional forgetting. They should also belie the “inaugural” and
“space-clearing” claims by anybody that he is the first of anything in this country.
These songs also bear witness to the inaccuracy, if incompleteness, of the project:
perhaps gay culture, albeit of a qualitatively different form, has been alive and well
much longer in the southern islands than even in Manila itself?
47. Rimonte, 9.
48. Marie Antonette Raquiza, “Bakla: Do They Have a Chance?” Diliman Review 31
(5): 35-77.
49. Philip Waite, “Notes on Swardspeak.” Mr. Waite’s folio of loose papers on the
subject of swardspeak may be found among the files on “kabaklaan” of the
Philippine Psychology Research and Training House, UP Village, Diliman,
Quezon City.
50. Laura Samson, “Ang Swardspeak sa Showbiz,” Sagisag, March 1979.*
It is deplorable that libraries do not keep copies of popular showbiz magazines.
I am just too sure that the gay entertainment culture manifests a texture of gayness
so different from what I have outlined here; renarrativizing it will possibly upset
many of the findings of this tentative undertaking.
51. Jose Javier Reyes, “Swardspeak: A Preliminary Study,” Pintig-Isip 1, no. 20 (October,
1977): 60-85. Behavioral Sciences Department, De La Salle University.
A list of undergraduate theses coming from the College of Mass
Communication of the University of the Philippines on the topic of swardspeak
includes the following: Raquel Bautista, “Gays’ Perception on Gay Language: A
Case Study of the Gay Language as Used in Lucban, Quezon”; Allen Field, “A
Study of Male Homosexual Couturiers of the Greater Manila Area: Personal
Characteristics, Attitudes, Sexual Behavior and Mass Media Habits”; and Salome
Flores, “A Descriptive Case Study on the Gay language as Used in Metro Manila:
Evolution and Its Use.”
On the more recent variants of swardspeak, see Isah V. Red, “Manash, Baklese
It Is, Type Nyo?” Manila Chronicle, August 9, 1987, 18; and Danilo Maramba,
“Gayspeak,” Sunday Times Life Magazine, February 21, 1993, 7.
Notes | 473
52. Joanne Ramilo et al., “Gay Bar: Isang Pagsusuri at Pagbibigay-Puna” (paper in
psychology, submitted to Prof. Virgilio Enriquez, Philippine Psychology Research
and Training House).
The researchers interviewed some of the patrons of the “Amulet” gay bar in
Ermita, and their respondents gave them the names of six gay organizations and
a brief description of each:
1. Boston Guys – composed of straight-acting gays; membership is by invitation
only.
2. Cosmopolitan Circle of the Philippines – all members of this group sport
a moustache, as proof of the fact that they are all former straights; most of
them are married, even.
3. Kami-kami Atbp. – the gays who make up this group all have celebrity
nicknames, after the current showbiz stars; e.g., Charito Solis, Hilda Koronel,
etc.
4. Mothers, Sisters, and Daughters – only impersonators may join this
organization; members are called “mujeristas” or “feministas.” (I must say I
find the latter monicker outrageous.)
5. Sining Kayumanggi Royal Family – the name of this group comes from the
bar its members regularly meet in; this group is largely geriatric. (I met the
original members of SKRF at their silver anniversary in the stately house of
one of its founding members, in San Mateo, Rizal, late 1992.)
6. A-Z International – supposedly the biggest gay group, with members from all
over the archipelago; there is a screening committee that decides on whether
or not an aspirant is “talented” enough to become a member. (I suspect the
group has since splintered and/or disintegrated. The current organization
KATLO seems to have inherited some of the A-Z International’s criteria for
selecting members.)
53. Ponteñila, 47.
54. This account appeared in the Sunday magazine of a daily broadsheet only in 1993.
It takes the form of a feature article in which an anonymous speaker provides a
chronological listing of the many different gay “cruising” spots from the 1970s
onward. Some of the places in which local gays had regular sex in the seventies
are the following: movie houses in Quezon City and Manila (Delta, Circle, New
Frontier, Coronet, Grand, Ever, Ideal, and Galaxy); gay bars in Quezon City,
Manila, and Pasay (690, Karetela, Taberna Taboso, Karachi, Adam and Eve, Can-
Can, Bar Gay-zer, Gas-Light, Inside Bar, Pendulum, The Saint, and Kalesa); and
public parks (Mehan Gardens, Luneta or Rizal Park, and the golf course in front
of the Manila City Hall, provocatively called “Chocolate Hills”). See Eric Catipon,
“Cruising,” Sunday Times Life Magazine, February 21, 1993, 3-6.
55. Nick Joaquin, Manila: Sin City? and Other Chronicles, May 1970 (Manila: Cacho
Hermanos, 1980), 270.
56. Ricardo Dimayuga, “Libreng Kaligayahan: Landas ng mga Bakla sa Lungsod
ng Maynila” (paper submitted in Psychology 118 to Prof. Bartolome, October
1, 1979; found under “kabaklaan,” Philippine Psychology Research and Training
House).
57. Lamberto Nery, “The Covert Subculture of Male Homosexual Prostitutes in
Metro Manila” (paper prepared for Psychology 150 under Professor Benedicto
Villanueva, Department of Psychology, University of the Philippines, first sem.,
1977-1978).*
An intriguing description of gay bar life in the eighties may be found in Cris
Marimla, “The Gay Life,” National Midweek, April 16, 1986, 32-33.
58. Martin Manalansan IV, “Speaking of AIDS: Language and the Filipino ‘Gay’
Experience in America,” in Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino
Cultures, ed. Vicente L. Rafael (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 1995), 193-200.
Manalansan distinguishes the Philippine pattern of male homosexuality from
the Latin American activo/pasivo, which is (strictly) characterized by a distinction
of anal receptive/penetrative roles.
59. Frederick Whitam, “Philippines,” in Dynes, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, 981.
On the bakla’s claims, see Manila Paper; Birion, 132; and Ponteñila, 115.
60. The notion of “pseudohomosexuality” is itself rather pseudo. According to
historian Kenneth Lewes, a certain psychoanalyst named Ovesey and his
colleagues advanced the idea of the pseudohomosexual in order to “come to the
aid of men troubled by feelings of inferiority and powerlessness, (but) to whom
the charge of latent homosexuality would be ‘catastrophic.’” Hence, the notion
of pseudohomosexuality is simply another heterosexual invention meant to
minoritize the question of homoeroticism by focusing the psychiatric model
of sexuality on a certain part of the population (in this case, the psychosexual
inverts) alone.
See Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (New
York: Simon and Schuster Inc., 1988), 238.
61. Ponteñila, 55-56.
62. Sofronio G. Calderon, Diccionario Ingles-Español-Tagalog (Manila: Libreria de J.
Martinez, 1915).
63. Prospero R. Covar, “Kaalamang Bayang Dalumat ng Pagkataong Pilipino,” Diliman
Review 41, no. 1 (1993): 10-15.
64. Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Conversion in Tagalog
Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988),
125.
Notes | 475
65. Alejo’s is the latest and inarguably most expansive scholarship on the Tagalog-
Filipino concept of shared inner self, or loob. See Albert Alejo, SJ, Tao Po! Tuloy!
(Office of Research and Publications, Ateneo de Manila University, 1990).
Alejo’s work aims to prove that loob is not a flat, static structure, but rather,
that it has “roundness” (lalim) and is dynamic. His framework is largely Christian
structuralist-Humanist, and as with other texts of this sort I choose to look at his
work not as descriptive (not in the least), but as prescriptive.
66. Rafael, 124-26.
67. Alejo, 104.
68. Joseph Itiel, Philippine Diary: A Gay Guide to the Philippines (San Francisco:
International Wavelength Inc., 1989), 12.
69. Reynaldo C. Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines,
1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979), 143.
70. Rune Layumas collaborated on this film project with German avant-garde
filmmaker Jürgen Bruning. It is the second part of the trilogy, Maybe I Can Give
You Sex, which is really Layumas’s work. The film came out of Bruning’s curiosity
concerning the reality of “straight-gay” relationships in the Philippines, a sexual
arrangement quite kinky and unheard of in the West. For more on the film, see
this study’s Conclusion.
71. A similar point is raised by Manalansan, in his essay on the strategies of Filipino-
American gays in the wake of AIDS.
“The Roman Catholic Church, with its coterie of female saints, martyrs
and most especially the Virgin Mary, has provided the models par excellence of
suffering” (Manalansan, 216).
While I can perfectly understand the argument that suffering has come to
be identified with femininity in the current time, I nonetheless disagree with
Manalansan’s implicit assumption that all suffering has always been feminized
within the history of Roman Catholic Philippines. As Reynaldo Ileto points out in
Pasyon and Revolution, the “stylized forms of behavior” of Christ and the faithful
in the sinakulo (passion plays) in the nineteenth century were not necessarily
understood by the Tagalog peasants to be indications of subservience. On the
contrary, the story of the sinakulo demonstrated Longinus’s “defiance toward the
authorities out of commitment to an ideal”; hence, Ileto’s work rests on the thesis
that the popular movements borrowed their ideology from the passion texts of
their time. See Ileto, 17.
72. Emerito Gonzales, “Homosexuality: An Ethical Appraisal,” The Thomasian
Philosopher, 1991, 29. University of Santo Tomas.
73. Dollimore, 131-47.
74. This may be linked to the notion of the homosexual as a joke: neither here nor
there, he is deemed funny because he cannot be placed anywhere. Alanganin has
been translated as “deviant,” and deviant means a quality of having strayed from a
path; wayward. In light of Augustinian theodicy, deviance is also evil itself.
I suggest, therefore, that rather than look at the conventionalized funniness
of the bakla, it is better to inquire into the insights that his being evil/deviant, or
“alanganin” brings.
75. Warren Blumenfeld and Diane Raymond, Looking at Gay and Lesbian Life
(Massachussets: Beacon Press, 1988), 214.
76. John Silva, “Filipino Resistance to the Anti-Homosexual Campaign during the
Spanish Regime.”*
77. Manalansan’s observation that the “masculine bakla is the cassowary (anomalous
category) in the Philippine taxonomy of sexual behavior” doesn’t take into account
the slippage of categories implicit in the bakla/homosexual dynamic: precisely, the
bakla cannot be masculine, according to the native distinctions of gender; but to
the degree that sexuality is not reducible to the categories of gender, that there can
indeed be homosexual males who are masculine and not bakla, as this study has
been trying to say all along. See Manalansan, 198.
78. Maria Aurora Garcia, “Ang Paglaganap ng Kabaklaan sa Pilipinas.”*
79. Leo Sergio, “Manila and the Male Homosexual,” Graphic, August 31, 1966.
80. Ponteñila, 58.
81. So popular did these gay representations become that clones of them appeared
in a number of movies in the 1970s and early eighties. Some of these are Tubog
sa Ginto, Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, Ang Tatay Kong Nanay, Lumakad
Kang Hubad sa Mundong Ibabaw, Showbiz Scandal, City After Dark, Si Malakas,
si Maganda, at si Mahinhin, and Mahinhin vs. Mahinhin. See Lamberto Antonio,
“Ang Tauhang Alanganin,” Observer, June 2, 1981, 44.
82. Julian E. Dacanay, “Pain and Reality in a Spoof Show: Close Encounters with the
Third Sex,” Who?, January 12, 1980, 8.
83. Manila Paper.
84. Manila Paper.
85. Arlene Babst, “Feminism and Gay Liberation,” Who?, August 23, 1980.
86. G. Gonzales, “The Funny Company,” Who?, July 21, 1979, 46.
87. Santiago.
The person who makes this remark is Dr. Lourdes V. Lapuz, a psychiatrist
who may be found giving interviews in many magazines at this time.
88. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 70.
89. Manila Paper.
Notes | 477
90. Banzhaf, 10.

More than a decade later, Barrera, another researcher on male homosexuality
in Metropolitan Manila, encounters the same social role specification for the
bakla. From a survey of male homosexual college students, she concludes that
they prefer and most probably will end up in artistic careers. Certainly, then,
her work is not cognizant of the bakla/homosexual dynamic, for if it were, then
definitely there would be more variety in the profile of her respondents who
would, to be sure, prefer a spectrum of “preoccupations for their careers,” the same
spectrum one would expect of heterosexual males. See Carmelina Barrera, “The
Homosexual College Students of Manila: Their Demographic Profile, Personality,
Career Preference, Problems and Opinions Regarding Issues on Homosexuality”
(master’s thesis, Philippine Normal College, Manila, 1983).
91. Desuasido.
92. Sedgwick, 4-9.
93. Marcos.
94. Ponteñila, 82.
95. Manila Paper.
96. Procopio Madlangbayan, “Will Your Son Be Gay?” Expressweek, June 14, 1979,
14.
97. Rosario Aquino, “The Sociological Aspect of Homosexuality,” Santo Tomas Journal
of Education, October-December 1965, 20-25.
Actually, her rather outré classification divides homosexuals into three:
1. Respectable – these are men who lead quiet, decent lives, and apart from
their sexuality they live normally.
2. Prostitute – this type is not only abnormal but uses his abnormality to his
profit.
3. Hoodlum – this is the bullying blackmailer who frequently works with the
prostitute type to entice the respectable homosexual to his clutches. (These
are almost verbatim descriptions.)
What is interesting about this schema is that it is so scheming: one almost feels
a plot thickening for these three characters who are a world unto themselves. This
classification, grounded in some kind of illogic I am unable to figure out (silliness
notwithstanding), reflects an early “criminalizing” as well as a minoritizing
tendency when regarding homosexuality. Suffice it to say that these three “classes”
of homosexuals feed on one another, and the heterosexual/homosexual dialectic
(in which hetero depends on homo to exist as a category) all but conveniently
vanishes.
98. “He has reconciled ‘herself ’ with himself and his man,” Philippine Panorama,
November 11, 1979, 34.
99. Margaruite Evans, “The Case of Bobby Torres” (master’s thesis in Education,
major in Guidance and Counseling, La Salle College, April 1972).
His story takes the form of a short autobiography he wrote himself, and
transcripts from several sessions with the researcher and a certain psychiatrist.
Suicidal when Evans met him, Bobby nonetheless manages to maintain a
relationship with a girlfriend who understands all his problems and whom he
marries after a false pregnancy. At the end of the case study Bobby is looking
forward to fatherhood and a busy career, and he forgets all about his homosexuality
of which he has been cured.
He does impress me to be a genuinely distraught homosexual, although I
could sense a certain pressure being brought to bear on him by the guidance and
counseling situation. Authentic or not? I dare not answer, because, as with all of
these archival materials, the more important line of inquiry is not authenticity or
its opposite (apocryphality). Rather the more interesting question relates to the
material and cultural effects these texts have produced. In the end, the voice of
a true anguish manages to whisper across the obvious restrictions an MA thesis
bent on mobilizing the myth of heterosexual panacea straddles along the way.
Bobby wrote poems—for self psycho-help perhaps? The sheaf of verses
that I found alongside his autobiography also reveals a certain yearning for
belongingness, something a gay community, had it existed then, would have given
him ungrudgingly. But certainly, minus all the trappings of a hateful humanism
that is bent on making everybody the same as everybody else.
One of the sadder and therefore necessarily gloomier poems is called “The
End.”
The End
a descending heart is crying

for love that will never be
the body, so dry, is dying
like an age-old tree
the leaves begin to fall

the twigs begin to dry
the trunk begins to rot
the roots begin to die
where is the fertile soil?

blown by the wind, eroded
where is the refreshing rain?
gone, consumed by arid air
Notes | 479
there will never be a smile again

it is forever gone from the face of earth
sweet music never will be played
it never will be hummed, it’s dead
Where is Bobby Torres now? The part of him that died in this poem lives now
in our remembering.
100. Darang, 16.
101. Marcos.
102. Mendoza, 62.
103. Manila Paper.
104. Marcelino R. Realeza, “Every Inch a Woman,” Expressweek, September 27, 1979,
31.
Chapter Three: Precolonial Gender-Crossing

and the Babaylan Chronicles
1. Josie Darang, “How About a Third Force?” People, July 8, 1979, 16.
A similar remark is made by a British anthropologist who did a recent
ethnography on the bakla in the Bicol region: “The bakla try to look for money
outside the barangay, possibly as a domestic servant, but more usually by setting
themselves up in one of the very numerous small beauty shops which can be
found in every tiny Filipino town, servicing the huge demand for dressing up,
even among the poor.” See Fenella Cannell, “The Power of Appearances: Beauty,
Mimicry and Transformation in Bicol,” in Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays
on Filipino Cultures, ed. Vicente L. Rafael (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 1995), 242.
2. I understand the concept of “gender-crossing” has been under attack, specifically
from the camp of social scientists who claim that it suffers from an uncritical
Western dualism: the idea of “‘crossing genders” would seem to assume that there
are clear frontiers to be crossed between male and female, when precisely—these
social scientists are quick to point out—traditional non-Western societies are
commonly known to profess unitarian rather than dualistic gender ideologies.
My use of the concept of gender-crossing, however, is informed by the
following assumptions: (1) genital difference, by virtue of our human embodiment
as persons, is a cultural artifact: that is to say, the human biological body is
always already symbolically constructed as a system of signs; (2) out of all the
possible signs which can be read from the human body, it is possible to signify
the human body in terms of genital difference in order to begin to understand
gender difference; (3) anatomic/genital “sex” (gender) may therefore be seen—

heuristically—as a cultural constant; and finally (4) certain other physiological
and hence occupational distinctions between genital “males” and “females”
further bolster this “difference.”
And so, even as the precolonial Philippine gender system may have indeed
been a “unitarian” (or to borrow from Errington’s nomenclature, “centrist”) one,
distinctions between male and female bodies—in our case, between the lalaking
katawan and the babaeng katawan—were not necessarily erased, only perhaps
“undeveloped” because of it. Hence, also, crossing from one gender to the other
was not only possible, but in the light of the findings of the present study, most
probably necessary for certain individuals whose pre-givenness (in terms of
bodily “nature” and/or temperaments) was, albeit initially male, tended to the
female in certain important, socially crucial ways. (As when, for instance, the
“transformation” from one gender to the other resonated integrally with the given
culture’s cosmology.)
3. For an “areal” overview of the various cross-cultural studies done on
“homosexuality” within the discipline of anthropology, see D.L. Davis and R.G.
Whitten, “The Cross-cultural Study of Human Sexuality,” Annual Review of
Anthropology 16 (1987): 69- 98.
4. For instance, this study will not really delve into the ethnographies written
during the American occupation of the Philippines that mention the existence of
effeminate cross-dressing in certain tribal societies in the archipelago.
An example of one such ethnography would be Fay-Cooper Cole’s work
on the Tinguian. On the matter of cross-dressed males in the villages where he
conducted his fieldwork, Cole writes: “On three occasions, the writer has found
men dressing like women, doing women’s work, and spending their time with
members of that sex … In Plate 34 is shown a man in woman’s dress, who has
become an expert potter.” See Fay-Cooper Cole, The Tinguian: Social, Religious,
and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural
History, Anthropological Series, vol. 14 no. 2, 1922), 360.
5. One of the conclusions of this study on Philippine gay culture is that the current
local model of “homosexuality” is characterized by gender transitivity on the part
of the bakla alone. By this I mean that the local model for both male homosexual
identity and relationship gravitates around the bakla, whom the culture recognizes
to be an anomalously embodied—hence, unreal or imperfect—woman; the
bakla’s partner, by contrast, remains a “real man,” metaphysically untainted by
homosexual demonization. Consequently, because of this, it should not be very
difficult to explain why there has been a very long tradition of transvestism in
Notes | 481
the Philippines: effeminacy is a necessary foil to machismo, that only renders it

necessary—and fascinatedly so—in the end.
6. Sister Mary John Mananzan, OSB, “The Filipino Woman: Before and After the
Spanish Conquest of the Philippines,” in Essays on Women, ed. Sister Mary John
Mananzan, OSB (Manila: Institute for Women’s Studies, 1991), 6-35.
7. Cristina Blanc-Szanton, “Collision of Cultures: Historical Reformulations of
Gender in the Lowland Visayas, Philippines,” in Power and Difference: Gender in
Island Southeast Asia, ed. Jane Monnig Atkinson and Shelly Errington (Stanford
8. Reynaldo C. Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines,
1840-1910 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).
9. Alicia P. Magos, The Enduring Maaram Tradition: An Ethnography of a Kinaray-a
Village (Manila: New Day, 1993).
10. F. Landa Jocano, “Conversion and the Patterning of Christian Experience,” in
Acculturation in the Philippines: Essays on Changing Societies, ed. Peter G. Gowing
and William Henry Scott (Manila: New Day Publishers, 1971), 43-72.
11. Zeus Salazar, “Ang Babaylan sa Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas,” in Women’s Role in
Philippine History, papers and proceedings of the conference held on March 8-9,
1989 (University of the Philippines, Center for Women’s Studies), 35-41.
12. Shelly Errington, “Recasting Sex, Gender and Power: A Theoretical Regional
Overview,” in Atkinson and Errington, 1-58.
13. Alfred W. McCoy, “Baylan: Animist Religion and Philippine Peasant Ideology,”
Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 10 (1982): 141-94.
14. See Francisco Ignacio Alcina, Historia de las Islas e Indios de Bisayas (1668), Part
1 Book 3., trans. Paul S. Lietz (Chicago: University of Chicago, Philippine Studies
Program, 1960), quoted in Evelyn Tan Cullamar, Babaylanism in Negros: 1896-
1907 (Manila: New Day Publishers, 1986), 18; Marcelo de Ribadeneira, Historia
de las Islas del Archipelago Filipino (Madrid: Imprenta Saenz, 1947), 52, cited in
Mananzan, 17; Domingo Perez (1680), “Relation of the Zambals” in The Philippine
Islands, 1493-1898, ed. Emma Blair and James Robertson (Cleveland: Arthur H.
Clark, 1903-1909), vol. 7, 300; Juan de Plasencia, “Customs of the Tagalogs,” Blair
and Robertson, vol. 7, 194; and Juan Francisco de San Antonio, “Cronicas,” Blair
and Robertson, Chapter 53, paragraph nos. 452, 459 (Manila, 1738-44).
For an English translation of San Antonio’s (partial) “Cronicas,” see Blair and
Robertson, vol. 40, 343-45.
15. Marjorie Garber, “Breaking the Code,” in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and
Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25.
16. Alcina’s Historia was being published by the Loyola House of the Ateneo de
Manila University within the third or fourth quarter of 1994. The translation
of this passage and this section’s subsequent references to Alcina’s account had
all been culled from that forthcoming book’s typescript. See Francisco Ignacio
Alcina, “Historia de las Islas e Indios de Bisayas,” part one, book three, chapter
13, 195-209.
17. Harriet Whitehead, “The Bow and the Burdenstrap: A New Look at Institutionalized
Homosexuality in North America,” in Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction
of Gender and Sexuality, eds. Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (Cambridge
18. Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, ed. Jose Rizal (Paris: Garnier,
1890). See Blair and Robertson, vol. 16, 130.
19. Miguel de Benavides (1605), Archbishop of Manila, Blair and Robertson, vol. 13,
278.
20. Gaspar de San Agustin (1717), Confesionario Copioso en Lengua Española y
Tagala, Para Direccion de los Confesores, y Instruction de los Penitentes (Sampaloc:
Convento de Nuestra Senora de Loreto, 1787), 148-49.
University of California Press, 1990), 202-3.
For these particular quotes on the “unmentionable sin/crime” (sodomy),
Sedgwick cites: John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality:
Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the
Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 349; and Alan Bray,
Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 62.
22. Tomas Pinpin, Librong Pagaaralan nang manga Tagalog nang Uicang Castila
(1610), La Primera Imprenta en Filipinos, ed. Manuel Artigas y Cuerva (Manila,
1911), 218-22.
23. This is an unpublished translation by William Henry Scott.
24. Francisco Blancas de San Jose, Librong Pinagpapalamnan yto nang Aasalin ng
Tauong Christiano sa Pagcoconfesar at Pagcocomulgar; nang capoua napacagaling
at capoua paquinabangan niya ang aua nang P. Dios (Santo Tomas, 1792), 160.
25. Francisco Combes, “Historia de las Islas de Mindanao” (Madrid, 1667) ed.
W.E. Retana (Madrid, 1897). An English translation may be found in Blair and
Robertson, vol. 40, 150.
The “pathologizing” of homosexuality, if the account is accurate, was not,
after all, exclusively a product of our Christianization, as University of the
Philippines anthropology professor Michael Tan would assume. See Michael Tan,
“Sickness and Sin: Medical and Religious Stigmatization of Homosexuality in the
Philippines,” MS (1992).
26. “Ordinances for the Sangleys” (Manila, January 26, 1599), in Blair and Robertson,
vol. 11, 56-57.
Notes | 483
27. The foremost young researcher doing work on the Mindanaoan bayot is a poet
from Iligan City, Ralph Semino Galan. He is currently carrying out an archival
project that aims at retrieving and documenting the noncanonical literary
productions of the Mindanaoan bayot, in order to demonstrate the luminous fact
that despite or precisely because of the strictures of Philippine southern macho
culture, effeminate homosexual men therein are able to express and constitute
themselves in their writings.
28. William Henry Scott, Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino (Manila: New Day,
1993).
29. Combes, chapter 16. See Blair and Robertson, vol. 40, 158-64.
30. While seemingly tongue-in-cheek and catty, this “malicious” reading that seeks to
locate desire in the ethnographic rendering by Combes of the exotically feminine
bido, actually explores the implication of Antonio de Morga’s observation in his
Sucesos that the Spanish were themselves committing with the natives—actually,
they were communicating to them—the “abominable sin against nature.” Morga
writes: “As long as the natives lived in their paganism, it was not known that they had
fallen into the abominable sin against nature. But after the Spaniards had entered
their country, through communication with them … it has been communicated
to them somewhat, both to men and to women (underscoring mine). In the matter
it has been necessary to take action” (see Blair and Robertson, vol. 16, 130).
Consider Morga’s statement that the Spaniards were not much loath to
the idea of sodomizing both local women and men, and then juxtapose such a
thought with the mixedness of gender characteristics in the bido, bayoguin, et al.,
and this specific reading of Combes’s text takes on an entirely new and refreshing
quality! Certainly, though, the ellipsis dots in this quotation conveniently excise
the typical indictment—even or especially in Morga’s text—of the Sangleyes, “who
are much (more) given to this vice.”
31. Combes, Blair and Robertson, vol. 40, 160.
32. Jonathan Goldberg, “Discovering America,” in Sodometries: Renaissance Texts,
Modern Sexualities (Stanford University Press, 1992), 179-92.
33. Chris Berry, A Bit on the Side: East-West Topographies of Desire (Sydney: Empress,
1994), 75-76. On this matter Berry quotes the work of Joao Trevisan on the
colonization of Brazil. See Joao Trevisan, Perverts in Paradise (London: Gay Men’s
Press, 1986), 19-24.
34. Goldberg, 216.
35. William Henry Scott, Cracks in the Parchment Curtain (Manila: New Day
Publishers, 1985), 98.
36. “The Manners, Customs and Beliefs of the Philippine Inhabitants of Long Ago;
Being the Chapters of a ‘Late Sixteenth-Century Manila Manuscript,’” trans. Carlos
Quirino and Mauro Garcia, Philippine Journal of Science 87, no. 4 (December
1958): 374-75.
The English translation here is by the editors, and may be found on page 430
of the same journal.
37. Sedgwick, 184.
38. McCoy, 167.
McCoy uses the term “homosexual” by which to describe Elopre. As I have
already distinguished the difference between the concepts of identity based on
demeanor and sexual object choice in the preceding discussions, I presume he must
have mistranslated the obviously transgender term bayot into the only popularly
used Western concept that came closest to it: homosexual, precisely. Furthermore,
Hart’s description of Buhawi, from which McCoy derives the comment, doesn’t
use the word homosexual at all: “Buhawi was tall, had a long nose and fair
complexion … Buhawi’s classification, by one informant, was as bayut-bayut (a
somewhat feminine-acting male).” In any case, McCoy himself interviewed a
descendant of another gender-crossing babaylan, Gregorio Lampiño, who also
led peasant uprisings in Panay, and whom he also describes as a homosexual. See
McCoy, 168.
See Donn V. Hart, “Buhawi of the Visayas: The Revitalization Process and
Legend-Making in the Philippines,” in Studies in Philippine Anthropology, ed.
Mario D. Zamora (Manila: Alemar-Phoenix Publishers, 1967), 336-96.
39. The transparent visibility and “freeness” of sex among the precolonial natives
of the Philippines make their sexuality not sexuality at all. According to lesbian
feminist Judith Butler, (Western) sexuality must always be partly undisclosed and
hidden in order to qualify as sexuality at all.
See Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out:
Lesbian Theories/Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), 15.
40. Rex Wockner, “Homosexuality in the Arab and Moslem World,” in Coming Out:
An Anthology of International Gay and Lesbian Writings, ed. Stephan Likosky
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 102-16.
Wockner declares that the Middle East may well be the most homosexualized
region in the world; and yet, despite this fact, it is also where one finds the world’s
harshest penalties for homosexuality.
41. Sebastian de Totanes, Arte de la Lengua Tagala y Manual Tagalog (Sancto Tomas,
1745), part two: 143-46.
42. Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Conversion in Tagalog
Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988), 122.
43. Louie Cruz, “Pretty Woman?” in the weekly column “Off the Shoulder,” Sunday
Chronicle, May 2, 1993, 35-36.
Notes | 485
44. Jerome Bailen, “Medical Anthropology: The Pal’awan Babaylan’s Views on Disease
Causation,” in Anthropology: Range and Relevance, ed. Mario D. Zamora and Zeus
A. Salazar (Quezon City: Kayumanggi Press, 1969), 477-88.
45. Juan de Noceda y Pedro de Sanlucar, Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala (Reimpreso
en Manila: Imprenta de Ramirez y Giraudier, 1860), 45.
See Pedro de San Buenaventura, Vocabulario de Lengua Tagala (Con licencia
infresso en la noble Villa del Pila, por Thomas Pinpin y Domingo Laog, 1613),
28; Guillermo Bennaser, Diccionario Tiruray-Español (Manila, 1892), 24; Jacinto
Juanmarti, Diccionario Moro-Maguindao-Español (Manila: Tipografia Amigos del
Pais, 1892), 339; Diego Bergaño, Vocabulario de la Lengua Pampanga (Manila:
Ramirez y Giraudier, 1860), 33; and Lorenzo Fernandez Cosgaya, Diccionario
Pangasinan-Español (Manila, 1865), 70.
46. Diego Aduarte, OP, “History of the Province of the Holy Rosary and the Order of
Preachers in the Philippines, Japon and China,” Blair and Robertson, vols. 30, 31.
47. Juan Felix de la Encarnacion, Diccionario Bisaya-Español (Manila: Imprenta de los
Amigos del Pais, 1851); respective pages are 49, 37, and 30.
48. See the most recent ethnography on the bantut of the Tausug and Sama of
southern Philippines: Mark Johnson, “Cross-Gender Men and Homosexuality
in the Southern Philippines: Ethnicity, Political Violence and the Protocols of
Engendered Sexualities Amongst the Muslim Tausug and Sama,” paper presented
at the European Conference on Philippine Studies, London, April 13-15, 1994.
49. That an effeminate bayot could lead an armed rebellion is something that cannot
be accounted for within Zeus Salazar’s evolutionary schema of the babaylan-
function within an essentially unchanged and unchanging Philippine history.
His biologistic, heterosexist, and egregiously sloppy transhistorical categories of
Philippine genders are seven: tunay na babae, tunay na lalaki, binabae, tomboy,
hermaphrodite, lalaking AC/DC (bisexual), and babaeng AC/DC. See Salazar, 35.
Salazar’s conclusion that the babaylan, who led the numerous peasant
uprisings against Spain, were “real men” begs the question of what exactly such
a concept signified during that time. (In any case, we must remember that the
category of “realness”—predicated as it is on anatomic immutability—would seem
to be more operative in our anatomy-obsessed century than during the Spanish
colonial period.) Precisely, as Perez’s account of the Zambal bayoc and Buhawi’s
case would appear to exemplify, effeminacy may not have necessarily entailed an
inability to fight, hunt, or perform certain acts we would nowadays thoughtlessly
equate with masculinity. It appears that, the “native” division of male and female
“experiences” aside, armed rebellion and gender-crossing, though apparently
independent and unrelated phenomena, may not have been mutually exclusive,
after all.
50. Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Tolerance or Struggle: Male Homosexuality in the

Philippines Today,” MS, 1990.
51. Pedro Chirino, “Relation of the Filipinas Islands and What Has There Been
Accomplished (1601-1604),” Blair and Robertson, vol. 12, 260.
52. Elizabeth Uy Eviota, “Gender Subordination: Historical and Contemporary
Configurations,” in The Political Economy Gender: Women and the Sexual Division
of Labour in the Philippines (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1992), 167-75.
Chapter Four: The Eighties

1. Teresita Leuterio Santiago, “The Self-Concept, Adjustments, and Interpersonal
Values of College Male Homosexuals” (master’s thesis, University of Santo Tomas,
September 1987).
2. Abe Florendo, “Out of the Closet, Into the Real World,” Times Journal, March 11,
1984, 9.
Florendo lists the following gay plays that were staged in or around 1984.
The stories of these plays basically deal with the painful process of Coming Out
which, predictably, reproduces the covert/overt distinction first seen in a local
production with Nadres’s Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Salamat; these
are Frank Rivera’s Casa Verde, Bobby Las-O’s Goodbye Loverboy, Clet Unrubia’s
Sukatin man ang Langit, Quito Co-Unjieng’s Skeletons in the Closet, Karlo
Abellar’s one-act Señora Segundina, Soxy Topacio’s Neneng, and other plays of
which Florendo does not mention the authors: Ismael (Mga Damdaming Maiinit
sa Gabing Malamig), Dingas sa Langit, and Belinda’s Replica: This Is Your Life.
The venue for these plays is mostly pubs and cafes, such as the Leather
Lounge, Ryan’s Pub, and other similar nightspots.
In another article, Boy Abunda’s gay play, Engkuwentro, is staged at Ryan’s
pub in September 1983. (From Nick Nicolas, “The Sad World of a Gay,” Times
Journal, September 17, 1983, 13.)
Rene O. Villanueva’s award-winning Kumbersasyon also gets produced
around this time, and the play is a sensitive study of gay self-disclosure which it
sees as necessary in the excoriation of homosexuality’s countless hungry ghosts.
Adaptations of foreign gay works like Bent, La Cage Aux Folles, and Kiss of the
Spiderwoman are also part of this exploration of gayness within local theater. For
a review of Bent, see Nick Nicolas, “A melodramatic play on homosexuality,” Arts
Monthly 2, no. 12 (1982): 14.
3. Susan B. Argel, “New Paper Dolls: Impersonation as Total Entertainment,” Parade,
August 31, 1980, 14-15.
Notes | 487

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 226-30.
5. Severino Montano, “The Lion and the Faun,” MS, c. 1980.
My reading of this novel, which I delivered as a paper in the University of
the Philippines Department of English and Comparative Literature’s Faculty
Lecture Series in 1992, reveals that Montano gravitates around two fundamental
themes: Misogyny, and Greek/Neoplatonic Sexuality, with the first being the
logical consequence of the second. It is also evident that Montano believes in a
“feminine inner self ”—again, a babaeng kalooban—which needs to be liberated by
homosexuals. The itinerary such a liberation takes is remarkable for the sacrifice,
faith, love, and happiness and religious faith that characterize it.
The novel, presumably written over the period 1960-1980, is unabashedly
autobiographical. In terms of “subject-position,” this is the first truly gay novel
in the country (which I am cognizant of, anyway). The point of view is Montano
himself, not some child prostitute; and, reading it, one begins to appreciate the
courage it took for Montano to endure the unbelievable torture of unbosoming so
many secret “truths” about the homosexual self. While we may argue that the novel
is “contained”—because it never really left the dominant ideologies as regards
homosexuality, and indeed, while alive, Montano called himself a humanist—we
nonetheless may not so easily dismiss the radicalizing effect of acknowledging the
presence of gay bodies and persons in otherwise purely heterosexual territories,
like Philippine Literature. Montano, we must remember, is part of the Philippine
literary canon. The existence of this scandalously candid and “confessional” novel,
in effect, troubles and revaluates our concept of this canon.
6. Dollimore, 230.
7. Marjorie Garber, “Breaking the Code,” in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and
8. Arlene Stein, “All Dressed Up But No Place to Go? Style Wars and the New
Lesbianism,” Outlook 1, 4 (Winter 1989): 38.
9. Other non-Roda movies with homosexual plots that are shown at this time include
Apoy sa Iyong Kandungan; Mga Paru-parong Buking; Si Malakas, Si Maganda, at
Si Mahinhin; Star; City After Dark; and Ang Kabiyak. Actors who portray gay
roles for some of these movies are Sandy Garcia, Eddie Garcia, Dindo Fernando,
George Estregan, Ronaldo Valdez, and Bernardo Bernardo.
Alternative cinema also sees the rise of gay filmmaker Nick Deocampo,
whose shocking and poignant documentary Oliver is a remarkable attempt to
understand the gay bar culture and the politics of impersonation.
10. “Manananggal Terrorizes Tondo Folks,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 9, 1992,
10.
11. Editorial, “From Man to Maternity,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 31, 1992, 4.
12. Editorial, “Truth and Media,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, June 17, 1992, 4.
13. Cynthia de Leon, “Male Nurse Faked Pregnancy,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, June
11, 1992, 1.
14. Cynthia de Leon, “Carlo Is Expecting a Boy,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 28,
1992, 1.
15. Cynthia de Leon, “‘Pregnant’ Male Nurse Loses Face, Job, Lover,” Philippine Daily
Inquirer, August 17, 1992, 1.
16. Gay screenplays constitute yet another area that sadly I have not been able to
exhaustively cover in this study.
As an undergraduate thesis in Mass Communication puts it, the popularization
of swardspeak as a lingua franca in Philippine television seems to accompany—
if not confirm—the ever-increasing presence of gay images and “lifestyles” in
popular media, particularly during the 1980s; nonetheless, I think it may be too
soon to celebrate the complete liberation of gays by virtue of this fact alone. See
Juan Leonardo Gonzales, “Homosexual Language in Philippine Television: A
Historical Case Study” (undergraduate thesis, College of Mass Communication,
University of the Philippines, 1988).
17. Cris Marimla, “The Gay Life,” National Midweek, April 16, 1986, 32-33.
Chapter Five: The Nineties

1. J. C. Nigado, “The Life and Loves of Lady Valerie,” Sunday Times Life Magazine,
February 11, 1990, 5.
2. Cynthia Allanigue and Josef Francia, “Homosexuals Say They’re Everywhere,”
Malaya, January 21, 1989, 14.
3. An essay written by this organization’s founding president explains the political
vision of the group as one of “social acceptance.” See Venir Turla Cuyco, “Apathy or
Revolution: An Apologia for UP Babaylan,” Sinag: Journal of the College of Social
Sciences and Philosophy 5, no. 1 (1993): 12-13. University of the Philippines.
4. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford
5. That the homosexual act—as sodomitic or as itself—is not covered by the
Philippine penal code does not perfectly mean, as we have seen in the preceding
analyses of Philippine gay culture, that homosexual persecution does not obtain
in this country. See Bartolome S. Carale, “Criminal Adultery and Fornication in
the Philippines: A Re-examination,” Philippine Law Journal, no. 45 (July 1970):
34-52.
Notes | 489
6. Senator Leticia Ramos-Shahani, Senate Bill 427, typescript (July 21, 1992).
7. Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, eds., “Introduction,” Out of Bounds: Male
Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1990), 3-21.
A relevant passage about a more constructionist feminist critique of
patriarchy is this (7): “Both terms (feminine and masculine) … are implicated in
patriarchy … the movement suggests the first step in a Derridean deconstruction
in which the hierarchies are reversed preliminary to dismantling the hierarchical
structure.”
8. The University of the Philippines’ theaters-in-residence have likewise been
regularly staging gay plays. For the first half of the 1990s, David Henry Hwang’s
M. Butterfly and Anton Juan’s Death in the Form of a Rose were presented at UP,
and both were notably outstanding productions. (For a critical essay on the latter
see J. Neil C. Garcia, “Death in the Form of a Rose: A Gay Perspective,” Diliman
Review 39, no. 2 [1991]: 24-30).
One of the more recent gay productions on campus was a trilogy staged
by the Playwrights Theatre and directed by Alex Cortez. All three plays in Tatlo
forward a universalizing opinion on homosexuality, and as a whole they revaluate
macho culture itself by turning its sexual structure inside-out: sexual dissidence
inheres within the boundaries of hetero and homo, and all three plays consider
it to be actually necessary for the existence of macho myth and domination. See
J. Neil C. Garcia, “A Theater of Sexual Dissidence,” Manila Chronicle, September
29, 1992, 16.
9. Other than Silva’s, another example of irresponsible gay historiography that
essentializes and mystifies precolonial “gayness” (precisely!) in regard to the
babaylanic chronicles is Jomar Fleras, “A History of Gays in the Philippines,”
Manila Chronicle, October 23, 1991, 16.
10. The Western (especially American) connection in the local AIDS-awareness
efforts by NGOs whose leaders and staff are gays is apparent to anybody keeping
tabs on the Philippine HIV/AIDS prevention scene. Some of these organizations
are ReachOut Foundation, The Library Foundation, HAIN, and the Remedios
AIDS Foundation. As early as 1990, an article that appeared in Katipunan seemed
to foreshadow the local movement that would originate from the Filipino gay
populations in the United States to combat the spread of AIDS from a specifically
homosexual front. See Benjamin Pimentel Jr., “AIDS Among US Filipinos: Silence
Equals Death,” reprinted from Katipunan 4, no. 3 (November 1990) in Health
Alert 6, no. 112 (December 1990): 500-502.
11. Alya Honasan, “Homosexuals: To Hire or Not to Hire,” Manila Chronicle, June
4-5, 1991, 11.
12. Allan Tibbey, “Is There Safe Sex?” Philippine Daily Inquirer, January 6, 1993, 11.
13. Mariquit Almario, “Tatad Seeks Ban on Gay, Showbusiness Senators,” Manila
Times, May 12, 1993, 1.
14. Michael Tan, “Foreword,” in Margarita Go-Singco Holmes, A Different Love: Being
Gay in the Philippines (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 1993), x.
15. Go-Singco Holmes, 171.
16. Tan, “Foreword,” ix.
Chapter Six: Prologue

1. Frederick Whitam and Robin Mathy, Male Homosexuality in Four Societies: Brazil,
Guatemala, the Philippines, and the United States (New York: Praeger Scientific,
1986).
2. For the ramifications of the essentialist/constructionist debate, see Edward Stein,
Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy
(New York: Routledge, 1992). Steven Epstein’s essay, “Gay Politics, Ethnic Identity:
The Limits of Social Constructionism” (239-93), provides a cornerstone discussion
of the ethnicization (both self-imposed and imposed) of gays in America, and
how essentially this affects everybody in the Gay Movement.
3. Arnold Davidson, “Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality,” in Stein, Forms of Desire,
89-132.
4. Carol-Anne Tyler, “Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag,” in Inside/Out:
Lesbian Theories/Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York; Routledge, 1991), 32-
70.
5. Jamie Gough, “Theories of Sexual Identity and the Masculinization of the Gay
Man,” Coming on Strong: Gay Politics and Culture (London: Unwin and Hyman
Ltd., 1989), 119-36.
6. Raymond Burgos, “Alunan: Gay Cops OK. But …” Philippine Daily Inquirer,
March 1994, 1.
Certainly, though, this frivolous attitude—typical by this time and in this
particular context—toward the topic of gays in the military belies its actual
seriousness, as General Espina of the Philippine Army himself revealed in a
candid interview a decade before. See Josie Darang, “How About a Third Force?”
People, July 8, 1979, 22.
A more recent article uses anonymous sources in the Armed Forces of the
Philippines in order to confirm the presence of homosexuals therein. See Lorna
Barile, “Are There Gays in the Military? Yes There Are,” Philippine Graphic,
October 12, 1992, 56.
Notes | 491
7. Marjorie Garber, “Breaking the Code,” in Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and

8. Ibid., 159.
9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” in Fear of a Queer
Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 69-81.
10. Tony Perez, “Ang Diwata,” in Cubao Pagkagat ng Dilim: Mga Kuwentong
Kababalaghan (Manila: Cacho Hermanos, 1993), 69-79.
11. See the third chapter of this book’s second part for an explication on this point.
12. “Five Prettiest Gays Chosen in PICC Pageant,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, January
24, 1994, 9.
13. Kris Kirk and Ed Heath, “The Rad Drag Queens,” in Coming Out: An Anthology of
International Gay and Lesbian Writings, ed. Stephan Likosky (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1992), 279-86.
14. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 146-47. Cited in Tyler, 53.
15. See Fenella Cannell, “Catholicism, Spirit Mediums and the Ideal of Beauty in a
Bicolano Community, Philippines” (unpublished dissertation in anthropology,
London University, 1992).
See also Mark Johnson, “Cross-Gender Men and Homosexuality in
the Southern Philippines: Ethnicity, Political Violence, and the Protocols of
Engendered Sexualities Amongst the Muslim and Sama,” paper presented at
the European conference on Philippine Studies in London, April 13-15, 1994.
16. I am particularly reminded of what New York visual artist Nan Goldin observed
about the “Philippine transsexuals” she had photographed for her book on global
gender-benders, The Other Side: of all the “queens” she had seen and met all over
the world, the Filipino bakla struck her as seeming to enjoy the highest level
of social tolerance. Goldin writes: “In Manila … one friend took me home to
meet her family where she and her boyfriend live with her parents and brother
and nieces and nephews. Another teenage queen supports her parents and five
siblings in the provinces with the money she makes from her shows. These queens
haven’t been alienated from their families in the way most of the queens I know
in the Western world have been.” See Nan Goldin, The Other Side (New York:
Scalo Publishers, 1992), 7.
Unlike other foreigners who have said the same thing, Goldin actually has a
photograph to illustrate what she means: Anna, a male-to-female impersonator
working in a gay bar in Manila, is shown putting on makeup on her way to work,
while nephews, nieces, and her mother are sitting in the living room, watching
television. Anna obviously hasn’t left her home in Pateros, and this arrangement
impressed Goldin immensely (96).
This tableau strikes the Western gaze as emblematic of familial and social
tolerance. I, on the other hand, see something different in it altogether: it isn’t
so much because of tolerance as the fact that Anna is the breadwinner of this
household that she can pretty much have her way. Again, what needs to be said is
that Philippine gays need to compensate for being “different” before they are even
granted the most grudging amounts of this “tolerance.” Also, in the photograph,
the mother’s face turns scornfully away from what her “daughter” is doing in
front of the mirror, thereby telling us a lot about what she actually feels about the
matter.
This “sociological” reading in regard to the putative familiar “acceptance” of
gays in the local culture is actually similar to what Ponteñila discovered in her
ethnography almost two decades ago: the bayot/bakla becomes “acceptable” to
his family only when he possesses some utilitarian value for his parents and/or
siblings. (For instance, when—like one of Ponteñila’s subjects—he is industrious
and does the laundry for all the members of the household.) See Ma. Simeona
Ponteñila, “An Ethnographic Study of the Bayots in Dumaguete City” (master’s
thesis, Silliman University, March 1975), 43.
17. Fenella Cannell, “The Power of Appearances: Beauty, Mimicry, and Trans-
formation in Bicol,” in Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures,
ed. Vicente L. Rafael (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 1995), 223-58.
18. Cannell, “The Power of Appearances,” 245.
PART TWO
The Early Gay Writers
1. Some of these writers are Nicolas Pichay, whose gay poetry collection, Ang Lunes
na Mahirap Bunuin, recently won in a literary contest and has just been published;
Tony Perez, whose newest book set in nightmare district Cubao promises to
be equally exciting and controversial; and Nick Deocampo, whose essay on
Philippine homosexual cinema, entitled “Homosexuality as Dissent/Cinema
as Subversion: Articulating Gay Consciousness in the Philippines,” appears in
Queer Looks, a book on homosexual cinema recently published in New York by
Routledge.
2. Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero, “A Clash of Cymbals,” Diliman Review (Quezon City:
University of the Philippines Press, 1968).
Notes | 493

Actually, Sedgwick cites two other novels, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, and
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, as foundational gay texts in the West.
4. Montano wrote thirty plays in all, four of which became the repertoire of his own
Arena Theater (founded in 1953 in the Philippine Normal College). See M. L.
Maniquiz, “Severino Montano,” in Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia
of Philippine Art, ed. Nicanor G. Tiongson (Manila: CCP, 1994), vol. 7, 355-56.
Chapter One: Where We Have Been …

1. The anthology spoken of here went through a lot of re-visionings, and a composite
of all such stillbirth versions came out in May 1994. See J. Neil C. Garcia and
Danton Remoto, eds., Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing (Manila:
Anvil Publishing, 1994).
2. Nancy K. Miller, “Arachnologies,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 270-99.
In order to establish a theory of female authorship, feminists have had to
“resurrect the author.” Most early feminist theorizing, after dismantling the original
power of authorship, inadvertently ended up “underreading”: the critic/reader
may be brilliant in her mapping out of the networks of meanings in the text, but
the woman who wrote it has been left behind in the process of interpretation.
In this “(auto)biographical approach,” the gendered author for whose sake
the reading begins to undertake itself in the first place remains clearly in the
foreground.
3. I got my facts about Montano’s life from the back covers of his two-volume Selected
Plays (Manila: New Day Publishers, 1981).
4. This is taken from Severino Montano, The Arena Theater of the Philippines:
A Progress Report.
5. Severino Montano, ed., The Prize-winning Plays of the Arena Theater of the
Philippines (Manila: Phoenix Press, 1958).
6. Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and Principle of Its Power,” in
Ecrits (New York: Norton, 1977).
Through transference, the analysand is unburdened of all the “ego-forms”
he has constructed for himself. The regression of the patient from one signifier of
demand to another is made possible only by their frustration, which is the only
method of the analyst to make the subject reach the signifier of his own desire.
Hence, we can see how the novel’s own version of “talking cure” is not
even credible or correct: the diagnosis can only be made—the cure can only be
ascertained—after the ego has been laid bare of its trappings, a process which is
described as potentially “interminable.”
7. J. Neil C. Garcia, “Gender Theory and Gay Writing,” paper read at the PAKSA
Conference, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, February 1992.
This “teleology of martyrdom” is the major preoccupation of Philippine gay
productions of the Coming Out period, by way of a predominant theme. This may
have something to do with the observation that, here, the ideal of a “real man” to
whom many gays are subjected, has made it very difficult to think of an “equal
partnership” taking root in gay relationships.
It is a fact that the economic complexities attendant upon the local gay
scenario only add to the disparity between the complexions of gayness here and
elsewhere in the West. Here, the homosexual is expected to “reward” his lover
with something invariably monetary, as a sine qua non to the existence of the
relationship itself.
Mainly, it is because the gay thinks it his duty: the illusion of a “real man”
prevents gay relationships from ever turning mutual because the “real man” has
to be compensated for loving not a “real woman,” who is his due, who proves his
realness, but another man, one who is not even “real” to begin with.
The philosophical underpinnings are truly a matter of ethics: here, it is
possible to remain a “real man” even when party to a homosexual relationship,
so long as the “real man’s” sexual love object is still a “real woman.” Indeed, most
men who have gay lovers also have female girlfriends, and in almost all such
cases, the gays themselves consent to the arrangement. The issue is an ethical one
not only because it can be said to lie at the heart of the macho culture itself, but
because in the Philippine sexual context, inner subjective “desire” (kalooban) is
most important, and actually offsets the resultant act which is regarded as purely
incidental anyway.
8. Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1988), 230-41.
9. John Fletcher, “Freud and His Uses: Psychoanalysis and Gay Theory,” in Coming
on Strong: Gay Politics and Culture (London: Unwin and Hyman Ltd., 1989), 91-
118.
10. Michel Foucault, “The Repressive Hypothesis,” in Foucault Reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 301-9.
11. Jimmy Alcantara, “jonathan n.,” in The Flame (Manila: University of Santo Tomas,
1989), 4.
Notes | 495
Chapter Two: Orlando Nadres …

1. According to the Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Art,
Nadres’s Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Salamat has been presented all
over the country over the past twenty years, often to full houses of appreciative
mixed audiences. See M.L. Maniquiz, “Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming
Salamat,” in Cultural Center of the Philippines Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, ed.
Nicanor G. Tiongson (Manila: CCP, 1994), vol. 7, 196.
2. See Fely Luz Marcos, “A Case Study on the Language of the Homosexuals Based
on the Play Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Salamat (undergraduate
thesis, Institute of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines, March
1976). Found in Diana Julao, “Gay Philippines: Ang Pagkatao, Suliranin, at Wika
ng Sward” (unpublished compilation, University of the Philippines, 1980); and
M.L. Maniquiz.
3. A slight but important variation seems to have been made on the play from the
first time it was staged by PETA in 1974 to the time it was supposed to be staged
by IPAG in 1992.
The variation has to do with the absence in the play’s first version of the
tangent narrative of Efren’s impending marriage to his (female) classmate in
Manila. Nadres must have added this narrative detail—which he nonetheless
didn’t consider important enough to be dramatized in a scene of its own—in order
to heighten the pathos of Fidel’s character, who is about to lose his secretly beloved
one to somebody else.
4. Cebu’s leading gay playwright today is Albert Claude Evangelio, who produced
and directed in 1990 a modern-day gay Cebuano sarsuwela entitled Pepe en Phil.
In Negros Oriental, on the other hand, Rajit Palanca put up Intermisyon, around
1989; likewise, around 1993, two Negrense writers were collaborating on a gay
play. They are established entrepreneur and playwright Bobby Flores Villasis, and
Negrense lawyer Ernesto Superal Yee.
5. Dean Alfar’s Short Time was the third play in a trilogy entitled Tatlo, staged by
the UP Playwrights’ Theater late 1992 and directed by Alex Cortez. All three plays
deal with homosexuality using varying degrees of conscious treatment, but it is
Alfar’s play that thematizes the Coming Out process in an unmistakable way. The
interesting thing in this production is the “Western-ness” of the characterization
of the two homosexual men. They are not effeminate anymore, but are rather
straight-looking and -acting. What’s more, they fall in love “equally” with each
other, and not with a “real man.” In fact, there is no such character here at all.
This play, therefore, may well be the signal of a new period in Philippine
Gay Theater, in which Filipino homosexuals begin to talk about issues that relate
directly to sexuality, and no longer strictly to gender and gender roles. The most
recent gay theatrical production furthering the same politics of homosexual love
was Nicolas Pichay’s Karga Mano. For a review of Pichay’s interesting play, see J.
Neil C. Garcia: “Karga Mano: A Gayer Kind of Love,” Manila Chronicle, January
18, 1994, 16.
6. This biographical tidbit comes from R. Galang, “Orlando Nadres,” in Tiongson,
358.
7. Michel Foucault, “The Repressive Hypothesis,” in Foucault Reader (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1988), 301-9.
Chapter Three: Tony Perez’s Cubao 1980 …

(London: Oxford University Press, 1991), 39- 45.
2. Inversion theory is now considered just one among several other narratives
and/or tropes of homosexuality that are circulating in contemporary Western
civilization. Nonetheless, the cogent unpacking of this theory was first
articulated by Michel Foucault: “Homosexuality first appeared as one of the
forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a
kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul … The sodomite had
been a temporary aberration. The homosexual was now a species.” See Michel
Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Pantheon, 1978), 43.
3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990).
4. This is the universalizing view which Sedgwick advocates in her book, Epistemology
of the Closet. Using this perspective, homosexuality becomes less and less easy
to isolate from mainstream social orders that obsessively denounce it and yet
actually reproduce it in order to maintain themselves. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Regents of the University of California Press,
1991), 2.
5. These are some of the facts that I have come across while writing a history of the
Philippine gay culture of the past three decades. See part 1 of this study, specifically
the section on the (happy) seventies.
6. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1982), 223.
Notes | 497
7. An account of the American version of gay liberation may be found in John

D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual
Minority in the US, 1940-1970 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983).
8. J. Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1985), 6.
Eakin says, regarding the blurring of the fiction/fact aspects in autobiographical
writing: “Autobiography in our time is increasingly understood as both an act
of memory and an act of imagination.” I suppose this means, in the case of gay
autobiography, an allowance for experimentation and embellishment, outside of
representing the gay subject-position in the text.
Conclusion
1. John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino
Responses (1565-1700) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 186-87.
2. A sample account of the Spanish friar’s distrust of the Sangleyes may be found in
the testimony of Fray Juan Ibañez, Regent of the College of the University of Santo
Tomas, before the ecclesiastical Commission headed by the Archbishop of Manila,
in 1685: “He (the Reverend Father Fray Ibañez) started preaching to all and except
for the Sangleyes and the Chinese, others asked for his forgiveness … he does not
trust these Chinese people since he has heard that those who have repented before
have gone back to their old ways, though they do it with much secrecy and fright.”
This translation of the Spanish colonial church’s efforts to curb the recurrence of
“demonic idolatry” among the newly converted indios and Chinese, may be found
under the file, In San Gabriel Extra Muros de Manila, Bolinao Manuscript, in the
library of the Institute for Women’s Studies, Malate, Manila.
3. Vicente L. Rafael, “Writing Outside: On the Question of Location,” in Discrepant
Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, ed. Vicente L. Rafael (Manila: Anvil
Publishing, 1995), xxiii.
4. Fenella Cannell, “The Power of Appearances: Beauty, Mimicry and Transformation
in Bicol,” in Rafael, Discrepant Histories, 241.
5. Marcelo de Ribadeneira, History of the Islands of the Philippine Archipelago and
the Kingdoms of Great China, Tartary, Cochinchina, Malaca, Siam, Cambodge and
Japan (Barcelona, 1601), ed. Legisma (Madrid, 1947), 50. This quotation is an
unpublished translation by William Henry Scott.
6. Jonathan Goldberg, “Discovering America,” in Sodometries: Renaissance Texts,
Modern Sexualities (Stanford University Press, 1992), 179-222.
7. Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and

Dreams,” in Rafael, Discrepant Histories, 5.
8. Goldberg cites Alan Bray’s New Historicist work on the Renaissance concepts of
male-male friendship in explaining the “other side” of the discourse of sodomy.
See Goldberg, Sodometries, 14-18.
9. Proceedings from the Second National Conference on Student Mental Health,
Problems of Counselling in Philippine Colleges and Universities (Quezon City:
Philippine Mental Health Association, 1961).
10. Jürgen Bruning’s film about the Philippine and Thai gay (sub)cultures is really a
trilogy entitled Maybe I Can Give You Sex? I had the chance to view it early August
of 1993, and after the preview the audience got the opportunity to talk about
the film with Bruning. Apparently, he had shown the film before an American
audience, and they had criticized him for cashing in on and exoticizing the “Third
World.” I had to tell him that there really shouldn’t be any problem about the film’s
ideological point of view, since it was clearly articulated (and confessed) in the
film. But still, the production of knowledge of whatever kind about countries such
as Thailand and the Philippines, when its consumption is meant for the West,
is and can only be fraught with political implications. An interesting point of
discussion—not so much between Bruning and the local gays but among the local
gays themselves—was about the preponderance of so-called filmic and literary
“alternative gay representations” that all use as either background or actual focus
the homosexual (prostituted) subculture. In other words, even the sections in
Bruning’s film that talk about the Philippine gays are still gay bar-specific. Not
only does this obsession with the flesh industry give a lopsided idea of what gay
culture mainly is about and what it can still be, this choice of imagistic focus is
keenly susceptible of imperialistic exploitation. I ended up saying that there are
so many other aspects in being gay in the Philippines other than that aspect about
prostituted sex, and everybody could only assent. Of course, this obsession is also
telling of how precisely homosexual love in the local context has been framed and
contained within the notably feudal, native patron/ward structure.
11. Historian Wayne R. Dynes, arguing against the diversitarian tendency among social
constructionists to insist on the fundamental uniqueness of all cultures, invokes
the ethnological concept of Kulturkreis or “supraregional cultural entities … (that
are composed of) a large complex of societies in which certain cultural constants
can be found.” Dynes further remarks that despite the 5,000 distinct human
cultures which have been identified in the field, “six categories suffice to classify
those in which the sexual configuration is known.” To prove this point, Dynes
demonstrates that it is basically the same berdache pattern which may be seen in
the ethnographic records of North America, Western Siberia, and Madagascar. See
Notes | 499
Wayne R. Dynes, “Wrestling with the Social Boa Constructor,” in Forms of Desire:
Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, ed. Edward Stein
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 209-38.
12. Peter A. Jackson, Male Homosexuality in Thailand: An Interpretation of
Contemporary Thai Sources (New York: Global Academic Publishers, 1989), 228.
13. For instance, this book has looked into two recent ethnographies on the Philippines
authored by London-based anthropologists and discovered their Orientalizing
projects. See Fenella Cannell, “Catholicism, Spirit Mediums and the Ideal of
Beauty in a Bicolano Community, Philippines” (dissertation in anthropology,
London University, 1992); and also Mark Johnson, “Cross-Gender Men and
Homosexuality in the Southern Philippines: Ethnicity, Political Violence and
the Protocols of Engendered Sexualities amongst the Muslim Tausug and Sama,”
paper presented at the European Conference on Philippine Studies in London,
April 13-15, 1994.
14. Frederick Whitam, “Philippines,” in Encyclopedia of Homosexualty, ed. Wayne R.
Dynes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), 980.
15. Rev. Eddie Karnes, Tears in the Morning (Philippine Publishing Company, 1979).
16. Joseph M. Carrier, “Gay Liberation and Coming Out in Mexico,” in Coming Out:
An Anthology of International Gay and Lesbian Writings, ed. Stephen Likosky
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 482- 98.
17. Stephen 0. Murray and Manuel C. Arboleda, “Stigma Transformation and
Relexification: ‘Gay’ in Latin America,” in Likosky, 412-18.
18. Dennis Altman, “Liberation: Toward the Polymorphous Whole,” in Likosky, 123-
52.
19. This may no longer be true in certain parts of the West. Queerness has emerged
as a signal for the return of the revolutionary perspective on sexual (no longer
just gay) liberation. Queer signifies the polyvalencies of desire which do not fall
within the normative homo/hetero dualism, and it arose in the 1990s because
of the stigmatizing effect of using “gay” as a self-identificational sign for young
queers and because of the increasing visibility of bisexuals within the Gay and
Lesbian Movement. It signalizes new identifications across race and gender
primarily on the grounds of nonnormative and dissonant sexuality and gender.
See Simon Watney, “Queer Epistemology: Activism, ‘Outing,’ and the Politics of
Sexual Identities,” Critical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 13-27. Cambridge:
Blackwell Publishers.
20. Barry D. Adam, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1987), 6.
21. Margarita Co-Singco Holmes, A Different Love: Being Gay in the Philippines
(Manila: Anvil Publishing, 1993).
22. Doctors from the Medical City hospital in Manila have been quietly performing sex
change surgeries since the early eighties. One of the first preoperative transsexuals
to undergo sex change in this hospital was Vinna—formerly Gavino—Santiago-
Robinson who bravely faced the media in the early nineties (after the collapse of her
six-year marriage to a British man), supposedly in order to enlighten the general
public on the complex nature of the transsexual surgery. See Joanna U. Nicolas, “Sex
Change,” Moneysaver: The Discount Card Magazine 3, no. 12 (December 1994): 7-9.
23. Whitam, 982.
24. Lorna Barile, “Pagsanjan and Puerto Galera Revisited,” National Midweek, January
15, 1992, 12-15.
25. Eric Catipon, “Cruising,” Sunday Times Life Magazine, February 21, 1993, 3-6.
26. Cora Lucas, “Breaking Free,” Sunday Times Life Magazine, March 27, 1994, 7.
27. Doreen Jose, “UP Offers Course on Gay Literature,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, June
8, 1994, 1.
28. Oskar Atadero, “Philippine Gays Go Mainstream,” Mr. & Ms., July 19, 1994, 16-17.
29. The clamor for gay rights in the Philippines has apparently been heard by certain
magnanimous souls. One such soul is Congressman Reynaldo A. Calalay of Quezon
City, who has just filed a bill providing for a “third sex” sectoral representative in the
House of Representatives. See Ceres Doyo, “Encounter: Rep. Reynaldo A. Calalay, A
Champion of Gay Rights,” Sunday Inquirer Magazine, September 24, 1995, 10-11.
30. Gerard Ramos, “Going, Going … Gay,” Philippines Free Press, August 6, 1994, 26-
27.
31. Venir Turla Cuyco, “No-Gay School Policy,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, July 25, 1995,
9.
Philippine Gay Culture: An Update and a

Postcolonial Autocritique
1. This chapter was read by the author at the “Queer Asian Sites: An International
Conference of Asian Queer Studies,” convened by the AsiaPacifiQueer Network and
the Trans/forming Cultures Center at the University of Technology, Sydney City
Campus, Sydney, Australia, February 23, 2007.
2. See my Philippine Gay Culture: The Last Thirty Years (Quezon City: University of the
Philippines Press, 1996).
3. Benita Parry, “The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (New York: Cambridge
4. From 1996 to 1997, The Evening Paper carried the weekly gay and lesbian section,
“Gayzette,” which I edited. The same paper carried a weekly feminist (sometimes
Notes | 501
lesbian) section, “Kawomenan.” The most popular soft-porn magazine of the

period was undoubtedly Valentino. The first commercially available gay newspaper,
ManilaOut, also came out in the late 1990s. The past five years saw the appearance
of gay lifestyle glossies, foremost of which are GPQ, Icon, and L Magazine. For a
short survey of the “Filipino gay magazine phenomenon” and a history of Valentino
in particular, see Michael Kho Lim, “When the Politics of Desire Meets the
Economics of Skin: The History and Phenomenon of a Filipino Gay Magazine,”
http://bangkok2005.anu.edu.au/papers/Lim.pdf (accessed September 14, 2007).
5. These publications included Mr. & Ms., Philippines Free Press, Evening Paper, Manila
Standard, Philippine Daily Inquirer, and Philippine Star—all of them nationally
distributed. Some of these avowedly gay and lesbian opinion-writers are Oscar
Atadero, Malu Marin, Ana Leah Sarabia, Danton Remoto, Michael Tan, John Silva,
Jose Javier Reyes, and most recently Manuel Quezon III.
6. The particular column by Isagani Cruz that started it all was titled “Don We Now
Our Gay Apparel,” and it came out in the August 12, 2006 issue of the Philippine
Daily Inquirer. Quezon’s subsequent responses took such bitchy and sarcastic titles
as “Oblivious in Cloud-Cuckoo Land” and “The Grand Inquisitor.”
7. Michael Tan, an outspoken gay columnist in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, devoted
a column critiquing these homophobic ads. See Michael Tan, “Goodbye Billy,”
Philippine Daily Inquirer, October 23, 2001.
8. Some of the more memorable lesbian and gay celebrities interviewed during this
period were Repertory Philippines’ Zeneida “Bibot” Amador, cultural scholar
and academic Nicanor “Nick” Tiongson, AM radio commentator Tita Swarding,
hairstylist and makeup artist James Cooper, socialite and newspaper columnist
Louie Cruz, television and film director Jose Javier (“Joey”) Reyes, transsexual
beautician-turned-millionaire Ian Valdez, lesbian musician DJ Alvaro, and former
matinee idol Rustom Padilla, who dramatically outed himself on a reality TV show
that aired on Channel 2. See, respectively, the following: Ara Abad Santos-Bitong,
“Bibot Diaries,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, December 11, 2004, C4; “St. Nick Against
the Moral Terrorists,” Interview with Nicanor Tiongson, Philippine Daily Inquirer,
April 1, 2001, D1; Pennie Azarcon de la Cruz, “When Machismo Gets Machismis,”
Sunday Inquirer Magazine, February 11, 2001, 6; Joy Rojas, “Taking It Like a Man,”
Sunday Inquirer Magazine, February 24, 2002, Q2; Wilhelmina Paras, “Dancing
Out of the Closet,” Asiaweek, August 7, 1998, 36; Oliver M. Pulumbarit, “How
Joey Reyes Stays Forever Young as He Turns 50,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, August
22, 2004, A34; Patrick Magalona, “Ian Valdez: Baklang Palaboy na Milyonarya na
Ngayon,” ManilaOut, no. 2 (2000): 20; Eric S. Caruncho, “Music Makers: Life Is
Queer,” Sunday Inquirer Magazine, June 27, 2006, Q8; and Alwin M. Ignacio, “This
Beautiful Man,” L Magazine, vol. 2 no. 1 (2006): 68-69.
9. Examples of such frank discussions of the gay sexual subculture, promiscuity,

prostitution, gayspeak, “rave parties,” and sexually transmitted diseases, and
family-related issues, are the following: Blue Arden, “How Fathers Cope with
Gay Sons,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, June 13, 2001, F1; Jose Javier Reyes, “In the
Company of Fairies,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, June 15, 2001, G1; Edwin Valdez
Vinarao and Michael Remir H. Macatangay, “The Other Goods in the Mall,”
Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 15, 2001, C2; Ramon Tulfo, “On Target: Beaten
Up by a Faggot,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, September 28, 2002, A36; Miguel
Garcia, “Learning a Lesson the Hard Way,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, November
6, 2002, F3; Rina Jimenez David, “At Large: Can You Tell Who’s Gay?” Philippine
Daily Inquirer, August 22, 2004, A16; 2BU! Correspondents, “Chuva Chuk Chak
Chenelyn Chenelyn Chika,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, November 6, 2002, D3;
Desiree Caluza, “It’s the first Gay Outing Saturday in Chilly Baguio,” Philippine
Daily Inquirer, November 10, 2004, A1; and Michael L. Tan, “Pinoy Kasi: Save the
Filipino Family,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, June 15, 2000, A16.
10. Examples of “confessional” articles that treat the question of gay and lesbian outing
during the period are the following: “Lea and Amy: Love Conquers Homophobia,”
ManilaOut, no. 1 (2000): 28; Mark Peter Zamora, “Anticipating Gay Fatherhood,”
Philippine Daily Inquirer, June 13, 2001, F2; Bino A. Realuyo, “Dear Country,”
Sunday Inquirer Magazine, June 11, 2000, E1; Mozart A.T. Pastrano, “The Rite
of Manhood Called Boy Bayot,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, February 28, 2001,
E4; John L. Silva, “End Page: The Origins of My Dress Code,” Sunday Inquirer
Magazine, February 24, 2002, 7; and Jade Lopez, L.J. Palma, Sam Tongson, and
Gina Ramos, “Homo… What?” Philippines Free Press, July 13, 1996, 18.
11. Among the many gay authors whose books appeared in this decade we can include:
essayists Louie Cano, Danton Remoto, and Jose Javier Reyes; fictionists Ernesto
Carandang II, Ian Casocot, Vicente Groyon III, and Gerardo Torres; poets Romulo
Baquiran Jr., Ronald Baytan, Carlomar Daoana, Jaime Doble, Eugene Evasco,
Alex Gregorio, Nestor De Guzman, Ralph Semino Galan, and Lawrence Ypil; and
playwrights Ed Cabagnot, Nicolas Pichay, Rody Vera, and Rene Villanueva.
12. Temptation Island … Live was put up by Madiraka Events and Services and ran for
the whole month of May in 2004 at the Republic of Malate. It was adapted by Chris
Martinez from the original screenplay by Joey Gosiengfiao, and its cast included
the following: Tuxqs Rutaquio, John Lapus, Peter Serrano, Raymond Sydney, Face
Sales, Romnick Sarmenta, Floy Quintos, Danny Ramos, and Christian Vasquez.
13. See the related articles on this queer restaging of Nick Joaquin’s famous play: Cora
Llamas, “New Musical Blurs Gender Lines,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 6,
2001, E3; and Alex Vergara, “Portrait as Sisters’ Act,” Philippine Daily Inquirer,
February 25, 2002, E1.
Notes | 503
14. For some of the better-written reviews of Zsazsa Zaturnnah Ze Muzikal, see Roel
Hoang Manipon, “Zsazsa Zaturnnah Zings,” L Magazine, vol. 2 no. 1 (2006): 49;
Francis Martinez, “Zsazsa Zaturnnah Inside Out,” L Magazine, vol. 2 no. 1 (2006):
50-51; and Francezca C. Kwe, “Zsazsa Zaturnnah Off the Page,” L Magazine, vol. 2
no. 1 (2006): 52-53.
15. For news coverage on this pioneering film festival, see the following related
articles: “Pink Festival Celebrates Gay Pride,” Inquirer Libre, May 28, 2004, 8; Vives
Anunciacion, “Festival Queens: Second International Gay and Lesbian Film and
Video Festival,” Inquirer Libre, July 5, 2004, 8; and “Gay Films: UP Seeing Pink,”
Inquirer Libre, July 5, 2004, 13.
16. Some of these outstanding films were the following: Markova: Comfort Gay, Aishite
Masu, Ang Lalaki sa Buhay ni Selya, Miguel/Michelle, Paraiso ni Efren, Pusong
Mamon, Happy Together Forever, Sibak, Burlesk King, and Twilight Dancers.
17. These digital-format indie films include the stylistically erotic Duda, Bathhouse,
Masahista, Ang Lalake sa Parola, Daybreak, and Ang Lihim ni Antonio; the
lesbian family drama Kaleldo, and the wonderful and internationally acclaimed
Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros, which, among other things, tackles the
controversial issue of pubescent gay sexuality. For reviews of Ang Pagdadalaga …,
see Marcus Iñigo Laurel, “Budding but not yet Blooming,” L Magazine, vol. 2 no. 1
(2006): 8-10; and J. Neil C. Garcia, “Paradoxical Philippines: On Ang Pagdadalaga
ni Maximo Oliveros,” L Magazine, vol. 2 no. 1 (2006): 13-14.
18. For commentaries on the changing attitudes toward gay and lesbian representations
on Philippine television, see Nestor U. Torre, “Gays on TV,” Philippine Daily
Inquirer, June 25, 2005, A 31; and Arvin Adina, “Boob Tube Reflects Changing
Gay Image,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, November 6, 2002, D2.
19. For GMA 7’s press release on this show, see “Out,” iGMA tv (News and Public
Affairs), http://64.41.100.97/npa.html (accessed September 15, 2007).
20. That the reason for the show’s cancellation was not that it was rating poorly (it was
the best-performing program in its time slot) but that the advertisers all decided to
mysteriously pull out was among the insights shared in a candid interview with Jigz
Mayuga, who hosted Out! together with JM Cobarrubias and Awi Siwa. For a text
of the interview, see Diana A. Uy, “The Colorful Life of an Ex-TV Host,” Manila
Bulletin Online, http://www.mb.com.ph/issues/2005/04/18/SCTY2005041832950.
html (accessed September 14, 2007).
21. “Controversies: Out of the Closet,” Asiaweek, October 5, 1994, 33.
22. See “Statement of the First National Lesbian Rights Conference, December 7-9,
1996,” http://hain.org/badaf6/lesbian-rights.htm (accessed February 3, 1998).
23. See Tabi-tabi sa Pagsasantabi: Kritikal na mga Tala ng mga Lesbiana at Bakla sa
Sining, Kultura, at Wika, eds. Eugene Y. Evasco, Roselle V. Pineda, and Rommel B.
Rodriguez (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2003).
24. For an analysis of this march’s significance, especially in relation to the framework
of “gay rights,” see my “Philippine Gay Rights,” in Slip/pages: Essays in Philippine
Gay Criticism (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1998), 60-64.
25. This march received much media attention. The newspaper and magazine articles
that covered it include the following: Nati Nuguid, “All About Rights,” Philippines
Free Press, July 13, 1996, 16; Choong Tin Sieu, “Revolution by Stages,” Asiaweek,
August 7, 1998, 38; Nati Nuguid, “Acceptance, Not Just Tolerance,” Philippines
Free Press, July 13, 1996, 14; and Anna Leah Sarabia, “Filipino Lesbians and Gays
Make History,” Gayzette, The Evening Paper, March 8-10, 1996, 29.
26. See “Encounter: Rep. Reynaldo A. Calalay, A Champion of Gay Rights,” Sunday
Inquirer Magazine, September 24, 1995.
27. See the related articles: Dinah Macatiis, “Lesbian and Gay Rights Act of 1999
Languishes in Congress,” ManilaOut, no. 2 (2000): 12; “Prohibiting Discrimination
on the Basis of Sexual Orientation (On Senate Bill 18631 and House Bill 9095),”
ManilaOut, no. 2 (2000): 38.
28. See Ross von Metze, “Gay Communist Rebels Marry in Philippines,” February
28, 2005, www.gmax.co.za/look05/02/08-philippines.html (accessed September
14, 2007).
29. For an overview of the last decade’s worth of accomplishments on the Filipino
LGBT rights movement, see: “LGBT Rights in the Philippines,” http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_Philippines (accessed January 12, 2007).
30. The reason given by the Commission on Elections is that Ang Ladlad lacked a
truly national constituency, and that Remoto, who heads it, and many other well-
educated and middle-class gays like him do not comprise an oppressed sector at
all.
31. Neil Lazarus, “Introducing Postcolonial Studies,” in Lazarus, The Cambridge
Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, 5.
32. Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (1994): 328-56.
33. Andrew Smith, “Migrancy, Hybridity, and Postcolonial Literary Studies,” in
Lazarus, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, 260.
34. Vincent B. Leitch, general ed., “Introduction to Theory and Criticism,” The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001),
25-26.
35. John McLeod, “Introduction,” The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies,
ed. John McLeod (London: Routledge, 2007), 7.
36. Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory
(Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall, 1997), 17.
37. This threefold model was first proposed by Michel Pěcheux in relation to the
“collusion/resistance” question of language and ideology. See Michel Pěcheux,
Notes | 505
Language, Semantics and Ideology, trans. Harbans Nagpal (London: Macmillan,

1982).
38. For more on this “national” deployment of Butlerian performativity, see my essay,
“Sexuality, Knowledge and the Nation-State,” in Performing the Self: Occasional
Prose (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2003), 3-15.
39. Even the early and possibly most eloquent champion of anticolonial nationalism
declares that a national culture is not and should not be seen as a folklore, nor
as an “abstract populism,” but as something that belongs to the present as well
as to the future. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance
Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 43.
40. Childs, 197.
41. An example of the elision of cultural—and indeed, national—localities under the
convenient and homogenizing description of “queer postcolonial theory” may
be seen in the work of Martin F. Manalansan IV, whose study of the “global gay
modernity” of Filipino gay men living in New York City conflates the experiences
of Filipino immigrants to America with the cultures and socialities of Filipinos
living in the Philippines. His queer postcolonial ethnocentrism is such that, in his
book, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora, Manalansan haphazardly
surveys the various Filipino efforts at theorizing kabaklaan in the Philippines, and
faults them for their essentialist presuppositions that do not take into account the
diasporic issues that beset Filipino American bakla queers like himself. This is a
disingenuous move, for it neglects to register the fact that these local theorizings
of Philippine-specific kabaklaan do not even pretend to pertain to the diasporic
question; moreover, while it condemns local Filipino scholarship for its naive and
“essentialist” presuppositions, by positing a sameness across the transnational
divide between Filipinos in the Philippines and Filipino immigrants to the United
States it is in fact promoting its own devious—and neocolonial—essentialism. For
an interesting review of Manalansan’s book, see Peter A. Jackson, review of Global
Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora, in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 36,
no. 2 (2005): 328-30.
42. Parry, in Lazarus, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, 75,
78.
43. Tamara Sivanandan, “Anticolonialism, National Liberation, and Postcolonial
Nation Formation,” in Lazarus, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary
Studies, 64.
44. Laura Chrisman, “Nationalism and Postcolonial Studies,” in Lazarus, The
Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, 196.
45. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell,
2001), 6.
46. Parry, in Lazarus, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, 78-
79.
47. Stephen Morton, “Poststructuralist Formulations,” in McLeod, The Routledge
Companion to Postcolonial Studies, 172.
48. This has been the point of many of the critics of the postmodern-inflected
varieties of postcolonial discourse. See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations,
Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 43; and Kumkum Sangari, “The Politics of the
Possible,” Cultural Critique 7: 157-86.
49. See one of this new “philosophy’s” most important books: Paula M. L. Moya
and Michael R. Hames-Garcia, eds., Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the
Predicament of Postmodernism (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2000).
50. Linda Hutcheon, “Circling the Downspout of Empire: Postcolonialism and
Postmodernism,” Ariel 20 (4): 149-75.
51. Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, found in The Philippine Islands,
1493-1898, ed. Emma Blair and James Robertson (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark,
1903-09), Volume 16, 130.
52. The Rizal-Blumentritt Correspondence (Manila: Jose Rizal Centennial Commission,
1961), 120.
53. Jaime Bulatao, SJ, “Split-Level Christianity,” Manuud, 1971, 16-33.
54. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993), 45, 75, 86.
55. McLeod, in McLeod, The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, 6.
56. According to Benita Parry, it is imperative that postcolonialism perform the
following critical tasks, if it is to become truly relevant in these neocolonial and
globalized times:
… empirical investigations of economic migrants, … the substantive and
experiential situations of the majoritarian settled populations of the nation-states
of Asia, Africa, and Latin America … [of] the millions of people whose mobility
is constrained; who are not part of the reservoir of cheap labor in either the home
cities, the Gulf States, or the old and new metropolitan centers; who still engage
in subsistence farming, or in extracting raw materials and producing goods for
world markets.
See Parry, in Lazarus, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary
Studies, 74.
57. Gigi M. David, “Gay Contestant Natigok sa Stage,” Standard Xpress, December 5,
2006, 2.
Index
A androgyny, 257
Ang Ladlad, 430, 504
activo/pasivo, 78, 407 Ang Lalake sa Parola, 503
Adam, Barry D., 411 Ang Lalaki sa Buhay ni Selya, 503
A Different Love: Being Gay in the Ang Lihim ni Antonio, 503
Philippines, 236-45, 412 Ang Lunes na Mahirap Bunuin, 492
Aduarte, Diego, 192 Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros,
aginging, 191 503
Aguja, Mario, 429 Angara-Castillo, Bellaflor, 428
AIDS, 12, 213, 231-35, 260, 408, 416, aniteras, 192
467, 489 antibakla utopia, xvii
Aishite Masu, 503 antigay school policy, 419
Akbayan Citizens’ Action Party, 428 antigay violence, 351-52
Ako si Emma … Babae, 96 antipornography law, 227
alanganin, 74, 476 A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, 423
Alcantara, Jimmy, 331-33 Aquino, Corazon, 413
Alcina, Francisco Ignacio, 163-64, 174 Asian Queer Studies, xiii, 431
Alejo, Albert SJ, 124-26 asog, 165-66, 174
Alfar, Dean, 336 Atadero, Oscar, 501
Alfon, Estrella, 293 Ateneo de Manila University, 430, 450
Altman, Dennis, 408 Augustine, St., 131-32
Alvaro, DJ, 501 Aunor, Nora, 270
Alyansa Laban sa Kalalakihang Bakla, authenticity, 6
413 autobiography, gay, 289-91, 497
Amador, Zeneida, 103, 501 Avenida, 114
527
B binabai, 191
binabay, 191
babaeng bakla, 105-7 binabayoguin, 191
“Babaye Bana Kini,” 107-8 biniboy, 79-80, 467
babayenon, 192 biographical criticism, gay, xvi, 25, 29,
babaylan, 154, 162-97, 395 290
Babette, 149-50 Birion, Juan, 94,145
“Badaf Forever,” 100 Blair and Robertson, 178
Bagong Pag-asa, 416 Blanc-Szanton, Cristina, 158-60, 174
bakla, 50, 316-23, 330-31 Blumenfeld, Warren, 132
as phase, 74-76 bodabil, 81
etymology of, 462-63 Bolinao Manuscript, 497
homosexualization of, 85 Bowers vs. Hardwick, 45, 393
bakla/homosexual dynamic, xvi, xxi-xxii, Boxer Codex, 181-82
50, 58-59, 62-66, 69-70, 82, 86, 88, boyos, 191
97, 134 Boys in the Band, 91, 372
Balagtas, 30, 74 Boys in the Band II, 142
Balboa, Vasco Nuñez de, 391 Bray, Alan, 49
Baligtaran, 229 Bruning, Jürgen, 396-97, 498
bantot, 192 Buhawi, 184, 484
bantut, 73, 193, 272-75 Bulatao, Jaime, 450
Banzhaf, Jane S., 63, 88 burlarse, el, 186
Baquiran, Romulo Jr., 502 Burlesk King, 503
Barrios, Joi, 229 butch-femme, 215, 257-60, 390
Bathhouse, 503 Butler, Judith, 265-66
bayas, 191
bayog, 190-91
bayoguin, 164, 181-83, 191 C
bayot, 50, 76-79, 89, 129, 195, 250
songs about the, 472 Cabagnot, Ed, 502
Bayot, Antonio, 300 Calalay, Reynaldo, 428, 500, 504
Bayron, Edwin, see Carlo/Diane Calderon, Sofronio, 120
Baytan, Ronald, 502 call boys, 114-17
Benavides, Miguel de, 168 camp, 43, 204-212, 265
berdache, 167, 174, 190, 254 Can’t Live in the Closet (CLIC), 416
Between Men: English Literature and Cannell, Fenella, 266, 269-92
Male Homosocial Desire, 27 Cano, Louie, 502
bido, 177, 182 canon, Philippine homosexual, 30-31
Carandang, Ernesto II, 502
Index | 529
Carlo/Diane, 80, 215-21 cryptohomosexual reading, 34

Casaje, Lito, 30 Cubao 1980 at Iba Pang Mga Katha: Ang
Casocot, Ian, 502 Unang Sigaw ng Gay Liberation sa
Castro, Pio de, 363 Pilipinas, 284, 361-86
category mistake, xvi Cubao Pagkagat ng Dilim: Mga Kwentong
Catholic Church, 130, 387, 414-15, 475 Kababalaghan, 262-64
CCP Encyclopedia of Philippine Art, 335 cultural materialism, 460
celibacy, 133, 177, 377
Cendaña, Percival, 425
Cervantes, Behn, 423 D
Charings, 100, 134
Chinese, and homosexuality, 388, 393. d’Angheira, Pietro Martire, 391
See also Sangleyes. daetan, 166
Chirino, Pedro, 196 Damas de Noche, 229-30
Cine Café, 64, 463 Daoana, Carlomar, 502
Close Encounters with the Third Sex, 100, Davidson, Arnold, 256
336, 372 Daybreak, 503
Closet Quivers, 64, 463 De Guzman, Nestor, 502
cobarde, 191 De La Salle University, 425
Coco Banana, 93 De Orbo Novo, 391
Cole, Fay-Cooper, 480 deconstruction, 213
Combes, Francisco, 172, 175-79 depth model, 119, 263
Coming Out, xviii, 25, 29, 37, 143-45, Desquibel, Pedro Hurtado, 173
203, 213, 230, 238-45, 259, 261, 339, determinism vs. voluntarism, 15
354-56, 406, 495-96 diaspora, 433
Coming Out: International Gay and Dickens, Charles, 28
Lesbian Writings, 406 Dios, Honorio Bartolome de, 292
Confesionario Copioso, 169 Dirlik, Arif, 433
constructionism, 14-16, 18-19, 116 dis-identification, 439
constructionism vs. essentialism, 154-55, diversitarianism, 247
247-56 Doble, Jaime, 502
containment, 8-9, 389 Dollimore, Jonathan, 10-11, 27, 83, 207-
Cooper, James, 501 10
Cordero-Fernando, Gilda, 30 Dolphy, 75, 137-40
counter-identification, 440 Douglas, Alfred Lord, 170
Covar, Prospero, 123-24 drag, 266
Crowley, Mart, 91 Duda, 503
cruising spots, Metro Manila, 473 dynamic nominalism, 85
Cruz, Louie, 501
E Florendo, Abe, 204-6

Flores, Jose, 300
Eat Bulaga, 205 Foucault, Michel, 44, 170, 329, 376
Elopre, Ponciano. See Buhawi. Francisco, R.S., 99
Encarnacion, Juan Felix de la, 192 Freudianism, 408
Encarnacion, Jun, 263
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, 400
englishes, 301 G
Enriquez, Mig Alvarez, 30
Enriquez, Virgilio, 464 Galan, Ralph Semino, 483, 502
Epistemology of the Closet, 42, 53, 410 Gamalinda, Eric, 30
equivalency, xix Garber, Marjorie, 28, 141, 210-13, 260
erastes, 329 Garcia, Eddie, 135
eromenos, 329 gay, 6, 56-58
Errington, Sherry, 162, 166 and lesbian theory, 22
Espejo, Tony, 91, 372 bars, 112, 222
essentialism vs. constructionism, canon, xviii
25, 53. See also minoritizing vs. gaycritics, 22
universalizing. liberation movement, 5, 40-41, 86,
Estrada, Joseph, 427 363, 371, 386, 406, 436
ethnic model, 42-43 literary criticism, 27
eunuchs, 175 rights, 418
Evangelio, Albert Claude, 495 theory, Philippine, 14-17
Evasco, Eugene, 502 Gay Men’s Exchange, 416
Evening Paper, The, 500 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Eviota, Elizabeth Uy, 24, 197 Subversion of Identity, 265
Exodus International, 416 gender-crossing, 48, 152-53, 165-97,
183-85, 254, 479-80
gender-crossing, comparative, 190, 193-
F 95
gender, Philippine conceptions of, 248-
Fanon, Frantz, 446 49
Fefita Fofonggay, 89 gender vs. sexuality, 22-24
feminism, 21-22, 43, 229 gender-transitive vs. gender-intransitive,
Fernandez, Doreen, 363 46, 19-20, 254-56, 410, 436
Filipinoness, 161, 434, 440 Genet, Jean, 9, 279, 383
first pleasurable experience theory, 15 Gide, André, 9, 28, 207, 383
Fletcher, John, 328 Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the
Diaspora, 505
Index | 531
global North, 432, 446 homophobia, 6, 26

global South, 421, 446-47 homosexual identities, 253
globalization, 432-33, 444-46 homosexual panic, 43, 49, 461
Gloria, Ricardo, 460 homosexuality, etiological explanations
Goldberg, Jonathan, 179-80, 391-94 for, 469
Goldin, Nan, 491 homosociality, 30, 33, 48-49
Gonzalez, N.V.M., 30, 298 Honasan, Alya, 233
Gosiengfiao, Joey, 91, 502 Hontiveros-Baraquel, Risa, 429
Gough, Jamie, 258 humanism, 312-14, 432
Greekness, 311-16 humorization, 143
Gregorio, Alex, 502 Hwang, David Henry, 99
Groyon, Vicente III, 502
Guerrero, Wilfrido Ma., 30, 92, 278, 336,
372 I
Guys4Men, 437-39
identification, 439
identity politics, 379
H Ileto, Reynaldo, 128-29, 159, 475
imperialism, 268, 421, 438, 443
Hacienda Margarita, 114 impersonation, 207
Hacking, Ian, 85 imposture, 207
Hagedorn, Jessica, 30 individual, gay as, 146
Hall, Marguerite Radclyffe, 9 Integrated Performing Arts Guild
Halperin, David, 45-46 (IPAG), 334
Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Intermisyon, 495
Salamat, 90-91, 282, 334-60, 372 International Conference on Population
Happy Together Forever, 503 and Development (ICPD), 415
Hart, Donn V., 77-79 inversion, xv, 43, 47, 70-71, 86, 102, 116-
Healthy Interaction and Values (HIV) 20, 136, 188, 214, 221-22, 251, 258,
workshop, 231-33 381, 390, 410, 496
Hemingway, Ernest, 28 Itiel, Joseph, 67-70, 128
hermaphrodite, 75
heteronormativity, 118
Hirschfield, Magnus, 96 J
history from within, 7
Holmes, Margarita Go-Singco, 47, 235- Jackson, Peter, 398-99, 505
45, 412 Jade Vine, 93
hombre mugerado, 192 “Joana Montegracia,” 454
homo/hetero, 398, 435 Joaquin, Nick, 33-34, 87, 114, 298, 423
Jocano, F. Landa, 160 Lesbian and Gay Legislative Advocacy

Johnson, Mark, 73, 266-67, 272-75 Network (LAGABLAB), 428
Jorgensen, Christine, 95 Lesbian and Gay Rights Act of 1999, 428
Juan, Anton, 30, 423 lesbian, 101-4
lesbian history, sources for, 471
LGBT Studies, 426
K Library Foundation, The, 237
Likosky, Stephan, 406
Kaleldo, 503 Lim, Alfredo, 413
Kaming Mga Talyada, 95 Lim, Michael Kho, 501
Karga Mano, 463 Linmark, R. Zamora, 423
Karnes, Eddie, 403 Longos, Pacita, 87
kathoey, 153, 397-99 loob, xxiii, 72-73, 119-30, 210, 251-52,
KATLO, 93, 237 261, 404
Kinsey, Alfred, xxii, 42, 44-45, 86, 240, as psychospiritual depth, xxiv, 73
380 loob/labas, xviii, 123, 127, 136, 341, 389,
Kirk, Kris and Ed Heath, 264-65 449, 465
Kulturkreis, 397, 498 Looking for the Pre-Hispanic Filipino, 175
Kumbersasyon, 336
Kung Paano Ko Pinatay si Diana Ross,
229-30, 336 M
M. Butterfly, 99
L maaram, 160
Madrigal-Vazquez, Chito, 293-95
Lacan, Jacques, 28 Magsaysay, Ramon, 293-95
ladlad ng kapa, 144-45, 147 Mailer, Norman, 28
Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Malate, 413
Writings, 29, 287-88, 423, 459-60 male homosexual identities, 5
Lady Valerie, 223-24 Male Homosexuality in Four Societies, 246
Lamangan, Joel, 424 Male Homosexuality in Thailand: An
Lapuz, Lourdes V., 476 Interpretation of Contemporary Thai
Las Casas, Bartolome de, 392 Sources, 398-99
Lawrence, D.H., 28 Manalansan, Martin IV, 193, 505
Layumas, Rune, 475 manananggal, 217-18
Lazarus, Neil, 432-33 manang bali, 178
Lean Alejandro Lecture Series, 459 Mananzan, Sister Mary John, 157
Lesbian Advocates of the Philippines, 429 Manila Standard, 453
Marcos, Fely Luz, 90, 144, 335
Index | 533
Marcos, Imelda, 403 N

Marcosian dispensation, 26
Maria Clara, 158 Nadres, Orlando, xvii, xviii, 90, 276-86,
Marin, Malu, 501 334, 372, 404, 410-11
Markova: Comfort Gay, 503 National Democratic Front, 429
Martial Law, 5 nationalism, 420, 437-52
Marxism, 26 nativism, xx, xxi
Mary Magdalene, 197 Natural Law, 188
Masahista, 503 nefandam libidinem, 170
Maybe I Can Give You Sex, 475 Neoplatonism, 302-11
Mayuga, Jigz, 503 New Criticism, 384
McCoy, Alfred, 162, 184 Noceda-Sanlucar, 191
McIntosh, Mary, 458 Noriega, Bienvenido, 30
Mehan Gardens, 114, 413 Nosce Te Ipsum, 11
Men in Frocks, 264-65 nympha, 104
Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), 59,
231-45, 255, 406, 412
Metropolitan Community Church, 415 O
Mexico, 406
Mickley, Richard, 415, 417 Oedipus Complex, 53, 328, 332
Miguel/Michelle, 503 ontogeny vs. phylogeny, 16
Miles, Aubrey, 454 organizations, early gay, 473
mimicry, 270, 272 Orientalism, 272, 442-43
minoritizing vs. universalizing, 46-48, orientation, homosexual, 47
408 Orosman at Zafira, 465-66
misogyny, 302-10 Out!, 425, 503
Miss Gay Peñafrancia, 270 Outing, 39
Miss Gay Philippines, 206, 232, 263 overt/covert, 97-98, 214, 338-58, 404, 410
Montano, Severino, xvii, 29, 208, 276-86,
292-31, 372
Moore, Lina Espina, 80 P
Morales, Paul, 464
Morga, Antonio de, 168, 483 Padgug, Robert, 17
Moro Islamic Liberation Front, 273 Padilla, Rustom, 501
Mother Lily, 218 Pagsanjan, 413
muger indigena, 157-58 Palanca, Rajit, 495
Panganiban, Jose Villa, 75
Paper Dolls, 204
Paraiso ni Efren, 503 Pride March, 417, 427

parlorista, 87 progress narrative, 141
parrang sabil, 273 Progressive Organization of Gays in the
Parry, Benita, 443 Philippines (PRO-Gay), 417-18, 427
Pasyon and Revolution, 475 prostitution, 104-5, 112-16
patriarchy, 49 Proust, Marcel, 279
Patron, Elena, 96 proximate, the, 211
Pêcheux, Michel, 504 pseudohomosexuality, 474
pederasty, 77 psychoanalysis, 28, 315, 323-29
Penal Code, 488 puit, 169
Pepe en Phil, 495 Pusong Mamon, 503
Peralta, Jesus, 300
Perez, Domingo, 163, 192
Perez, Tony, xvii, 29, 262-65, 276-86, 292, Q
361-86
performativity, 266, 439-40 queer, 443-44, 499
Perry, Troy, 415 Quezon Memorial Circle, 417
perversion, 83 Quezon, Manuel L. III, 421-22, 501
Phelan, John Leddy, 388-89 Quran, 172
Philippine Daily Inquirer, 421-22
Philippine Educational Theater
Association (PETA), 229, 279, 335, R
459
Philippine gay culture, 2-4, 11, 261 Rafael, Vicente, 124-25, 159, 186, 389
Philippine PEN, 233 Rea, Ruvic, 429
Philippines Free Press, 104 ReachOut Foundation, 427
Pichay, Nicolas, 463, 492, 502 real man, 51-52, 54, 369-71
Pink Film Festival, 424 realism vs. nominalism, 16
Pinpin, Thomas, 170 Realuyo, Bino, 423
Plasencia, Juan de, 163-64 Remembrance of Things Past, 279
Ponteñila, Ma. Simeona, 98, 107, 137 Remoto, Danton, 430, 459, 501-2
positivism, xv resistance, 8
postcolonialism, 420-52, 506 Revilla, Ramon Jr., 429
postinversion, 45 Reyes, Jose Javier, 501-02
postpositivist realism, 447-48 Ribadeneira, Marcelo de, 163, 390
poststructuralism, 446, 448 Rizal, Jose, 30, 449
Power and Difference: Gender in Island Roda, 214, 287
Southeast Asia, 162 Rosales, Etta, 429
Index | 535
Rosca, Ninotchka, 30 Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern

Roth, Henry Ling, 178 Sexualities, 179, 391
Rubin, Gayle, 72 sodomy, 17, 168-174, 179-80, 391, 393
solidarity sex, 78
Soriano, Maricel, 222
S
Spirit vs. Flesh, 210
Salazar, Zeus, 160-63 split-level Christianity, 450
San Agustin, Gaspar de, 169 Sta. Cruz, Manila, 322
San Antonio, Francisco de, 163, 171-73 stereotypes, 13, 139-40, 368, 424
San Buenaventura, Pedro de, 191 Sterne, Laurence, 27
San Jose, Francisco Blancas de, 170-71 Stop Discrimination Now, 429
Sangleyes, 168, 497 strategic essentialism, 385
Santacruzan, 132, 144-45 subjectivity, 9
Santiago, Carmen, 66-67 Super SiReyna, 1
Santos, Aida, 23 sward, 87
Santos, Bienvenido, 298 Swarding, Tita, 501
Sarabia, Ana Leah, 501 swardspeak, 107-11, 422
Scott, William Henry, 155, 174-75 Switchboard, 416
Sechrest, Lee and Luis Flores, 62
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 16-17, 20, 27-
28, 42-43, 48-49, 246, 279, 408, 410 T
Self/Other, 442
Serrano, Fanny, 222 Taberna Taboso, 115
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 240 Tadiar, Neferti Xina, 378-86
Sexual Dissidence, 27, 46 Tan, Michael, 236-45, 482, 502
Shahani, Leticia Ramos, 227 Tana, 87
Shakespeare, William, 55 Tatad, Kit, 235
Short Time, 336 Tausug, 272-75
Sibak, 503 Tayabas, 337
Sikolohiyang Pilipino, 66, 72-73, 464 Tears in the Morning, 403
silahis, 134-37, 255 Temptation Island … Live!, 423, 502
Silva, John, 101, 132-33, 501 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 28
Sining Kayumanggi Royal Family Thailand, 397
(SKRF), 93 The Clash of Cymbals, 30, 92, 278, 336,
slippage, xvi 372
Smith, Lance Corporal Daniel, 453, 456 The Hispanization of the Philippines:
Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses,
388
The Lesbian Collective, 427 V

“The Lion and the Faun,” 281-82, 292-31,
372 Valdez, Ian, 501
The Picture of Dorian Gray, 279 Vera, Rody, 229, 336, 459, 502
The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, Villa, Jose Garcia, 30
411 Villanueva, Rene, 30, 336, 502
Third Sex, 76, 82, 94-96, 101-5, 136, 198,
224, 257, 400
Third World, 433 W
Third, the, 210-13
Tiempo, Edith L., 30 Waite, Philip, 109
Tiongson, Nick, 362-66, 374-75, 379, Whitam, Frederick, 68, 401-2
381, 501 Whitam, Frederick and Robin Mathy,
tolerance/acceptance, 13, 68, 82-85, 151, 246
400-401 Whitehead Harriet, 167, 254
tomboy, 103 Wilde, Oscar, 170, 207-12, 279, 383
Torre, Nestor U., 91, 100-101, 336 Wolfe, Barbie Ann, 206
Torres, Bobby, 478 woman, Philippine precolonial, 157-61
Torres, Gerardo, 502
Totanes, Sebastian de, 185
transference, 307 X
transgressive reinscription, ix, 10, 207-
15, 383 xenophobia, 217
transsexualism, 94-95, 189, 500
transvestism, 99, 151-52, 165
Y
transvestophobia, 260
Turingan, Col. Manuel, 80
Ynfante, Fritz, 91, 140
Twilight Dancers, 503
Young, Robert J.C., 446
Tyler, Carol-Anne, 257
Ypil, Lawrence, 502
U
Z
Ugarte Field, 414
Zsazsa Zaturnnah: Ze Muzikal, 423, 503
unay, 118
universalism, xxi
University of the Philippines, 425
UP Babaylan, 225-27, 425, 458
utopia, 316-22
The Author
J. Neil C. Garcia finished his BA Journalism (magna cum laude) in the

University of Santo Tomas in 1990. He is currently teaching creative writing
and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman, where
he also serves as an associate for poetry in the Institute of Creative Writing. He
is the author of numerous poetry collections and works in literary and cultural
criticism, including Our Lady of the Carnival (1996), The Sorrows of Water
(2000), Kaluluwa (2001), Slip/pages: Essays in Philippine Gay Criticism (1998),
Performing the Self: Occasional Prose (2003), The Garden of Wordlessness
(2005), and Misterios and Other Poems (2005). His Postcolonialism and Filipino
Poetics: Essays and Critiques (2005) is a revised version of his dissertation in
English Studies: Creative Writing, which he completed in 2003. In 2007 he
edited for Philippine PEN the poetry anthology At Home in Unhomeliness,
for which he also wrote an accompanying monograph. He recently finished
a Fulbright research grant at the University of California (San Diego), where
he studied Asian-American poetics. He is currently working on a full-length
book, a postcolonial survey and analysis of Philippine poetry in English.

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What is the book about?

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What are some of the topics discussed in chapters 1-3?

What are some of the topics discussed in chapters 1-3?

Philippine

© J. Neil C. Garcia 1996, 2008, 2009

First published by The University of the Philippines Press in 1996,

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

Philippine Gay Culture: 420

The spirit or “intent” of this question, though perhaps honestly curious

History from Within and Containment Theory

unified Self of humanism to have all but disappeared in contemporary times.

oppression, who ever wanted to transform the “world/nature” (now seen to

The Question of a Philippine Gay Theory

In order to carry out the first function of a Philippine-specific gay theory,

Although seemingly contradictory, essentialist and constructionist

“Homosexual” and “heterosexual” behavior may be universal: homosexual

Padgug further specifies that the concept of sexuality as a “private truth”

1) the way we go about studying the world is determined by available

And so, sexuality as an abstraction/category of erotic experience which

from male to female, translating into effeminacy and/or inversion) or as

the field of inquiry that is contemporary Philippine gay culture. Furthermore,

become internalized into the gay and lesbian struggles themselves—and is

of homosexuality, and essentialist gender transitivity (or inversion) is just one

Elizabeth Uy Eviota, in a historical materialist analysis of the Philippine

Eviota’s work, as a whole, studies the various historical transformations

as the peculiarly gay expression or swardspeak to which she is indebted and

Gay Literary Criticism and the Philippine Canon

Journey, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, and Charles

not included “that interesting little detail” of his homosexuality. Should it

and sadly bankrupt scientistic norms of well-writtenness and craft, which

The separatist impulse readily evident in this early reflection of mine—

identity of such authors remains reducibly and identifiably homosexual. The

antediluvian matriarchy (to be seen in such stories as “The Summer Solstice”

Gay Culture: History and Writings

The questions I wish to answer in the section on Philippine gay culture

and to finally relate these to their authors’ concrete “autobiographical selves.”

I can imagine this study eventually becoming significant to Philippine

diversity of Filipino gay men, especially where individual philosophies, interests,

a majority obsessively imagines a minority in order to constitute itself. Thus,

The emergence of homosexuality out of inversion, the development

Chapter One: The Sixties

admittedly interesting and suggestive. See Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Tolerance or

is to be considered a most necessary undertaking. Enriquez calls this orientation

Zelim: Abdalap na taksil, ang isip mo baga

been so strongly definitive of an enduring, gender-anomalous condition that it

Chapter Two: The Seventies

8. Rosalia de Leon, “Filipino Attitudes Towards Homosexuality” (term paper

27. Princesita Buma-at et al., The Misunderstood: An Attempted Study on Homosexuality

13. Tomas Q. Andres, “Homosexuality: A Third Normal Sex?” Philippine Values

Nagkakaroon ng bakla ngayon dahil sa dumarami ang mga

46. Ponteñila, 128.

90. Banzhaf, 10.

a descending heart is crying

the leaves begin to fall

where is the fertile soil?

there will never be a smile again

Chapter Three: Precolonial Gender-Crossing

gender difference; (3) anatomic/genital “sex” (gender) may therefore be seen—