Sacred Camp: Transgendering Faith in a Philippine Festival

Soft shafts of light barely shine through openings of Augusto Fuentes Diangson's two-storey concrete house when he commands Persing, one of his household helpers and a few years younger than him, to start making breakfast. His seven friends, who have come all the way from Manila and Davao City, are about to wake up, and the ten musicians whom he annually hires from the adjacent province of Iloilo have been waiting downstairs for coffee and the usual 'pan de sal' (staple bread roll). For two consecutive days now, Tay Augus or Tay Gusto, as his close relatives and the local residents of Kalibo, Aklan call him, has been up at five in the morning. He is neither to hear an early Catholic Mass at the nearby Cathedral, as he regularly does, nor to attend to his orchids, which are the envy of his mahjong friends. Preparing for the 2000 Ati-atihan, a week-long street-dancing festival celebrated in the Central Philippines in honour of its unofficial patron saint, the Santo Nino or the Holy Child Jesus, has been the focus of his days. Tay Augus walks around excitedly, and invites some early guests to have breakfast but hurries to the bedroom. Miniature statues of the Virgin Mary, the crucified Christ, and the ubiquitous Santo Nino emboss its yellow walls. The beautician, Benjie, has been waiting and is already sorting out brushes and make-up ready to transform Tay Augus' face similar to past years into a Caucasian-looking Folies Bergere chorus girl. Tay Augus, with a height of around 1.68 metres, sits down, lifts his chin and gazes past into the exposed, bleeding heart of the 'Sacred Heart of Jesus' nailed on his altar wall. He is ready to have himself transformed. An hour later Ambo, another teenaged male servant of his, appears. He helps Tay Augus put on a skimpy bustier and thong. Ambo is tasked to put together a wide array of accoutrements and a set of feather boas and pink plumes that Tay Augus' nieces and nephews have sent from faraway Chicago and San Diego. This is to complete Tay Augus' mimicry of the Folies Bergere. By mid-morning, Tay Augus will have divested his 80-year old self and taken on a foreign self for the Santo Nino, and for the thousands of devotees who have come to worship and dance. The above and following vignettes describe the transgendering of Tay Augus, an agi, a man belonging to what he categorised in English as the 'third sex'. (1) They recall his participation at the 2000 Ati-atihan festival, an annual carnivalesque, street dancing-parade in Kalibo, Aklan on the island of Panay. Every second or third week of January both the local Roman Catholic Church and the municipal government organise this festival to honour the popular Santo Nino or the Holy Child Jesus. The vignettes are portraits as well of the festival life of Tay Augus, who, while not secretive about his homosexuality, decided to politely avoid spaces considered in Kalibo to be sites of the bastos (lewdness) and linandi (flirtatiousness). These sites are almost always associated with the beauty parlours, where lower-middle-class agi or the bakla hang out. (2) When asked why this was so, he reasoned, 'I am a man of the third sex alright, but I have a name to protect, besides I have class and am educated unlike the other agi out there.' (3) Tay Augus here is seen against the background of two opposing poles, on one side, of heteronormative masculinity, and on the other, of the bakla who are effeminised men working and/or taking up residence in beauty parlours. He did not fall into either of these worlds, and thus created a third category, an ambiguity that all the more captured the in-between, interstitial character of 'camp', and of the Santo Nino Himself. As evidenced by the awards he received from the provincial government of Aklan for his many years of teaching physical education, Philippine folk dances, and ballet, Tay Augus was an outstanding member of his community. (4) He was also known in Kalibo to have participated in the major rituals of the Roman Catholic Church, and hence was considered by parishioners and priests alike to be Katoliko sarado, 'completely Catholic'. …