 
|  _Closet_ |  _Queeries_  
---|---|---
_Also by J. Neil C. Garcia:_

Poetry:

_Closet Quivers_

_Our Lady of the Carnival_

Criticism:

_Philippine Gay Culture: the Last Thirty Years_

Anthologies:

_Ladlad_ and _Ladlad 2: An Anthology of Philippine Gay_  
_Writing_ (edited with Danton Remoto)
|  _Closet_ |  _Queeries_  
---|---|---

#  _Essays by J. Neil C. Garcia_

_Closet Queeries_

_J. Neil C. Garcia_

Copyright to this digital edition © 1997 by J. NEIL C. GARCIA

All rights reserved. 

No part of this book may be reproduced  
in any form or by any means  
without the written permission  
of the author and publisher. 

Published and exclusively distributed by  
ANVIL PUBLISHING, INC. 

7th Floor, Quad Alpha Centrum

125 Pioneer Street, Mandaluyong City

1550 Philippines

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www.anvilpublishing.com

ISBN 9789712733550 (e-book)

Cover and book design by digital ek. 

E-book formatting by Arvyn Cerezo. 

Version 1.0.1

##  _Acknowledgments_

_I_ 'VE DEPENDED FOR the writing of this book on the irreplaceable help of certain dear people:

Francis L. Martinez and Ronald Baytan, who pinch-hit for me and lent their beauty and wit to "Gayzette";

Krip Yuson, who hired me and thus gave me my first and most probably last job as a columnist, and Arnold Azurin, who warmed him to the otherwise unthinkable idea;

Bimboy Peñaranda, who made things a little easier for me at the paper;

Alman Quiboquibo, Joy Cruz and Robert Baytan, who contributed articles to "Gayzette";

Jing Hidalgo, Jimmy Abad, Butch Dalisay and Charlson Ong, fellow-columnists, colleagues and friends at the UP Creative Writing Center;

Thelma San Juan, for putting out some of these essays in the Lifestyle Section of the _Philippine Daily Inquirer_ ;

And Anvil's Karina Bolasco, for letting this book see the light of queer day. 

##  _For my life's one Constant Thing_

##  _and for Family..._

##  _Contents_

 _Preface_

 _one: Queer pedagogies_

Gay lit.  101

Sob stories

Advice to a beginning gay writer

Conversions

AYOR

 _two: Queer geographies_

Camiguin interlude

An American notebook

A Siquijor sojourn

Leyte on my mind

 _three: Truth-tellings_

Gay and Catholic

Volleyball memories

Three hours in a seminary

A dinner conversation

Growing old

Getting Tested

 _four: Queer Readings_

Myth and meaning

Gays and promiscuity

CMT and intra-male sexuality

Between shadow and light

Total eclipse

The gay-besotted woman

Villa re(dis)covered

Of legends and poetry

 _five: Queering the pitch_

The queer and the bakla

Gay villains

Was Rizal gay? 

Ladlad: the second unfurling

[Orlando Nadres's  
"Hanggang dito na lamang..."  
and the question of gay identity](../Text/42_ch28.xhtml#ch28)

Nature vs. nurture

Sex and globalization

##   _Preface_

_T_ HIS BOOK GATHERS together the columns I wrote for the late and much lamented _Evening Paper_ , along with a few odd pieces of reviews and one lecture.  As such, they represent the "clearest" that I most likely will ever get as far as my writing style is concerned.  Readers who found their senses virtually assaulted by the tortuous prose of my earlier work of criticism, _Philippine Gay Culture_ , will probably be heaving a sigh of relief with _Closet Queeries_ , for in these pages one readily notices an airiness that admittedly was lacking in that obviously denser and more academically oriented book. 

I must say that I exerted not a small amount of effort to write these columns, and I can only presume that sometimes the effort showed.  While I was happy to make the shift from the language of academic theory to journalese, I was also, to be honest, a bit disheartened by the fact that the standard of what clarity in writing is in our time has come to be solely journalistic, and deviations from this norm are readily dismissed, by the public at large, as incomprehensible babble.  Obviously, there are different kinds of clarity—as there are different kinds of opacity—and the language of theory is necessarily difficult only because theory and the world it wishes to explain _are_ difficult. 

In any case, I believe I have not compromised the "idea" (which is what theory is, really) I wanted to put across to my readers, but simply modulated its articulation, with these essays.  If my guess is right, the more regular and sensitive readers of _Closet Queeries_ most probably had become, after some time, increasingly familiarized with and thus less resistant to certain toughnesses of thought and phraseology, and these, taken together, hopefully crystallized into something beautiful and memorable in their minds, which was really what I wanted done all along.  With _Closet Queeries_ , I believed I could scale the babels of academic discourse at the same time that I sounded like I was merely writing journalism, and if I was being deluded then at least I have actually produced something, in the end: all thirty fabulously mongrelized pieces of it! 

This book has five parts, which is really a random number, come to think, as is the logic that underlies each of these divisions. " Queer pedagogies" is about my experience as a teacher of Gay Literature at the University of the Philippines.  It details the kinds of passions and trajectories of knowledge and wit that I've needed to bring to my classroom in order to make more appetizing the whole idea of studying the peculiar, painful but ultimately rewarding body of homosexual writings coming from all over the world. 

"Queer geographies" contains what I must say are "early attempts" at writing the travel essay.  Each of the pieces in this section ends with what is relatively the same insight concerning the act of describing a place: paraphrasing the poet Mark Doty, all description is nothing if not "encoded desire."  In the third section, "Truth-tellings," I've taken all the liberties that columnists often take: to talk shamelessly about oneself.  These essays are rememberings, mostly, but they also express some sort of futurity, especially where the question of human happiness is concerned.  I never really say it in any of these pieces, but I believe that question (as Ben Okri surmises in _Astonishing the gods_ ) should never be raised while one is still _of this world_. 

"Queer readings" is precisely that: deviant and dissident acts of attention and interpretation.  Here, I put texts of both the literary and everyday kind, under a decidedly queer and pinky-colored magnifying glass, determined to expose what lies hidden under the most gleaming and magnificent of surfaces (very often, something dark and ugly).  And finally, in "Queering the pitch," I raise my voice to a shrill and squealing falsetto, for in these essays I wrestle with the burning issues of the day.  With this last section, I hope to register a number of specific demurrals against the many insulting ways Philippine society always manages to handle the question of its own oppressiveness.  In these pieces, I make known my stand on the issues of gays in the military, sexual exploitation in local showbusiness, globalization, among others. 

Why "closet" and why "queeries"?  In pondering the title of my column for the _Evening Paper_ 's gay page, "Gayzette," I wanted something jazzy and strange, and yet also acute and meaningful.  The phrase "Closet Queeries" came to me completely unexpectedly one moonlit evening, in the way titles of many books probably do.  I guess, ultimately, these essays really are _closet queeries_ , which is to say, queer queries that one secretly—inside the closet of one's heart and mind—wishes to ask and have answered. 

And although these essays can only offer what are really just provisional if not tentative answers, the important thing, I suppose, is that one has asked at all. 

|  _J. Neil C. Garcia_  
---|---  
|  _21 May 1997_  
|  _Kamias, Quezon City_
|   **_one:_ **  |   **_Queer pedagogies_ **   
---|---|---  
|  |   

##   _Gay lit.  101_

_T_ HE SEMESTER'S ALMOST through and in the University of the Philippines where I teach everyone's busy wrapping up things.  From the time I started teaching at the Department of English and Comparative Literature five years back, I've always dreaded these last few weeks before the end of the school year.  They invariably spell tons of papers that remain unchecked and lessons yet to cover in the little time that is left. 

Of course, students get the other end of the rotten deal.  I mustn't give teachers all the credit in the academic pursuit of wisdom (which to us is more like making a living, anyway).  Students must dread these final days just as much as their overworked professors do.  I would actually hate to be in my own class, since as a teacher I seem to be given to too many mood swings and inordinate demands (this rare moment of self-awareness came to me after taking a long, hard look at my syllabus).  Take my gay literature class, for example, in which the number of students has dropped to nearly half the original figure on account of the heavy reading and writing load: 72 stories requiring around 15 short papers, as well as one final paper that summarizes what they've learned throughout the semester. 

At this point, I suppose I should give a short background of the subject's history.  Gay literature was first offered at the UP in 1994, right after I finished my M.A. thesis on Philippine gay (male) culture. _ Ladlad_ , the first anthology of gay writings by Filipinos, had come out earlier in the year.  Gay culture had also been seeing an effervescence of sorts: plays and films and books dealing with homosexuality were enjoying a kind of popularity among the country's _culturati_ hitherto unbeknownst.  The sea-change may have been due to a kind of historical transformation attending the highly sexualized decade of the 1990s.  Talk of women's reproductive rights, sexual behavior (in the context of population control and AIDS prevention), and gay and lesbian liberationist discourse, all helped in effecting a shift of attitudes in mainstream Filipino society toward the subject of sex and sexuality.  In fact, by the late eighties, a new generation of middle-class gay men whose socialization afforded them more freedom to speak openly about their sexuality (or to think of sexuality in totally new ways), came to the fore and organized themselves. 

UP has never been impervious to social upheavals of whatever kind, and in 1994, it proved willing enough to listen to yet another group of voices coming from the margins.  I agreed to teach the course because it was one of the best ways I knew to redeem the gay issue from the bathetic, mass-media morass in which it had been languishing, and because I myself would like to learn more about it (and I am still learning of course). 

The first time around, teaching gay literature seemed too difficult, the emotional entanglements it entailed too tortuous.  I had to be skewered over the coals by the local media that found the course by turns newsy and outre: _imagine, homosexuality can now be taught in school—in the premier state university no less!_  And certainly, making sense of the enormous amount of material that I had to teach was harrowing enough, without all those television cameras poking into my reluctantly public classroom.  Come to think of it, my poor students must have been confounded by all this, too: none of them had expected that their choice to enlist in this subject could cause them (or their families) so much anxiety.  As a result of the media's mainly patronizing curiosity about what sorts of unspeakable things we were taking up in class, we all had to plug along that semester, especially during its first few weeks.  As time passed, however, the hype exhausted itself and finally we were able to go about our work more quietly (though not necessarily without the occasional shock courtesy of one or two racy stories and plays). 

The subject has been offered for two semesters thereafter, although not consecutively.  Each time I taught it I had felt it necessary to alter the reading list, either by adding more readings, or changing them altogether.  I have also had to rethink the strategies I used to clarify the issues involved in studying the various writings about homosexuality which, since the subject is the only one of its kind (and therefore enjoys no cognate courses that would logically pursue its methods and conclusions), have had to come from all over the world.  For the first two classes, I thought that providing students some handle in literary theory would help them understand the selections better.  The class that I'm currently teaching, on the other hand, has been spared from much of this, only because its constituency is much more heterogeneous (and it would appear, _heterosexual_ ) than my first two classes which had mostly consisted of literature majors.  For the present batch of gay literature students—whose home colleges are as geographically and disciplinally distant from one another as Mass Communication and Business Administration—I decided to inflict a whole lot of gay short stories rather than their erudite, critical readings by the many gay and lesbian scholars from all over the world. 

My readings for this semester comprise a merry muddle of gay writings coming from the Philippines, Latin America, Europe and North America.  And, surprisingly enough, even without the theoretical foregrounding on the concepts involved in studying gay literature, my students have been able to identify the same issues that I would have wished to introduce to them via theory.  One of the first lessons they learned is that it is quite difficult to define what homosexuality is, given the lack of universal agreement across cultures as to what constitutes it.  The Latin American stories (compiled and translated by William Leyland) illustrate this very well: there are male characters in them who regularly engage in homosexual sex, and yet remain "macho" simply because they look the part, as well as enact the role of the _activo_ (penetrator) in the sexual act itself.  A similar case may presumably be found in the Philippines, and my mostly female class has found it frustrating that they can no longer be too sure about their boyfriends (prospective or otherwise).  As the stories from _Ladlad_ illustrate, gayness is not so much a matter of how one looks anymore, as what one feels and does. ( And who can tell just what everyone feels and does during his most private moments?) 

Another issue—although one that is related to the definitional problem attending the idea of homosexuality—is how to view gay literature itself.  If what defines gayness is homosexual desire, and if what proves the existence of homosexual desire is a complex network of deep-seated and largely unconscious feelings, acts arid roles, then what are the qualities that would distinguish gay literature from straight literature?  For the moment I have come up with a way out of this conceptual impasse: gay literature may be defined both as a self-conscious as well as an unconscious production.  In simpler terms, this means that writings about gayness by gays who know they are gay, as well as any writings that can be read in a gay way, may qualify as forms of gay literature. 

The first form of gay literature is simple enough: all the stories in _Ladlad_ are instances of it, along with the stories coming from the American anthology series, _Men on Men_ , edited by George Stambolian. ( The editorial policy of _Ladlad_ and the American series explicitly stipulates that the contributing authors be gay).  There are stories written by women that talk about the gay experience (such as those that may be found in _The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories_ , excellently selected and edited by David Leavitt), and they constitute a special sub-genre, one that poses its own set of questions as far as the idea of crossing boundaries of gender and sexuality is concerned.  Nonetheless, since these literary texts frontally—and sometimes even, obscenely—tackle questions of gayness, they qualify as a kind of self-conscious homosexual production as well. 

The second form of gay literature is more problematic, because it involves questioning the grounds upon which we are able to distinguish forms of desire.  One very clear example of literature that isn't about the gay experience and yet can be read in a gay way would be the poems and treatises written by the ancient Greeks (Plato et al.),  that celebrate the paederastic union of the _erastes_ (the lover, who is a free citizen, adult and the penetrator) and the _eromenos_ (the beloved, who is a slave/youth, not yet a citizen, and the penetratee).  These pieces of ancient Greek writing cannot strictly be called gay because they were all premised on a form of sexual consciousness that was quite different from the one that produced the idea of homosexuality in the West sometime in the late nineteenth century.  If one should look into the concepts of sexual difference obtaining among the ancient Greeks, one would discover that it wasn't the gender of one's sexual object choice that was important, but rather distinctions of age, social status, and sexual role.  Likewise, sex wasn't symbolically central to ancient Greek life, and so engaging in it didn't have to amount to anything definitive about who one was.  This kind of "protohomosexual" writings can, however, be read to illuminate what gayness means, simply because they demonstrate the multiple ways in which male-male desire can be (and indeed, has been) perceived and enjoyed all throughout the history of human civilization. 

Or perhaps I should visit the more recent past in order to prove what I mean.  Before the idea of homosexuality became widely known and institutionalized in Europe, male friendships and homosexual acts were mutually inclusive things.  Both may be seen as component parts of a continuum of male homosocial bonds that ranged from heterosexual rivalry, to bureaucratic subordination and mutual admiration.  But with the development and promulgation of the concept of homosexuality as a psychiatric condition, and with the introduction of the concept of the homosexual person whose sexual desire for members of his own anatomic sex described a pathological psychosexual state, the homosexual aspect of these bonds was suddenly subjected to erasure and violent disavowal.  The event of homosexuality's invention thus produced, according to Gay Studies diva Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the "homosexual panic" that may be seen inscribed in the Paranoid Gothic novels of such writers as Charles Dickens, Laurence Sterne and William Makepeace Thackeray. 

In other words, the absence of patent homoeroticism in a male-authored text does not imply that such a text cannot be read as an example of homo _social_ (that is to say, most probably homosexual) writing.  There are stories that were written by such early-twentieth-century gay writers as Henry James and E.M. Forster (stories which were judiciously selected by Edmund White for _The Faber Anthology of Gay Short Stories_ ) that treat the intimacy of men in largely metaphorical terms.  And of course, the ubiquitous _menage a trois_ in the literature of the period lends itself to a homosocial reading as well: the rivalry of two men for the same beloved woman is actually a product of a detour of their proscribed desire for each other.  Lover A desires Woman C, less because of her own intrinsic attributes than because he imagines Lover B to be desiring her as well. 

And then there are those stories where one male character exhibits hatred for another male character, a hatred that is both unmotivated and underexplained.  I am thinking of a particular story ("You May Safely Gaze," by James Purdy) in which a man dwells on his dislike for two of his officemates, an obsession that he openly (albeit unselfconsciously) relates to another co-worker over lunch.  And certainly, after some time, the lunch partner turns suspicious (and so does the reader) of what his friend actually feels about these officemates, since he seems rather fixated on them, and has obviously been paying them—including their well-built bodies—a little too much finicky attention. 

What all this does is to worry my beleaguered students to the point of surrender: Who isn't gay, then?  While I do not wish to claim that the homo/hetero distinction has suddenly turned false in every way, I hope that the testimony of the different literatures we take up in class renders our easy conceptions of our own—as well as of other people's—sexualities somewhat too simple to be true.  Sexual desires are rather complex realities that all at once straddle both choice and accident, nature and nurture; they are also extremely malleable human attributes that have the potential to vary from culture to culture, and from history to history.  Moreover, despite the fact that these stories may be gay (because they discuss conscious and/or unconscious gay experiences), they nonetheless talk about things that are never so different from the experiences of non-gay readers that they cannot be understood from just anyone's own unique perspective. 

The primary motive of the subject may therefore be summarized as one of negotiating the tricky crossovers between sameness and difference.  Every time my students are able to identify with a gay character's joys or tragedies, I am quick to remind them this character's specific situation and therefore his undeniable difference.  When a particularly raunchy or violent story drives a painful wedge between the "aberrant" character's life and my student's own sheltered lives, I make a plea for sameness in the name of the universally human feelings of loss, suffering and love. 

While the students who enrolled in gay literature must have done so because of a variety of reasons—ranging perhaps from a desire to understand their gay brothers and friends, to a desire to understand themselves—they all might hopefully come out of it with a renewed awareness of what being human (as well as what good literature) could mean. 

##   _Sob stories_

_A_ REGULAR READER OF this column buttonholed me as I was rushing to class last week.  In between fanning himself passionately on account of the muggy weather, and pausing to ogle the cute guys passing by, he complained that he had found nothing but sob stories appearing in _Closet Queeries_. " Are there no happy gays about whose lives you could write?,"  he inquired, looking rather worried that I was beginning to sound like a soap opera queen hanging out her tear-soaked handkerchiefs to dry in this weekly paper outing. 

While I couldn't, by any stretch of my imagination, think of this column as an emotional latrine into which I had been dumping nothing but melancholy and pathetic effusions distilled from my own life as well as from other gay lives, I had no cause to disagree with this particular observation either. ( To the extent that such observation was proof of the tenuous presence of a readership _out there_ , I was all but willing to simply let it slide).  At least, if by "sob stories" he meant the accounts of gay struggle against the sundry assaults of homophobia—certainly I have deliberately been dwelling, alongside my reflections on certain burning issues of the day and within a handful of travel essays, on such examples of gay suffering (and pining away) throughout the life that this column has thus far led.  I must hasten to add, however, that the invariable final note in all of these bittersweet narratives has been, I can only hope, one of abiding faith in and celebration of gay survival. 

In any case, just to humor this friend (who, after all, proves himself a real friend by buying a copy of this paper—or at least its weekend edition), and to indulge a nudging need from deep inside me to prove his observation wrong, I thought that for this column it might be possible to call to mind memories or stories that show how being gay could be, of itself, already a happy and fortunate thing. 

Stories of gay resistance are commonplace where I work.  Every time I meet or am introduced to a gay student with a survival story to tell (and it is usually the case that every one of them does), it never stops amazing me just how stubborn gay life is, which chooses to live and live despite the terrible odds.  Of this I can cite many examples.  Here are three which I have found to be at once singular and typical:

Z. is a graduating liberal arts student who hails from somewhere in the _tuba_ -drinking and macho South.  One day years and years ago, his father caught him putting on lipstick in front of the bedroom dresser, thereby confirming for himself that the nasty rumors that had been buzzing around his tipsy head indeed held water.  He then stripped his son naked and whipped him with a _buntot-pagi_ (sting-ray tail), an object which the locals in the area believe has the power to drive away evil spirits from the body that they have chosen to possess.  While his father relieved himself and unleashed his lashing fury on the small of his back, Z. was made to run stark-naked from their house all the way out to the street in full view of the aghast but somehow fully approving neighborhood.  At present, Z. is doing rather well for himself finishing his studies while working as a writer for a leading television network.  Since achieving financial independence from his parents, he has decided never again to speak to his father (okay, maybe not really never—just _not for a very long time_ ). 

M. is a petite and clean-shaven young man whose two older cousins took turns sexually abusing him from as early as he can remember.  One of them even forced himself on him in front of the altar inside their grandparents' bedroom, and even used the blesséd oil at the foot of the crucifix as _pampadulas_ (lubricant).  For years, M. felt that he had brought this abuse on himself, and suffered untold mental anguish that led to his depression and low self-esteem.  In school, however, he ended up finding his calling in the theater, and in due time, he was able to overcome the traumas of his ravaged past.  Now he is confidently gay and happily "married" to a Makati yuppie, while his two cousins from hell have degenerated into miserable drunks who have fathered not a few children with several unfortunate women. 

Handsome and wonderful P. never met his European father, and grew up away from his mother in the care of priests in a certain "home."  Not a few of the care-takers in that place did "care" for the boys who stayed with them—and apparently they extended this service to more than just their wards' young and impressionable souls.  After being betrayed and sold down the river by this priest (whom P. had loved and come to depend on for practically everything) in order to save his own holy and hypocritical hide, P. painstakingly taught himself how to do hair and makeup, put himself through college, built up a steady clientele, and just recently opened his own salon.  After overcoming the adversities of his orphaned youth, he has sworn that he will never go to mass again. 

Now these are "sob stories" all right—but they do end up happily, ' _no_?  Nonetheless, I think they may not be what my complaining reader was thinking of, fanning himself with such bitchy vehemence in my mind and ogling guys just the same. ( Oops!—the cat's out of the bag—there are guys _living_ in Neil's mind!)  I understand that he is looking for narratives of beauty and light that don't have to come at the end of a long and very dark tunnel.  Let's see.  Now that I think of it, there are at least two times when I heard stories from friends who declared, with conviction stern enough to detain my undivided attention, that being gay was a positive and even life-saving thing. 

Back in college, a classmate who had come from an exclusive school for boys, ended up becoming a close friend. ( No S. wasn't gay—at least that was what he told me at the outset).  As we got to know each other better, we occasionally fell to talking, over bottles of icy beer, about our plans and passions.  Once, S. told me that he couldn't understand why I wanted to write about the many hardships associated with being gay, for he didn't see that as a problem at all. ( This was the time I toyed around with the idea of becoming a writer, and predictably enough I wanted to write about stories—my own as well as my friends'—of gay survival).  Indeed, in his case, and throughout his early youth, he grew up thinking that "gay" (actually, _bakla_ ) was synonymous to an intelligent and responsible student, well-liked by all the teachers and even the school principal, and assured of getting the highest honors come recognition day.  His gay classmates were all bright and softspoken achievers, excelling not just in academics and conduct, but even in sports (volleyball and football).  The positive impression of what S. perceived as his gay classmates' innate superiority made such an impact on him that there were times when, left to his own thoughts inside the school canteen, he felt sorry for not being gay, too. 

I had and have no reason to doubt S.'s story—its truthfulness or even the spirit that animated its telling.  For S. admitted to having gone through what he called an "identity crisis" because of his (I must say) "peculiar" socialization in school.  He really believed it was more desirable to be gay—despite the fact that he knew some uncouth boys in his neighborhood often got a kick out of making catcalls at and teasing gays.  He thought they were merely being stupid—for, definitely, it was still better to be brilliant and gay rather than uncouth (or stupid) and "male."  Only much later, after waking up one morning and deciding that he liked girls better than boys, and that he wasn't gay after all, did he begin to identify himself with the masculine aspects of uncouthness and stupidity. ( He might have taken this too far, I now see: he got drunk once too often in college, and made out with several girls, two of whom he nearly got pregnant).  But he never really took to insulting gays because there remained, somewhere inside of him, a shadow of that sorry and lost little boy in whose eyes gays would always be better than the rest. 

Venir Turla Cuyco, the founding president of UP Babaylan, once told me this story of how his being gay practically saved his life. 

It happened in one of his island's handful of towns—somewhere in the Visayas, I think.  A week-long fiesta had been in progress and was drawing to an end in this town quite a distance from his house, and Venir had visited his friend who lived here.  It was getting late, and he and his friend had bartered enough _chismis_ over swigs of beer and plates of spicy _pulutan_.  Actually, Venir had second thoughts coming to this remote place, because it was common knowledge that the men of the area turned especially _bolo_ -happy after guzzling down one container of _tuba_ too many. ( Every year, the community newspaper carried stories of male townsfolk whose disemboweled bodies glowered in the sunlight the morning after the patron saint's feast day).  And now, as he was left all by himself on the road waiting for his friend who had gone back to get his beauty kit from his house a block or two away, he remembered just how dangerous the place was, and grew afraid.  The moon waxed full and shone silver in the cloudless sky.  A chill breeze blew from the tops of the coconut groves that straddled the narrow and desolate road. 

Before long, the image he had been fearing rose up in front of him: a man who walked swaying from side to side emerged from between the trunks of the coconut, and was heading "straight" in his direction.  Venir couldn't see his face—a shadow had lodged itself there—although it was clear that the man wasn't friendly.  A very long _bolo_ hung from his waist and its sharp edge glinted in the moonlight.  Venir had to think fast.  He felt his pulse quickening.  He broke out into a cold sweat.  And then, just before the man was barely two meters away, Venir started stamping his feet irritably, and swinging his hips left and right and flinging his limp wrists about, gibbering in his usual shrill and curling voice about how bored he was beginning to get waiting for his vain, flirt of a friend to arrive.  The man who had looked purposeful until then suddenly appeared perplexed and stopped dead in his tracks.  He looked at Venir from head to toe, let go a vulgar belch, and spat to his side, muttering, "Peste, bayot man di ay!"  Disgusted and visibly disappointed, he walked swayingly along and left Venir thanking the heavens for another chance at life, and cursing his _malandi_ friend for leaving him all by himself on that fatal country road of swaying, _bolo_ -wielding crazies. 

The fact that he was a _bayot_ had spared Venir an ultimate and irreparable loss.  The masculine code of conduct that periodically turned men into blood-thirsty brutes in that part of the world couldn't countenance the killing of a mere _bayot_.  Venir wasn't even worth the effort of mindless slaughter.  There is something unflattering about that, one must admit.  But who the hell cares?  On that moonlit night, swishing his way back home, and relishing the feeling of being very much alive, Venir certainly didn't. 

Well, apparently, there are no perfect stories, especially not gay ones.  And I feel that this is because for gays—perhaps more than for any other kind of person—happiness, like love, is always further away. 

It looks like my disappointed reader may have to wait a while longer for that gay happy-ever-after. 

##   _Advice to a beginning gay writer_

_I_ _NEVER RECEIVED ANY such thing_ : no one gave me advice just when I might have needed it, which was around eight or ten years ago, when I first thought of becoming a gay writer. 

Let me correct that: I didn't really plan on becoming a gay writer.  In the beginning, all I wanted was just to be a writer.  A fair to middling, or possibly good, writer.  And the fact that I was gay didn't inform my wish to put pen to paper and become a practitioner of the sullen craft of poetry, as I was in the middle of finishing a degree in journalism. ( Just now it strikes me as bizarre that I had to discover my poetic calling while immersed in the language of clichés: journalese).  But I became a gay writer soon enough.  I have often wondered why this was so. 

I think I became a gay writer because I realized early on that one has virtually no choice but be a gay writer, if one were a writer who happens to be gay.  Of course, one has the choice not to write about gay experiences. ( I can only speculate just how innumerable are the gays of my generation who are constantly choosing _not_ to come out via their writings—I get claustrophobic just thinking about how stuffy the literary closet must be these days).  But I somehow knew from the very beginning that one's being gay will always be part of one's literary creation, as the background scaffolding from which one paints frescoes of words on ceilings of feeling and thought.  And if this were so, then why even bother to hide it—indeed, why make it more difficult for one's readers to get to the heart of one's _oeuvre_ by figuratively disguising one's true, inescapably homosexual self? 

What does this say about the works of the many gay writers out there, whose gayness is never the conscious subject of their writings?  I suppose this means that their gayness is already encoded in their texts anyhow, whose inner operations and significations a more nuanced and _crypto-homosexual_ reading might someday lay bare.  I may need to explain the concepts of writing and sexuality further, if only to make more convincing these claims. 

Let me begin by situating sexuality in our consciousness as modern individuals writing in this day and age.  I have a feeling that despite or precisely because of our vehement demurrals, sex is already a centrally symbolic thing in our lives.  I make this remark guided by the observation that the very reluctance of many contemporary writers to thematize sexual desire in their textual productions already points to the immense sexual investments they have made and continue to make on the level of the unconscious.  In other words, there is no guarantee that the absence of sexuality in one's writings means precisely that.  On the contrary, it invariably signifies its presence.  A stealthy, though not for that matter any less potent and looming, presence. 

And let us likewise remind ourselves that our present-day culture abounds in sexual representations coming from media images, religious and medical discourse (courtesy of debates surrounding the issues of family planning, women's reproductive rights, homosexuality, AIDS, etc.),  and art, and these representations most probably have already influenced our concerns.  Indeed, from an omniscient, transhistorical standpoint, this century may well be the most sexually obsessive period in human history, if only because what had otherwise been an unselfconsciously performed set of acts during the previous centuries recently became more formal and verbalized as a highly specialized, all-pervasive discourse of "sexuality."  Modern humanity has made so much verbal fuss about what may well be the most natural feature of our human biological constitution, that sexual pleasure has come to possess an existence apart from and even opposite the physiological.  Sex is now, more than ever, a symbolically pleasurable thing: the pulsating vortex of a physical, as well as a linguistic, excitation. 

In fact, the category of the "erotic" can be applied to just about anything these days, because our eyes have become more seeing (and conversely, more blind) in certain distinct and curious ways: for instance, the striptease voyeur possesses a personality that only someone from our sexological era can have.  Our largely naked ancestors never knew there could be pleasure that might be derived from the slow and progressive divestment of one's clothes.  Or that the clothes that they wore as protection against the cold could be considered sexual in the very least. ( I am tempted to contemplate whether our ancestors even had a concept of "the sexual," distinct from other areas of life, in the first place). 

On the other hand, writing is an activity that is closely linked to sexual gratification.  Feminists early on came up with the wonderfully kinky insight about the writer's pen being really the _penis_ , and literary creation being, at the bottom of it, a kind of procreation.  The imagination that propels the hand across the creamy-white page carries out the same instinctual need for conquest of virgin terrain that characterizes sexual obsession.  The unstoppable (re)production of symbols—words—that writing mainly is may be compared to the covert desire to possess the objects hiding behind these symbols.  Thus, writing is nothing if not the sublimation of the sexual urge to acquire the object of its colonizing, passionately territorial libido. 

All this should convince the beginning gay writer that whether he likes it or not, his writings will somehow evince his sexuality, no matter how carefully hidden or disavowed it may be.  Indeed, no secret can remain hidden for long, especially not when it comes to literary texts that have the strange ability of betraying their maker's avowed designs, and thus of giving their makers' secrets away. ( Perhaps this is because the language in which writers couch their texts isn't really their own—having pre-existed them—from the very start).  Gay and lesbian critics are working overtime recuperating the many cryptic gay and lesbian texts of otherwise heterosexual writers in the West—Henry James, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, D.H. Lawrence, and even, recently, Ernest Hemingway!—and their studies make for really fascinating reading indeed.  I'm not too sure we can duplicate these critical projects for our own closeted gay and lesbian writers in the Philippines—or that we should even try to.  In any case, I feel the time will come when a Philippine-specific gay criticism will have evolved its own crypto-homosexual methods that will reclaim the canonical works of our some of our country's best (and not surprisingly, gay and lesbian) writers. 

There is something malicious in all this, you may argue.  For isn't it being wicked to desire to read gayness in everything?  And isn't it enough that there are some writers who are already avowedly gay—why desire to implicate everybody else? 

These questions are best answered by another question: Why shouldn't it be desirable to read gayness in everything?  In other words, I am calling to question the spirit behind these questions because at heart they are homophobic and are merely interested in keeping the status quo intact.  Indeed, without anybody knowing or acknowledging it, heterosexuality is already presumed by everyone to be the natural and normative form of desire.  It is therefore assumed that all literary texts, all literary characters, all literature, are straight, unless indicated unmistakably otherwise. 

What I'm trying to say here is this: Without the willful effort to challenge this heterosexual presumption, gayness will remain the demonized and abject sexuality that it is.  Imagine the world in reverse: everyone is presumed gay unless proven otherwise.  Every story, every image on print and television, every movie, every book, tells you that you should be gay (and you know you're not or at least don't want to be).  Wouldn't you want to prove that those stories, images, books and movies are not what they say they are—are, in fact, already straight without them or anybody admitting it?  That way, you wouldn't have to surrender to the rule of the mob.  Instead, you turn the tables on the powers that be, and you restore meaning to its fullest measure and sense.  Thus: by not acknowledging the possibility of reading a text's homosexuality, one cheats it of its fullest signification, the truest gauge of its worth. 

Thus far, this "advice" has not sounded like an advice at all: where, in all this polemic, is the survival kit with which the beginning gay writer can overcome the hardships of his craft (and sexuality), and possibly become a better gay writer?  I answer this by appealing to the first statement I made in this column: I never received advice as I was starting out, and would like to believe I turned out not a bad gay writer because of it. ( Needless to say, I wouldn't know what advice to give, the value of advice being largely dependent on who in particular wants it).  And besides, writing, like all important things, is not, nor ever, taught.  On the contrary, writing is ever only learned. 

What might prove useful here is the insight I hope to have drawn for the sake of the gay writer who isn't too sure if he should write about being gay or not: It doesn't matter, in the final instance, because if he is gay this fact will already resonate itself in his writing—tucked somewhere within the hidden weft and woof of the unconscious desire that throbs within the silences of his words.  Nonetheless, to deliberately write about one's gayness does represent a brave and courageous act of Coming Out, an act that stares homophobia in the face and proves it fundamentally wrong (because, contrary to its claims, it is nothing more than a form of bigotry), and an act of inspiration and generosity to future beginning gay writers who just might emulate it without needing to be advised to do so. 

I think being gay and being a writer are, in the end, rather similar and comparable things: they both are a matter of accident and choice.  I don't think I chose to be a writer any more than I chose to be gay.  But at the same time, I don't think I was born a writer any more than I was born gay. 

But once I _knew_ I was gay, and once I _knew_ I was a writer, I resolved to do my best to be good (nay, excellent) at both.  That, I suppose, is all the advice I—or perhaps any other gay writer—can give. 

##   _Conversions_

_I_ AM NOT TEACHING gay or any other literature this semester.  I didn't want to: there is something particularly exhausting about discussing poems, stories and plays.  I think it's because (for me, at least) the only way to understand and appreciate literary texts is to "live" them, somewhat.  Literature is the most readily available, if not quickest, method of reincarnation around.  And yet, literature doesn't become any less "life-like," for that. 

How many lives have we lived just by reading?  After going through so many books, it feels like I've enough lives stocked up to spare me a good number of rebirths.  And what have I learned?  Just this: life is pain, mostly.  I remember a lesson from a classroom several years (lifetimes?)  back, when I was still a wide-eyed student, a novice at life and love, sitting awkward—long crazy limbs, unkempt hair, pimples and all—somewhere in the back row.  It was a class in Asian literature, and we were discussing ancient Hindu texts. ( Strange, but in hindsight it sounds more like we were discussing ancient Hindu religion).  Anyway, our teacher said that according to the Vedas, the kindest blessing you can bestow on someone is: "May you be spared from future rebirths."  And I thought to myself, the worst curse must be: "May you be reborn a countless number of times."  Whether as hex or benediction, the message in this can only be that although we need life for our eventual transcendence, we are still better off with as little of it as possible. 

That I have continued to believe in life's essential painfulness after all these years can be partly blamed on my readings.  There is no literature that has at once uplifted and bothered me that didn't also talk about pain, no matter how obliquely.  I guess I was raised to like suffering, which sounds somewhat perverse, doesn't it? ( On second thought, having been raised a devout Catholic, I am supposed to _like_ or even emulate suffering anyway!)  But don't get me wrong: I do experience certain "ecstasies" in between whiles.  It's just that between being happy and being sad, I've learned to recognize the former's inherently short-lived nature, and the latter's abiding and somewhat comforting presence on which one can depend, and in which one almost feels closer and closer to home.  It's come to be, after a quarter of a century of living—nay, suffering— _this_ life, that I can only experience happiness through sadness, and never the other way around.  A sad state of affairs indeed. 

Almost as soon as I discovered it, I realized that gay literature is remarkable in that it deals almost exclusively with themes of sadness and pain. ( And this sounds slightly oxymoronic, since gay literature should first of all be "gay," shouldn't it?).  I find that of all the gay books that I have read, the better ones are nearly always tragic.  The strange thing is, the _literariness_ of these gay stories, poems and plays has actually made me like the experience of reading them, so that after a while, the inalienable quality of their pain and sadness has become a desirable thing for me as well.  Take poetry, for instance.  Inherent in its form is pleasure: the lyricism, visual appearance, cadence, and imagery of a poem impart pleasure to the one reading it.  And yet, if the poem is elegiac—and nearly all great poems, gay or otherwise, are elegies of some sort or other—one is made to feel sad for the poem's tragic situation at the same time that one derives pleasure from the poem's language.  The effect can be quite schizoid, I must say.  But in the end, one ends up wanting the pain in the poem, if only because of the wonderfully pleasing way it is said.  And so, the magical thing about literature is that it makes being sad feel almost happy. 

One of the more memorable gay stories we took up last semester was by Allan Gurganus. ( I admit this author's suggestive last name has all but thrust and embossed his story in my anal-retentive mind).  The story, "Forced Use," is told from the first-person point of view and in Gurganus's trademark, cropped yet lyrical, brilliant style.  The main character is a thirty-one year old man, at the peak of his intellectual and physical powers, and in the opening scene, he has parked his car at a resting area along the side of the highway.  He is driving home after successfully giving a talk in a conference three states away.  He calls up his wife and while on the phone he notices a dark, topless and brawny young man who looks like a thug lounging on one of the tables.  Here the story gives one the feeling of a split-screen movie, with one side being the main character's conversation with his wife (all about the new food processor working the way it should, their talkative son's trip to the planetarium, the cold watercress soup awaiting him, etc.),  and on the other what he sees just outside the phone booth.  And what exactly does he see?  The man flexing his muscles, touching his crotch that bulges from underneath his cut-off khaki pants, fixing his cheap brass buckle, throwing a smile in his direction, and gesturing to follow him into the glade just behind an opening in the fence over which a sign reads, "Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted Beyond This Point.  State Land Ends." 

Needless to say, the man in the booth is confused.  He is especially confused since he has always wanted to feel "used up" by life: his comfortable married existence, his high-paying job, his blameless reputation, the predictability and safety of it all, he feels have left the enormous reserves of his energy and youth virtually untapped.  And now, the chance to explore and expend this hidden energy has finally presented itself to him, in the person of this dark and roughly beautiful youth waiting for him somewhere in the bushes behind the fence.  A family with twins and a cat has also parked at the resting area, and as they are busy eating their packed lunches, they remind him of his own cut-and-dry life.  To be honest, he has grown cold toward the thought of it, and instead casts his gaze deep into the greenery beyond. 

He remembers his youth, the day he saw two of his brother's closest friends mutually masturbating in the attic, and how he liked seeing them: "They had serious hold on, of, around one another's crucials, long arms grasped to make a sinewy brown X... a bond like Siamese twins'—some slab of mutual gristle, tubular and linking them—boys hooked like this forever, sharing one rosy erection, but forked."  He remembers his injury in the Army, how the therapist moved a warm instrument all over his back, and how he told him to turn over: "And so I did, turn over, show him... He was my age, about my build, perspiring too.  He looked down at the whole raw front of me... 'Look at you,' he said, admiring... my fellow soldier said, 'The backbone's one thing, real easy to throw off.  And then, of course, there's all of this, isn't there, buddy?—There's all of this down here that needs attention, too.  Am I right?'"  And he remembers sitting back and doing nothing while the therapist paid that part of him so much loving attention, and he remembers all the other times the same thing happened to him, long before he married Alice, his perfect (because unsuspecting) and devoted wife, and that he resolved to forget. 

But he hasn't forgotten.  He remembers his father, the lesson he desperately tried to teach his son who was around eight or nine, and whom he caught getting naked with an older boy, the son of a Greek that ran the bait shop: "Dad came over, within reach.  Someone like him started hitting me. ' This,' he said, 'And this.'  Rocked side to side and yet detached, I thought I knew why—in cartoons—they show stars when some funny animal gets clubbed or belted in the head a lot.  It's _like_ stars.  Points of light, sudden, jagged, coloured, out of nowhere, decorating what is otherwise the total dark.  I heard my father groaning, the exhaustion of beating me this thoroughly...He grumbled, blaming me for the amount I'd bled. ' I do this for you, Willy.  Trying to get _at_ whatever's in you makes you act like this—not like your mother's family, not like me.  It's just that one part I'm after, son.  Not _you_.  I'd like to find that one bad spot and...lance it, like I would a sty, son.  Cure you.'... He saw me noticing his chest, admiring what the late light did.  I was dazed.  I couldn't judge or move my head.  Whatever came into my sight I looked at. ' Haven't learned?'  he yelled and, backhand, cuffed me. ' I hit at _it_ , not you.'  He called down through all the stars he'd sired...He pulled me close against him so I couldn't see his front side buckling.  I felt sorry for him...I thought, whatever's in me that he hoped to get at—it's too far gone already—you can't lance that far in and have the person live." 

And now, little Willy's all grown up.  Nothing's really changed, though, except that now he has a wife and a child to show for all his father's pains teaching his faggot of a son his lesson of a lifetime one star-filled dusk far away.  And now he has followed the young man behind the fence, sees him fondling his erection in the middle of a clearing, feels his own erection painfully trying to spring out of his workpants.  He doesn't know what to tell the stranger who motions him to come closer.  Without thinking, he begins to move closer and closer to the center of his attention until he sees "the wet thing's true shade—an almost bloody coral orange.  Blunt and wide and glossy...the color of a brick."  Just when he is near enough, he changes his mind but the young man will not hear of it.  Just before he can run away he gets slapped around, jabbed at the face.  He reels and tastes his own nose bleeding, while one of his eyes begins to swell.  The young man drives him to his knees, grabs the hair at the back of his head, and shoves his penis into his mouth, all the while muttering the names of many absent women.  After the dark stranger comes in his mouth, and after he himself has shot his thick load onto the other's hairy legs, he is left there, bleeding and wasted and used.  He falls asleep, and when he wakes up he thinks he will want to stay here for a while, here where all sorts of men can come and do what they will with him, for he is "past reputation, free from any single use but this."  Looking up, he sees "three white stars...burning, burning—burning up." 

I remember the story elicited a number of reactions from my students.  Those who were familiar with homoerotica thought the story didn't quite succeed in their book—Gurganus wasn't kinky enough, which is to say, he didn't dwell long and lovingly enough on all the juicy details. ( I remember wanting to disagree with them on this point, but that meant admitting to an expertise I didn't want to admit I had, and so I just shut up).  Some who had come from convent schools were simply flummoxed by the explicitness of gay sex in the story—and the contexts in which it happened: in someone's house, with two hometown boys mutually masturbating in front of a pornographic postcard; in the Army, with perfectly regular-looking soldiers; beside an interstate highway, between a colored mechanic and a white man whose wife and son were innocently waiting for him a mere five-hours drive away.  And in all these instances, the men who performed homosexual sex didn't even look gay—or worse, didn't even think they were gay just because they happened to do it, or to like doing it, with other men. 

But almost everyone was moved by the story of Willy's abuse at the hands of his father.  Everyone got the connection between the stars that he had seen while getting clubbed as a boy, and the stars he saw burning themselves up in the sky in the story's final tableau. ( The former served to foreground the latter).  We also felt that Gurganus was trying to say something about why fathers beat up their sons whom they feared might be gay.  In this story, we again came face to face with the theme of "conversion," about which we had already read much as a class in all our other readings.  This time, however, I wanted my students to find out just what this message might be, and the question I knew would likely take them there was: "Why do fathers beat up their gay sons?" 

Someone said that the reason some fathers beat up their gay sons was because, just like every parent, they only wanted the best for their children.  But someone else quickly shot back that no matter how noble the motive might be, in this as in every other situation of abuse, the end did not justify the means.  Another student said fathers beat up their gay sons because they were embarrassed by them.  And to this someone from the front row retorted that for her nothing could be more embarrassing than an adult who beat up a defenseless little boy.  A convent-bred girl in the first row surmised, her voice aquiver with the possibility of being wrong, that fathers did that to their sons because they loved them very much.  I remember not commenting much on this last answer, for fear of damaging someone's fragile heart (and ego), and since I half-agreed that love did oftentimes hurt.  Instead, I merely asked them to think harder about the question, to look through it, and to see just what lay at the bottom of it—just what it assumed or perhaps even implied. 

After several near-misses, someone finally came up with the answer I was more or less looking for: The idea that you can convert your son from gayness to straightness—by beating him up shitless or using whatever other method of persuasion you can devise—derives from the idea that homosexuality isn't a matter of nature (in other words, one isn't born gay), but of choice.  Fathers who beat up their sons expect them to change, precisely because they've known all along that sexuality can be transformed, that sexual orientation is not a fixed or pre-given thing.  My next question was, Just how did Willy's father's know about this?  Indeed, as I was on a roll and as I was quite pleased that the class seemed to be finally thinking along the same line as I was, I felt compelled to follow this up with: How did any faggot-beating father know that by physically abusing an effeminate child he could harden his resolve to change his sexual preference for sure? 

In "Forced Use," the father beat up his son a second time after noticing that the latter was staring at his muscular chest. ( The son, on the other hand, was so dazed from all the belting he'd received in the head that he merely looked at whatever was in front of him).  This detail told us that the father knew what gayness was about and how it manifested itself even before the son did—and also, that the father feared what he knew, that he saw what his son saw, and even preempted what it could mean to him. ( Or was it because it meant something to himself, too?)  The father battered his son to reform or convert him—and the question this begged was this: How did he know this was an effective way of doing it?  It didn't take a long time before the class, in unison, could come up with the desired response: Most probably because he had gone through it himself. 

Gay literature, like all literature, offers readers sundry opportunities to live other lives.  More accurately, within its word-bound world, literature gives readers the chance to become the "Other."  What this story did to my class the rainy afternoon we took it up was to make it more and more difficult to imagine an Otherness (the gay son) which was not at the same time another version of the Same (the straight father).  This story shows us how the idea of conversion can only be possible—indeed, can only make sense—when the one who converts is already himself a convert. 

Although life, for the most part, is pain, and although literature, being about/of life, can only resonate this pain, I remain literature's avid fan. ( And I say this even as, caught in the throes and agonies of life, I quite don't like it anymore and have often wanted to give up on it).  I guess it's all because literature is never really just about life as it is, but about life as it should be.  Indeed, if literature were to have its way, life should be more beautiful than it really is.  As I was reading this story for the second time for this column, I experienced being alive again (and remembered experiencing being alive the first time I read it, only now it felt slightly different). 

Reeling from this story's wonderful and arresting imagery, the music of its language, and the delicate intricacy of its structure, and at the same time feeling its tragedy pressing down all its terrible weight on my heart, I must have looked a sight then as I did now: a grown man hunched over a tattered book, and smiling, ever so softly, through his tears. 

##   _AYOR_

_I_ AM GOING TO miss teaching gay literature next semester, but only because I volunteered to let someone else in my department—a true-blue _babaeng bakla_ —teach it. 

Contrary to what many people may think, I never completely enjoyed that course in any of the three semesters that I handled it.  Sure, it was nice to know that one was making real connections with one's students—giving them something they seemed to vitally need.  Also, it soothed one's ego no end that one could successfully bring to bear all one's erudition on the texts in question, that one made what Roland Barthes called a _critical difference_ in one's readings of what was obviously a "different" kind of literature. 

But what many people don't know is that gay literature isn't very gay at all.  I suppose this is logical enough: a world custom-built for heterosexuals will have very little for gays to find comfort in.  And so gay writings are invariably melancholy rhapsodies in pink.  It also hasn't helped that in the last decade, AIDS has brutally decimated Western gay populations and stolen so many brilliant writers and artists from our midst.  If I have to be quantitative about it, I can say that around 80 percent of all the stories we ever took up in class had something to do with the immensity of loss, the interminable task of mourning, the paranoia, that are the aftermath of AIDS.  And if one were a sensitive reader of literature—as one ought to be, if one were to teach it—one could not help but be affected by all that sadness and pain. 

Suffice it to say that teaching this subject for three consecutive semesters depressed me.  Other than that, it also caused me to worry excessively about my own state of generally fragile health.  In fact, after reading Paul Monette's _Borrowed Time_ , and Christopher Coe's _Such Times_ , I remember becoming mortally frightened, plagued by the spectre of swollen lymph nodes, a lingering cold, a persistent cough, night sweats, etc.,  and had myself tested once I couldn't bear _not knowing_ anymore. ( I suppose I'll talk about that experience at length once I've achieved enough distance—aesthetic and otherwise—from it).  Needless to say, I wouldn't recommend a hypochondriac to teach or even read gay literature a lot—at least, not its more recent, necessarily morbid, variety. 

But sometime this past week (a phrase that must by now sound like a device this column periodically resorts to in trying to make itself sound pumping-warm and urgent) a friend visited me at my office for _merienda_ and a chat.  I am specially fond of this friend—let's call him Cris—because he is a genuinely warm and generous soul, and is always bubbling with stories of sexual escapades, stories which he himself went through, usually within the last few days or weeks. 

Cris is not at all very butch, but strangely enough this has not proven disadvantageous to his "market value" and sex life.  I suppose he is what one might call "pretty": clean-looking, smiley-faced, neat, and gifted with a strangely feminine physique, complete with full, child-bearing hips and the most sensual lips on the planet.  He also possesses that strange, "horny look" that one can vaguely notice hiding behind those sleepy eyes of his that are framed provocatively by gold-rimmed glasses.  His overall appearance wouldn't give a butch gay man pause for sure (since butches go for other butches, _naturellement_ ), but in the alleyways and crannies of the neighborhoods Cris likes to mill around in, he fetches a lot of prurient interest and is desirable through and through.  This time, after the usual greetings— _beso-beso_ and the customary "how have you been?"  and " _ang ganda-ganda ng aking lola!"_ — he apprised me of his latest adventure with a pedi-cab driver who forcibly penetrated him from behind. 

I couldn't tell if Cris felt bad about what had happened.  While unfurling for me this latest tapestry he seemed not in the least bothered by the incidents he was narrating.  In fact, Cris simply slurred over the part when, after the man had asked him for a blow-job, Cris found himself getting pinned hard against the side of an abandoned jeepney on some dark street in the wee hours of the morning, after which came the quick, stabbing pain.  He was more interested in talking about how the man and his pecker looked, how it was the man who had seduced him, and what all that said about his undiminished sex appeal despite getting on in age (he'd just turned twenty-one the previous month).  After finishing his story, he said he had to rush someplace, and would be back sometime soon to tell me more.  And there I was, left stricken with horror for what had happened to this pretty friend, and yet also strangely roused and reeling with vicarious joy. 

Cris is not the only gay student in my university who has found in me a great and avid listener.  Over the years a number of them have regularly regalled me with the most lurid blow-job and seduction tales.  I guess it's either I give off the impression that I could be trusted with their most scandalous secrets (hah!),  or I simply look like I need other people's stories of sexual glee and abandonment, being obviously too stuck up—too much of a _lola_ —to experience my own.  I must admit that I have derived pleasure from such charitable tellings of lives that I, by being who and _what_ I am, can never live, but the pleasure has not been without its accompanying pain.  Attending these sessions is the feeling that I am not doing anything to prevent my friends from harming themselves and others; and that, in fact, I have been encouraging them to keep on doing what they do so that I can enjoy myself, safely because vicariously, as they relive for my sake all the wonderful details of their adventures after they are over. 

I am reminded of one of the stories my class and I found rather endearing the last time I taught gay literature a semester ago.  It's called "AYOR," and it was written by one of America's most talented young fictionists, David Leavitt.  The narrator of the story talks about his relationship with Craig, a good-looking and very sensual friend whom he'd fantasized over when they were still teenagers.  One time, during their reckless and still closeted youth, they both agreed to go camping somewhere in Tennessee (they're both New Yorkers), and for this they had to sleep together for six or seven nights in the same bed.  Nothing happened, though, and the narrator only recently realized that it was because Craig wasn't in the least interested in his body, being not quite like his own (which was gorgeous). 

Despite the yawning gap between their looks, Craig and the narrator remain the best of friends.  Craig is always telling the narrator all about his sexual exploits, and only in his company can the latter bring himself to go to the bars and gay brothels in New York, and only because "...with Craig I was protected.  I could live vicariously.  I was never tempted, because no man, seeing Craig and me together, would even notice me...He was everyone's freshman year roommate, the president of the debate society, your sister's sexy boyfriend.  I used his attractiveness as a shield; in its shadow I was invisible, and could watch, fascinated, as men approached him, as he absorbed all the damage that might be inflicted in those late-night places.  It was Craig who got crabs, amoebas, warts.  I always ended up at home—alone, but unscathed.  Safe." 

One summer years and years later, both the narrator and Craig go on separate vacations to Europe: the former to France, the latter to Spain, Switzerland and Germany.  While in Paris, the narrator manages to get a relationship going with a Frenchman, whom he'd picked up in a weird, gay-identified disco downtown.  He'd gotten the information about that place from _Spartacus Guide_ , and had decided to go there only because it wasn't described as an AYOR ("At Your Own Risk") place by this international tour guide for hot-to-trot gays.  Anyway, in Paris Craig visits him after having spent a month in Madrid.  Over dinner, Craig tells the narrator that while in Spain he was raped by a man who had said "Hola" to him on the street.  They then went to the man's apartment where another man had been waiting.  After arguing with each other in Spanish, they asked him to strip and afterwards, one of them raped him—penetrated him from behind—while the other merely watched. 

The narrator is shocked by what happened to his friend.  And later that evening, while Craig lies sleeping on the floor of his flat, he thinks: "I lived in two worlds: I came in and out of the underside as I pleased, with Craig to protect me.  I could not say it was my fault that he was raped.  But I realized, that night, that on some level I had been encouraging him to live in the world's danger zones, its 'ayor' zones, for years now, to satisfy my own curiosity, my own lust.  And I wondered: how much had I contributed to Craig's apparent downfall?  To what extent had I, in living through him, made him, molded him into some person I secretly, fearfully longed to be?" 

The story ends basically on that note.  Reading it now makes me think about my own relationship with friends who have been living at their own risks, who have been telling me all about their life—perhaps with the vaguest hope that I can help them emerge from it?  But this may not be the case: I don't want to turn messianic all of a sudden and self-righteously claim that their "life" needs redeeming after all.  I think that to the extent that the narrator believes that he had a hand in Craig's fate, he is not only vitally wrong but also quite self-important: in all of his actions, Craig has been a free agent, and the narrator's conceit at the end of the story merely reflects his resentment against this friend whom he secretly loved and yet never possessed. 

I don't think I can claim that I have never wished to be in the shoes of friends who have done things I would have wanted to do, had things been different about my life.  But it is also true that when gays tell one another their sexual stories, they are usually trying to validate themselves, which is something they cannot really do otherwise.  And besides, story-telling is itself a therapeutic means of coping with one's past.  Vicarious or not, life invariably hurts, and turning this feeling of hurt into a story is the only way we can tame it, take away the venom from its fangs, and make it our own. 

I guess all that's left for one to do, the next time a friend comes calling on one's house with his spools and spools of yarn, is to let him into one's cozy _sala_ , feed him a deliciously refreshing _merienda_ of _halo-halo, sago_ or _gulaman_ , tilt one's head to the side, keep one's ears pricked to both the pleasure and the pain—and learn. 
|   **_two:_ **  |   **_Queer geographies_ **   
---|---|---  
|  |   

##   _Camiguin interlude_

_T_ HE FIRST ILIGAN National Writers Workshop was held in 1994.  I was one of the three fellows from Luzon that year: the other two were Camilo (a poet), and Charles (a fictionist). 

Iligan is the industrial capital of Mindanao.  But despite the presence of factories and manufacturing plants all along its bayside, the city still possesses a kind of pristine quality, which is perfectly in keeping with the general "greenness" of the region.  To the back of the city are the mountains where Iligan's tribal people, the Higao-non, live.  All over the cityscape are trees with robust trunks and lusty foliage.  Our hosts, like the environment, were more than kind, and for all the five days that we stayed in Casa Luz, the boardinghouse with a huge window overlooking the plaza, we were well taken care of and nearly spoiled.  The city proved gracious to us, and the black-veiled Maranao women who come down from Marawi to trade their goods in Iligan's bustling markets lent the place a kind of quaint, Moorish charm. 

After the workshop was over, us three Manila-based fellows felt like we needed to see some more of Mindanao.  Ralph, a sister-native of Iligan and solicitous "den-mother" (more like _mama san_ ) of our days at Casa Luz, suggested that we go to Camiguin, the volcanic island just north of mainland Mindanao.  He himself had not yet been to Camiguin, and the prospect of an adventure with three moony, nature-tripping writers proved irresistible.  And so, after the Iligan workshop, I, Camilo, and Charles, together with our tour guide Ralph (who fancied himself a mermaid in disguise), rode the bus that took us to Cagayan de Oro city, from where we took another bus to this sleepy seaside town somewhere along the coastline of Misamis Oriental.  From this port, boats ferry passengers and cargo to Camiguin several times a day. 

The bus-ride was pleasant—the coastal road we were traveling afforded splendid vistas of the sea on the one side, and of the verdant mountains on the other—but by the time we reached the port that faced Camiguin's southern end we were dead tired.  I remember that from the port's ramp (that jutted out into the sea like a breakwater), the sea was clean and bottle-green.  The trip across was strangely comforting: we took our seat somewhere on the boat's bottom level, where the sea spray always touched our face and kept us awake.  I took a picture of the island with my handy, "instamatic" camera—the only kind simple enough for my inept fingers to successfully use—and marveled as it changed shape at our approach: at first it looked like a pyramid-shaped mountain in the middle of an endless expanse of blue, and then it grew flatter and greener, full of ridges and palm trees all along its coast as the boat pulled in from the open sea.  The pier is located in Benoni, one of the island-province's handful of towns. 

Ralph, who knew Cebuano, wasn't much help in getting us going from where we got off.  Actually, none of us had planned on where we would go once we had reached the island: we figured there were any number of cottages or inns that might accommodate us.  The natives of Camiguin also spoke with a kind of accent peculiar to the place, which Ralph had trouble following.  After several attempts to haggle over the price of a tricycle trip to Mambajao—the city's capital where some resorts are located—we were finally on our way. 

Misfortunes hounded us twice that late afternoon: our tricycle developed engine trouble in some eerie section of the coastal road (which was a weird stretch of highway, come to think of it: all throughout it had chapels dedicated to saints whose names we hadn't even heard before), and upon reaching Mambajao we discovered that there were too many tourists (mostly Japanese and European) in town that most importune time.  Like Joseph and the expectant Mary (plus two sidekicks), we were turned away resort after overflowing resort.  Finally, just when I was almost ready to collapse from exhaustion (I felt like I was going through labor myself), we found something further south than we would have wanted.  I forget its name, but it had uniform, box-shaped bamboo cottages along the beach, and a nice, soft-spoken _bayot_ caretaker.  Just letting go of our huge bags and plopping ourselves on the creaky beds seemed salvation enough.  And we were eternally grateful to the gods for giving us that place. 

The sky of Camiguin on our first evening was deep.  But it was speckled with stars that were brighter than any I'd ever seen.  I caught sight of a shooting star the first time I looked up.  I felt happy just being there. 

We were not planning on staying longer than four days, and so we lost no time exploring the beach.  Charles, who wanted to look tan when he returned to Manila (and when he left for Tokyo a while later), lost no time sunning himself on one of the reclining wooden chairs.  The sand disappointed us, though, for it wasn't white.  It wasn't creamy-colored or brownish even: it looked more like a shade of gray.  And the metamorphic rocks and boulders that cluttered certain areas of the beach reminded us that we were on an island with seven active volcanoes after all. 

I have always been afraid of the sea.  It's just so awesome, isn't it?  Infinite, in fact.  I am not a good swimmer, never was, and in the calm Camiguin sea I barely even took a dip.  Instead I walked along the water's ever-ravelling edge, and picked among the empty shells and broken pieces of coral.  I remember that, on our penultimate day, I left Charles and Ralph to themselves, and with Camilo ventured further up the beach, to where I knew the sun would set.  I don't know what possessed me but I just went on walking farther and farther away, until I couldn't see the resort anymore, or Camilo, and Hibok-hibok's highest peak looked different from what I remembered.  But the sea to my right was always the same: placid, its lapping slow and sustained, like my own deep breathing.  I looked at the distant surf where the water turned green and saw seabirds swooping over the teeming waves.  Meantime, the island seemed to be bleeding freshwater blood from the mountain's deepest springs, and crystalline streams were rushing from its interior out to the underbrush and down to the thirsty sea.  No sound or vision that didn't feel like it had been there from the very beginning of time intruded into this private communion.  I knew I was alone in my thoughts.  I felt at peace with many things. 

By the time I returned to our cottage Charles had dozed off on the beach, which had gotten bigger because of the receding tide.  Camilo had collected a veritable collection of odd-looking crabs, and Ralph was, as usual, calmly seated on the sand, beautifully possessed of the knowledge of his former fishy existence.  After we had all taken a bath—from the shower where the water contained bits of coral and sand—we withdrew into our own brown studies.  The sky was toying with the idea of blueness, and kept trying on its different shades.  I took out my instamatic and clicked away at the sea, the mountain, the cottage, ourselves.  I nearly took a stolen shot of our neighbors, a Filipina and a German who didn't look bad.  Good thing Ralph stopped me, reminding me it was rude and could get us all in Teutonic trouble.  And so I just looked out into the faint, distant sea, it was much smaller now, for land had risen up and exposed its booty of shells, weeds, kelp, rocks, and all sorts of sea insects that made funny sucking sounds from under the soft, moist ground that, here and there, broke into water-spouting holes.  The boys of Camiguin, darker than my dreams, were out on the beach now, bobbing in the distance on board their slender skiffs, or merely hunting for shellfish among the sea's sudden pools. 

I would have wanted to take a picture, but was overcome with embarrassment before I could.  Besides, they looked perfect as they were, and a picture would never be able to do their earth-bound beauty justice.  I had an idea, instead: Ralph, mermaid-friend, had always fascinated me, and struck me as a wonderful subject for a photograph.  And so I asked him to pose on a boulder, and took one or two shots.  Later that evening, we decided to eat outside our resort's restaurant (where the waitress had a peculiar idea of friendly service: she would set the table anywhere she liked, even when we had already seated ourselves somewhere else).  On the way back, Camilo, in usual bumpkin fashion, immediately became "friendly" with certain local boys.  Ralph and Charles had gone back to the cottage ahead of us.  I chatted awhile with Camilo's adolescent catch, took a picture of their shiny, toothsome faces, and then ambled back to the resort. 

The next day we left Camiguin for Cagayan de Oro City.  I took the plane for Manila the following day, while Camilo and Charles pushed on to join the writers workshop in Dumaguete.  Ralph the mermaid returned to Iligan's watery crypts. 

I thought I had lost many of these memories.  And then, recently, a friend told me that he made it to the third Iligan National Writers Workshop.  Those four enchanted days came flooding back to me.  I am happy for this friend.  But I honestly wish he can take the time off to spend a few days in Camiguin after the workshop, and experience the peace I felt in that corner of infinity beside the sea.  I look at the picture of Ralph that I took on our last afternoon on that magical beach.  I am amazed at the way it looks perfectly composed, and just now I decide to call it "Anchored Mermaid."  I am rereading the poems I wrote about Camiguin, the island that has bequeathed me so much, and, not so strangely, I am happy once more. 

_The boys of Camiguin: two versions_

(For Ralph, Charlson and Camilo)

_Version one_

From across the waters Camiguin is a peak

that grew an island to perch on. 

But now the island is less excuse

than reason this place insists to be:

here, on shore sea laps up vainly,

I am never more aware of sand's rudimentary

grace, face of sky, wind's breath

of murmuring oysters.  Camiguin of seven

active volcanoes: are these the furnaces

smelting ores that taint the sunset bronze? 

From Mambajao the pier is kilometers

and a procession of chapels south. 

The gods of fire must love it here,

enshrined redundantly after every few trees. 

And I can almost see them carouse

with boys whose skins shimmer spiritually,

brown filigrees on brown.  Like wreaths

of kelp, they redeem the shore from grief. 

Coiled about the foam, they grant the sea

forgiveness, nakedly wrapping its fingers

around their waists.  From beyond the beach

this welter of sea-sprung forms cuts my eyes

more sharply than the salt.  And from springs

burbling deep in the island's heart streams

of my molten subterranean lust rush forth. 

_Version two_

The boys of Camiguin adorn the shoreline

like so many garlands of kelp. 

Deep-brown and glinting, they bloom

as though in sympathy with fish

exultant in the fatal grip of birdbeaks. 

I am here looking out from a rock

split through the heart by earthfire and brine. 

They do not see me become touristy

behind a gaze that whittles them down

to a palm, open and dreaming

of the secret skin of turtles. 

Instead, they slip deeper

and farther out the sea's pleated skirt

whose hemline breaks

into lacy ribbons near my feet. 

Their skiffs are slivers of pain

shooting across the water's curling spine. 

Everywhere are moods of blue

splashed across the unfolding scroll

of the horizon.  As the many fingers of sunset

touch me, I turn earthen like the sky. 

By dusk Camiguin's shore is wreathed

with boys casting nets past the shoals. 

Orphaned among shadows, a gull croons

plaintive like the sea. 

##   _An American notebook_

_I_ NEVER THOUGHT I'd keep beyond a few days of traveling.  I'd always excuse honoring friends' invitations to come visit with the declaration: I spoil easy.  But there it is: a three-week-long sojourn to various places in the United States, beginning with the Philippine Studies Conference in Honolulu, from April 15 to 18.  And then came San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and New York.  I flew around so much I can almost say that I was on an airplane nearly half of the time. 

I arrived in Manila just a week ago.  The flight took all of 16 hours, and if not for the two inflight movies I don't think I'd have come out of that trans-Pacific flight with my sense of humor intact.  Here, then, dear readers (who never really knew that I was away, since I had advanced my columns before I left, and had entrusted this page to dearest queen-friend Ronald), are some scattered pages from my benighted American notebook.  I decided to keep a notebook of my travels because I knew it would come in handy just in case I needed to reflect on the significance of my sojourns in this earthly life (yeah, I'm sure). 

_April 14_

The UP group I am traveling with has been billeted at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, which also happens to be the Conference venue.  We must count ourselves lucky for having been given a more generous stipend by our university.  Other Philippine-based scholars had to find cheaper accommodations, which are invariably a ways off from Waikiki beach which is just at the back of our hotel.  I am staying in a room with a three-quarters view of this world-famous beach, with three full-flegded faggots—one of whom being genitally female. ( She's slightly less authentic, for that).  We have been exploring the beach since we arrived this morning.  It's funny but the beach isn't full of hunky bodies at all: as Sharon, a Filipino-American exchange professor who is currently teaching at La Salle put it, Hawaii is the favorite destination of Moms and Pops from Iowa out to get a tan for the sake of the pale folks back home (she can be so mordantly delightful with words!).  It's true, though: there are too many beached whales today, it isn't even funny anymore.  Maybe tomorrow will be better.  But then we're not really here for pleasure, are we? 

_April 15_

The Conference opened this afternoon.  Some of us are reading papers later in the day.  Our hotel accommodations don't include food so we've been eating at different bistros and cafés since our arrival.  Today we had brunch at the café across the street that serves food 24 hours a day.  I had a Hawaiian burger—honestly it wasn't bad.  But lest I be misled by the figures, a $10.00 meal isn't exactly cheap, even by American standards.  More savvy people tell me that Hawaii is the most expensive state to live in.  I have yet to find this out for myself, I guess. 

I sat in one of the sessions.  It included an arnis exhibition.  The arnis master asked his wife to render a native Filipino dance—"pangalay"—in order to prove his thesis that arnis is a form of dance-in-combat.  Although I wasn't too convinced, I did notice that the body of one of the arnis experts was quite simply yummy. 

For dinner, me, Patrick and Boy venture further up the beach.  There are scrumptious luaus everywhere, and Samoan dancers are busy entertaining middle-aged hotel guests with their million-and-one variations on the hula.  We look at the menus from outside the windows of the many restaurants situated along the beach, and decide to look further.  We end up eating at this diner a little walk off the beach, on some busy side street.  After eating, Boy wants to find out if Honolulu has anything to offer another kind of touristy appetite, and the Filipino waiter (not bad-looking himself) refers us to his fellow-waiter, a rather nice and friendly white faggot who rattles off a number of places, both near and far.  After getting back to our room, we decide to give the closest one a try. 

Hula's is a funny-looking affair.  It's an open-air club and disco with a raised platform in front from which a solo gyrating male form projects lust out into the murky audience.  Tonight two dancers alternate in eking out sluttish choreography from the curious, spotlighted perch.  We prefer the native-looking dancer to the more muscular white one.  He's just friendlier and much more fun to watch (and Patrick is quick to point out, fresher).  We bump into Roland and his two female friends, both Japanese students.  They are rather intelligent and interesting folk, if I may say so.  One of them's an avowed bisexual, but is currently gay-besotted.  Despite her obvious Otherness, she and her problem sound all too familiar. 

_April 16_

My talk didn't go as well as I wished.  My fifteen minutes ran out even before I could finish the super-super-super abridged version of my paper on Philippine precolonial gender-crossing.  Our panel chair, Elynia, just had to wag her cue-card that said "STOP" in my face before I could wind up my talk.  But I take comfort in the fact that I brought copies of my paper with me (unlike everyone else, I hear).  Those who didn't get the gist of my talk can just read the paper in its entirety later on. 

But something interesting has come up: actually, it's more like someone interesting comes up to me after the panel is over.  He's Mark, an anthropologist based in London.  Almost as tall as me, bearded and mild-mannered, he has heard about me even before my arrival.  Or should I say, he read something I wrote in the book bazaar, and of all the pages his eyes could have landed on, they just had to skim across the section in my book (on Philippine gay culture, to be published by UP press in September) where I harangue this certain London-based anthropologist for being such an imperialist... and this is the man himself, all smiles and nice brown eyes and unkempt hair trying to engage with me! ( He doesn't look half-bad, and even has this softspoken charm and ponderousness about him that I think are really cute). 

I don't know why, but I just had to apologize right away. _ So sorry, I sort of overdid it back there.  I was just taken away by my emotions... youthful indiscretion, you know.  I wasn't trying to say that you're an imperialist bastard, only ever so slightly insensitive perhaps..._ Just talking to him proves therapeutic in a way, for I am beginning to forget the person I left behind, who is one of the biggest reasons for my wanting to travel just now.  Should I toy with the idea of distraction that presently offers itself up for my perusal in the person of this charming, undeniably attractive man? 

_April 17_

Today I am feeling more rested and relaxed.  The Melatonin tablets I bought yesterday from Long's Drugstore in Ala Moana (the biggest shopping complex in Hawaii, similar in lay-out to the Ayala Center) must have done the trick.  I opened the sliding door of our hotel room's balcony early this morning, and a pigeon flew near my head and landed at my feet.  Hawaii feels pristine despite its skyscrapers.  There is an eternal breeze blowing from the mountains, cooling one despite the hot, noonday sun.  Everywhere I see flowers of all shades—mostly they are sharply hued, though.  They all begin to look garish after a while. 

Of course, the underbelly of this place can scarcely be available to a tourist such as I mainly am in this trip.  And so, I forgo all ambition to know just what this island is about (deep inside), and instead do what I am tasked to do here: skim across everything while taking part in the Conference and feigning learning because of it.  I attend this one panel on ritual: Why am I not surprised that a lot of the foreign scholars who have studied the different forms of ritual in the Philippines are just so out of it?  I mean, other than the fact that there is something condescending about the way they describe my country, they don't even sound like they understood me or my country in the very least!  Without meaning to be personal, I am simply disgusted by it all. 

I meet Mark for dinner, but Boy has signified his interest in him earlier today: I saw the two of them having some sort of intimate tete-a-tete just before dinner.  I really can't fuck up my life further, even if only wishfully.  I have yet to untangle my heartstrings from a messed up dalliance back home. ( Or am I simply afraid of losing out to competition?)  A postprandial walk to the beach sees us—Boy, Mark, and me—having Mexican-made beers in some glitzy pub.  I am my usual chatty and reflective self, but this time I am not trying to impress anyone with all my perorations.  Just now I realize that I am perorating because I am trying to forget him, who has caused me great suffering—much of which is really my own doing, I must admit.  After a while I turn away from the two of them, and walk out to the barely visible but perfectly audible surf.  I realize that one doesn't just fly away from one's sadness, without feeling all the sadder in the process.  All this distraction is useless.  I need to embrace my sorrow and tame it—that's the only way I can make it out of this anguished rut with my sanity intact. 

_April 18_

This is the last day of the Conference.  Tomorrow some of us will be flying to the mainland to give talks in universities in California.  I attend one session today—the one on economics, chaired by an Australian.  Nothing interesting or new here. 

I join Elynia, Chris, Roland, Tet and Chari for a car-cruise around the island.  We first drive to Manoa valley, just further inland from Waikiki.  The University of Hawaii and East-West Center are situated here.  The jade mountains that have always amazed me from our hotel room's balcony look even more majestic up close.  The price of real estate in this valley is said to be egregiously steep, and the houses we pass by, though small and modest-looking, are among the best addresses in all of Hawaii.  The valley receives a pleasant amount of rainfall every morning, after which the sun abruptly emerges to paint rainbows everywhere one looks.  We go hiking inside Paradise Park, and Chris (whose lover used to take him all around the park) leads us to the park's best look-out place, Inspiration point.  It really is inspiring: all of a sudden, from out of the thick underbrush, we emerge onto this clearing on a hill's sloping crest, from where a breathtaking view of the valley past a three-dimensional frame of trees and mountains is afforded one.  Later, we buy packed lunches from a deli store and eat them in the car.  I barely finish my chicken dish.  I have fed too much on beauty, I guess.  While in the car, I could hear the words open, opening, opening, repeating softly inside my ear.  I never thought there could be such glorious freedom and space that could open itself up to me. 

We then drive to Northshore, almost opposite Honolulu on the map.  At first we get lost, but then a gas-boy gives us the simplest—and it later turns out, most reliable—piece of instruction: keep the mountains to your left, and you'll get there.  And soon enough, we are where we want to be, but only after rushing past old plantation sites and quaint-looking lodges situated all along the coastal road.  Elynia tells us that the last plantation is closing down.  The island-state will have to ship in all of its food from the mainland, then.  Henceforth, tourism will be Hawaii's sole money-maker.  I wonder just how regular people in the island will cope with such difficult vicissitudes. 

The waves are thunderously threatening in Northshore.  Chris explains that during certain times of the year, they can reach as high as 30 feet, which is when surfers from all over the world come to face the burbling aquatic challenge.  The sky has become strangely overcast.  After taking a few pictures of ourselves poised on wobbly rocks, we decide to head back to Honolulu.  We all have engagements we need to keep. 

_April 19_

I didn't see Mark after our trip to Northshore.  I sort of didn't want to anymore, given the previous evening's epiphanies.  Even when I knew that I was running late, I didn't want to head back to the hotel to catch him.  Today a group of UP scholars will leave for the mainland.  My own party will be going to San Francisco, which is just across the bay from Berkeley where I am to stay with newly-weds John and Marivi. 

The plane finally lands in San Francisco after five flying hours.  Local time is a little past midnight of the next day.  Despite the late hour, John and Marivi welcome me at the airport, buried in warm clothes (which I didn't bring a whole lot of—oh no!).  San Francisco is shrouded in freezing fog, but while driving over the Bay Bridge we can see that it has managed to keep its splendor intact, despite the mist and the cold.  A little seaside town with just enough skyline to make it a city, San Francisco is a wonder to behold!  Tomorrow, I will give a lecture in the symposium on Filipino studies at the University of California-Berkeley.  I can't wait to lie down and rest first.  All this flying—with hardly enough time to recover in between take-offs—has worn me out. 

I must say I am happy to be here. 

_April 20_

Carol is staying with John and Marivi as well.  She flies to Manila tomorrow.  Since she has finished her course-work for her Ph.D. in English at Cornell University, she will stay in Manila for nine months to do research, before returning to Ithaca to write her dissertation. 

We meet up with Oscar, an assistant professor in English at UC Berkeley.  He is Filipino and is very warm and kind to us.  We drive to San Francisco and have dinner at the Stinking Rose, an Italian restaurant in Northbeach famous for its garlicky menu.  Everything we eat reeks of garlic-pesto sauce.  But it's all quite nice, I must say.  Marivi says her dad will go crazy over the food here.  I know I'm already going crazy over one of the waiters, who bears a more-than-striking resemblance to Mel Gibson. ( And then I recall how homophobic this arrogant Aussie actor is, and I begin to recover my sanity a bit). 

We walk around Chinatown, which is strangely in the same vicinity as the Italian quarters (both specialize in noodles, I guess).  This is the first clean Chinatown that I've seen (cleaner than the one in Manila or Honolulu, anyway).  I buy postcards from one of the all-and-sundry shops, which I later leave behind in the Greek restaurant where we have our deserts. 

Back in the flat, John, Carol and I engage in a lively debate on Philippine nationalism.  I am staunchly against invoking it in my theoretical explorations, only because I know just how easily given it is to exclusionary politics.  Carol and John argue that there is no available space to theorize other than that which takes cognizance of the nation.  We are at it until all hours, just like the good old days in the Faculty Center of the UP.  After exhausting ourselves, we end up disagreeing about the other's position on the matter, even as we agree just how much we have missed one another's company. 

_April 21_

Carol left for the airport this morning.  I join Marivi playing pinball at the arcade.  The nice old man who manages the place (he looks Chinese) is used to having Marivi over.  She gets five free balls and is ecstatic about it.  I am cracking up myself, but because of the way Marivi has sunk to depths of unemployment hell.  We get depressed after a few seconds, and decide to go grocery-shopping at Andronico's.  Now this is fun: rows and rows of produce and consumer goods.  And you have a choice of grocery bags: plastic or paper.  After loading up on greens, ice cream, cheeses and apple juice, we hobble across the street to the flat. 

Marivi takes me to Telegraph, one of the main streets in Berkeley, famous for its outlandish denizens.  Indeed, despite the cold weather, there are a lot of weird people milling about the place.  Evangelists, bag ladies, homeless black guys, crackpots of all shapes and sizes.  And of course, there are the punks-in-black who ask for dimes all the time.  Marivi and I are appalled at their gall to ask us for money when their leather-wear and silverware (they're all deep into the idea of body piercing) must cost a lot.  I end up panic-buying books at Cody's (where I espy a number of brand-new poetry titles), and Moe's (a four-floor second-hand bookstore that can nearly drive one crazy).  I stop myself just before I spend all my money, thinking that there will be other days to do this kind of thing without getting all too impulsive. 

The symposium at UC-Berkeley is sponsored by the Filipino American Studies Group on campus.  Oscar acts as the group's adviser.  I am one of three speakers this afternoon.  Roland and Edna are the others.  My talk is cut short by Maria, a lovely Filipino-American who's acting as the timekeeper. ( Getting interrupted is getting to be a habit with me).  A lively discussion follows our papers.  The people in the group are all smart and eager to share their views.  Nerissa and Fidelito are with us as well. ( Nerissa organized the symposium, actually).  They look happy, if very much settled, here. 

After the symposium, we are all treated to a sumptuous Thai dinner by the group.  One of the students who came to the talk is a handsome mestizo called Anatalio.  But for the annoying fact that he's full of himself, he can be a nice person to hang around with (for 30 minutes, tops!)  I must say he is a sight to behold, but he can give one indigestion if one talks to him for too long. ( Best taken in "small doses"—I wish!) 

Later in the evening, Oscar and Mau ask me and Roland to join them and Morris (a friend of Oscar's; butch-looking although a drag queen deep inside, just like every other Pinoy gay in the US) for an all-nighter in the faggoty city by the bay.  It will be our pleasure (we hope).  Morris drives us up and down Castro and takes us to Twin Peaks, a famous look- (and make-?)  out point.  San Francisco's grandiose from up here.  Oscar blurts out that the city must like our presence—the view's not foggy, even as it's definitely always faggy, hereabout. 

We bar-hop at the Castro.  There's this one place—Detour—where we grab beers and nothing else besides (Drats!).  And there's this really happening disco called The Café, a butch/dyke bar that allows queer crowds in.  From above the din of the music one hears Filipino being spoken by familiar-looking faces in the multicultural mass.  Gorgeous white men are hanging out with other gorgeous white men.  And so, despite the babel, the crowd is cloven in predictable ways. 

We all independently gravitate around the bar.  Actually, around the bartender: a half-breed Asian-American hunk with a really cute smile and an even cuter butt.  He's such a flirt, beaming his pearly whites and winking his gorgeous, mongrel-eyes.  Oscar is obviously taken in by all this (he turned down an offer to have drinks with a man who looks like Nancy Travis in favor of the bar-man).  He orders tequila after tequila, all the while trying to start a conversation.  So his mother's Chinese, his father's American.  His name's Louis.  Meantime the rest of the crowd (including me) is busy shimmying and getting sweaty. ( I wish there were someone I could get sweaty with).  The music's pretty danceable, albeit a bit repetitious (three songs played over and over, I think).  The lesbians are the boldest people around.  I've seen at least four couples necking and petting while getting sweet and schmaltzy on the dancefloor. 

By two in the morning the music abruptly stops and the place disgorges its queer content.  Oscar must've given Louis $20 in tips.  And all for nothing, it appears.  Just as the house lights are turned on, the cute bartender gets all tender with the white man who's been sitting by the bar all night long.  And then they french in front of our famished, dejected gaze.  Oscar quickly recovers and sourgrapingly bitches: "What can I do if he's decided to be assimilationist?  He must not like POC-POCs (people of color) very much."  Oh well. 

We've all had a tequila too many, and go to a Chinese dim sum around the corner to sober up. ( It works a little).  Morris drives us to Oscar's flat where we take our vexations out on Oscar's VHS machine.  John Wayne Bobbit's surgically reconstructed debut into the world of smut proves too grotesque even for our jaded minds, and we, whimpering and deprived, drift open-mouthed off into sleep. 

_April 25_

Today a handful of UP professors—Patrick, Preachy, Vivencio and _moi_ —deliver papers at the California State University in Long Beach.  Yesterday Preachy and I gave lectures at the University of California-Los Angeles, upon the invitation of Enrique de la Cruz, one of the directors of UCLA's Department of Southeast Asian Studies.  While in LA, we were taken around by Barbara Gaerlan, an American scholar on the Philippines whom I'd earlier met in Manila.  She took us to Universal Studios where we got a tan walking under the hot, southern California sun. ( It's hot and dry in LA, and somehow that isn't as bad as Manila's hot and humid state, which can make one feel sticky and so ickypooh). 

It was strange to see my first American theme park built around the collective fascination of Americans with the tinseltown called Hollywood.  I must say that two attractions in the park impressed me: Backdraft and Waterworld.  In the first we were led into a fire chamber where we saw—and felt—the high-tech combustions that made the movie after which this attraction was named rather famous.  The effects were real enough to singe my eyebrows!  And the second was held in an ampitheater-like place where the stage is really a man-made lake.  And stale water splashed and crashed and splattered all over the audience—but no one seemed peeved.  After all, we all paid to be there.  On the other hand, the ET studio was downright stupid: after waiting for an hour for the flying bicycles to be fixed, all we got was a dumb, mechanical ride through the cold recycled air past musical dioramas of weird-looking ET puppets! 

The CSU campus seems just as sprawling as UCLA, albeit a little quainter if only because it has more greenery (and, of course, it doesn't have Beverly Hills for its neighbor).  The students here also don't appear all too particular about the way they look: although largely brown (as far as I can tell, that is, by casual observation), they are not as preppy as their counterparts in LA.  Or maybe I'm being unfair here: CSU comes closer to UC-Berkeley in ambience than UCLA, and because I've fallen in love with _that_ campus (which happens to be just across San Francisco, a city in which someone's heart had once been left and I'm afraid mine as well!),  I am being unduly biased against the campus which has Sunset boulevard as one of its back-streets.  But still...

My talk is on the similarities and differences between the concept of the "queer," and the _bakla_.  The audience appears receptive enough, although no one seems inclined to deploy the same level of sophisticated questioning which I received from the people who came to my talk in Berkeley.  After the lectures, a Filipino queer student from Irvine approaches me.  His name is Cirilo and he is the curator of his own gallery in which, barely a month ago, he exhibited pieces of queer art.  He later takes us to a pizza parlor somewhere down Second Avenue.  The entire district is crowded with people and we have to park a distance from the restaurant.  But the walk is an enjoyable one, if only because of the view: Long Beach does have a very long beach, and Second Avenue is something of a restaurant-row which for tonight is offering food of all sorts at a special open-café-cum-buffet package.  And my, there are a lot of gorgeous hunks romping all over the place in skimpy shorts and tank tops! 

Cirilo is hungry for stories from back home and I decide to feed him some.  He can hardly believe it when I say that nowadays there are a lot more places in which gay sex has dared to stake its home, and that the strangely delicious thing is that these places are quite accessible to everyone!  He tells me how it's hard to make Filipino American gays cooperate around a gay liberationist agenda, only because they cannot even bring themselves to like each other sexually.  Apparently, being a brown and Asian homosexual man in California is synonymous to being a "potato queen," or someone who gets turned on exclusively by whites.  Just now the logic behind this gay nomenclature strikes me as funny: I mean, just what role does the gustatory metaphor play in such monikers as "rice queens" (whites who prefer Asian lovers), "shawarma queens" (whites who prefer Arabic lovers), and "pasta queens" (who like to eat Italians, er, Italian)?  Cirilo bewails the fact that even Filipino American gays have bought into the whole idea that for an Asian to like another Asian is a great abomination, if not the unmistakable sign of a woebegone life.  The moniker for such a loser is "sticky rice."  It's all quite sad, I think.  I don't even understand how they can believe that crap when some, if not all, of the most attractive men I've seen in all all of the three California campuses that I've visited must have been Asians (or at least partly Asians). 

But then again, it is also true that this myth of mutual Asian unattractiveness is largely a product of the myth of white fascination with Asian meat.  Thus, for Cirilo, this "M. Butterfly syndrome" isn't necessarily bad: at least there are some people who find Asians attractive (and of course it isn't bad that they happen to be the WASPS themselves!) 

_May 4_

I'm on an airplane again, en route to San Francisco after spending four days with my friend in New York City. 

New York is a wonderfully cold place.  Spring has come in a little too nigglingly this year, and my first two days were rather frigid and wet ones.  Of course, while in the Big Apple I tried to see as much as I could.  My flight coming in was via Memphis, and it arrived at La Guardia a little past midnight.  I was fetched by my friend's _yaya_ , and since she knew a trip to New York wouldn't be complete without a visit to the subway, she took me for a train ride from Grand Central to 69th avenue, where I was to stay in my friend's studio-flat.  I must admit the midnight trip underground scared me, and it didn't help any that I'd read in a newspaper how earlier in the day a fire in one of the stations trapped thousands of commuters in the dank and dark subway tunnels for five or more hours!  But I found the place charming, too, with its vagabond minstrels performing lonely solo concerts for quarters on the ramps.  While I couldn't smell anything, the graffiti-ridden walls, sticky floors and defaced trains told me just how dirty the place was, and most likely would always be, despite the fat black man who was hosing down the steps with blue-green disinfectant. 

The next day, my friend and I went to see a concert of Julliard school students.  They were great, especially the young black woman whose singing repertoire ranged from rhythm and blues to operatic arias and Irish folk songs.  My friend cried when she sang a sad and plaintive song called "Donny Boy."  I ended up getting all teary-eyed myself.  And then I went to the Metropolitan Museum and tried going through all the exhibits in three hours (which was all the time that I had for that day).  It turned out that the place is quite huge and its collections much too veritable to exhaust in such a short time.  I ended up lingering in the medieval art exhibits, and found a really interesting piece of sculpture in a rosary bead that was made in the twelfth (or was it the sixteenth?)  century.  It is made of box wood, and is no more than four inches in diameter.  It's like a fruit that's been sliced in two, but with a flap of skin serving as hinge so that both halves can come together like a bivalve shell.  And the amazing thing is that inside each of the halves is a three-dimensional tableau sculpted in minutest detail crammed into that little space.  I remember seeing a full-blown crucifixion scene, with the sky teeming with angels in the background, and the crucified Christ between two thieves after it, and the apostles, and Roman soldiers and saints in the foreground.  And all this executed in realistic relief—down to the hair-thin spears, bared fangs of barking dogs and horses' mane! 

In the next two days, I visited the Museum of Modern Art where I had myself photographed with Claude Monet's "Waterliles" as a backdrop, saw _Miss Saigon_ (for sentimental reasons, after all I had memorized its libretto during the time it was not yet _baduy_ to do so!),  and shopped around for electronic thingamies to take home with me to the Philippines until my feet almost dropped off.  Oh yes, I also found a way of squeezing in a trip up the famous Empire State building, after going to St. Patrick's cathedral to pray. ( I didn't see much from the 86th floor, though.  The fog afforded only zero visibility to the tourist, even as the feeling of going that far up into the sky where the clouds billowed and flowed was something I'd have wanted all on its own). 

But now the plane from La Guardia to Memphis is going through a lot of turbulence.  The pilot has not been able to turn off the "fasten-your-seat-belt" sign at all.  I am scared to think of a possible engine failure 28,000 feet in the air.  To calm myself I read the poems of Lynda Hull in her last poetry collection, _The Only World_ , published posthumously after her fatal car crash in 1994.  I think of what John told me during one of our idle talks in his Berkeley flat: something to do with how relatively safer air travel is—in terms of the ratio and proportion of reported accidents—than any form of land transportation.  The woman in front of me is trying to comfort her two young sons as the plane bobs up and down. 

...The plane reached Memphis in one piece, although I had to deplane and board another airbus bound for San Francisco. ( I suspect the pilot was not about to let the plane that shook rather violently for three hours leave the airport without first getting examined for possible damage).  On the flight to SF I notice a middle-aged white couple across me, around three rows away.  A black man (I can tell from his nape) occupies the window seat in the row where this couple are supposed to sit.  But the minute they notice the man, they get all anxious and look for other seats.  I think they are such racists, and for the entire flight I am fuming with hate deep inside.  As I leave the plane, however, I manage to catch a glimpse of the black man, and I see how sick he looks—sick with AIDS to be sure, with the telltale lesions, the rheumy eyes made more opaque with something like despair.  While I still hate the couple that shunned him earlier in the trip, I am overcome by sadness and pity at the sight of him trying to avoid everyone's stare, and looking out of the window into nowhere. 

_May 7_

Tomorrow I leave for Manila.  I still have to pack my clothes and the boxful of books I ended up splurging my money on (the most) in my entire stay here. ( I bought as many titles of poetry as queer theory—I'm proud of myself for having controlled the urge to buy only theory books).  The dinner Oscar, John and I had in an Italian restaurant in San Francisco proved a perfect last supper, punctuated with very good red wine.  One of the Italian waiters looked interesting—although it occurs to me that looking is basically all that I've been able to do here! ( This dinner was just as nice as the one Oscar and I had before my New York trip, in this out-of-the-way place that served the best Indian food I'd ever tasted). 

As I begin to fall deeper into sleep, I begin to dream of home and how happy I am to be back with my family and friends.  In the morning I awake, finish my packing and have breakfast with John at a café inside the UC-Berkeley campus that serves hot chocolate and donuts.  I buy last-minute presents from the grocery store across the street, cram them into my bulging _maleta_ , wait for the shuttle, arrive at the airport just around noontime, take the plane out of San Francisco, get off at Tokyo-Narita after an eleven-hour transPacific flight, stay in the waiting lounge, board the flight to Manila...

_Look homeward, angel_. 

##   _A Siquijor sojourn_

_T_ HE DUMAGUETE WRITERS Workshop had been in full swing for a week when we arrived.  It had basically been my and Ricci's plan to return to this city that had haunted our dreams since we last visited it (I just a year ago, she three years back).  We were able to convince Ronald and Vince to come with us.  And on that overcast Wednesday morning we boarded the PAL plane from what I thought was such a wonderful improvement on the old, run-down domestic airport of my previous travels. 

The flight from Manila took barely an hour.  The runway in Sibulan, the town right outside Dumaguete City, had been lengthened by several meters: I noticed how the plane's taxiing down didn't feel as short, and the stop didn't feel as abrupt, as they had felt the last time.  Ronald and Vince of course had no memories against which to compare their present sensations.  Ricci and I, on the other hand, were busy looking around, touching old landscapes with misty eyes and instantly recognizing the difference between nostalgia and the presently throbbing and insistent fact.  Dumaguete looked and felt slightly different this time, its trees all soggy and uninviting, the boulevard wet and the sea in front of it a dull sheet of gray, but we were quick to put it all down to the bummy weather.  From the airport we took a tricycle to Al Mar, the inn where we stayed for a day before moving to the Silliman University Alumni Hall.  Just now I remember how that awful tricycle driver ripped us off, asking fifty pesos from each of us when the usual fare is not even a fourth of that amount. 

We met the fellows in this year's workshop just as they were leaving the CAP Building where the sessions were being held.  After going through a number of workshops myself, I've realized that writers are quite predictably cast from the same predictable molds: the vamp, the nerd, the faggot, the faggot, the loser, the flake, the pot-head, and all of the above mixed up into one. ( Of course I never did fraternize with this crop of fellows—Mickey who did swore they were saner than usual or than he'd have preferred).  We had lunch with Jing afterward.  I will cut this recollection short and try to segue to the day we boarded the pump boat for Siquijor.  I do this because nothing much really happened to us—or should I say, to me—until then.  The thing was, my decision to go to Dumaguete not even a week after I'd arrived from the States was an admittedly crazy one.  The change of temperatures and humidities and all that traveling finally took their toll on me: I got sick.  At first I thought it was allergies: while snacking in South Seas at Jing's invitation one night, I started wheezing for no apparent reason.  Must be some pollen in the air, I thought. 

But alas, the very next day, I ran a temperature and felt really, really sick.  Snot and phlegm started dripping out of me soon after.  Ronald, the most talented giver of names alive, immediately christened me Miss _Singha_ pore and/or Miss _Uhug_ uay __, in keeping with the Miss Universe pageant which we watched in Jing's stately hotel room the afternoon she and her fellow panelists left for Manila.  But he more than made up for this nasty maligning by serving as my mother and nurse who periodically helped me buy mineral water from Lee's department store (by the end of our stay I realized that I'd consumed around two dozen one-litter bottles of _Nature's Spring_ , the purest gift from Mother Nature, sourced from Carmen, Cebu), and who put up with all my whining, bitching and coughing as the days became more and more brilliant and as I sank deeper and deeper in a sea of salty, olivine fluids oozing out of my nose and mouth. ( Ickypooh). 

Anyway, Siquijor was always in our thoughts.  I mean, you see it just across the sea from the boulevard, Dumaguete's granite slab of beauty and pride without which the city would not be half as memorable for any visitor. ( Of course the ancient acacias—painful ascensions from the sodden ground—looming over everywhere texture one's memories of the place, too, but the boulevard lends it a simultaneously cosmopolitan and rustic charm quite hard to come by anywhere else).  It's on the boulevard where many poetic waxings take place—for nothing is literal in Dumaguete, especially not during the Writers Workshop—as well as many cruisings.  Ronald would have wanted to sample the native cuisine, but in sympathy with my snotty state, he pinched his crotch between his thighs to stop his libidinal juices from flowing. ( He was beginning to turn blue in the face by the time we left for Manila—I am eternally grateful to him for going on a fast while I was indisposed, but come to think of it I never asked him to deprive himself on my account anyway!). 

We were thinking of renting a _catamaran_ (a skiff-like thingamie which we saw marooned on the sands of El Dorado in Dauin town south of Dumaguete), but it cost too much (a thousand five hundred, for a day).  By the way, I had one of my best meals at El Dorado: a grilled _tanguigue_ steak, obviously fresh a few minutes before and almost as good as the _kinilaw na mamsa_ that Dyutay prepared for us the day we smoked a few joints and sipped _guhang_ palm wine while he, Mickey, Shelfa, Victor, Ricci and Vince jammed it up on the flute and drums and cymbals in his beachside resort.  The _inato_ at Joe's, and the _tuyok manok_ at another restaurant further down the city's main avenue (I forget its name just now), were not bad.  But we were pigging out on chicken too much—pardon the mixed metaphor—that by the end of our stay we felt like flapping our arms and clucking a chicken dance all the way home. ( Not so funny?  Go suck an egg). 

And so everyone had ideas where we should stay when we got to the island of sorceries— _if_ we even got there, that is: the story of a batch of writing fellows and panelists getting driven away by a sudden squall at midsea was still fresh in everyone's mind.  A small group of fellows from this batch, however, had made it to the island and back, and undaunted by the witches (and since I secretly knew I was a witch myself—a self-knowledge I have possessed from as early as I can remember), we took that rickety boat out of that bustling pier situated on the left end of the boulevard. 

The first thing I realized is that the rites of boarding one of those little pump boats can drive one crazy.  The instruction from the experts was: You go to the pier and ask for the boat that leaves for Siquijor (there's one leaving every two hours, from early in the morning to just a little past noon).  You talk to the caretaker and get your name listed down and wait.  By the time we returned to the pier, however, the boat that we were supposed to be taking already had an entire load of passengers whose names couldn't have been in the list.  I was about to give up on the whole thing when this cute, dark and hunky man (the boat's "main man," it would seem), pulled out a piece of crumpled brown paper from his tight-fitting jeans' back pocket and called out the names, with a thick Visayan accent, of those who were legitimately in the list.  And so that was over and done with soon enough. ( And I felt like kissing him for sparing me the spectacle of squealing at all the cheats hanging out on the pier). 

But trips across the strait between Negros and Siquijor, especially around noontime, are far from smooth.  I was seated near the boat's side, and a bulky, blonde woman who could no longer sit anywhere else was standing on one of the ramps that straddled the pump boat left and right.  She was getting all wet from the sea spray.  I was feeling a little seasick because of the constant bobbing of my boat-bound world, but I was partly impervious to it all because of Loreena McKennitt, whose elfin, Irish lyrics played in my ears all throughout the two-hour trip and somehow fell into rhythm with the sea's own rolling curlicues.  Ronald looked relaxed, but I knew he was a blob of nausea and fright deep inside.  Ricci was of course having the time of her life, gliding over the water that is her nature.  Vince was such a kid, I thought, not really caring about what was happening but having so much fun just the same. 

***

WHY DO PIERS in the south have the same kind of water: bottle-green?  From my experience the waters off the docks of Camiguin, Cebu, Dumaguete and Siquijor, all give off the same crystal, viridescent sheen.  The only difference lies in the kind of sea life you can see clearly from above the water's edge: in Cebu and Camiguin it's sea urchins and star fish, in Dumaguete it's fish, and in Siquijor it's fish and sea urchins.  When we got off the pump boat, we had no idea where we were going.  We'd heard the names of a few resorts from people back in Dumaguete, but we didn't know how to get to any of them.  After lolling about and looking lost on the breakwater, we boarded a jeepney that was going to Maria, the town where one of the resorts that we had in our list was located (we were told).  The trouble was, we couldn't all fit into the jam-packed vehicle, and I had to make _sabit_ somewhere on its rear end, perched precariously on a metal foothold while I clung with both hands for my dear, two-hundred-pound life, jiggling with the wheels as they careened over potholes and bumps and praying to the elements to cushion my fall just in case I came flying off from the jeepney as it dipped and rose barreling down the bright, hilly roads. 

But thinking back, there was some kind of ineffable thrill that coursed through me as I hung there, the wind buffeting me as I flew past trees and bamboo groves, green-tipped branches brushing lightly over my head.  I could hear the leaves rustling inside my ears every time the jeepney swooped down a shaded area, the sound soft and shrill like countless little castanets rattling all together.  The jeepney ride (which had started to get fun after a while) had to end when we reached the town just before Maria.  We took a tricycle whose driver was short and dark, but also nice and talksy.  In the marketplace he'd asked us where we were going and had offered to take us for a fixed rate.  As usual, we really had no choice in the matter. ( That's the one drawback to traveling around this country's far-flung regions: without your own car, you end up being at the mercy of natives who are out to make a killing on helpless, immobile and often ignorant tourists such as yourself). 

We reached the resort late in the afternoon.  Siquijor itself is still and all an unspoilt and beautiful island, its mangroves managing to perpetuate themselves despite human encroachment, and the limestone nature of its heart resplendently evident in the white, powdery sand of its many beaches.  But this resort had the extra advantage of inaccessibility and thus of a pristineness about it: we had to pass through a forest reserve to get here, and although we'd have loved to stay, there were absolutely no accommodations waiting for us.  No water.  No electricity.  No food.  After picking up broken pieces of coral and shell from the creamy white sand, we just took pictures of ourselves perched on the immense limestone formations carved out of the craggy sides of rocks running all along the beach, and left on the same tricycle that took us here. ( And, of course, this meant more money for the driver, who apologized for not telling us sooner about the resort's lack of basic facilities). 

The ride was bumpy and we vibrated so much our ears were ringing with echoes of the tricycle's motor days after we'd arrived from Siquijor.  But that's getting ahead of things.  Presently, we were navigating the coastal road again, which had already metamorphosed into a mountain road, coastal road, mountain road, coastal road several times in our journey.  The driver, pretending to take pity on our sorry plight, did his best to annotate the various scenic spots that were whizzing past our bleary sight: basically they were the sea, trees, trees, the sea.  I remember stopping on an ancient _adobe_ bridge just across an even more ancient-looking wooden house on stilts ("the oldest house in the Philippines," as the man proudly and most probably falsely claimed), just where the sea lapped the sand.  Old people were going about their business, feeding the piebald piglet tied to one of the posts, or bending over the wooden stove and stirring the slowly cooking rice in the earthen pot, or merely looking out of the window at us, looking absently at them.  We sat on the bridge's concrete rim and the driver took our picture. ( And like our mood the picture turned out lousy, with only one of us—not me—getting caught inside the frame). 

After something like half-a-day, we finally arrived at "Hidden Paradise": the sun had set an hour ago, and we couldn't really see what this resort looked like.  But we just wanted to get somewhere and rest.  The roundish, middle-aged woman who owned the place was kind enough to let us stay—this being not the season for tourists, who must mostly be European and Japanese businessmen out to get tanned (and laid) in the exotic islands in the sun—and to fix us up a quick supper of leftovers.  She lived with her family in a house perched on top of a limestone hill overlooking the cove where the beach and all the resort's three wooden cottages were located.  This hilltop house was also the resort's one and only restaurant.  A map of Siquijor hung on one of its walls—where a collection of colored bottles and chipped earthenware she said was her husband's (read: not for sale) was out on display—and after figuring out our present location we realized that we had nearly gone all around the island. 

Ronald looked at me and let go of one of his most memorable monikers for this trip: This is Siquihell!  Where we were was actually nearer the pier than we should have experienced it: we had gone the longer and more "scenic" route to get here.  She smiled at us and told us what we already knew: that the driver had charged us too much—and would charge us too much, I regrettingly added, having already arranged for him to pick us up tomorrow and take us to the pier. 

The night went by unremarkably.  But for the rock-hard bed, the geckos clacking all over the place, and the invisible puppies yelping under the cottage where Ronald and I were staying, I must say my evening was relatively peaceful. ( It helped that I brought my walkman and snoozer's eyepatch, and that I was just too tired since I had not yet fully recovered from my sticky affliction).  And then, just as I was beginning to finally lose my sleep (and awaken dreams), there came Ricci and Vince—who it turned out had not slept at all, staying out on the beach all night long and counting stars falling over their tilted heads—knocking on our cottage door, and calling us to go watch the sunrise with them.  I went out still in my fabulous _malong_ —I had bought it from the Muslim Barter in Dumaguete for a pretty penny, and had gone to bed in it—and took out my camera.  Poor Ronald.  He had barely even caught a wink's worth of sleep (he claimed that I was snoring all the time, and I'm supposed to believe him since we were always together as roommates for the entire duration of our trip), and now he felt he had no choice except to grumpily come along. 

The horizon over to the right was beginning to grow rosier with every passing second, but since there were clouds immediately above it we couldn't tell if the sun had already risen and was not in fact already tucked inside one of those peach-colored fluffs that hung here and there in the sky.  And then it came: a neon-pink arc that grew wider and rounder and turned into a ball soon enough, rising out of the horizon with our every expectant pulse.  I never thought I'd see it, but there it was: the phenomenon of adhesion, where the sun, just as it completely lifts above the horizon, rather looks like it is being held down by it, its bottom-most part sticking to the sea that rises up a little in a desperate bid to cling on to it and yet losing it in the end (until, of course, the sunset).  It was magical I tell you.  A bit garish in a way, but a bravura performance still and all.  The drag queen that is sky put on one her best appearances yet, with a feathery boa of cloud trailing from the now fully flamboyant sun to the pastel-colored firmament right above us.  And to cap it all, a white heron flew out of nowhere and stood on one leg in front of us, blessing us with its pure, mystic grace.  And then, just as quietly as it came, it slunk away into the mangroves to the left side of the beach. 

Ronald saw all this, took pictures, and yawned.  Ricci was all element, feeling the springs of eternity welling up inside her, while Vince kept quiet, presumably vowing to someday write all of this down.  We all went back to our cottages and tried to cadge a little more sleep from the sandman, who was slightly kinder this time and didn't begrudge us a few hours of unconsciousness.  We woke up just before lunchtime.  I was the only one who didn't swim in the now-visible, crystal and fully submerged beach, being quite unwell still.  I looked around and saw that there really was some truth to this place being called "Hidden Paradise."  Strange chirpings were coming out of the trees on the verdant hills that surrounded the cove, the water was clean and lukewarm and the sand was gleaming and powder-white.  And there were hardly any people around (aside from those on board an occasional skiff shooting across the distant surf).  Ronald changed into his skimpy, neon-green fake Speedo with a piece of black padding somewhere near the crotch (and the whole thing started running at the seams after a few minutes), and waded girlishly into the water.  Vince and Ricci went snorkelling further out into the open sea.  We all had to get ourselves ready before the tricycle driver arrived (can I call this character "Mang Juan" since I don't think he'll mind it just now?)  After washing and sunning our crystals (which we had bought and given one another at Sidlacang Negros), we dressed up and went to the restaurant for lunch. 

For lunch the owner of the resort cooked up the toughest chicken on earth, and served it to us disguised as _adobo_.  Ricci swore she had heard the rooster crowing near her cottage last night and had missed hearing it by the time she woke up.  We couldn't care less, we were starving and getting the hang of it with every hard and clenching bite.  After a while we fell to talking about other, more pleasant things, such as our imminent trip out of Hidden Paradise to another resort near the pier, and out of Siquijor (which Ronald maintained had simply been Siquihorrible) itself back to Joe's _inato_ and the _tuyok manok_ of the restaurant somewhere down Dumaguete's main avenue.  Mang Juan arrived promptly as scheduled, and it was back to the coastal-mountain-coastal road and back to the whirring in the ears and the jiggling in the butt.  Only this time, we were treated to free facial powder billowing out parts of the road that were being bulldozed from the limestone passes. 

We arrived in the town just before the pier, and decided to call home.  I called up the house and talked to my dad who was pleasantly surprised that I was in Siquijor (he had gone there several times when he was still in active service for the Armed Forces, and he knew more than anyone that his citified, technology-dependent son wouldn't be able to cope for long trapped in a small, backward island such as Siquijor—he was right) to confirm that I was alive and would likely be back in a few days.  Ronald and Vince called home as well.  People in the PLDT office looked at Ronald as he screamed into the receiver immediately after picking it up.  I of course knew that screaming is basically the way people in Ronald's household talk to each other (I had to find this out for myself), and so didn't think much of it.  After loading up on mineral water, we were back on track for the pier. 

To be safe, we knew we had to catch an early boat ride out of the island.  And so we decided to stay in a resort just near the pier.  It didn't have the same view and pristineness as the other resorts we'd seen, but this one had a restaurant with real food, and an electric fan inside a mosquito-proof room.  Our last sunset in Siquijor was ruined by the dark and ominous clouds that settled on the peaks of Negros Oriental where it should have gorgeously set.  By the evening, the surf was churning violently on account of the high winds, its lapping quick and desperate in the distance.  We were afraid we might have to stay in this island longer, for if the weather was even slightly bad we definitely wouldn't dare making the trip across. 

The next morning, however, proved balmy and agreeable.  Although there were patches of dark clouds cluttering an otherwise heavenly sky, the sun was clearly not going to be upstaged today.  The boat ride was calm and even soothing, and before we knew it we had survived the worst of the crossing.  The cute and dark boatman (remember him?)  was with us all the way back.  While Ronald looked dazed at Dumaguete slowly yearning into shape in the distance, I was secretly flirting with the fantasy that should the boat capsize at midsea the handsome boatman would rescue me ahead of everyone else.  I knew this was being selfish and all, but what could I do?  While boarding he _did_ look my way and he _did_ throw me a smile and I _did_ smile back in between sneezing and blowing my nose into a chrysanthemum wad of Kleenex somewhere in the middle of the calm Siquijor sea...

We would stay in Dumaguete one more day before flying back to Manila with, as it would turn out, the rest of the writing fellows.  Of course, we made sure we ate _tuyok manok_ one last time, and that we lingered on the boulevard on our last night.  I remember sitting on the concrete ledge looking at the cute boys promenading by, regretting that nothing spectacular had really happened to me in this trip—except perhaps that splendidly faggoty sunrise in a cove aptly called Hidden Paradise. 

Oh well, there's always next year, and our country will always have its share of boatmen and islands and maritime tragedies.  I can always founder close to doom some other overcast day in the grip of some other deep blue sea, just before strong and dusky arms sweep up from under me, enfold me and never let me go. 

##   _Leyte on my mind_

_I_ T'S SEMESTRAL BREAK in my university and I just spent a whole week in Leyte, as part of the UP National Writers workshop.  The Creative Writing Center of which I am an associate designated me and Jun Cruz Reyes to be members of the workshop panel, together with four other writers from the Visayas: Merlie Alunan from Tacloban (she was also the workshop director); Paloma Sandiego from Cebu; Vic Sugbu from Tacloban; and Timothy Montes, who is currently taking up law while teaching literature at the Silliman University in Dumaguete City. 

We were billeted at the MacArthur Park hotel in the town of Palo, located a few kilometers south of Tacloban City.  The fellows from Luzon, together with Jun, CWC representative Carla Pacis and myself, had arrived sometime in the afternoon of that brilliant Sunday, and the first thing we did was to order seafood at the hotel's _alfresco_ restaurant.  Carla had _kinilaw na tanigue_ while I ordered _hinatukan na lapu-lapu_.  Both dishes were superb, not the least of all because of the extra-rich sauce of coconut milk and spices in which our generous portions of fish swam.  While we were stuffing ourselves silly, the sea lapped calmly out in front of us.  Carla and I would repeat this ritual several times in the next few days, sampling practically all the seafood on the menu. 

Our rooms were big and cozy.  I stayed with Tim and Jun, while Carla roomed in with Merlie, Pal and Alice (a fellow of the workshop, who teaches at the Visayas College of Agriculture or VISCA, whose beautiful campus we would visit sometime toward the end of the week).  I had no problems sleeping that night, and it struck me as strange since I usually am _namamahay_ for the first two or three days after arriving at a new place.  Come to think of it, however, the sea that overwhelmed everything in our hotel—for there was just so much of it: stretching up and down the length of the beach and across to Samar that painted itself different colors toward sunset, and flowing out of sight into the infinity of the Pacific to the right of one's thirsty gaze—is no longer a new place to me or to anyone.  As Carla had said, the hazel in her eyes becoming slightly darker in the pale of our first twilight on the island: the sea is our home.  And as she muttered this, bats whirred above us, flying in a V-formation out over the darkening waters toward the distant hills. 

Most of the sessions were held in a function room of the hotel, just beside a kiddie-sized pool whose shape none of us could account for. ( On the other hand, we all got the rationale behind our rooms' keyholders looking like a pipe—in homage to the tobacco-puffing habits of the one who kept his promise to return).  The fellows, all fifteen of them, were characters in their own right: Totoy, the Waray poet who fancied himself official photographer of the workshop; Bong, erstwhile _kadre_ who rarely spoke; Charlie, Cebuano fabulist who was given to romantic brooding and singing when in the company of women; Adonis, Cebuano poet who gave the hotel's dance instructors (yes!  the Warays are into ballroom-dancing too!)  a run for their money; Ven, Cebuano engineer-fictionist and the "anointed one" of the workshop; Rey, Franciscan brother-poet and eternal child; Nancy, short story writer and reigning Ms. Deprivation (a private joke); Randy, one-gay variety show and all-around performer; Ronald, softspoken fairy and upcoming poet-cum-fashion designer from Cebu; Sem, poet and misanthrope (well, not completely); Me-ann, playwright and disaster-controller; Mang Tem, cheery Cebuano bard and lothario; Alice, English teacher and poet; Bang, slogan-shouting _Bulakeña;_ and Shelfa, activist-fictionist and keeper of a mysterious and beautiful pain. 

Merlie had arranged our accommodations, and she did a tremendous job of it.  We were fed really well: three heavy meals, two sumptuous snacks daily.  Our lodgings were clean and well-maintained, and I found this a bit surprising since I knew that MacArthur Park is a government-run facility.  As panelists, we took turns moderating the sessions, but soon enough there was hardly any need for us to do this, the fellows having bonded well enough to enable them to criticize one another's works without coyness or qualms. ( Unlike the panelists, they were mostly nice!)  There were intrigues brewing among them, we'd occasionally hear, but since I wasn't a fellow, I never really knew what these were. 

I could only think back to my own time (which wasn't too long ago, mind you!),  in particular, my first workshop in Dumaguete in the summer of 1990.  My batch must be the faggotiest Dumaguete's ever seen, with only two genital females and one straight male whom many of us ended up lusting after.  The only trouble was—the guy was a priest!  And I could only imagine how this poor man of God had one hell of a time trying to catch some sleep inside our sultry dormitory bedroom that throbbed all throughout the evenings with unrequited desire. ( Of course, I am merely being presumptuous here—while still a seminarian, this priest must have slept and lived under basically the same conditions, after all). 

I saw the sunrise on our second day.  I woke up just as it was beginning to get light (I could tell from the way the squares of the _capiz_ window beside my bed were turning increasingly opalescent with every passing minute).  I walked to the beach with my walkman, sat on the sand and sensed the day unfolding before me: the early morning joggers working up a sweat running along the water's edge, the sparrows chirruping in the canopy of flowering branches over my head, Mang Tem taking an early morning dip, and Totoy composing a shot.  And the sea was simply being itself as the sun emerged piecemeal from behind the jagged mountains of Samar until all of a sudden it turned warm and yellow everywhere. 

All the while I was listening to an album by Deep Forest (a rather strange collection of tribal chants mixed with synthesizer dance music, which Ralph had given me before I left for this trip).  Memory inhabits the senses.  This I learned after Dumaguete.  And I also learned there is a way to pin down memory and give it a name.  There is a way to call memory as one pleases, and memory has no choice except to answer.  In other words, I discovered there is a way to trigger memory, and it is by enfolding it in sound.  Tracy Chapman's "Crossroads" takes me back to Dumaguete; "Elemental" by Loreena Mckennitt restores me to the pristine coves of Siquijor; and sitting on the sands of Leyte that blessed morning, I knew I'd be damned if I couldn't revisit this sunrise when I got back to the wasteland that is Manila. 

We could've stayed in the hotel for the entire week, but Merlie knew better: workshops are just as much about art as about life, and she saw to it that we "experienced" Leyte in the little time that we had.  She took us around.  First, we went to San Juanico bridge, the "beauty and pride of Samar and Leyte," where we had a photo opportunity on its dizzying and panoramic crest.  Then we went to VISCA in Baybay, a seaside town almost opposite Tacloban on the map.  We held one session there, in the company of some of the campus' English teachers.  This is a gorgeous place, I must say: the campus literally sprawls from the mountains to the sea, complete with forest reserves and rice fields in which students of forestry and agriculture can practice what they learn in the classroom.  Toward the end of the day, our party gave a poetry performance for the high school students who were beside themselves with glee as several fellows and panelists read their naughty love poems in Filipino, Waray and Cebuano.  Tim was a revelation: he charmed the girls with his looks and his candor.  Jun, who had been feeling tired and worn out by all the sessions, later conceded that seeing those young people responding resoundingly to the reading of poetry made the whole trip worth the effort.  Thinking back to those students' toothsome faces, I could only agree. 

The next day, we attended the first of two celebrations of MacArthur's Leyte landings in Dulag, Tolosa town.  The affair, graced by Leyte's lady governor and workshop sponsor, was held at the foot of Hill 120, which the American soldiers needed to capture before the major contingents of MacArthur's fleet could land safely elsewhere on the island.  It ended just as the rain started to pour. ( According to the _barangay_ captain's wife, this was the exact same weather that obtained in the place the day of the landing).  Later that day, Merlie took some of us to Basey in Samar (yes!—over the bridge once more!)  to see the matweavers.  We didn't see any, but that was fine because we did get to see something curious: a tropical Baroque house of a woman who sold mats.  From outside, the house didn't look much.  But its living room, viewed more closely from the window beside the balcony, revealed itself to be quite extraordinary: not a single square-inch of space was left vacant, as stuffed toys, doilies, lampshades, curtains, furniture, appliances, and all sorts of gaudy urban appurtenances cluttered the view from ceiling to floor.  And overlooking all of this were portraits of children who had made it in life: capped and garbed in graduation togas, they proudly declared that this family had indeed arrived.  Meantime, outside, roosters crowed, hens clucked and turkeys scratched about the dirty and narrow streets. 

This "journal" wouldn't be complete if I didn't mention two other things.  First: I saw the Rose of Tacloban, La Imelda herself, sashaying around the hotel the Sunday we left for Manila (which was the day all of Leyte celebrated the 52nd anniversary of a promise well kept).  Carla and the others had gone to Tacloban to buy _muron_ (a kind of chocolate-flavored _suman_ ), _pastillas_ , and other goodies to serve as _pasalubong_ when we got back to Manila, and some of the other fellows had already taken the boat back home.  I, on the other hand, was trying to kill some time milling about the hotel lobby which was packed to overflowing with guests.  A cultural program was in earnest.  As I was beginning to examine more closely the material of the _saya_ that the dancers were wearing, from a distance I saw her.  She was resplendent: her elegant floral gown was clearly a cut above the rest.  A perfect pompadour rose gracefully over her head.  I hadn't realized she was so tall!  Almost as tall as me, in fact, as we walked past each other somewhere in the back of the hotel's main hall.  Up close it was clear that she was no longer very young and had put on some weight.  But still, she was like an apparition who commanded respect from everyone, if only because of the confident manner in which she carried herself (not to mention her divine clothes!). 

Second: I have to register a specific demurral against criticisms that are purely formalist in orientation.  I am saying this because of the realization I made while serving as a panelist in this workshop.  Jun and I share the opinion that writing is a political act that makes sense only in the context in which it occurs.  This was made clearer to me while going through the manuscripts in this batch: there were poems that we discussed which a creative writing teacher would have straightaway dismissed as lacking merit: too much incoherent imagery, obscure allusion, lack of focus.  But these very same poems, I instinctively knew, were attempting to confess something vital about who wrote them, about _what they are really about_ : they were gay poems whose under- and overwrittenness were perfectly understandable, given the delicacy of their message and the repressive conditions in which it was meant to be delivered.  And so, for these works, I attempted a reading that largely glossed over the clutter of their form, in order to make better sense of them.  When it was their authors' turns to speak, my instinctive reading was confirmed. 

I guess all I'm saying here is that to limit one's appreciation of a poem to its craftedness (or lack of craftedness) may also be to limit one's understanding of the functions of poetry.  For many aspiring or beginning gay writers, poetry (or art) cannot be but a form of personal expression (and liberation).  And so long as society cannot be completely open to this form of expression (or to this form of liberation), gay poems and stories cannot be but different from those expressions which are perfectly harmless and easy to make. 

Still, I enjoyed the workshop.  And of course, I enjoyed Leyte.  I left something of my own (a hair brush) there.  Some people say this means I'll be going back soon.  I sure hope so. 
|   **_three:_ **  |   **_Truth-tellings_ **   
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|  |   

##   _Gay and Catholic_

_T_ HE HOLY WEEK served to remind us just how Catholic we are.  Perhaps, more than any other place in the world, the Philippines celebrates Lent with remarkable piety and pomp: with rituals, processions, crucifixions, and self-flogging enough to make the foreigner drop his jaw in amazement, or shake his head in disbelief.  These mark us off from the rest of the Christian world because they are outward displays of religiosity, at a time when quiet contemplation would seem to be the more desirable mode of devotion to take. 

Our seemingly great obsession with images of glorious suffering is something Catholicism found most endearing about us.  When the Spanish introduced their religion into our islands four-hundred something years ago, they hardly had to placate us.  They taught us the story of Christ, the God-Man who came down from the heavens to suffer for our sake.  And our ancestors understood.  More than that, suffering was something they may have secretly desired on themselves, as such would make them like the white-man's God.  The first native, Catholic prayers are in fact the lyric narratives detailing the passion and death of Christ: the _pasyon_.  And the _pasyon_ became so popular among the masses that when finally a few native men and women decided that they had had enough of their Spanish overlords, they borrowed the language of their rebellion from the _pasyon_. ( And many of their rebellions failed—probably because in the end Christianity, being transcendental, can only yield defeatist texts). 

Holy week also got me thinking about just how Catholic I am.  And this is not something I can help: my childhood, come to think of it, was filled with so much religious fervor that I can only echo it in my present life.  Specifically, in my poetry. 

My earliest poems were about the saints, Jesuses and Marys that crammed my waking—and even sleeping—days as a child in a very pious household.  My maternal grandparents, who stayed with my family ever since I can remember, taught me to value my faith in palpable ways: to sing it, to recite it, to flaunt it.  They collected a menagerie of religious images, with which I became slavishly fascinated.  I was like a child stolen by these icons and sombre-faced likenesses that peopled my world.  When I learned to play with modeling clay, my first and last figurines were precisely miniaturized versions of the crucifix, the Virgin of Lourdes, the _Nazareno_ , and the _Santo Niño_.  I was especially fixated on the Holy Child, and only recently did I realize that the reason for this was that I was actually identifying myself with the image of the _Santo Niño_ who, like me, I fancied a sissy: he doesn't look boyish at all, what with those long lashes and golden locks, the pink-rouged cheeks and ruby-red lips!  I wanted to be the like him was why I fashioned so many clay versions of him, using my sissy, nimble fingers. 

When my grandmother died, three years after my _lolo_ , I turned even more spiritual: youngest of the family's _apo_ , I somehow ended up closest to them, and was their shameless favorite.  And when they, three years apart, passed away, death touched me, much more deeply than it did my siblings and cousins: I wanted to die, too, to be with my grandparents who loved me.  But early death eluded me, and so instead I became a _sacristan_ , joined the choir, and thought myself bound for the priesthood.  In hindsight, I only turned more and more religious because of my desire to avoid getting teased a _bakla_ by the neighborhood's roughish boys, who never really managed to make me one of their own.  And because by staying close to God I thought I might ever be close to my _lolo_ and _lola_ whose spirits—I was convinced—hovered over me and kept me happy and safe. 

It must have been in high school when I finally decided that I was different from the boys of my childhood, who kicked and punched and roughhoused one another silly: like my newfound friends, I realized I was gay (and that I can never be a priest because I enjoyed my newly discovered sexuality too much!).  This epiphany happened to us not because we turned one another gay, but because together we finally were able to put to rest our common doubts, and vowed to face up to the consequences of this realization.  We excelled in school, suffice it to say.  And this made us impervious to the attacks of our school's intolerant heterosexual majority, who got a kick out of bashing just any old gay they happened to bump into.  We weren't that, to be sure: not being just any old gays, we gloried in our collective pride, and even bullied the boys who weren't half as bright or popular as we were. 

But since my high school was a Catholic one, I never lost touch with my obligations as a believer either.  If anything, our being exemplary meant that we had to lead our classmates to the path of holiness.  And the strange thing is, we were doing that rather well: despite being avowedly gay (we had crushes who knew that we liked them—and I must believe that some of them liked us back), we were the perennial conduct awardees, and served as lector during mass, sang in the choir, etc.  There was hardly any conflict between our sense of who we were (males who were sexually attracted to other males), and what our theology classes taught us we should be (anything but who we were, basically).  I have often wondered just why this was so. 

And I wonder, too, just how come other gays I came to know much later in life didn't seem to have enjoyed their adolescence as much as my friends and I did.  It must be because they were alone, or felt like they were alone: I must admit our being a relatively big group gave us some measure of (imagined) power over the rest of the high school population.  And when I think of it, being gay and alone must be the worst fate anybody can have in this life.  To know one's demonic difference is hard enough, but being the only who knows about it makes it all the harder. 

I have a feeling that I can be confidently gay and Catholic because the kind of Catholicism I grew up in wasn't dogmatic about anything: like the devout Church-going usurer (or corrupt politician) in our society, I can continue being myself at the same time that I profess my faith in all sincerity. ( Of course, this analogy is false because being gay isn't like being a usurer or corrupt politician at all!)  I look around me and see basically the same thing: the faith healers and soothsayers hawking their wares in front of the Quiapo church, the blood-weeping image of the Virgin of Agoo, the dancing sun, the miraculous in almost every little thing... they are proof of our ability to make our faith follow our needs, perhaps because our needs, being always human, can only be of a piece with our spiritual nature.  Or perhaps, because Catholicism was never really understood by us, we have been able to make it understand us for a change.  And so, the native revolutionaries rose up in arms against the Spanish _frailes_ and _governador-generales_ , quoting passages from the _pasyon_ , with pig-Latin inscriptions on pieces of paper plastered fervidly on their chests. 

I end this column with a note on suffering.  And how gay suffering can be perfectly heroic, in keeping with the spirit of the "passionate" times.  This is a poem I wrote around four years back.  It's a prose poem, actually, and in it I try to explain why Lent bears heavily down on its persona, who is out to get the ashen cross rubbed onto his forehead, but ends up getting weighed down by something else instead. 

####  _Ash Wednesday_

> There is a cross yearly staked in the mind and people, remembering their own graves, carry it in earnest.  Their heads weighed down are stayed by thoughts of the Passion that is come: planks of wood propped up on a Skull; nails riveting hands and feet; of thorns, a crown; water and blood drawn forth by a spear which stoked septuple a mother's great, inflaming heart, etc.  It is, of course, the season of passion.  The coolth is gone from mornings as people show their warmth by wearing more the body than its cloth.  The Pontius Sun is let to pass sentence on skins bared impassioned to its cat-o'-nine rays.  And _this_ becomes their mortification. 
> 
> I repent with them, then, this day: people on whose faces the season casts the cruciform shadow of consecrated ash, that brings to bear on me much more than my own mortal load.  As I heft the cross of death upon my forehead I carry not just this body's burden of dust to dust, ashes to ashes; but agonying in the skimpy shorts and hanging shirts of boys crucified in earnest to their summer's passions, I fall the fourth time under the terrific weight of mine. 

##   _Volleyball memories_

_N_ EARLY A MONTH ago, a local paper carried a story in the sports section about the disqualification by Thailand's national sports committee of male-to-female transvestites from the national volleyball team.  This news article got me thinking about my own volleyball memories—and why so many gays have them. 

Obviously, it isn't true that gays in the Philippines—or perhaps gays anywhere—are so physically debilitated by their effeminacy that they cannot possibly excel in sports.  Of course, I speak here of only one kind of gays—the overt, effeminate kind—because, if I have to be strict about it, there most certainly are more gays than are immediately recognizable or commonly avowed, and thus there are gays just about everywhere and everytime there are straights. ( Sexuality being the fluid and ever-shifting thing that it is, the straight/gay divide is largely illusory, after all).  In any case, I feel it is worth investigating why despite the preponderance of the macho myth about gayness' inherent lack of substance and strength, limp-wristed gays in our country find themselves in the forefront of at least one form of athletic competition (volleyball).  And weak and ineffectual athletes they are not. 

I don't believe gays have an exclusive claim to volleyball.  All I am willing to say here is that I have observed how they seem to overrun this field of sports.  And this observation may hold true for the grass-roots of our society as well as for the middle and upper middle classes.  How do I know these things for sure?  Well, I don't think any social scientist has found this topic of such interest that he/she had to undertake a study of it: I don't believe there are any available figures to bolster this claim.  But, dear readers, let us be honest and think back on how many times we have seen _bakla_ volleyball players flaming gloriously in inter- _barangay_ and interschool competitions. ( Or, dear _gay_ readers: let us be frank and admit that we played volleyball rather well sometime during our heyday—and how we loved hitting that ball over that wonderful net using the very same limp wrists for which we were collectively ridiculed as children!) 

Looking back on my strangely remote youth—I'm not far removed from it, to be sure, but just now the ghost that I was appears rather strange and inscrutable to the ghost that I am—I am surprised at how physically active I was as a teenager.  I roller skated, skateboarded, biked.  And certainly, I played volleyball: as a hobby, initially, and then, during high school, as a more serious sport. 

I wasn't a very good volleyball player.  My friends were better—so much better.  I could spike but I wasn't a spiker.  I did blocks more than any other move (being invariably the tallest in the group), and tossed.  What I want to call forth now are those memories of how much gayness was put into our games—by my team as much as by our opponents', as well as by those gays who established themselves both through the excellence of their volleyball skill and the _style_ with which they flaunted it.  Indeed, it amazes me that gays can be themselves with so much flamboyant impunity at the same time that they prove themselves peerless in athletics, which of course runs contrary to what common wisdom says on the matter.  In other words, I find it a wonderfully _affirming_ thing that there is something Filipino gays can be excellent at—other than doing hair, designing clothes, putting on makeup or being outrageously funny. 

It mattered so much to me that I proved myself good at volleyball because it was an official sport in my school, and because almost all my friends were good at it.  My friends and I didn't make it to the varsity team—we were just too engrossed in academics, I suppose, to be able to devote time and energy to such extra-curricular pursuits.  But we played in the intramurals competitions, and were not ashamed to use female names on the back of our shirts. ( I was "Carmel"—a moniker that sounds a little queer and androgynous, I realize just now).  We advanced to the semi-finals but before we could move further we lost to an admittedly superior, more faggoty team whose players let their fingers fly in the air while screaming in a shrill, grating voice everytime they jump-served or spiked: we got distracted pretty much of the time and ended up stretching the straps of our bras to their snapping point trying to run after the softly falling ball. ( Our opponent was into doing dinks a lot—and this we hadn't realized until it was too late). 

I remember watching the interschool volleyball competitions with my friends one day—just to see what tactics there were that could be learned.  Instead, we were treated to the gayest display of athletic prowess and bitchery between my school and this varsity team coming from a lower-class community parochial school tucked somewhere in the ghettoes of Tondo.  Our varsity team was composed of statuesque beauties who all had their hair done one way (teased and coiffed in a small pompadour), but were nonetheless very _colegiala_ in their manners, keeping their arms close to their sides, not opening their mouths unnecessarily, and maintaining a generally calm composure throughout all the games that they had played and won.  The visitors, on the other hand, were all grotesquely muscular and dark-skinned, loud-mouthed and garish faggots, their tightly fitting uniforms of the screaming neon kind, and their hair dyed an outlandish pink or peroxide blonde and hairsprayed stiff into Mohawks.  They also were quite boorish and vulgar, shaking their butts at us whenever they scored, and screaming invectives at the court official when they disagreed that their ball was out of bounds, or that their feet crossed the line under the net, or whatever else. 

By contrast, our school's varsity gays, just like me and my friends, were by and large gentle and mild-mannered fairies.  But soon they found themselves needing to match the enemy's chutzpah, coming up with their own flaming gestures and letting their hair down—till it reached their pink-socked ankles, so to speak.  We in the audience found ourselves engaging as well with the enemy's own rowdy cheering squad, which was being led by a monstrous-looking faggot with a Tina Turner coif and dressed in shabby, technicolor rags with tinsel pumps, who swished shamelessly and screamed out his lungs at us.  We tried to keep our cool, but before long someone from our side came up with a hastily composed cheer that cast aspersion on the enemy's school—and how _cheap_ it was.  The game, on the other hand, was heating up, for despite themselves, the squealing volleybelles from Tondo were quite good.  Their wallops and spikes were powerful enough to send their receiver pirouetting like a ballerina who didn't know what hit her.  At first, this posed a problem to our players, but after several substitutions, they got their act together and started bouncing back, much to our relief. 

The captain ball of the other side had the ugliest mouth on the planet—it cussed the loudest and pouted thick, orangutan lips in the process.  Our school's captain ball, on the other hand, was one of the most girlish members in her team, standing tall and pretty and looking every bit like a lady. ( Her gorgeous boyfriend was in attendance, a rumor had said; but she knew better than point him out us, lest some snaky little faggot's fingers start doing the walking to steal him from under her very nose).  After a particularly bitter altercation that had something to do with someone's bungled nose-job, and by the end of the second set, it was agreed that the captain of the enemy team had to be punished for her ugliness.  By the time the third set ended, all our spikers had sent their strongest and most ballistic balls right smack-dab into those repugnant monkey-lips of hers that must have swelled some more from all that passionate pounding. 

I don't think I want to talk about who won that game. ( It's just too painful—our scholastic pride was hurt, but not, in hindsight, our gay pride).  In our society, basketball is perceived as a straight sport. ( We always knew it wasn't, but let's not tell anyone this—straights are entitled to their own delusions, anyway).  Volleyball, on the other hand, is most definitely gay territory hereabout—or at least from the grass roots level up to, perhaps, the municipal level.  For just like the case in Thailand, I don't think our national sports officials can bring themselves to approve of flaming _bakla_ players representing our country at the Southeast Asian games, without at the same time feeling queasy with unease. ( On the other hand, there are _bakla_ who don't flame at all, and they most likely are already part of the national teams in the different sports—but let's not tell anyone this either). 

The fact that volleyball has come to be a _de facto_ gay sport in the Philippines only means that despite the vigorous and heartfelt denials of many, our society _does_ allow all its different members their own little quirks, their own little havens, their very own "moments in time," in which they can realize their potentials and become fully themselves. 

Does this imply that the straights in our midst have finally learned the valuable lesson of acceptance?  Maybe not.  I think it's just the way things simply, irrevocably, are. 

##   _Three hours in a seminary_

_S_ OMETIME LAST WEEK, I spent three hours in a seminary. 

Around a month ago, I had received a rather queer request to give a talk "at some future date" to a group of seminarians.  Although I was admittedly intrigued by this invitation, I had no intentions of honoring it, and was almost hoping the one who had extended it to me would recur to his senses soon enough and forget all about the unthinkable thing. 

But one early morning last week, Bro.  N., one of the seminary's senior students and a discussion leader in theology class, called up the house to remind me about the request.  On pain of ecclesiastical excommunication (more like guilt), and since I had strangely woken up on the right side of the bed, I relented and accepted the invitation.  But there was a catch: the subject under which I'd be speaking wasn't going to be "Deviant Sociology" or "Abnormal Psychology" (or any of their ignominious ilk where I'd often found myself an unwitting specimen in the past), and I was going to take a friend along. 

The friend, of course, was Ricci, who is my dinner partner at least twice a week, and who, like me, has been numbly picking among the ruins of a great and tragically unrequited love.  Needless to say, I thought she and I might benefit from the spiritual benediction and sense of inner peace that being in the company of religious men might bequeath us.  And certainly, I was also intrigued by the idea of sharing supper and engaging with men who were about to become selfless servants of God, puttering about the very place I myself might have ended up in had certain events not taken place in my life (such as the fine, sunny day I looked at the mirror and knew I couldn't possibly be a priest because I enjoyed sex too much).  In other words, I was quite curious of what the pious men of God might ask me, who I feared might have already heard that I was some devil-inspired "gay guru" teaching all sorts of perversions in a heathen school nearby. ( This, of course, turned out to be nothing like what they thought of me—and God was I relieved!) 

Bros. N. and B. picked us up at the Faculty Center around 7 p.m. After a half-hour drive, we reached the Formation House and Theology School.  A pale gibbous moon hung in the sky, and we could barely make out the lay of the land inside the sprawling, tree-rimmed compound which must be around a couple of hectares wide.  What we readily noticed, however, was the quietness of the place: despite the fact that a national rode fronted it, and that all around the compound's perimeter were residential houses, the seminary itself seemed miraculously shut off from the noise of the outside world.  The incense-borne ambiance of an inner sanctum filled the compound and rendered it otherworldly in the lunar half-light. 

Our hosts took us to the dining hall, just outside of which was a spacious receiving area with two fully lit 100-gallon aquariums in which solemnly swam—what else?—lace-finned angelfish.  Our meal was simple but satisfying (in fact, was satisfying precisely because it was simple): fried fish and _ginisang munggo_.  For desert I asked Brother B. if they had any papayas around—actually, if the seminary had a papaya plantation somewhere in the backyard, as was the lore.  Brother N. said they would have wanted one, but the soil in the area didn't permit it, thereby making it necessary for the seminary to requisition its daily quota of the libido-reducing fruit from the public market. 

Brother B. added that, fortunately enough, their papaya diet was available only in the mornings (he personally disliked it, I think).  Sensing my dismay, he held out his hand and proferred instead a big, golden-yellow banana which he had twisted off from the bunch that lay on the center of the table.  The next few moments proved torturous, for I couldn't help thinking how provocative I must look eating this long, gracefully arched and compromising fruit.  I was embarrassed and felt strangely girlish, despite myself. 

After dinner, Bros. N. and B. took us to the seminary auditorium, located on the second floor of what must look like a perfectly regular school building in the daytime (now it seemed more sacrosanct than that).  I was surprised to see that there were around twenty seminarians already waiting for me.  This wasn't the kind of crowd I'd imagined when I agreed to speak before "a class of theology majors."  But there they were, and there I was, trying my best to feel and look relaxed (which was impossible, since my heavy sweating gave me away), and desperately composing my thoughts (which shouldn't be too radical or corrupting, I decided, lest I banish myself to hell then and there!).  I began by confessing—I was _that_ desperate to be appropriate—my ulterior motives: I had come to advertise the launching of my book on Philippine gay culture (which happens on 2 September, 5 p.m. at the UP Faculty Center), and to indulge a long-forgotten fascination with the very life I had wanted for myself years and years ago. 

I had to get the discussion going and so I began to rattle off the implications of the Catholic Church's current (ethical) stand on the issue of homosexuality, namely, that while the homosexual person may not be blamed for having a homosexual orientation, he or she nonetheless remains culpable for committing homosexual acts which are objectively disordered and inherently evil.  I explained how this idea that split the person from his or her actions had enjoyed a relatively long career in Christianity, originating from St. Augustine's privative theory of evil (which denied evil any reality or essence, inasmuch as it was unthinkable that evil and good were one and the same), and becoming formalized as a sex-negative dogma by Thomas Aquinas, the patron saint of the school whose product I was. 

This, I now realize, was the most boring part of my talk, since I must have sounded more pedantic than I would have wished.  In fact, I ended up sounding anything but pedantic towards the conclusion of that "sharing session," inasmuch as the questions I ended up receiving were just so human they demanded answers which had to be grounded on a life that had been lived, not merely imagined. 

How has my being Catholic been affected by my homosexuality?  was a question that yanked me out of the philosophical mode that I had initially adopted.  I admitted readily that my religious upbringing and my being gay were intimately related, but unlike what might be expected, they did not cancel each other out at all. 

In truth, I have found so much comfort and understanding from my religion for my homosexuality, and this was because I never really experienced Catholicism as a prohibitive, doctrinal force in my life, but only as a ritualistic, formal presence that never failed to evoke for me the scent of votive candles, the sound of my grandmother's "Ave Maria" murmured every night before we slept in her warm and narrow bed, the beautiful, long-haired images of the Virgin Mary and the other graceful saints hovering over my little life, the epicene and long-suffering God nailed to a majestic and gleaming cross, whose glorious suffering I knew rather early on was going to be my own _someday_. 

My religion had never been characterized by dogma, but by ceremonies, sounds and symbols that provided me satisfaction for a very basic need: as a sissy child raised in a devout household, I discovered that religiosity could offer me refuge from the ridicule of neighborhood boys.  I was effeminate, but so was, I thought, the limpwristed, pink-cheeked, and long-haired Santo Niño with whom I childishly identified and to whom I became especially devoted.  As a pious sissy who wore a number of scapulars around his neck, and who owned a whole drawerful of novenas and _istampitas_ , I felt impervious to the insults of an intolerant community.  The death of my grandparents, three years apart, also introduced me to the reality of an afterlife, and of spirits like my _lolo_ and _lola_ whom I knew were always around to help me every time I felt sad and needed consolation.  It was a charmed childhood I led, come to think, for it was one that embraced the world and its mysteries with the simplest and most needy of faiths. 

This ability to negotiate my desires with my religion, I understood later in my life, is not possible for homosexual men who grew up evangelical or Protestant, for their religiosity is largely grounded on the rigidity of scriptural readings rather than the provisionality of ritual.  Catholics, on the other hand, are never really expected to memorize biblical passages, since for many of us, faith is simply a matter of performing our many pieties at the end of every week, during which we partake of a communal rite that imposes rhythm (and thus, order) on an otherwise unpredictable and chaotic life.  Faith is largely form, rather than content, I told my audience of discerning theologians, and the substance of one's faith cannot possibly be realized except through palpable rituals, performed symbols and solid sacramentals from which people seek and derive satisfaction for a multiplicity of human needs, many of which the Church would likely be shocked if only it were fully cognizant of what they were. ( As an aside, I told them the story of three gay friends who had asked the patron saints of their schools for lovers.  Before long, the heavenly intercessors were able to deliver, and my friends had never been more religiously devoted since). 

Someone wanted to know if I had ever been in a relationship that was as meaningful as a heterosexual relationship.  I didn't get the question at first—maybe because I couldn't agree with what it presumed: that only heterosexual relationships were meaningful.  After a while, however, I finally appreciated the intention of the query, and my response was, yes, I had had two special relationships in the past, both of which badly hurt when they ended.  I added, however, that length of time did not necessarily invest more meaning into a relationship, for the fullness of a life (and a love) can sometimes be lived in a minute, and conversely, a marriage of a lifetime can sometimes end up bitterly and feeling completely devoid of meaning. 

There were a number of other questions that I received from my audience of would-be priests.  I cannot put all of them here.  Some of the more memorable ones were: Do you agree that allowing gays to marry will eliminate the problem of homosexual promiscuity?  Are gays part of the Third Sex?  What can I say about gays who think they are women trapped in men's bodies?  Are all gays effeminate, and are all effeminate men gays? 

My answers, respectively, were: No, marriage has not prevented straights from sleeping around—why should it work for homosexuals? ( Or, come to think of it, why should promiscuity be that much of problem anyway?)  Gays are not part of the "third sex" if by the word "sex" is meant genitals (I remember saying that I hoped my genitals weren't so extraordinary as to constitute a third category!)  On the other hand, sex shouldn't be tied to genitals alone, methinks, but may even be anything one would wish it to be: sometimes, I think my sex is "flower," or "sea," or even "star."  Why shouldn't anyone be allowed to think he is a woman trapped in a man's body?  I sometimes think I'm a dog, or a cat, or an angel trapped in a man's body, and Ricci, the only genitally female person in the audience, is convinced she is a mermaid despite her legs.  Not all gays are effeminate, and not all effeminate males are gay.  In fact, sexual orientation is not located anywhere on the body (there is no gay nose, straight mouth, gay waist or straight buttocks).  It is not found in acts either, since there are men who have sex with each other and think nothing of it afterward.  The truth is, sexuality is most probably to be found in one's feelings and thoughts—and who can tell just what everybody feels or thinks every single moment of his or her life? 

I think the last thing I said was this: gays are as perfectly capable of goodness (and badness) as straights.  One's sexual orientation, finally, shouldn't be _that_ important.  It becomes important only when people become so foolish as to take it against one another.  Finally, I don't think anyone should think too much of homosexuality—or heterosexuality, for that matter—unless he or she is prepared to make it a defining feature of his or her life. 

Ricci and I left that seminary feeling sanctified.  For her it was a chance to relive her magical childhood with the nuns in St. Scholastica's, Bacolod.  For me, it was an opportunity to glimpse the life I could have ended up having, and to experience the brilliant joy of realizing how despite or precisely because of who I ended up becoming, I had found my way to my own beatific vision nonetheless. 

##   _A dinner conversation_

_W_ HEN ROBBIE ASKED me last night to meet him in Megamall for dinner tonight, I knew he wanted to talk.  Dinners are always less about the eating and more about the conversation.  I didn't have to think long and hard about what to say.  After we patched things up between us a month ago and decided that we would give our friendship another try, I've noticed that he has tried much more than I have to do good on this pledge.  I have simply been preoccupied with other things, I guess.  I just don't remember what. 

And certainly Robbie is not the type to be lazing about doing nothing.  I never knew him to be an idler.  In the first place, his boyfriends are always demanding his full (and erect) attentions—and he has had a lot of both.  Sometimes he would have two or three boyfriends at a time, sometimes he would flit from one relationship to another without even enough time between take-offs to forget the other's bodily scents and textures.  We have often wondered about his seemingly inexhaustible libido.  I always put it down to his age: when I was younger I remember being hornier and less inhibited, too.  But a slut I never was.  Neither is Robbie, I think.  Over mineral water and bananas in my office at the Faculty Center, he once explained how his ability to maintain several relationships at a time merely reflects the boundless generosity of his soul.  Such crap.  And to think I may have taught him the art of beating his way around rhetorical bushes when he was still my student in the first gay literature class that I handled years and years ago. ( It seems I've been doing what I do for ages now).  He smiled as I frowned.  I was afraid I might have produced a monster. 

But as I arrive at Gourmet Café for our appointment, I see him looking different from the bright-eyed student who argued his way around anything with boyish panache.  There is something tired and sad about his face.  He smiles as he offers me a seat by the window.  I look out and see the rush-hour EDSA traffic from where I just emerged and feel a little depressed.  We order appetizers.  He wants _crostini_ with olives and pesto.  I ask for _pan con tomato_ , which is really just three pieces of bread with melted cheese, anchovies and sliced-tomato topping.  We both order banana-melon shakes. 

The funny thing about us is that we are always anticipating what the other will say.  Even now, five years into our friendship (not counting the one year we didn't talk to each other—mostly on my account), we haven't changed.  It's comforting to know that somehow.  Just as we are biting into our slices of Italian heaven (we always said we wanted to eat Italians, er, Italian together someday), he instinctively knows what I've been meaning to ask and blurts out that his love life has never been better. 

"So how many lovers do you have now?"  I ask anyway, feeling a little superior that I can always get away with such frank questions only because he wants me to. 

"Just one.  I let go of Albert.  He was getting too close for comfort.  The night I said goodbye he cried all over me.  He sat there sobbing like a little girl who just lost her kitten.  I really felt for the guy but I just had to go."  He looks at me and catches me nibbling on a piece of celery leaf. 

I shoot back, "But I thought you loved Albert.  And who's this guy now?" 

"I don't think I loved him.  I liked him and all—cute as he is.  But he was falling in love with me too much and too fast I panicked.  Mel's the guy I told you about last week.  We met in Cubao.  He's a banker and looks really macho."  He sips his creamy shake and swallows a piece of _crostini_ without even chewing it. 

Unable to keep myself from expressing my disgust, I decide to let go of what will later turn out to be the fulcrum around which we will seesaw with our impassioned opinions for the evening.  I don't regret saying it, since our conversation will have ended up in the same place, seeing as how it's what Robbie has been wanting to tell me for a long time now, and is precisely what he asked me out to dinner for. 

"Why do you seem incapable of loving anyone, Robbie?  Why can't one man be enough for you?" 

There, I've said it, remembering the very same reason I turned cold toward him a year or so ago.  Robbie had been going out with a really dear friend, Arthur.  They had been together for six months and Arthur loved him to bits.  He would talk to me about Robbie and all their plans together for hours over the phone.  Arthur is an artist for whom happiness is a stranger pretty much of the time—the time he met Robbie was the happiest moment of his life.  And when he caught Robbie lying—lying through his teeth about a lot of things, including what he was really doing with Abe, the student he was supposed to be collaborating with on a class project—he fell to pieces.  They split up, but mostly because Robbie had decided to keep Abe and dump Arthur.  I would panic then, talking Arthur out of contemplating suicide on certain moonlit nights.  For a year I couldn't bring myself to forgive Robbie.  He would call and I would pretend it wasn't me who answered and said I was asleep or out of the house or whatever.  When finally I got over my hatred for him—partly because Arthur had, too, recovering in full measure the time he lost sulking for the loss of his love, and returning to the theater scene brimming with energy and enthusiasm for a project involving his tribes people in Pal'awan, with whom he discovered a fuller meaning to life than Robbie might have been decent enough to dole out to him—I decided to talk to him.  He had visited my office after leaving a note on my door, asking to meet with me the next day.  I decided that a year of coldness was enough to send chills down any compulsive liar's spine.  When we met we were deathly quiet at first, as though we had never so much as known each other even casually (for I usually am rather chatty, even with relative strangers).  And then, when he got around to telling me all about his adventures with all sorts of men (and lately, women), I found out that I missed him after all.  An hour of warm and funny stories was enough to restore some semblance of our old friendship.  Like I always said, even to Arthur during the time he was beginning to regret cutting clean from Robbie, friendships only end when they never were in the first place.  It was good that he and Robbie ended up being friends, too. 

The thing is, Robbie represents more than a smart, former-student-who-never-forgot-his-teacher type for me.  He represents someone I would have wanted to be, had I been differently constituted (by nature and nurture both).  He was raised very butch, and takes this comportment to heart.  He has passed himself off as a straight man to so many people in so many different situations that I have sometimes found myself wondering about how nice it must feel to be unobtrusive for once.  My gayness, by contrast, seems fabulously emblazoned on my face and on my every gesture and word.  And although things accrue to one when one is obviously what one is, things are also pushed irreparably beyond one's reach.  When Robbie was picked up by a call boy in Cubao who thought he was also one of his kind, Robbie proved himself heir to an estate of carnality from which I am forever exiled.  My own adventures in the skin trade flashed before my mind as Robbie told me about his part-time hustling and the relationship he had with one of Cubao's most gorgeous rents.  In a culture that values masculinity and scoffs at effeminacy, I realized, I have been the simpering fool.  And I was none the wiser for pretending otherwise.  As Robbie said, in trying to explain why call boys hustle each other (not for money, only for sexual companionship, he insisted): these men give each other the tender loving care and affection that the poor, paying customer will never get.  I thought: how sad for the rest of us, then. 

But tonight I think different about desiring to be in Robbie's butchy shoes.  Here he is, bragging about his latest conquest in butchness' paradise, and showing me a picture of his freshest catch, and yet he looks tired and wasted by the seriality of it all.  I am repelled by him and pity him by turns.  Before I can express one emotion or the other, I find myself saying,

"If I fall in love with someone, I don't think I'll be the first one to fall out of love with him.  I really am consevative, I'm afraid." 

He proceeds to finish his last _crostini_.  And after a few seconds he begins to defend himself.  It's strange, I discover, he may actually want my approval on this matter, something I have no intentions of giving him just yet. 

"I fell in love once.  I followed this man around like a dog.  For weeks I was desperately trying to get him to love me back.  He was going through a spiritual crisis, he said, and left me.  I don't want to be in that same situation again."  There is something wisftul about his expression as he sips the fruity concoction, his second helping. 

"And so promiscuity is the solution?  Do you actually think you can avoid falling in love by sleeping around with and dumping people?"  I am surprised at the bile I feel rising up my throat.  I let go a discreet though still audible burp. 

"You told me that gayness in our culture remains trapped within the male/female binary.  And that campiness is what we should aim for if we want to escape from this hierarchical structure.  I've merely been following your advice, proving myself plural in my relations with my fellow human beings."  He fixes his eyeglasses while fixing his gaze on me. 

"Oh God Robbie!  You don't seem to understand that much of what I say in class must not be taken too seriously!"  I only say this because I am shocked that he should use my own words to justify himself.  After realizing that I cannot possibly believe that I am a liar like him, especially not regarding the things I tell my students, I add, "But see, you don't become campy by being macho.  Camp is basically self-irony, a self-knowledge so devastating that you can bring yourself to be butch only because you know you're also femme, and femme only because you're butch.  And you have not even convinced me that you're butch simply because you leave hearts broken in your wake."  As I say this I think of Arthur, Jake, Carl, James and Albert, picking up the throbbing bits of their hearts all over the kitchen floor. 

"But Neil, don't you think I try to love everyone of them, too?  Believe me, like them I am pained by our parting ways in the end.  It's just that I lose interest soon enough."  He starts with his chicken casserole, while I twirl my _spaghetti a la primavera_ over and over around my fork, suprised at my sudden loss of appetite. 

"But Robbie, you have hurt so many people already!  Aren't you afraid of the karmic debt you're accumulating?  Can't you give it a rest sometimes?  Have you tried purifying yourself with crystals, for instance?"  Just now I remember my dear mermaid-friend Ralph, his cheerfulness and positive ambience, and my own recent fascination with things ethereal, elemental and netherworldly. 

"I can't stop it.  I know I'm not capable of loving anyone—at least, not after my first and only love.  I've not loved any one of my boyfriends since then.  But despite that I have to be in a relationship in order to feel complete."  He looks sadder with every bite of his food, as though he is a lion cub feeding on his first carcass. 

"But don't you see you can't enter and leave relationships without losing bits of yourself in the process?  You inhabit someone else's life for a month and when you leave you don't notice that you've left something of yourself behind.  One of these days you'll discover that there is nothing left of your soul."  I feel myself speaking up for the downtrodden lovers of this man, those he allowed to fall in love with him, only to drop them writhing in the fill of their own empty arms. 

"I'm afraid.  I need something, but I don't know what that something is.  Mel's beginning to love me, I feel.  I'm afraid I'll be leaving him soon." 

There's really nothing I can say.  He has lived too differently from me, and has enjoyed pleasures I can only dream of enjoying.  I admit I have harbored some kind of _ressentiment_ against this friend, but just now I am awakened to the immensity of his fears.  I've never been in the position to dump anyone.  If at all I've always been the one dumped.  All I know is that love scares me, but not because I don't want to be vulnerable, but only because I'm afraid I can't be vulnerable enough for someone to love me. ( Are the two one and same?)  Because I've always been effeminate, wearing my heart on my sleeve is something I'm used to doing.  Robbie, on the other hand, cannot do such a thing without feeling diminished of his masculinity in the process.  I tell him he cannot even enjoy his serial relationships anymore because he has had too many—their spontaneity is lost in their repetitiveness.  He's seen and done it all before.  Without saying a word I know he agrees with me, not because I'm his former teacher, but because he knows it's all true.  Seated across me in this Italian café, he looks worn out and run down.  Albert may have been the better off without him. 

We finish our dinner and go home.  I can't sleep and have to write all this down.  Now I know what preoccupies me: my writing.  It's the one thing that loves and loves, and is not afraid of not being loved back. 

##   _Growing old_

_A_ T TWENTY-SEVEN I don't consider myself old, although a couple of months ago I suddenly felt my body dying: I'd lived in my mind too much, I thought, and to balance things off I took to jogging several times around my campus' tree-lined oval. 

I am amazed I didn't discover the thrill of jogging earlier: it's quite an experience, sensing the cement under your feet propelling you forward, the wind buffeting your body on all sides, the feeling of actual movement and physical (instead of metaphysical) pain.  But other than the obvious cardiovascular and related benefits, running represents for me a line of flight, a method of escape, a metaphorical "running away" from things that hound me: fear and uncertainty, despair, the lack of love.  Panting my way past one gnarled acacia after another, I am almost happy if only because I am almost convinced _I am no longer here_. 

Gays, just like everyone I suppose, sometimes think of growing old.  In fact, we may actually be more obsessed with this topic than most other people or than is healthy for us, since there is really very little in this world that we can look forward to, when bent and grey—and gay.  We have often heard our mothers telling us to "mend our ways" and go straight—marry, have children, grandchildren—since gays don't have anybody to take care of them in their final days.  Although we know better than our mothers think—remembering the potential riskiness of love, and how our grand aunts and uncles were abandoned by their own children in homes for the aged where no one ever visits anymore—we do see her point.  Since marriage is not possible for homosexuals, there is practically no social institution designed to take care of us when we have wizened and mellowed past our prime.  And there is very little in literature or art that we can find comfort or wisdom in, as well. 

Every time this topic crops up, friends generally shoo it away with a drunken pledge never to grow old, either by dying young or accidentally discovering the fountain of youth.  The former option is certainly more realistic than the latter, and indeed I have time and again found myself pondering the context and nature of my death. 

I tell myself that death, unlike life, is something I can choose to have, and that the choice to die may well be the only thing that I can ever do with perfect and absolute freedom.  And I remember that death may be a kinder alternative to life, given the brute fact that this world was not meant for the likes of me. 

But just before I can do anything about this notion, I am jolted back to the mess that is my bedroom and the work at hand, and realize that, maybe, the only reason I think this way is that I'm a poet and find early death romantic. ( And then I remember my first lessons on the morbid laps of Sexton, Plath and Berryman, and begin to doubt whether poetry has not in fact made me more miserable than I already was).  In any case, for me and my friends at least, the future is nothing if not one hazy and frightening prospect, as immense as the sky and its infinite variety, and just as unthinkable. 

An American gay writer whose name I can't remember once said that the gay world is virtually classless.  The homoerotic desire that thrives and is negotiated in the different nooks and crannies of modern gay existence flattens out distinctions between rich and poor.  To a certain extent this holds true for our society as well: in exclusively gay haunts like the many discos in Makati and the cafes in Malate, class distinctions among gorgeous denizens are blurred in favor of other qualities. 

And yet, it is precisely in these very same places that new currencies circulate: beauty and youth.  It has often happened to me and my friends that seeing a _lola_ —a sad-looking and wasted faggot—pathetically trying to cruise boys inside a movie house or a mall, depresses us and makes us hate the fact that we are gay.  Gays can be such ageists, I'm afraid.  But perhaps the distaste we display toward the more elderly of our kind merely reflects our collectively denied fear of ourselves becoming old and unattractive one day.  As we walk past this one _lola_ with the sad and rheumy eyes, we are surprised to see that they are just as bottomless as our own searching gaze, needy and innocent as an infant's. 

Just now I am reminded of Allen Ginsberg, that once-indefatigable pillar of the Beats, whose recent poems and rhapsodic reflections on being gay (and old and alone) are a far cry from the howl of a poet-madman-seer that he used to be during the fifties and sixties.  Ginsberg is perhaps the only gay writer who has written extensively on the subject of homosexual aging, and reading him now—the "him" of his newest poems—can be a strangely funny and painful experience. 

Ginsberg writes about the lovelessness that accompanies senescent gayness in his wistful "Maybe Love":

> _Maybe love will come/ cause I am not so dumb/ Tonight fills my heart/ heavy sad apart/ from one or two I fancy/ now I'm an old fairy... This is hard to say/ I've come to be this way/ thru many loves of youth/ that taught me most heart truth/ Now I come by myself/ in my hand like an old elf...It's not the most romantic/ dream to be so frantic/ for young men's bodies,/ as an old sugar daddy/ blest respected known,/ but left to bed alone...Stealing here & there/ pricks and buttocks bare/ by accident, by circumstance/ Naivete or horny chance/ stray truth or famous lie,/ How come I came to die?...  This can't go on forever,/ this poem, nor my fever/ for brown eyed mortal toy,/ I love a straight white boy./ Ah the circle closes/ Same old withered roses!...  I haven't found an end/ I can fuck & defend/ & no more can depend/ on youth time to amend/ what old ages portend—/ Love's death, & body's end_. 

Indeed, what happens to desire, to _our_ desire, when we grow old?  Do we lose it just before we realize that there is more hair on the bathroom floor than on our own sorry heads?  Does it intensify with the passing of the years, growing richer in texture, more powerful in scent, until perhaps it kills and overwhelms us?  Ginsberg seems to say otherwise.  His persona—always shamelessly autobiographical and poignant—in this poem affirms the presence of his desire despite "love's death & body's end."  I'd like to believe the slow and progressive diminishment of our bodies' substance and strength—the inevitable surrender to gravity of all our vain attempts at transcendence—does not necessarily amount to a diminishment in our ability to want and enjoy pleasure.  As Proust once dramatically put it (and I'm only paraphrasing here): "We know we are still alive because we can still desire." 

There are really only a few pleasures we can seize whole and perfectly in this life.  Sex is one of them.  Gays have never been made to feel that sex should be more than just for pleasure, being that marriage and love (and their legitimating discourse, romance) were never really packaged as things that they remotely deserved.  And indeed, after centuries of oppression, many gays have learned what was so brutally taught them.  Feeding on each other in the cozy darkness of parks and movie houses, they know that sex is not love, and that marriage which has conflated them in myths and fairy tales has, in the end, produced more harm than good in the lives of so many tragic romantic heroes and heroines.  Gays have thrown off the shackles of hypocrisy and accepted, more than anybody, life's essential aloneness, which romance and its many children have managed to disguise. 

Maybe growing old wouldn't be so bad, especially after one has had a lifetime of rehearsal for life's eventual loneliness—and aloneness—from which no one, not even the once-young and/or beautiful, is ever spared. 

##   _Getting Tested_

_1 November 1995_

_E_ _VERDEAREST_ ,

Comes now the time to light candles for the dearly departed.  A week ago I had no idea whether I'd have the courage—or the life—to go through this yearly ritual of strangely festive, macabre remembrance: on 25 October, Wednesday, I had my long-delayed and much-dreaded blood test. 

Why did I decide to have it, finally?  I don't know exactly anymore, only that for the past weeks I'd been getting progressively anxious about my health.  All this anxiety was not new to me, as you very well know.  Still, the thought that I could have been infected in any of the times (not so often, just fitfully periodic) I'd had casual sex, since puberty, came to a head _inside my head_.  After all the comfortings from friends, who assured me that not having been buttfucked more or less exempted me from the likelihood of having contracted this contagion, I nevertheless just had to know. 

The previous semester, in Gay lit.,  I asked my students if they would, should the thought occur to them and should they feel the need to, consider getting themselves tested (a question spurred by the AIDS stories we were taking up in class).  Unknown to them, the question was not hypothetical at all: I was sounding them off on what they thought was the proper thing to do, should they find themselves in the stories' characters' (actually, my) sodden and all but ruined shoes.  Most of them said they wouldn't want to know, as knowing would plunge them inexorably into a downward spiral, a cesspool of dread and pre-mortem dying.  Obviously, last week, I thought otherwise. 

The first thing I realized after going through the whole episode was just how courageous I could be when necessary.  I honestly never knew I could be that brave.  I resolved to do it just that morning, and so I took the cab alone to St. Luke's on the afternoon of that overcast and extraordinarily gloomy Wednesday.  I wanted to lie to the pathologist when he asked for my name—on the way to the hospital I was rehearsing the pseudonym I'd give: _H_ ector _I_ van _V. N_ ava; HIV-Negative, a trick I'd picked up from Alex—but I ended up blurting out my real name by dint of honest habit: I'd always been proud of my identity, and just couldn't go against the grain that textures the inmost layers of the self in whom I'd always tried to keep faith up to that point!  I had to bear the embarrassment of declaring the purpose of my request—"I had a number of encounters and am afraid I may have been infected"—to a perfect stranger. ( Come to think of it, it was infinitely better that way: often it is to strangers that we feel best equipped to bare our souls).  In that short span that I was counseled by that doctor with an antiseptic expression, I realized just how useless all my imagination (as well as the poems it had birthed) was, faced with the irrefutable finitude of my body's life. 

I had long gotten tired of my body.  God knows how often I'd given up on my life.  But it had never occurred to me that I could be so desperate to cling on to life, to the idea of life, to what _being alive_ itself by its very nature means, until then.  Numb to the hypodermic's intrusive entrance into the body that had been myself for the past 26 years, I was surprised at the sight of rich dark blood filling up the ampule that was to cradle it until the resident medical technologist of the lab could add to it the chemical reagents that never tell a lie about what they infallibly know: reactive means the sample has the HIV antibodies; non-reactive means it doesn't.  I could imagine it bubbling inside that ampule for the longest time, and quickly closed my eyes at the thought of my possibly poisoned blood. 

What would I do if I tested positive?  The edges of this question turned most ravagingly jagged that night.  I had to sleep in a room with sisters who had no idea why their _kuya_ wouldn't be visited by the sandman, even as their eyes flickered and raced under lids that were heavy with the pubescent weight of restless, high-school dreams.  A positive result would mean that I brought home, to this very room, to the sheets, the plates, the spoons, to the precious doorstep of the haven that is my family, the seeds of a horrible and unspeakable plague. 

Actually, I couldn't imagine what I'd do in the event of such a diagnosis.  I would have to leave this house, that was for sure.  I just couldn't tell if I should leave it physically (as in move elsewhere, to some other place I'd no idea what or where or how exactly), or leave this plane of existence physically as well as cognitively: that night I entertained the thought of suicide more warmly than I ever had before. 

A negative result, on the other hand, seemed most remote from my mind, even as its presence manifested itself in all the promises I made in between muttering the prayers of the Rosary which I must have said for half-a-dozen times.  I bargained with God, would you believe: no more sex, no more gay radicalism, no more poetry, no more books—things I fiercely cherished in this life, and that I was surprised I would gladly part with in exchange for a clean bill of health.  Actually, not health per se, but the absence of AIDS antibodies in my circulatory system.  It's funny that many of us will gladly welcome a diagnosis of terminal cancer than AIDS, when both are equally terrible, wasting illnesses.  It's even funnier that an otherwise politically self-conscious and relatively intelligent person such as myself could have fallen so short of what his future had promised. 

Why did I prove craven in the face of this adversity?  Where did all my learning—and specifically, gay learning—go?  Why did I turn religiously scheming so quickly and without second thought?  I suppose all the advocacy, all the radicalism, all the gayness I professed in the past must have been just a crock of shit.  Either that or even suicidal poets are actually secretly enamored of life—in fact, are life's greatest lovers whose fanciful thoughts of death occur to them only to the extent that death is life's purest expression upon which it relies in order to exist as a specific reality.  When I returned to St. Luke's the next day I was as pallid as the unremarkable sky.  I had not slept a wink.  My heart was laboriously trying to keep itself from bursting inside my chest. 

Bereft of a companion in whose arms I could possibly collapse at the arrival of tragic news, I practically dragged my way to the lab.  Everywhere in the lobby of the hospital, people were otherwise full of life: doctors, nurses, patients, interns.  Even the visibly afflicted seemed flushed with an inner glow that flickered for a moment and yet burnt on and on.  The world that had driven me to the deepest caverns of solipsistic and poetic retreat, that had so disappointed and repulsed me at its lack of beauty, of sensitivity to beauty, of love, seemed most desirable at that point—yet most uncome-at-able, too.  It's amazing but Auden in "Musee" was correct: tragedy strikes one while the rest of world looks away.  Every glance proved just that: it glanced off me just when I was about ready to confess to it what assaulted my heart and had nearly torn it to shreds.  I have no doubts now that had I been asked by just anybody what my problem was, I would have disclosed everything and more. 

Another reason I got tested when I did must have been because, at that time, I was in the process of reading Christopher Coe's AIDS novel, _Such Times_.  It was a good read; Coe's was the most elegant pen on the planet, for sure. ( He died last year, right after finishing the book).  What I liked most about the novel was its main character's self-immolation in the name of love: Timothy knew it was his lover, Jasper, who had given him AIDS (because he was monogamous and Jasper wasn't), and yet he forgave him and loved him more and more.  Jasper killed himself just before AIDS could.  Timothy wouldn't have done the same because he knew that after sharing one's life with another person for two decades, one no longer possesses complete and inalienable right over it.  One's loved one is entitled to it just as much as one is.  This moved me to tears and tore me up inside, only because I was afraid there was no one who had cohabited my life like that, whose legitimate right over it I would have had to consider before I decided to end it.  I had no Timothy to live for just in case I tested positive and became mortally sick. 

What surprised me was how Timothy or people who have AIDS and have lost their lovers to it manage to go on living despite such reversals.  I became more morbid because of this novel.  I think I would have turned more so had I seen the play "Angels in America" before I had finished reading it.  There was so much AIDS consciousness in the air the few weeks surrounding the decision to get myself tested.  This must have been foreordained, I was afraid.  I just had to see "Angels..." (the reviews and friends' ravings over it were simply irresistible), and the only way to do this was if I knew I could well afford to see it—to suffer the catharsis of it—only because the tragedy of the play was never to be my own, in fact.  I knew there was no way to negotiate around the very clear imperative to confirm or unconfirm my fears.  Admittedly, I wouldn't have known what I'd have done had these fears been confirmed.  But much more unbearable than this lack of imagination for what this particular truth would entail was the lack of knowledge of whether I could even begin to understand anything truthful at all. _ I just needed to know the truth_. 

I thought "Angels in America" was simply perfectly witty and gay.  After seeing it, I had all the desire to write a Filipino gay play that might prove comparable to it some way or other.  Ronald invited me yesterday to give a talk to his Gay and Lesbian Literature Class next week.  I would have to prepare for it lest I slur my words for joy and anticipation of the warm and benevolent sunrise—and the words that would impale it in the heart—that is to come. 

|  _Love,_  
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|  _Neil._ 
|   **_four:_ **  |   **_Queer readings_ **   
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|  |   

##   _Myth and meaning_

_M_ YTHS ARE STORIES about the origin of things.  Every human culture produces myths to survive.  Without myths, there would be no reason for any given form of life to exist, inasmuch as it would have no meaning (being incapable of justifying itself).  Myths articulate what people in a given culture hold sacred, and what they hold profane.  Myths are social values told—and retold—and actually lived out by those who participate in its many tellings.  Myths give human culture its memory, so that nothing of importance ever disappears, as long as there are those who remember what myths are about, and what they say. 

Myths can be classified in a number of ways.  The most common form of classification is the thematic.  Cosmogony myths, for instance, are those that talk about the origin of life, of the universe and the first human creatures.  Not strangely enough, cosmogonies reveal so much about what a particular society thinks about its place in the natural order of things.  And of course, stories of the first human parents can tell us a lot about ourselves as well. 

The Judeo-Christian myth of creation is quite well-known.  God made everything great and small in a span of six days, and on the seventh day He took a rest.  On the sixth day, as well, He created Adam from a lump of clay, and breathed a soul into him.  And then God realized how lonely Adam was, and so he caused him to fall asleep, which was when he took out a rib from his side, and fashioned it into Eve.  And so the first man and woman (according to the Judeo-Christian bible) came to exist.  And then Eve met the forked-tongued serpent coiled around a tree-trunk, and the rest is salvation history...

Lest my readers think I have turned biblical of a sudden, I must confess what this column's real occasion is: as I was leafing through Damiana Eugenio's _Philippine Folk Literature: the Myths_ the other night, I came across a particular myth called "The Origin of Homosexuality."  I read it right away (but of course!),  and found the whole story amazing in its lack of the same elemental quality to be found in the more familiar Genesis: light, waters, the deep, clay, etc.  I mean, shouldn't myths—especially those that concern the creation of new species—abound in such primal things?  This story, which according to a footnote came from an American's manuscript collection (circa 1922), suprised me in a way quite different from what I would have been capable of foreseeing. 

Basically, the story goes this way: In one of their travels together, Jesus and St. Peter find themselves wanting to have _siesta_ at an inn somewhere.  Try as they may, they are not able to catch a wink of sleep, because of the neighbors who must be having a party or something just as uproariously noisy.  Jesus, as expected, isn't about to create a scene, but the primary apostle takes matters into his own hands by stealing into the offensive household and beheading everyone in sight.  Just as quietly as he left, he then sneaks back to the room where Jesus, the all-knowing God that he is, sits waiting to give his overeager and sword-happy disciple a severe dressing-down.  No one who follows God should ever be impatient and belligerent!  Not in so many words, Jesus orders him to undo what he did.  And so the saint goes back to the neighbor's house and in his hurry—and perhaps because he is feeling a little groggy because of lack of sleep—he attaches certain male heads to female bodies, and vice versa.  And so this is why, according to this myth, there are homosexuals in the world. 

Weird, yes?  But quite interesting, we must admit!  Immediately after reading it I was reminded of one of Plato's dialogues in _Symposium_ , where Aristophanes explains to a young male follower (whom he no doubt must have "followed around" as well, as was the fashion among the ancient Greeks) the origin of men who desired other men, women who desired other women, and men who desired women.  In that myth, the original humans are made up of two people joined together as one (at the waist, I think), and there are three such creatures in the beginning of time: the first one is male, the second one is female, and the third one being half-male and half-female, is a hermaphrodite.  And then, out of some whimsy or other, the supreme deity of Olympus decides to punish them.  Using lightning bolts as a kind of cleaver, he splits each of these creatures in two.  But this hardly solves things, for the split-beings now find themselves terribly missing their original other-halves.  According to Plato's narrative, the descendants of the first creature are those males who look for other males with whom to sexually bond, the descendants of the second creature are women who turn to their fellow women for affection, and the hermaphrodite's brood are those men and women who erotically bond with each other. 

Of course, the former myth is quite unlike Plato's rather clever story.  Plato's myth explains why men and women want to have sex with each other: because it is the best way they can reunite with their former selves.  Hence, Plato supplies an explanation for sexual desire, and of why certain people prefer men to women, women to men, etc.  On the other hand, the Filipino folktale hardly gives any explanation for the existence of sexual desire. ( And for this reason I am at a loss why it is introduced by the title "Origin of homo _sexuality"_ in Eugenio's book).  Certainly, it might be argued that this story assumes that sexual desire is present in everyone, and so those people whose heads were cut off and then later on (wrongly) restored were bound to have sex sooner or later.  But still, the story could well have simply been about the origin of gender-confused personalities, such as that of the "feminine-minded man" or of the "masculine-headed woman."  Nonetheless, by attributing homosexuality to the story of this myth, this myth's maker (or teller) made sexual desire so central to the identity of individuals, that just because this identity underwent cerebral change according to the violent vicissitude contained in the myth, then these very same individuals started having peculiar sexual orientations forthwith! 

The parallelism is striking, in any case: in both stories, the event of the punishment that becomes the myths' point of transformative origin seems to be quite a haphazard one.  In Plato's narrative, Zeus punishes the first humans not for any clear reason, other than that the Olympian gods are given to such excesses in between whiles.  In the local myth, the people next door just happen to be "normal"—they are capable of having fun, unlike perhaps the piously stuck-up St. Peter—and for that they get their heads chopped off (and to add insult to injury, their heads end up getting reattached to the wrong bodies!).  If this story is about homosexuality (as it supposedly is), then just like Plato's split beings, the "wrong-headed" people in the local myth cannot be blamed for being who they are.  Precisely, their transgression—quite minor, in view of the greater sins humans are capable of committing, for example, crucifying an innocent man and putting him to death—is something at which Christ himself doesn't take umbrage.  If we have to look at this story for anything meaningful at all, it is that according to it, men who get sexually attracted to each other—as well as women who "like" other women—are merely the victims of a saint's boorish ways, and of a God's playing shameless favorites. 

Certainly, this myth surprises us because of its Christian elements: Jesus and St. Peter (and stories of the two of them traveling across the countryside) date this story to, at the very earliest, the last two hundred years or so in the history of Roman Catholic Philippines.  If we want a more indigenous cosmogony story, we must cast the net of our vision further into the past.  And there, perhaps, we might gather certain other insights into the meanings we attach to our (sexual) selves in the present time. 

As we very well know by now, Marcosian propaganda extended its odious tentacles to folklore.  As commissioned by Malacañang, certain local folklorists all too eagerly appropriated myths coming from the different tribal cultures of the country in the service of their retelling of Philippine history, a retelling that was meant to favor the image of their benefactors, as "paragons" of the "Filipino race."  One of the popular Visayan myths was in fact transformed by these academic hacks into a pan-Philippine "Adam-and-Eve" narrative: _Malakas at Maganda_ , emerging from the primeval bamboo. ( And the iconic representations of the first Filipino and Filipina not so strangely bore a more-than-striking resemblance to the conjugal dictators who commissioned them!) 

In the original myth—as such may be inferred from oral tradition, early Spanish accounts, and ethnographic data coming from Southeast Asia, where the myth appears to be a familiar if not an altogether common one—the first man and woman are not necessarily distinguished by strength and beauty respectively (or at least, not for these attributes alone).  These are more accurately conventions that were shamelessly manufactured by hired minds in the Marcosian academe of the 1970s, in order to refurbish the myth and make it more romantically mainstream.  Nonetheless, the story tells us a lot about how the natives in our islands must have perceived themselves in relation to the cosmos: they were directly descended from nature (bamboo), and the first man and woman were created equally and at the same time (one was not the cause of the other).  The myth even mentions that when it is time for them to procreate, the Philippine Adam and Eve hesitate at first, because they are brother and sister, and so would be committing incest (a taboo which is easily explained away in this case because it is quite necessary to reproduce the rest of humankind first!) 

Again, the idea of wholeness getting cloven finds itself repeated in this myth.  Just like the rowdy neighbors in the other local myth, and Plato's twin-creatures, the first man and woman of Philippine cosmogony get sundered from each other because of divine intervention.  And unlike the Platonic myth, this story doesn't attribute sexual desire to the essential splitness of the first woman and man. ( Even as like in the St. Peter narrative, sexuality is somewhat implied by it).  If we have to look, however, for the "homosexual" in this myth, we might not find him/her right away. 

But the "homosexual" is here all right—at least, if by "homosexual" is meant, just like in the other local tale, one who is sexually mixed, possessed of both male and female "souls."  In this cosmogony tale, the "man-woman" is the bamboo itself, swaying gracefully in the wind, before difference cleaves it to give birth to the community.  And as bamboo, this figure represents the ideal being, fully possessed of its own inner power, meaningfully abundant, resplendent.  It's indeed a shame that very few of us realize that the healing of the fracture that was the initial creation may well be what being both woman and man represents.  Given the history of _kabaklaan_ , which is characterized precisely by this agonistic doubleness of essences, we may well conclude that the _bakla_ is the latest incarnation of the primeval bamboo of this cosmogony tale.  Only it is incommutably necessary to split her-him for everything and everybody else to happen. 

Apparently, this pagan myth may have something in common with the Edenic episode, after all: innocence lost is lost forever. 

##   _Gays and promiscuity_

_I_ N GAY LITERATURE class, a number of female students have asked me why promiscuity and gayness seem to be mutually inclusive things.  Most of them are well-meaning enough, and I guess that while this question has long bugged them, it is only in my presence that they have thought it politic to raise it (I, reputedly, being quite well-versed on the topic, and more or less reckless enough to speak my mind). 

While I do not think that gays, at least on the level of fantasy life, are any more promiscuous than straights, I cannot help but agree with my students' observation that their gay friends manage to get off rather often, and that they hardly have the qualms not to talk about their adventures in the skin trade.  For why, indeed, do most gays I know seem to talk about nothing but sex when they (that is to say, _we_ ) get together?  Or, more tellingly:Why do gays seem to find it easier to talk—and actually get—sex than everybody else? 

Any savvy homosexual man in this country knows that almost anywhere can be a cruising spot hereabout: churches, movie houses, shopping malls, outdoor parks, the neighborhood _sari-sari_ store, one's own office building, etc.  By this I mean that just about every public place can be a venue in which two men can have a "moment," and then proceed to whatever that moment promises. ( So, I don't mean to say that men can have sex anywhere they want, although some guys I know certainly don't let the fact that they are in a movie house full of parents and children watching the latest Disney feature get in the way of their passions!)  But there is similarly nothing that prevents straights from turning these very same places into cruising spots as well—and yet, why are gays more adventurous about it all? 

In the first place, not all the men who cruise and get cruised in these places—or all the men who have sex with men—think that they necessarily become gay because of what they do with each other.  For all we know many of these men lead regular, otherwise unremarkable lives: they may have families, or girlfriends; they may be the paragon of heterosexuality in front of colleagues and friends.  And yet, by the day's end, they drive down a certain street in Cubao, Mandaluyong or Makati, and pick up a young man to have sex with for the night.  Or else they watch a movie and strike some kind of tacit, tactile agreement with fevered hands and/or lips.  And then it's over—at least, until the next time. 

We can begin to understand these rather perplexing activities of certain men as being part and parcel of the definitional problem attending the issue of homo- and heterosexuality: is it a matter of identity (that is, of gay people as being distinct from straight people); or is it simply a matter of acts/feelings (which is to say, of people who sometimes act/feel homosexually, and sometimes act/feel heterosexually)?  At the outset we must remember that there is really no satisfactory way of solving this crisis of definition, except perhaps by arguing for the essential bisexuality of the human species, which was precisely what Freud was saying all along. 

But getting back to the topic of this column, it's quite true that there are a great number of gays who are seemingly obsessed with sex, both as a topic of conversation and as a real preoccupation.  Sometimes, they get sex from men who don't think they become gay just because they sometimes do it with other men; other times, they get it from other gays like them.  Whoever they get it from, the point is that they get a whole lot of it.  And this is what proves most bothersome to a number of my students. 

I must confess that I remain suspicious of all this concern for homosexual promiscuity, only because I feel it to be rooted in a kind of erotophobia, or fear of sex, which, strangely enough, is common among many young people today.  In this case, the problem is less promiscuity per se, than the kind of attitude one takes on issues concerning sex and sexuality.  Nonetheless, while my students may, officially, be sexually conservative, the latest statistics on premarital sex prevent me from believing teenage avowals of the official sort.  Many of them may in fact be just like the men who cruise other men and yet remain straight at the end of the day: what they do, and what they say they do, are two entirely different things. 

But to humor the query, I am inclined to think that vis-a-vis women at least, gays are able to lay claim to their sexuality more easily, and to declare it with much more impunity.  The relative freedom to be sexually frank is in fact what attracts many women to the company of gays, with whom they become "fag hags" who can now explore the rondure of their desire linguistically (even if not bodily).  Also, the promiscuity so often associated with gays derives its substance in contrast to the romantic ideal of courtly love, which has long been heterosexuality's singular reserve.  In other words, the repugnance people feel toward the excessiveness of gay sex may have more to do with the fact of it being gay than it being excessive.  Nonetheless, it is true that in the absence of the same monolithic institutions shoring up the temple of heterosexual conjugal love, gay love has had to evolve its own hazardous, often short-lived and multiple, habitations. 

Why shouldn't gay love be directed toward many objects when it was never really made to believe it oughtn't be that way?  The dingy back-alleys, the anonymous gropings in the movie house dark, the hungry looks exchanged in the public parks—these are where gay love has dared to stake its claim, lest it disappear altogether.  Why do gays feel they have to announce their exploits?  Not for any reason other than that they need to affirm their sexual lives, which no one else will likely want to affirm short of becoming gay himself.  A certain kind of urgency weighs down heavily on the gay experience, as it never does on heterosexuality: without the categorical admission of its reality, it ceases to exist altogether. 

In "Lights in the Valley," a story by Andrew Holleran (author of the now-cultic, _Dancer from the Dance_ ), a sister asks her gay brother, Louis, why gays have to be so promiscuous.  The edges of this question come to Louis as particularly jagged ones, since he himself has been feeling awful about the "lifestyle" that has killed so many of his friends and, he secretly fears, has probably infected him as well.  But his repartee will serve me well at this point.  And I quote:

"(Louis) started to say: Because gays cannot form functional unions, with children, and families.  Because they cannot seem to even form liaisons that endure very long.  Because they are greedy, like all human beings.  Wouldn't you have all the sex you wanted, if you could?  Because sex is the most transcendent, marvelous experience, the greatest adventure a person can have on earth.  Because they are dogs, and go sniffing each night in public parks.  Because they are human.  Because, because.  Then she took out another cigarette, and he said: 'Why do you smoke?'" 

I suppose in the end it's like that: we know that promiscuity (like smoking) might someday harm us.  But we're still at it anyway. 

Huff...puff...umph...

##   _CMT and intra-male sexuality_

_A_ FRIEND WHO just graduated from college visited me at my university last week.  He should have graduated a year ago except that he still hadn't completed his CMT (Citizens Military Training) courses, and only recently did he finally get around to finishing those non-academic albeit required units.  Last summer, he underwent extensive military training for a month in a fort somewhere, and boy did he have fun! 

I never liked CMT.  I doubt if anyone ever did.  But my friend, a sadomasochist butch gay man, found the all-male situation of military training not only up his alley, but _up his alley_ precisely!  The macho little faggot that he is, he had the time of his life passing himself off as "one of the boys," and as such partaking of the carnal feast to which only "boys" are invited.  As it turned out, he made more lovers than friends during the course of that truly torrid summer, and as he was getting all flustered apprising me of his foray into thickets of crew-cut, uniformed and musk-scented men, he didn't nonplus me in the least.  For what my friend discovered is quite old-hat: it is one of patriarchy's most preponderant open secrets that its all-male institutions—the merchant marines, the military, fraternities, the seminary—are fertile breeding grounds for all sorts of unspeakable acts between men that express what appears to be an intrinsically male need for social as well as sexual bonding. 

The sexual dimension of this need for exclusive male bonding has sometimes been called intra-male sexuality.  Intra-male sexuality is the continuum of erotic bonds and desires that are exchanged between men.  Gay relationships may be subsumed under this "umbrella concept," but they nevertheless do not exhaust it.  There are all sorts of male homosexual behavior that are not consciously gay—funnily called "pseudohomosexualities"—and they pass largely unnoticed by the very people who perform them, and certainly by society at large.  The necessity for males to bond lies at the heart of patriarchal logic: the domination of women could only be accomplished and sustained if men kept certain things to themselves, if they promoted each other's interests as men, and if power were passed from one group of men to another under the strictest of confidences and with the least possible amount of female contamination. 

I never had the chance to participate much in intra-male sexual intimacy when I was in college, simply because my being effeminate already shut me off from the world of masculine bonding. ( And certainly, I malingered my way out of CMT—with the sanguinary help of certain sympathetic connections, that is).  During high school, however, I did get the chance to see just how this secret intimacy operates.  As boy scouts we'd have those yearly camping trips to Batangas or Laguna, and at first, being not yet obtrusively gay (only slightly refined, perhaps), I was allowed to see my platoon-mates mutually masturbating in front of their father's suddenly missing copies of _Playboy_ and _Penthouse_.  They would even try to outdo one another by seeing who could shoot farthest. ( He won who shot as high as the tent's plastic and already-sticky roof). 

But soon enough, being overtly sissy entitled me and my equally sissy friends to some other form of experience, albeit it was one that struck fear in our hearts: after "lights-out," we knew the raids would start.  The officers who had been taking their pick on the faggots in the camp earlier in the day could now operationalize their sick schemes under the convenient cover of darkness.  Our tent was spared because our platoon leader—a wonderful straight classmate who respected us—pleaded with the sex-starved marauders not to touch us, for we were already blissfully asleep.  We didn't care to find out what was happening to the other gays in the nearby tents, although for a few seconds we could hear so much screaming, giggling and shuffling of feet outside. ( Later, these same gays bragged that the officers had kept them hostage for the whole evening, asking them to massage their brawny aching backs which they willingly performed as well as "whatever other things were requested of them"—and I must add that this final clause was said with a wry smile and the flamboyant raising of a faggoty plucked eyebrow). 

I am shocked by this recollection, actually.  Who would have thought that all those innocent jamborees and campings could be an occasion for boyish phallic irrigation?  Or that the military training, whose history involves preparing for the eventuality of armed conflict, has already been overtaken by fevered expressions of so much sexual love? 

My friend who found CMT rewarding had another observation to make: the sissies who were training with them were spared from the strenuous physical activities that everybody else had to endure, and were consequently the object of jeering ridicule and contemptuous spite.  They could violate the hair and dress codes, and served as scribes, all-around clerks or members of the "utility" (who sold softdrinks and tidied up the office of the corps commander).  My butch friend didn't envy them, of course: while they might have been better off as far as not marching stupidly under the sun was concerned, none of them could _penetrate_ the world of masculine sexual exchange in which he found himself a most active and well-liked participant.  There was so much physical magnetism leaping from one male body to another in the middle of all that regimented solar torture that he nearly swooned—not from the heat but from the orgasmic joy of unbridled and sensuous physical contact between perspirant and throbbing men who shared their drinking water, crawled on the ground side by side and took showers together.  Standing stock-still in the verdant field, they felt each other's bodies pulsing with desire, and in some cases, subsequently pursued that initial moment to its promised conclusion in the bedroom of their unsuspecting homes. ( Or in my friend's case, someone's parked car). 

I find it interesting that the Philippines still requires its adolescent male population to undergo military training, even when the War for which such a preparation was originally meant is a good half-century past.  CMT, from what I remember of it (I did give it a try—I gave up before the semester ended) and from what everyone who has taken it knows, hardly prepares anyone for combat.  A lot of it is rather stupid and useless, in fact: rote-memorizing of the most inane of facts about the different parts of a rifle, the ideals of military training, and suchlike, and the regurgitation of these during exams (which everyone had pilfered advance copies of, and for which everyone was therefore perfectly prepared), marching and marching all around the parade grounds.  But there must be something about CMT that has made it socially functional—for lest I be minsunderstood as its staunch opponent, I must admit it does serve some useful function in our current-day lives, despite the now-anachronistic nature of its war-time history. 

Because of its national and compulsory character, CMT provides the most monolithic socialization for males in our country.  In CMT, codes of masculine comportment and masculine "ideals" are uniformly imposed on adolescent Filipino males, with the implicit purpose of in-graining these into their lives.  A peculiarly Philippine macho culture characterizes this institution, and if one only examined its qualities one wouldn't be surprised why there are so many wife-beaters in our country, and why our country's leadership doesn't seem to be going anywhere in the hands of so many macho men: the institution of the CMT reflects the hollowness of machismo's soul, its craven dependence on the abomination of "inferior versions" of itself in order to preserve its illusionary integrity, its hypocritical condemnation of male-male love which it secretly relishes and which it actually encourages in private, and its lack of intrinsic self-worth. 

The _bakla_ , being genitally male, is required like every other Filipino male to go through CMT before he could finish college.  His abjection in the culture at large may already be foreseen in the way he is treated in the CMT: as a freakish outsider, as a necessary foil to masculinity that only heightens its deluded sense of superiority, and as a sexual object to be toyed around with and disposed of just like that (very like the woman he so pathetically mimicks). 

That there are gays in the military of the United States remains a hotly contested issue.  Membership in it, after all, is purely voluntary: if one were gay one would think twice about entering a place where one already knows one can easily become the target of institutional violence.  But in our country, where every male college student is _required_ to undergo Citizens Military Training (in order to become part of the reserves unit of the armed forces), there is less room for debate or doubt as far as this issue is concerned.  There most certainly are gays in the Philippine military—both the _bakla_ and the butch kind, both in the silly CMT and the more serious PMA—and my friend, for one, was rather happy last summer that it is so. 

##   _Between shadow and light_

_A_ BOOK I had written a year ago was launched at my university last week.  The UP Babaylan, the only student gay organization on campus, and the Gender Sensitivity Center of the University Student Council, sponsored the launching (with a little help from my department).  The event would have been livelier—if not brighter—had the power failure not put a damper and cast a pall on things.  But first let me talk about the book. 

The basic idea of _Philippine Gay Culture: the Last Thirty Years (Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM)_ is that for the past three decades, homosexuality as an issue had become sufficiently "real" and important to the lives of people in the metropolitan centers of the Philippines, that individuals who were identified as homosexuals (and who subsequently self-identified as homosexuals) had come to constitute a distinct variety of persons who "made meanings" in more or less the same way.  This "sameness" in the way these individuals signified themselves and the world they lived in can, in the loosest sense of the word, be said to comprise a "culture."  From this provisional definition, we can therefore infer that "gay culture," as it has existed in the urban centers of our country for the past thirty years, is the product both of the free expressions of Filipino gays, and of the ascriptions of an increasingly Westernized, homophobic and macho social order. 

There are so many other questions this book seeks to answer—or at least, gesture possible answers to.  But central to its agenda are two goals: liberation and remembering.  The first goal involves not just the liberation of the gays for whom the book seeks to provide some semblance of a map that shows where they are presently located within the tapestry of a collectively lived albeit largely agonized history, but also the liberation of myself as an author and "scholar."  In fact, at the very outset, I admit to a subjectivity and self-reflexivity that effectively situate me as both the subject and object of my work. ( In the book's introduction, I warn the reader that my own life as a member of the gay community in the Philippines will sometimes appear to be so integral to the study that it may well be the study _itself_ ).  For the second goal, the book offers its very own exhaustiveness: four hundred odd-pages of obscure-sounding but hopefully not completely useless erudition, with an ample number of notes that should prove handy as a kind of sourcebook for future inquiries in local gay studies. 

Being an academic endeavor more than anything else, the book has had to adopt the jargon of contemporary cultural theory, albeit because of its avowedly personal interest, whatever difficulty that might be said to inhere in its language gets decidedly softened and rhapsodized by the intermittent intrusions of autobiographical narratives and personal asides.  One of the theoretical decisions I have had to make at the beginning of the book is to adopt a moderately constructionist perspective on the question of sexuality.  This means that although I agree that homosexuality and heterosexuality are the products of Western sexological culture and history—and that therefore they are not necessarily to be found in our largely pre-sexological society from which they obviously did not originate—I nonetheless do not, and indeed cannot, presume to know that there is absolutely nothing biologically determinate about sexuality. ( Hence, while subscribing to the idea that sexual orientation is a matter of nurture, the book is not really foreclosing the debate on whether on another level of reality, it is also a matter of nature). 

Likewise, this historicist perspective makes it possible for me to qualify that, for example, although I cannot impute a homosexual identity or consciousness to any of the apparently sexually volatile males in the many islands that comprised _Las Islas de Filipinas_ —who, according to early colonial confession manuals, were not loath to the idea of mutually arousing one another within the context of childish play—I nonetheless can discuss their sexual activities as either homosexual or heterosexual. ( Needless to say, central to this distinction is the idea of genital sex, and its relatively stable dimorphism transculturally). 

The book has two parts, each relatively independent of the other.  The first part, admittedly, is more challenging (that is, difficult) and controversial than the second part, precisely because it clears the ground for the beginnings of some kind of gay inquiry in our country.  Here, the book studies the many understandings Filipinos have manifested toward the issue of sexual orientation, and what is clear is that these understandings have all followed the same heterosexist script: the _bakla_ is homosexual, while his macho partner is not; the _bakla_ is "woman-hearted," the macho partner is a "real man."  I offer a deconstructive reading of this local "model" of homosexuality, showing that the "economic rationale" that supposedly obviates consent on the part of the "real man" and thus exonerates him from the charge of himself being homosexual, cannot really hold up to scrutiny.  The questions arise: Why, indeed, does he appear to enjoy himself while being brought to orgasm by the _bakla_ , and why, indeed, can't he or doesn't he say no to the whole thing? 

The purpose of this "undermining" of the local model of sexual arrangements between males (for the _bakla_ is genitally male anyway) is to implicate the "heterosexual majority" in the supposedly "minor issue" of homosexuality which, upon closer inspection, is the very ground on which heterosexuality rests. ( Another way to illustrate the conventionality of the homo/hetero distinction is to look into the many instances of exclusive male bonding that are actually required of men in our culture—mutual admiration, bureaucratic solidarity, mentorship, fraternity, etc.—and point to their potentially homosexual character). 

It is also in the book's first section that I attempt to answer the question of why no liberation movement has managed to take root in the Philippines, despite the recurring spurts of activism put up by a number of Filipino gay radicals coming from the arts and academe.  This question leads the study to examine the meanings that Filipinos have attached to homosexuality, and to look at how the "gays" themselves seem unable to get their act together: despite the infusion of the ideology of homosexual solidarity from the US gay liberation movement, there clearly remains an antagonistic relationship that obtains between effeminate and masculine gays.  In fact, the different homosexual "selves" of the past thirty years of local gay history—the _binabae, bayot, sward, badaf_ , gay, _silahis_ , closet queen, MSM (men who have sex with men), and a host of other copiously generative, _swardspoken_ names—are cloven along the lines of feminine and masculine, and are therefore not united under the same banner of homosexuality.  A likely explanation for this antagonism is apparent enough: contemporary Philippine culture, being macho, itself violently disdains effeminacy, and hence, the effeminate _bakla_ cannot really be expected to enjoy being in the company of those gays who already presume themselves "better" and more "respectable" than he is.  Moreover, our culture genderizes even the matter of sexual desire, and thus, gender distinctions appear for all respects and purposes more important than sexual distinctions, inasmuch as they actually determine who gets to wield power over whom. 

Why has the "effeminate model "become the dominant—and indeed, as far as many people are concerned, the only—model of homosexuality in our country at the present time?  Other than citing Philippine society's trenchant effeminophobia, the book gestures toward another possible answer to this question by showing how, in the remote past, certain local cultures in our archipelago already allowed for the existence of "gender-crossers," which is to say, genitally male individuals whose occupational preference, "temperaments," clothing, and demeanor tended toward the feminine rather than the masculine; obviously, "traces" of this allowance have managed to survive four centuries of colonization.  In the book's chapter on the _babaylan_ , I argued that Philippine "national" history has seen if not encouraged a progressive degradation of the status of femininity (and consequently, effeminacy).  And so, whereas the _hombre mugerado_ or womanish man of precolonial times was nearly always a figure of spiritual potency (as healers, sacrificers, and religious leaders), the contemporary _bakla_ is decidedly a lesser mortal who can only aspire to a comicality of being or to a liminality of role as a connoisseur of beauty and fashion, or an arbiter of taste. 

This insight readily presents itself to one if one simply examines the various terms that denoted the womanish male in the past, namely: _binabae, bayoguin, asog, bido_.  These terms all located the fact of "gender-mixedness"in the immutable order of nature (for they referred to objects in nature, such as _bayoguin_ which was a variety of small yet sturdy bamboo). _ Bakla_ , on the other hand, owes its semantic origins to the idea of "confusion" and "fear"—temporary attributes, really, of which one can most certainly be disabused, by means of a serious and protracted beating at the hands of one's tragically loving family. 

The book's second part ventures, willy-nilly, into the hitherto unexamined terrain of "gay literature," courtesy of the early self-consciously homosexual works of Severino Montano, Orlando Nadres and Tony Perez.  The premise of my analyses here is simple: these works embody the autobiographical positions of their authors, especially where gender and sexuality are concerned.  After doing a close reading of Montano's unpublished novel, "The Lion and the Faun," Nadres's cultic play, "Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Salamat, "and Perez's recent _Cubao 1980: Ang Unang Sigaw ng Gay Liberation Movement sa Pilipinas_ , I can conclude that the early forms of Philippine gay writing have been, at best, radically humanist.  All three authors fervently subscribe to the ideology of self-determination and authenticity and a variety of transcendental "liberation" that will finally come to the _bakla_.  I relate this peculiar mindset, in the book's conclusion, to the all-pervasive, effectively Christianized, heterosexually defined model of local subjectivity— _kalooban_ —that locates goodness and authenticity in a humanistic, intractable, "psychospiritual" depth. 

Anyway, just before the hour of the launching, the skies over Diliman turned ash-gray, lightning flashed and rain fell in dull sheets.  It was upsetting, to say the least.  The building in which the book was supposed to be launched is not designed to be without electricity at any time: it turns into a mausoleum the moment the lights go out.  But the launching had to proceed as scheduled: people had come, the books were available, and the little food that the sponsors had procured for the occasion had already been prepared. ( The painfully formally dressed author, on the other hand, was close to experiencing a break-down). 

Needless to say, the launching _did_ proceed some time later, although not in the original venue, but somewhere along the building's many-windowed hallway, with hastily arranged chairs, some candles and in the light of the dying sun.  After a radically cropped program, I would have wanted to read a longer speech (with which I had come prepared), but the magical _chiaroscuro_ on the faces of so many students and friends who showed up because they cared enough for the book (and its author?)  bade me be brief.  As I thanked the many people to whom my book is indebted, I had to admit that it felt good to be there, to have written the four-hundred-page monstrosity that made that gathering possible, and to know that of the few things that are truly valuable in this life, friendship must surely be primary. 

As Danton, friend and "fellow feeler of pain," later put it over pasta and pizza, the launching of a book on the demonized history of homosexuals in our culture couldn't have been held at a more propitious time: during twilight, _takipsilim_ , in between shadow and light. 

Smiling, I thought to myself, It was mostly light, Danton, mostly light. 

##   _Total eclipse_

_I_ NEARLY MISSED seeing this movie.  As is usually the case with "intelligent" films shown in this country, this one didn't even last a week in many of the malls.  The day after arriving from Leyte, I was immediately prevailed upon by my best friend, Ronald, to catch Leonardo DiCaprio's launching film which he had already seen while I was away, and didn't mind seeing again (with me, this time). 

"Total Eclipse" is based on the lives of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, turn-of-the-century (almost) French poets whose claim to fame lies as much in their beautiful _symboliste_ poems as their explosive and rambunctious relationship.  It starts off with Rimbaud (DiCaprio) arriving in Paris to live with Verlaine (David Thewlis) and his wife (Romane Bohringer).  Rimbaud is a visionary, a virtual poetic prodigy who disdains life on the farm (and his stern-faced mother who lords it over in it), and prefers to read and write obscure-sounding, because "free," verses.  Verlaine read his poems and was impressed by them, but upon seeing Rimbaud he is surprised at how young he is (ten years his junior).  Before long the two of them develop a kind of lewd and crazy intimacy that drives a wedge between Verlaine and his wife.  It is clear that Verlaine has never been completely happy with the domestic arrangement—and this despite his wife's unquestioning devotion that borders on the stupidly blind, excellently eked out on the screen by Bohringer, whose ethereal and expressive face resembles some Pre-Raphaelite angel's—and in a moment of reckless abandon he agrees to accompany Rimbaud in his wild quest to follow the sun. 

Another friend who had seen this movie before I did told me that it reminded him of himself, and of how like Rimbaud he sometimes pushed love to the extreme, to test the limits to which he could bring the Other, and to prove just how much the Other was capable of loving him. ( Therefore I shouldn't miss it for the world).  In one of the film's crucial scenes, Verlaine is absinthe-drunk (as always), and he and Rimbaud fall to talking about love.  Rimbaud doesn't think love is real anymore, and believes people need to reinvent it if they wish to make it exist anew.  Verlaine insists on the old romantic notion that love is possible, noble and pure, and he confesses as much to Rimbaud.  Instead of gratefully acknowledging Verlaine's drunken albeit presumably honest declaration (for isn't it that people are most truthful when intoxicated?),  Rimbaud thrusts a knife straight into the middle of Verlaine's palm.  Ronald and I like this scene, for it objectifies (poetically and in Rimbaudian fashion) the truism on love which we are often inclined to believe: it hurts. 

And yet ambivalence exists in the act's significance: Did Rimbaud, the beloved, do this to drive the message of love's hurtfulness home (literally) to the lover; or did he inflict this pain to punish Verlaine for being so foolish?  The former remains an endorsement of love (despite the pain that punctuates it); the latter is synonymous to love's rejection.  I guess, for the film, this is precisely the nature of the love of Rimbaud and Verlaine: traditional yet innovative; romantic yet anti-romantic; true yet untrue.  It would seem that the poet in them eschewed the commonplace, both in life and in art: they had to experience love afresh, and the first thing they needed to realize was that love is love only because it isn't hate (and how better to know the former except through the latter?). 

But the movie succeeds on other levels, too.  As a period piece, it accurately captures the cloven ethos of the time: while very much Victorian and officially prudish, European culture teemed with sodomy, prostitution, profligacy, and all the other vices that one would not usually associate with this particular era, but which Rimbaud and Verlaine (and legions of others) precisely revelled and trafficked in.  This reflects well on the film's research consultants, for they must have kept themselves abreast with the new historicist studies on what really went on in the everyday lives of those blue-nosed and straight-laced Victorians. 

And yet, the film also shows the truth behind Verlaine's incarceration in Belgium: he was charged with engaging in passive and active sodomy, a crime which at this time was becoming increasingly identified with a pathological condition of sexual abnormalcy.  Homosexuality was officially invented in Europe sometime in the 1860s, and by the time Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison, the Belgian courts had already begun seeing sodomy not as the aberrant behavior that it used to be, but as the symptom of a sickness—homosexuality—that festered in the sodomite's psyche.  Thus, his imprisonment was characterized (and the film shows this somewhat) by "corrective," psycho-therapeutic chores, such as walking around in wooden shoes in strictly measured steps, which, come to think of it, must not have been too difficult for Verlaine, who was a lyric poet, after all. ( One is almost tempted to say that before Rimbaud came into the picture, his poems had been as metered as his life). 

The film also succeeds in revealing another interesting aspect of the relationship of Rimbaud and Verlaine, and in a sense, this aspect is true of love in all its reincarnations.  Toward the film's final third, Rimbaud is getting tired of Verlaine's drunken ways and is thinking of fleeing their love-nest in a seedy London district.  He is less than kind to Verlaine, insulting him and calling him names (nasty things like "your mind is as ugly as your body" and "cunt"), until Verlaine cannot take anymore of it and repairs to Belgium.  Rimbaud follows.  They live together for a few months until Rimbaud grows restless yet again, but this time it is clear that it isn't just Verlaine who is the problem, but rather his own increasingly unhinged mental state: he has stopped writing and been losing sleep.  He decides to leave for home, but Verlaine, in a desperate bid to stop him, takes the gun and shoots.  In what appears like a perfect example of poetic foregrounding, the bullet hits Rimbaud in the very same spot (the palm) where he had earlier stabbed Verlaine.  The circle closes.  In reinventing love they merely forged, rechristened and experienced for themselves love's oldest attribute: it is nothing if not the desire for utter and perfect possession. 

For don't we all want to possess the one we love?  And isn't this the reason why the end of all love is death, which is the perfect lover for there is no way it will ever let go of whomever it has chosen to embrace?  It isn't a failure on the part of the writers and producers of "Total Eclipse" that, in the end, they can only sum up the love of one of French literature's most eccentric and scandalous writing couples in a cliché, for that is really the paradox within which all art functions: it is new only because it is old.  There is nothing that hasn't been said before (Rimbaud actually says this in the film), and all art is nothing if not quoted. 

And so let me end with _a_ quotation.  Actually, a quotation in verse, as translated by J. Murat and W. Gunn.  It's a poem authored by both Rimbaud and Verlaine, which appears in _The Penguin Book of HomosexualVerse_, edited by Stephen Coote.  It must have been written while the two of them were bunking in with and buggering each other in their cockroachy London flat, which the British and French governments decided to turn, sometime during _this_ century, into an artistic shrine of sorts (Rimbaud must be turning in his grave!). 

I put this poem here for the sake of a female friend who would have wanted more poetry readings incorporated into the film, as well as to "make present" a little of the poetic genius of Rimbaud and Verlaine. ( Needless to say, this is the least that I can do, having already talked my head off about their scandal- and pain-ridden life and earned myself a column in the process).  Likewise, as should be clear to the film's aghast viewer, what she saw and broke into a squeamish reaction for during certain bawdy scenes in the movie, doesn't even come close to the actual, smelly and juicy stuff that went on between the real-life Rimbaud and Verlaine. 

_Sonnet: To the Asshole_

_Dark, puckered hole: a purple carnation_

_That trembles, nestled among the moss (still wet_

_With love) covering the gentle curvation_

_Of the white ass, just to the royal eyelet._ 

_Threads resembling milky tears there are spun;_

_Spray forced back by the south wind's cruel threat_

_Across the small balls of brown shit has run,_

_To drip from the crack, which craves for it yet_. 

_Not wishing the prick to have its bent,_

_My mouth too has often mated with that vent,_

_My sobbing tongue tried to devour the rose_

_Flowering in brown moisture.  The chute unmanned,_

_It's a heavenly jam-pot, the Promised Land_

_With which other milk and honey overflows!_ 

##   _The gay-besotted woman_

_I_ N DAVID LEAVITT'S latest collection of stories, the title story, "A Place I've Never Been," talks about the relationship between Celia and Nathan.  Celia is Nathan's chubby friend, who has secretly been in love with him all these years.  She tells the story, and quite candidly admits her affection for her gay friend who obviously cannot reciprocate her feelings for him, even as he admits that she is the only friend he's got.  See, Nathan has a problem: ever since a former lover called to tell him that he was HIV-positive, Nathan has been living in dread of the disease.  He decided to live in Europe for a while, but by the time the story starts he has returned to New York and finds his apartment in shambles.  He only agreed to sublet it to a cute but tormented visual artist so that he might vicariously feel his warmth in the walls and furniture, being too afraid to actually have any kind of physical contact with him.  In the midst of the chaos in Nathan's life, Celia comes to the rescue and pulls him out of his rut yet again. 

Celia is the typical "gay-besotted woman," a woman who acts like a fag-seeking missile, finding other men less worthy of her incendiary attentions.  But in exhibiting this pathological predilection for gay men, she thrusts herself into the maw of unrequited love.  My female students can identify with this very much.  A lot of them have in fact fallen in love with gays who just cannot love them the way they want to be loved.  We discuss this topic often in class, since the figure of the gay-besotted woman occurs a number of times in the stories we are taking up.  And since the way we conduct our discussions meanders from the literary to the mundane, we invariably relate the stories to our own experiences, and make sense of them in the context of our own lives. 

Some of my students dislike Celia for being so slavishly fascinated with Nathan.  They think she has to wake up and smell the coffee, to pack up and take her business elsewhere.  They themselves will never consider falling in love with a gay man, but because we have taken up enough "coming-out" stories that make it difficult to define who gays are, they admit that they cannot be sure if the men they end up liking might not turn out gay sooner or later.  But still, they would prefer not to become emotionally attached to a man who will never be able to return their affections. 

My feeling here is that they look at the Celia-Nathan relationship as a parasitic one: Celia gives, and Nathan takes.  But doesn't Nathan serve some kind of usefulness for Celia, too?  I mean, why does she hang on to him that much if she doesn't get anything for it?  In the story, Celia immediately gathers her wits together and goes to the grocery to buy all sorts of detergents and bleach, to help Nathan clean up the mess in his apartment.  She likes doing things for Nathan because she feels protective of him.  And because she wants to nurture him.  While this may simply be the case of the slave who has learned to love his master's whip, still Celia is free to do what she wishes, and to refuse.  But why she persists in taking care of Nathan must be because she loves him and doesn't mind—despite her occasional feelings to the contrary—that he cannot love her back. 

For why does love have to be reciprocated in the manner that we would wish it to be?  Can't love be love and worth giving to another person despite that person's inability to reciprocate?  Some others don't think that there is something wrong with Celia, but they believe that she needs to respect Nathan's sexual orientation and for that alone, should stop considering having him sexually.  In the end, they also think that Celia should content herself to being Nathan's friend, period.  My feeling is that by saying these things, we might be giving sexuality too much importance, and subordinating our freedom to it.  I don't think it impossible for a gay man to love (even sexually) a woman, in the same way that I don't think it impossible for a straight man to love another man and yet remain straight through it all.  These things in fact happen more often than we think.  While one's sexual orientation is important, it is still something that we largely choose to have. ( I therefore don't think homosexuality or heterosexuality is necessarily biologically predetermined).  Maybe Nathan will finally come to love Celia the way she wants to be loved?  I've seen enough of these "unlikely pairings" happening to friends and acquaintances, anyway. 

Why women find some gays attractive is, I believe, a more interesting question.  Maybe it's because gays don't have any sexual interest in women, and therefore they are able to value them for who they are, rather than for what they have.  And certainly, most gays are in touch with their own emotions, and wouldn't mind crying in the company of their women friends.  Their vulnerability must be a refreshing change from the stolid facade of straights who look fine even if they're a mass of messed up feelings deep inside.  And certainly, enough women will vouch for their gay friends' impeccable taste for things beautiful and cultured, and this too proves an endearing attribute. 

Celia may not be a very wise woman but she knows what she's doing: at the end of the story she indicates that she might not want to play the role of emotional latrine into which Nathan empties all his frustrations anymore.  She was actually ambivalent about his arrival: while she likes being around him, his presence prevents her from exploring her other options.  While he was away, she started to open up her life to the possibilities of love: a man who works in the same building was beginning to show interest in her, and she had had a makeover at the local mall and worn less dowdy clothes because of him. 

I have a feeling, though, that Celia will never be as happy trying to look pretty for this man as when she is most fully herself in the company of her miserable gay friend who might, just might, end up loving her and going to a place he's never been before. 

##   _Villa re(dis)covered_

_W_ HEN THE OPPPORTUNITY to participate in the tribute the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) was planning to give for the late National Artist for Literature, Jose Garcia Villa, was presented to me last February, I immediately grabbed it.  This was the perfect time, I thought, to bring to light a facet of Villa's writings which had not been much appreciated in his country, if only because of strange deletions that occurred in the local publication of his short story collection, _Footnote to youth_ , which had previously appeared in the United States in 1933, as well as of the "politeness" with which Villa's critics generally approached the subject of his personality. 

The deleted stories in question were the second and third parts of a trilogy of stories, which Edward J. O'Brien, the American editor of the collection, had lauded in his introduction for their "native sensuousness of perception and expression," and pronounced as autobiographical, and another obviously related story.  The CCP tribute consisted of readings from a selection of Villa's opus, and the story I wanted to read, "A walk at midnight," from the trilogy "Wings and blue flame," I knew would accomplish my twin goals of "rediscovering" and "recovering" the legendary poet who had lived and died an exile from his native land, who had acted out the fate of one of his poems' more memorable personae, the "anchored angel," and who was now the object of a grateful people's posthumous praise. 

I know these two words are in some ways contradictory—for obviously one cannot rediscover something that one is merely recovering—but the pun is precisely deliberate and salutary, in this case: in all of the commentaries on Jose Garcia Villa's writings, practically nothing has ever been mentioned about these stories, particularly, the "confession" they contain of their author's sexuality.  By reading in the august halls of the country's premiere cultural institution what I thought was the most revealing of these works, I hoped to recover Villa from the depersonalized and "formalist" dustbin in which he had been languishing (a dustbin of Villa's own choosing, one might say, for even to his dying day, he had continued to subscribe to the ideology "art for art's sake," which he had propounded within the remote if not obsolescent corner of the small room that is Philippine literature).  In the same breath, too, I wished for everyone in the audience to arrive at another, perhaps completely surprising awareness of who this person they were honoring really was, what sort of man it was that had hitherto lain hidden behind the guises of dove, eagle and lion, and perhaps begin to understand why this poet wrote in the difficult and highly figurative way that he did. 

The trilogy strikes one for its lyrical and rhapsodic quality—a quality reflected in the short, numbered paragraphs that comprise it and that therefore make it read like verse—and for the resonances in imagery and themes running through and bouncing off each of the stories.  But they do build on and reinforce one another, with the first story, "Untitled story," introducing the leitmotif of Villa's strained if not altogether hostile relationship with his father, who'd sent him to study in America ostensibly to separate him from his girlfriend, Vi. 

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is to study, Villa immediately makes some friends: Georgia, Joe, Louise, Greg, Wiley and David.  It's David who instantly becomes dear to him.  David is lovely "like a flower," a boy who wears shabby clothes, but whose eyes are soft, unlike Villa's father's.  Villa takes care of this boy when the latter has fallen ill.  David, consequently, comes to depend on Villa for company, and even recites poems to him.  But after a while, David has to go back home for lack of funds.  Villa "die[s] in himself."  After this episode, Villa falls in love with Georgia, whose hair is wonderfully golden.  This feeling soon passes, though.  Villa thinks of his girl Vi, back home, and wonders if she, too, has fallen in love.  This thought rekindles his anger for his father, and he imagines this anger transforming into a "gorgeous purple flower" which he offers to his father but which his father refuses.  Villa lies to his friends that he is going to New York.  He doesn't really go to New York, but thinks he's there anyway, inside his mind, and in this New York of his mind he starves and grows cold. 

The second story, "White interlude," commences with the same sad note about Villa's father, how the latter had bidded him farewell on the boat in Manila, an incident which made Villa "unwhole."  He brought his father's "love" with him to America, where in fancy it became a tree in whose cool and gentle shade he basked.  The story then summarizes Villa's encounter with David, who returned to his home in Santa Fe because his family could no longer afford to send him to school.  Villa wants to visit David but he has no money for the bus fare.  A Jewish boy, Joseph Lieberman, tells him that he can get a ride near the park by allowing himself to be "picked up."  Villa goes there very early in the day, but nobody stops to pick him up.  Instead, he derives pleasure from thinking himself a "god of love," because he has stepped on so many "kissing" ants on the ground where he stands, waiting for the ride that never comes. 

Back in the dorm Villa meets a newcomer, a Swedish boy named Jack Wicken.  At first he dislikes Jack, whom he thinks gave him "ugly glances" at the dining hall.  But when Jack has moved to the room opposite his, and when they have gotten to know each other better, Villa ends up liking Jack.  They talk about their families.  Jack's father used to be a mechanic, but is now jobless.  Villa tells Jack about how his father hated his mother's relatives, and once even threw away the grapes his aunt had given him.  While listening to his stories, Jack says "Gosh," an expression Villa tries but fails to recapture when all alone in his own room.  Jack and Villa end up as close friends, and are joined at the end of the semester by a short Welsh boy named Johnny, who likes to sing from operas and take long walks in the evenings.  One time, the three of them talk about girls. 

One morning, a brown dog with "panthery eyes" follows Villa to school.  He remembers the puppy he once had when he was a boy, but this puppy died of a cold because his father didn't want it inside the house.  Villa remembers his father's thin lips which only said sharp words, quite different from his mother's, which were full and "ripe with bloom."  Villa and Johnny bump into the dog the following day and give it a bath.  Villa calls the dog "Wicki," after Jack's surname.  Villa thinks of Jack's impending summer vacation, and misses him already, and cries.  When he and Jack decide to watch a movie, they leave Wicki behind and never see it again.  Villa thinks he's lost all that he ever loved: Vi, David, Wicki.  And come summer, Jack.  One day, Jack receives a letter from a boy named Morgan from Philadelphia.  He tears up the letter and calls Morgan "son of a bitch."  Villa is shocked to see Jack's insensitivity, and wishes to retrieve the crushed letter, which is a "whisper of God."  After this, he knows he will never be lost to Jack because Jack can never lose anything. 

"A walk at midnight" returns to the scene of Villa's childhood.  This time, he thinks of God and His love which caused him to be in this world, and which now beats in him like "wings against blue flame."  Villa, as a boy, "had no playmates... swam no river... climbed no trees... was alone."  His mother was close to him.  She taught him his prayers.  He was faithful to her. ( After this short section concerning Villa's childhood, several paragraphs summarize the events of the two previous stories).  Villa discovers Jack's selfish nature, which is a far cry from Johnny's kindness.  Unlike Johnny, who cleans Villa's room when it is dirty, Jack will never do such a thing, unless he gets paid at least a dollar.  But despite this, Villa likes Jack better than Johnny, and feels slightly guilty for it. 

Jack does change a little after Villa gives him sandwiches when he has no money for food.  Villa now learns "to like Jack a lot," and resolves to "love him" and "be good to him."  He prays: "God, let him love me even as I love him."  But the thing is, Jack likes a boy called Dick better than Villa, with whom he played a lot more.  This hurts Villa immensely.  He nonetheless tries his best to win Jack's affections, by treating him out to the movies, all because "Jack mean[s] so much to [him]."  One time Jack does something out of the ordinary: he buys popcorn for Villa, which makes Villa so happy that he "cannot trace his thoughts."  Johnny, Jack and Villa go to the mesa where the university is situated, and they let the wind muss their hair.  Villa sees that Johnny looks lovely flinging his head up to the winds, which are the "flowers blown from the fingers of God," but still he loves Jack more. 

A while back, Villa asked Jack to walk with him alone, but Jack refused.  This time Dick asks him and he readily agrees.  Villa feels the beatings of wings in him rise confusingly and then fall silent.  In bed that night," tears stand in [his] eyes."  He cannot sleep and so goes to Johnny's room to cry.  Johnny leads him by the hand out into the night.  They walk on the mesa, where the "sky [is] deep...stars...[are like] metal dandelions against the field of the sky."  Villa picks up flowers that stain his hands and "drip gorgeously to earth."  He lies on the ground, "flowing with flowers, filling them with love, draining [him]self with love." 

Softly at first, wings beat and turn into a "music of silver and of flames of blue."  He asks Johnny if he sees the Bird making the music, and Johnny says he doesn't.  Villa is hungry for the Bird, who is God, and tells himself and Johnny: "It is enough to know the Bird is there."  And as he listens some more to the "rain of music," he no longer fees hurt by what Jack did to him.  Lying on the cool grass, the "sky wet with stars above" him, he is "taking Jack out of [him] and giving him to the earth and to the sky, and the white flowers in [his] hands [are] the gifts of [his] forgiveness." 

A story that might as well have been included in this trilogy (which would've made them a tetralogy, come to think) is "A song I did not hear."  It follows up on a character only briefly mentioned in the first story, Joe (Joseph) Lieberman.  He is Jewish and doesn't want girls because they want their men to be like horses (and he doesn't like that).  Joe's lips are similar to Villa's father's, jerking like the feet of horses when he's angry.  But his eyes are soft, unlike his father's, and he laughs a "crying, yet laughing laughter," which his father couldn't do.  Despite this, Villa doesn't like Joe and even drives him out of his room one time.  Joe moves to a cheaper dorm and Jack moves to the room just across Villa's. 

Jack and Villa pal around and Joe doesn't like it a bit.  When the two of them get drunk and hung-over, though, Joe visits them and feeds them milk and pies.  Villa knows he should like Joe better, but he still loves Jack the most.  Jack is not capable of loving anyone, and so Villa cries himself to sleep at night.  No matter how hard he tries to get Jack out of his system, he can't: one night, out on the mesa, he asks God to take Jack out of him.  But "God cannot kill love," and so after that evening he discovers he still loves and will always love Jack. 

At the end of the semester, Jack leaves for home.  Villa wants Jack "always to be in [his] life...even if it hurts. [ He] is ready to be hurt."  Joe visits Villa and is spurned by him, who says he likes Jack better than any of his friends.  Joe mocks Villa: "Jack, Jack...Will he ever see into you?  Will they ever see into you, your friends?  Can _they_ see?  Can they _see?_  And there is so much light to be seen!...  It's like feeding honey to swine."  And he says good-bye.  Later, Joe sends Villa a letter: "I saw light and beauty in you—I laid myself at your feet waiting for your door to open.  I knocked with prayer and madness and love.  But now I am tired...I _too_ am low.  But now I have run away from you."  Villa learns that love is a difficult lesson, for both him and Joe, and he ends this "song he did not hear" with this line: "The tiredness of my wings is love: I will be winged again!" 

I read "A walk at midnight" almost in its entirety, and while listening to the standard Villa poems which were also read on that day I was struck for the first time at how well this story, as well as the two others in the trilogy and other story related to it, foreshadowed (if not preempted) nearly all of Villa's poetry.  The images that had flickered in Villa's short-lived career as a fictionist lived on in the poems that eventually established his reputation.  Indeed, the Villaesque flowers are there, the wings of the Bird that is God (of the angel of God?),  the stars, the tree—the elemental and immutable in Nature, the religiosity taught him by his mother, that Villa loved to cite and rhapsodize in his poems, were already in evidence in the stories that had framed and antedated them. 

Read in Villa's poetry, these very same images have the tendency to confound, to hold one in thrall and to enchant one, as was perhaps precisely their purpose when he used them.  Read in these stories, however, these same images are more down-to-earth and local, grounded in the situation that evoked them in the poetic mind of Villa who is the unabashed subject and perspective of these texts.  This is what I mean by "rediscovering Villa": maybe it's time we read the poems in view of the stories that had, at an earlier and more formative time, spurred and quickened them, given birth to them.  And what, in specific, I wish to emphasize now is that these stories plot the life of Villa as a man who loved other men, who possessed feelings of an undeniably homosexual nature, and who (to his undying credit which no one until now was willing to give him) bravely wrote out these feelings in as honest an expression as he could manage. 

Of course, broaching the idea that Villa was gay—or if he didn't think of himself as gay, at least behaved and felt the way gays do—is not really a new thing, if not here then in the US where he chose to live a large part of his life and where he eventually made a living and raised a family.  In a "eulogy" that came out in his column for the late _Evening Paper_ , novelist Eric Gamalinda quoted an American poet, Stephen Dunn, who was a student of Villa's once, and who had later on fallen out of grace with him and declared him a second-rate writer and embittered "Filipino homosexual" who insulted his female students.  Gamalinda certainly didn't agree with Dunn's view on Villa's poetry, but what's significant is that he didn't disagree with Dunn's view of Villa (the person) either.  In fact, similar literary anecdotes that had come to surround Villa's persona in the sixties and seventies portrayed him to be at least something of a sybarite who, during his brief visits to the islands, took pleasure in scandalizing Manila's conservative elite with his bawdy jokes and twisted sense of (sexual) humor.  I'm sure that despite being unspecific about the nature of such a humor, these very same anecdotes can be easily re-read to confirm the presence of a more homosexual subtext. 

These four stories, taken together, provide us a glimpse into Villa's otherwise unrecoverable sexual biography.  We know that he felt alienated from his stern and cruel father, and gravitated around the protective and nourishing influence of his mother, aunts and sisters. ( Could it be that Villa believed in the Freudian theory that thinks male homosexuality to be the product of a childhood with a dominant mother and an absent father?)  We also know that he was a loner.  His first "love" was a girl named Vi, but we know nothing else of this, really.  And we are also told that in America he fell in love with a blonde girl, Georgia, but this wasn't anything serious since it was really her hair that he liked, as well as the nickname he gave her, "Georgie," a boy's name that made him smile secretly to himself. 

The stories are, most definitely, not about Villa's affections for women (other than perhaps the casual mention of his love for his mother and aunts), but about his love for two boys, David and Jack, and about the love of two boys (Johnny and Joe) for him, which he never returned.  In a way, Villa maintains a tragic view of this kind of male-to-male love in these stories, for the beloved in them is never really in love with the lover, and vice versa.  It's almost like a daisy chain of men where everybody is looking the other way.  In "A song I did not hear," Villa wonders this out loud: "Would I have known why I could not enter Jack's life...even as Joe Lieberman could not enter mine?" 

And yet, despite this symmetry between Joe and Villa's lives, it would seem that Joe, unlike Villa, is more honest about who he is: in the last time that they see each other, he accuses Villa of not telling his friends who he really is, implying that he isn't like that at all, and that he knows what they do not, and yet despite it loves Villa all the more.  This is truly a sad state of affairs, but I think it is simply that Villa, in this story, has never been attracted to Joe, for he reminds him too much of the father he despises. 

I will not even try to argue for the gayness of these stories—this is simply as self-evident as the stories themselves.  But what about the fact that Villa mentions falling in love with girls, too?  I have nothing to say about that, except perhaps this: that a man can fall in love with a woman does not necessarily foreclose the possibility that he can fall in love with a man as well. ( For the two kinds of love can and indeed do cohabit in many of us, after all).  Likewise, Villa's autobiographical trilogy and its post-script are not about his affairs with any girl (even as these are casually mentioned in them), but rather about the unrequited love of young men (whom he calls "boys") with one another.  And besides, the mention of girls/young women strikes one as somewhat obligatory in this case, merely a part of the scenes in which regular boys are shown talking about their regular lives (which should regularly include girls), and is not really pivotal in the sense that it is subjected to the inexorable workings of the story's plot. 

In the end, the existence of these stories should prove vital in recovering what may be the most historically relevant thing about Villa: he was not just a foppish _aesthete_ who advocated the ascendancy of decontextualized form in his art.  If these stories are any indication, Villa was, very early on—earlier, I'm afraid, than I originally thought was possible—a socially conscious writer, one who confronted the social stigma attending the nature of his desire, and wrote out this desire and celebrated it, despite.  That he was a Filipino, and that he did it in the 1930s, should make this feat all the more astounding, in view of the anachronistic homophobia still holding sway over many of our lives. 

Thus, these stories' indubitably _political_ (for isn't sex the oldest politics there is?)  character should put Villa's carping critics in their place.  In the light of what we now know _of who_ the man called Jose Garcia Villa was, relegating him to the "incorrect" corners of our literary history will no longer be possible short of making fools of and extremely embarrassing ourselves. 

##   _Of legends and poetry_  *

_T_ HE LAST SECTION of _Our Lady of the Carnival_ brings together ten poems which are my retellings of legends that I first heard as a child. 

I included them in this book because they represent my latest project of "legendizing," a project to which I feel peculiarly attracted at this point in my poetic life, in whose sun-kissed aerie the flightiness of my pen has apparently come home to roost.  Legendizing provides me with a form in which to actualize certain poetic ideals, some of which I will attempt to explain in this short lecture.  And to the extent that these ideals are of a piece with the kind of poetry that I would still like to write, legendizing may well be what I have been trying to do in every one of my poems all along. 

Legends nourished me at a time when food per se couldn't.  I had trouble eating when I was around four or five, and had to be bribed with stories before I could be made to open my mouth to let in the spoonful of rice mixed with a morsel of fish or vegetable.  Aling Remy, a distant relative of my father, took care of me then, and she must have found me a most difficult child, so unlike my older brother and sister whom she cared for, too, but who didn't have such a strange craving for her stories.  She never knew it, for I never told her, but while listening to her voice that called forth from the very air that surrounded us the first _ylang-ylang_ , lizard, pineapple, squash and other objects which were found in and around our house, and which her stories made suddenly magical and extraordinary, I was actually eating her words.  I'd be so caught up in the world of her words that I altogether forgot chewing the starchy lump sitting inside my mouth, sucking on it until it turned tasteless and dry instead.  Then it became even harder to swallow the awful thing, which was why I loved having Keeshie, our fluffy white dog, panting against my knobby legs under the little red table at which I sat.  Needless to say, unlike Keeshie I was peaked and skinny, and remained that way for pretty much all of my childhood. 

Only in elementary school did I learn about legends, and how they are a particular kind of story whose purpose is to explain to a community the origins of things that its members hold sacred, like certain places and landmarks.  Legends are similar to myths in that respect, except that unlike myths, legends are supposed to be based on historical facts.  Myths, on the other hand, bespeak a stranger, more ancient time, peopled by gods and goddesses whose deeds one had to believe as a matter of faith.  This distinction between legends and myths was something I never did understand, since what made a story a legend for me was precisely its mythical quality—exemplified by some event of incredible transformation happening in it—whose reality rested purely on one's belief alone. 

Inasmuch as they both trafficked in what was magical, I thought myths and legends were basically the same.  And while upon the acquisition of education I came to understand more and more that the legends of my childhood couldn't have been real—according to Darwinian theory a boy, no matter how selfish, would never have been the ancestor of the lizard!—I never lost touch with these stories.  They spoke to me in a language purer than my learning, for their message—as I was to discover only much, much later—was something that constituted who and what I was.  To the degree that the purpose of legends was to instill obedience in the children who grew up listening to them, I realized I was, myself, raised under legend's disciplining gaze. 

I arrived at this realization at around the same time that I was beginning, seriously, to write poems.  This was sometime just after my adolescence, which had been a time of profound transformations, too, some of which were very telling ones, like the eruption of my libido which, as it so happened, came to be focused on the many handsome males in my school.  But this is another story, characterized by silly prohibition, suffering and eventual transcendence. ( Like every other queer child raised in a Catholic environment I suppose I had more than my share of guilt and shame.  Like every other Catholic homosexual in this country of contradictions, however, I was able to finally negotiate keeping my sexuality despite or precisely because of my religion).  I decided that I wanted to become a writer, a poet to be precise, because of the wonderful poems I'd read during this period in my life, whose beauty I coveted and desired to imitate in little verses of my own. 

As I said, I realized soon after I started writing poetry that I had been shaped by the legends of my youth, some of which I wanted to write down, nostalgically as well as critically, as poems.  I mean this in a rather simple way: recalling the stories that explained why certain things came to be in this world, I found that they were nearly always about disobedient boys and girls, whose transformation into another life form was not a beautiful thing at all, but rather a kind of punishment.  I had internalized this didacticism, which was why legends remained credible and real to me: I remained fascinated in legend-telling's thrall, perhaps because I was afraid of becoming myself transformed into a slimy cold-blooded reptile, a flower or a fruit, on whose scary and terrible note a legend invariably ended in my forever-four-or-five-year-old mind. 

My earliest attempt at a retelling of a legend was therefore informed by this self-knowledge, this critical stance toward what had been a sacred part of my life as child, toward the shrine of my simplest faith.  It was no longer possible for me to feign innocence about a legend's real story, which I now thought was quite unfair.  There was violence in almost every single legend that I'd heard, and I wanted this _told_ , I wanted this _to tell on_ the real reason why there were legends in the first place.  The model I thought I should follow was Anne Sexton's famous versions of Grimm's fairy tales, which I read avidly because of their wit and pieces of offhand insight.  There were other poems after which I thought I should pattern my own work, but all of them were basically the same, in that they were retellings of old stories—poached from narratives in the Bible, Greek mythology, fables, and folk tales—from the point of view of the persons who otherwise had never told them, being these stories' villains or figures of abjection.  There was new magic that was revealed hiding from within the wefts of the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah or Samson and Delilah, or in the tales of the Medusa or Leda, as poets like Anna Akhmatova, Karl Shapiro, Mona van Duyn, and Jorie Graham unravelled and _re_ -ravelled them.  I knew at the very least I had to accomplish the same thing for my legends. 

The first legend I undertook to retell was the legend of the lizard.  Its story is quite well-known: an ungrateful son kills his mother and takes out her heart to offer to the woman of his dreams, and as he rushes away from the bedroom he trips and falls to the floor, whereupon the bloody heart whispers next to his downcast face, "Are you hurt, my son?"  Because of his iniquitous deed, he is transformed into a lizard who will forever kiss the ground in penance at sundown.  I retold this legend from the point of view of the son, investing him with a self-knowledge that he was to be the villain in this particular script, which he really had no choice but to follow, coldness being, for the sake of the legend and the admonishing it simply had to accomplish, his very nature:

He was cold, he could not feel. 

As they lowered his mother

down a hole in the ground,

the leaning trees kept to themselves. 

At the end of this poem (which is included in my first book, _Closet Quivers_ ), the point of view shifts from the third to the first person.  I wanted my retelling of the legend to be an occasion for identification with the animal child himself, the ungrateful lizard who, like me, was merely acting out what the story wanted him to act out.  When they lowered his/my mother in the ground—my poem "Lizard" declares—the legend had already put him/me in it. 

Lizard is my eponym:

I am the child who cried from the hole

for the love of my mother crashing. 

What fascinates me about the idea of retelling legends, indeed of any story already well-known (whose truth otherwise lies beyond question), is that it lays bare elements in the narrative that had been smoothed over, elided, in their traditional tellings.  If we look more closely at the lizard's tale, for instance, its real message is not so much about the reason lizards exist, but about how filial devotion—devotion to one's parents—ought to exceed and supersede all other forms of devotion.  Thus, in retelling the many tales I had heard as a child, I came face to face with the systems of valuation, the unquestioned principles, the cognitive home in which I was raised and which had come to determine who and what I was. 

In other words, legendizing entails painful self-criticism, even as it proceeds out of a kind of analytic consciousness that at once undermines the very ground on which it rests.  A retelling is only possible vis-a-vis a previous and initial telling, toward which it turns a critical eye.  And yet, a retelling is at the same time a self-conscious composition, possessed of a reflexive awareness of the narrative conventions it employs in the process of re-reading (and re-writing) what has already been there to begin with.  I feel it is precisely because legends are didactic that they need to be retold, which is to say, _re_ -thought and _re_ -viewed, in other words, _re-visioned_.  Hence: to legendize is to denaturalize the values that an otherwise transparent and "natural" narrative espouses, and imperceptibly passes on its receivers. 

The question arises, though: Do legendizings, by the mere fact of their self-reflexivity toward their own status as stories, necessarily abandon the spontaneity of the poetic imagination?  In other words: Can one really write critically—which is how one writes in the retelling of legends—and still remain within the realm of poetry? 

This issue relates to the traditional contradiction between analysis and synthesis, between theory and metaphor.  Poems, we are told, are a remarkable form of expression in that they are basically synthetic in nature, metaphorically building on objects and ideas that are already in evidence before the process even begins: a symbolic addition over and above the givenness of things.  As such, poems are the opposite of theory, which is typically an activity of dissection and diminishment, of analytically paring down objects and concepts to their component parts.  This traditional dichotomy, I propose, is brought to a crisis in the activity of legendizing. 

When one decides to retell a popular tale, one necessarily confronts narrative structure.  This is unavoidable, since the only way one can come up with one's own version of an old story is if one knows the story formally—knows how it says what it says.  Thus, at the outset, legendizing is a demystifying, meta-narrativistic act.  On the other hand, there is nothing pre-determined about this process, since like in every other creative undertaking, the conclusion to any story or poem is never completely apparent to the author from the very beginning.  In the legends I retold in my book, for example, I do not think I really knew how I wanted any of them to end.  It was usually the case that the legend wrote itself as it went along, and like in any of my other poems, I could not then, nor now, completely explain the inner workings of my writing, from the point of inspiration, to the finished poem's realization and resonance on the page. 

In other words, legendizing cannot any more be a purely deliberate activity than other forms of creative writing, since at bottom what it still is is a variety of poeticizing, and all poetry is mythical on the level of its metaphoric utterance.  In fact, the heart of any legendizing is metaphor itself: the transfigurative moment in which a literal truth becomes, by the action of the imagination as well as of narrative device, something altogether magical and different.  Thus, legends already contain, in themselves, poetry's transformative touch.  What one does, in legendizing, is to make this touch touch itself, and report back on its findings.  Indeed, it may well be that the project of renarrativizing myths and legends is the exemplary poetic endeavor, since it remains conscious of the process of its enactment, while simultaneously giving itself over to the mystery which is the essence of all creativity. 

And so, legendizing may not be such a singular affair, after all.  In fact, in many ways, it is the precondition of all poetry.  Since implicit in every poem we write is a structure of meaning, a pre-existing form of utterance to which the poem refers, we might say that all poetry embodies the origin, the theory, the legend, of its being.  In the end, all writing is a re-writing, a re-telling, of the original, primeval legend which is language itself. 

* * *

I know all this has sounded a little too academic—not to mention theoretical—which is why I don't want to conclude on this note.  After all, it is hardly ever the case that one theorizes on the poems one has yet to write.  It is likely to be the other way around, in fact: after one has written, and been read (and one hopes, been liked), one is asked, on occasions such as this, to talk about one's work.  For the remainder of this lecture, I would therefore like to dwell a little on one particular legend(izing), and how its occasion is itself legendary—for me, at least. ( One might call the following section of my talk, "The legend of one of the legends in Neil's book"!) 

After four years, I decided to return to Dumaguete in the summer of 1995.  I had been a fellow to its annual writers workshop, and had, since then, always thought of coming back.  And so, this time, I joined the current batch of writing fellows (which included my friend, Ralph); my colleagues at the University of the Philippines, Jimmy and Jing; and my mentor, Ophie, for a week's reprieve from the wasteland that is Manila. 

Maybe I need to mention, too, that Dumaguete holds a special magic for me.  It is basically a university town (Silliman and Dumaguete are almost synonymous), stretched along the edge of the sea on the southeastern side of Negros Oriental, and shaded from harsh sunlight by the sprawling canopies of gnarled, centuries-old acacias that are practically everywhere.  The most memorable part of the city is the boulevard, on whose ledge I remember waxing lyrical as the breeze blew in from the sea all around us—Jing said it was as though I was getting drunk with the briny air.  I didn't tell her then, but I really needed to be there at that particular time, having worked myself to exhaustion teaching and taking up my masters at my university, and feeling quite sick of the pollution and prosiness of big-city life.  Were it not for that trip, and the mystical experience it bequeathed me, I seriously doubt if I'd have made it through that summer with my sanity—or at least sense of humor—intact.  I'd always known that nothing was ever literal or ungracious in Dumaguete; I proved this again to myself for the second time. 

There was poetry in the air for all those six days.  We all felt somehow in synch with the elements that spoke in and through us.  Ophie treated us to a private piano recital at a seaside restaurant, Jimmy and Jing took long leisurely walks on the boulevard, Ralph touched every tree to make himself known to its spirit and slept with amethyst stones on his face, and I, I was just taking it all in, determined to replenish the supply of beauty and peace that I knew would easily get depleted just by leaving this wonderful place, just by living in the nightmare that was my city, which seemed, compared to the benificence sighing everywhere around me for all those magical days and nights, less real, remote, more incredible.  Sitting on the branch of one of the giant acacias of the boulevard on one of our nightly strolls, I knew that Dumaguete was and would always be my home. 

This general sense of creative excitation and enchantment in the company of friends in the haven that is Dumaguete formed the backdrop to the writing of "Legend of the seafoam," which I will be reading after my talk.  The immediate occasion was, however, one afternoon's trip with another writer, Susan, to a beach in the town just north of the city, from which one can sense the turbulent streams rushing under the waters of the sea that lies between the southern tip of Cebu and Negros island.  Ophie was not with us anymore, for she had left for Manila on the same plane that Susan took coming in.  We even saw it take off from the airport far to the right side of the beach, and waved good-bye as it lifted and swerved above the blue of the water and into the blue of the sky. 

While we were waiting for our lunch in the resort's open-air restaurant, Ralph and I gave Jing and Jimmy the quartz crystals that we'd bought for them at Sidlacang Negros.  We then waded into the sea to wash our own respective stones and left them out in the sun.  I don't know what possessed me just then to talk about the legend of Alunsina and Tungkung-Langit, the primeval beings in a popular Panay-on cosmogony story.  I think it was because I remembered one of the fellows had recited—rather lousily—Rio Alma's retelling of it at a poetry reading in Dyutay's _dap-ay_ the night before.  But maybe it was because the sea simply evoked it: Alunsina, the name itself whispering the rising and falling of the tide, lapping of waves, eddying of foam, the churning of the water that was her nature.  Feeling the warm currents of myth swirling within me I knew I had to write that poem, to claim it from the sea that seemed to proffer it in its thousand, wispy hands.  I knew I had to re-tell her story.  In the meantime, Ralph had decided to take a swim further out into the surf, and Jing raised the idea of naming our crystals, after all we'd just baptized them.  It was then that Jimmy quipped, "Alunsina, I'll call her Alunsina," as he, fumbling, put the crystal in his jeans' side-pocket. " No wonder Tungkung-Langit cannot find her," I said. " She's there all snug inside your pants!" 

I didn't succeed in writing that poem as soon as I wanted.  Somehow I don't think it wanted to be so hastily written.  I remember trying to write it, though, the day that I returned to our house in Quezon City.  But no matter how much I wanted to do it, it was just _not there_ to be done.  I think I needed to forget the occasion that had prompted it, to become disenchanted first, to return to the banality of life without the sea, without grace, without beauty, before I could re-enter the world of legend, before I could claim the poem which the spindrifts and glitters of that brilliant afternoon told me was already, inescapably, mine. 

I also needed to recall the original version of the legend, which I realized tended to discredit Alunsina altogether, thinking her a frivolous and jealous wife who did nothing to help Tungkung-Langit put order into the chaos of the first universe.  But what this original story didn't mention was just how it was Alunsina herself who set the inexorable wheels of creation turning, by disappearing from Tungkung-Langit's life, for which he was forced to look outside himself, and produced, out of his unfathomable sense of sadness and loss, what we now recognize as the living and limpid world.  According to this myth, we came out of a god's mourning for his lost love.  In my retelling, I wanted to say something else, and maybe it is this: Alunsina is the implicit, fluid, unnameable, dark though no less active principle in all of creation, without whom nothing vital would exist. 

I know this particular legendizing shares very little of the initial cynicism with which I approached legends the first time I decided to retell them.  Perhaps it's all because, despite the critical consciousness required in the retelling of such didactic stories as legends, one remains, so long as one calls oneself a poet, committed to and already enfolded in mystery.  There is really no choice in the matter.  The demystifying of the world can only be accomplished by more mystification.  And of all mystifications, legends—and their retellings—happen to be by far the more honest, if only because they do not pass themselves off as anything other than what they are. 

The word legend, it is said, comes from the Greek _legein_ , meaning, "to gather, collect; to speak."  I think that, in the end, all my legendizings have been forms of gathering, of speaking, then.  In the poem that follows, I have tried to collect the grainy bits of coral and sand, the spray of lucent water, the liquid syllables of speech of that blessed day, when the sea sang inside me and told me her ancient, shimmering name. 

_Legend of the seafoam_

In the beginning there was always mist

shrouding and blurring the edges of things:

untouched by clovenness, water and sky

knew nothing of horizons; land and air

lay languidly, caught in the grip of shared

rootlessness and sleep.  In the beginning,

the void stirred awake from itself, remembering

all it could of its mist-borne soul as it began

to dream of difference.  Out of this wish

two beings churned loose, and arose:

Tungkung Langit, omnipotent Lord of the sky,

and his wife, Alunsina.  She was his lilting

consolation as he was her all: at sunrise,

he returned from his labors at creation

to find her singing beside a pond

which had been her desire turned into water. 

He loved her enough to bequeath her

this one power: a gift of crystal grief

and pain that grew lucent in her breast

and flowed shimmering to her lips.  As she sang,

she strummed the water's anxious skin

with her fingers, and he felt the cool touch

of ripples spreading faintly from his brow

to his mind's very bottom.  But still,

Tungkung Langit alone wielded heaven's

towering staff, for he was lord over all

that cowered in its shadow.  Alunsina

thought little of the massiveness that was

his shape, but of what hid there:

while he was not looking, she had mastered

the trick of seeing the space between his stares

as he searched for more emptiness to fill, more

black regions to banish from his sight

that craved light and more light.  She had felt

the doubt in his limbs as they tore apart

ancient waters from their springs, had heard

the muffled sigh in his breath as it blew out

heaving mist like a candle whose flame

was darkness.  And so, when he told her

in the brilliant clasp of sunrise how her songs

tired him so, how darkly woeful he found them

as depths that lurked wanton under

the formless worlds that he despised,

she knew more than he did of the folly

inside his heart.  While Tungkung Langit

was stern-eyed blowing fire into the sun's

roaring furnace, Alunsina disappeared

from the sky which had been her home. 

At first he thought it refreshing

not to listen to her songs, not to find her lying

on her side by crystal ponds that cooled

the air of celestial places.  But soon,

he was weary of the heat sputtering

from within his fervent imaginings.  Soon he craved

her fingers to put out the flame on his brow,

to heal the gap leering at him from within

the blinding magnificence of his mind. 

In his solitude her absence spoke to him

more loudly than any creation

he could ordain!  Fired frantic by her loss

he sought her from the bottom to the surface

of things he had caused: from sunrise

to sunrise, from order to order,

light to more light in the universe

of his own proud invention.  She was not there. 

And so he remembered who she was:

Alunsina who haunted everything

he had shaped as shadow haunted light. 

He threw the pall of his sorrow

over half of the sky, leaving only a hole

through which he might see her and the glint

of countless pinpricks to guide her home. 

But she remained lost to him the way dew

was lost to the newly formed earth in the haze

of the very first sunset.  And then,

he gathered her liquid sadness from all

the ponds she had orphaned in her wake

and cast it into the hollows down below. 

Perched on the crest of a rainbow,

Tungkung Langit wept a rain full of life

that took root everywhere it fell:

on land it crept, through air it flew,

and across the ocean it swam, all in the same

fitful rhythm of loss.  He pressed

his mouth to the soil where quivered

flowers sighing their mottled fragrance

into his face.  For all this he only grew

more forlorn: she was nowhere in the exuberance

for which he was everywhere called Almighty

by the progeny he had enfleshed.  If only

they knew the formless grief enwombing him,

the pain whence they themselves had throbbed

within his heart's seething mist! 

After staying in a fire-lit cave

where his longing had moved the fingers

of an upright creature across a wall,

Tungkung Langit lifted himself up

to the evening.  He would have thought

the moonlit sky beautiful had he not

noticed the glimmer of ripples

over the surface of a breeze-blown sea. 

For a moment he could see her lying

across the horizon, her head resting

on a hand while the other strummed the water's

trembling skin.  She would seem to be singing

to waves that rushed headlong to shore as if

desiring seamlessness.  From across the sea

he called her name an eternity of times

into the rising wind, Alunsina,

Alunsina.  But no sooner had he spoken

than she vanished as the foam swirling

lucent among storm-swept rocks. 

* _Delivered by the author at the first British-Philippine Literary Conference, held at the De La Salle University, 6 and 7 of February, 1997_. 
|   **_five:_ **  |   **_Queering the pitch_ **   
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|  |   

##   _The queer and the_ bakla

_A_ NEW KIND OF sexual politics has taken root and been fructifying in the key urban centers of the West.  And it is one that has the potential to dissolve traditional distinctions of sexuality (homo/hetero) and gender (male/female).  The name by which this politics would like to be known in the current time is offensively pejorative and raucously rebellious, by turns: Queer. 

While giving lectures at the different campuses of the University of California (Berkeley, LA, Long Beach) last April, I had the opportunity to encounter this politics first-hand.  A number of people in the audience were self-identified queer activists, and after engaging with them I am now able to more clearly describe the phenomenon of the "queer," and to do so alongside the concept of the _bakla_ , which is an identity that has dominated gay culture in the Philippines, and determined the course of its liberationist initiatives for the past three or four decades. 

First of all, queerness signifies sexuality at the same time that it supersedes it.  To be queer is to be sexually non-comformist, which is more than merely being gay.  A straight man who happens to like wearing women's underwear, or who fetishizes feet, is queer.  Bisexual men and women are queer.  Whites who prefer Asian lovers, Asians who prefer white lovers, anyone who has a fixation on specific racial, class, or physical types, are definitely queer.  In other words, the queer identity is not identical to "homosexual," for it doesn't even partake of the homo/hetero dualism: to be queer is not necessarily to be un-straight, for even straights are considered queer if they violate the conventional form of sexual relations.  And queers are either male or female, or even neither or both: drag queens, transgenderists, transsexuals, anyone who crosses and blurs the boundaries between "male" and "female," are queers, too. 

And yet, queerness is at the same time, not about sexuality or gender at all: while historically "queer" has been used as a term of abuse for gays and lesbians, it is, strictly speaking, an adjective that denotes strangeness of any sort.  Hence, while queer activists rally around this label for the purpose of overturning oppressive gender and sexual norms, they do so in order to challenge the idea of the normative itself.  It is therefore the distinct nature of queerness to transgress its own claims to self-coherence and clarity: no one can predict just what the word queer will signify in the future, because what is queer now may not be queer later on.  In fact, there may be no way to ascertain what is truly queer from what isn't, since at any one moment in history there exists such plurality of meanings as lived out by individuals that no norm may be posited that doesn't flatten out differences among apparently similar people and lives. 

What queer politics seeks to accomplish is to realize in practice what has already been produced as discourse in Western social theory for the past 50 years: people can choose to reinvent themselves according to their desires, inasmuch as our bodies do not define anything natural and self-evident about who or what we are or can be in this world.  Thus, queerness is of the same piece with postmodernism and its celebration of self-fashioned difference. 

The idea of the _bakla_ , on the other hand, may well be congruent to queer in that it, too, is an adjective that, in its strict sense, pejoratively denotes something aberrant, even in the non-sexual sense.  A crab that is not of the usual size or shape is called _bakla.  A_ momentary state of confusion is sometimes called _pagkabakla_.  And like queer, _bakla_ represents a painful stigmatizing weapon when deployed against gays. ( Thus, like queer, its reappropriation for political ends can represent the same violent inversion that turns the stigma on its head and throws it back at the power-brokers who tooled it). 

However, _bakla_ represents an identity caught in an ontological trap: he is a "woman-hearted man" who is sexually attracted to "real men," but whose love will never be fully reciprocated precisely because he isn't a "real woman."  The _bakla_ self is therefore tragicomically pinioned on the heterosexual cross of despair, being that it is both unreal (not a real man, not a real woman) and unrealizable (cannot be a real man, cannot be a real woman).  In contemporary times, the _bakla_ has been made to bear the burden of another stigmatizing label, homosexual.  With this yoking of a term of sexual orientation onto a term of gender selfhood, the _bakla_ in effect is made to inhabit two prisonhouses, and to suffer two confinements, thus: his objectionable effeminacy and his now demonized sexuality. 

Because it is really the _bakla_ that is behind the concept of homosexuality (and gayness) in the popular spaces of Philippine cultural life, the trajectory of gay political contestations has been limited to issues of civic reforms that would alleviate the oppression of the _bakla_ in terms of occupational choice (gay policemen, politicians), political representation (gay sectoral representatives), and symbolic capital (gay literature courses, gay newspapers, gay anthologies).  This form of politics therefore assumes that the _bakla_ are the only homosexuals/gays around, and that their oppression could be eliminated if they were granted certain special rights. 

What I find most objectionable about _bakla_ politics is that it isn't even self-reflexive enough to realize its tokenist ends: by agitating for rights for what it takes to be a unique variety of people, it contains its own potential liberation.  Hence, it amounts to nothing else but the ghettoization of the _bakla_.  Patterned after the idea of minority rights, the _bakla_ movement cannot seem to take the hint that as practiced in the Philippines, minority politics leaves so much more to be desired: just look at the way our so-called "national minorities" (the T'boli, Mangyan, Aeta, etc.)  are being deprived of their ancestral lands, and being made to surrender their culture in favor of "progress," and one would be readily convinced of the futility of this form of politics, not to mention its deviousness. 

And certainly, _bakla_ cannot exhaust all the potential meanings of sexual and gender difference in the Philippines.  While there may be a paucity of insitutional, written discourse on sex hereabout, there is nonetheless so much variety in the ways in which Filipinos experience their sexuality. ( One assumes this to be the case despite the absence of textual proof).  It is in making visible this plurality that the idea of queerness might prove useful to us in the current time.  To the degree that queerness connotes an openness to variety and a negation of normativity, it might just be the concept we are looking for in order to yank away the idea of gay liberation, as it has been understood in the Philippines from the seventies onward, from its presently tokenist, heterosexist moorings. 

But just how does the _bakla_ self turn into the "queer"?  Or should we even want it to do so, or can it anyway? 

Queer politics first found its battleground in the American and British hecatombs of the AIDS pandemic, sometime in the late 1980s and early nineties.  The vigilante organization called "Queer Nation" pioneered what would later be called "in-your-face" activism, and the political slogans of its rallies and protests directed against the dispensation which was not doing enough to help AIDS sufferers, set the tone for the other forms of sexual vigilantism that followed it. 

What is significant here is that this self-arrogated use of what had hitherto been considered a term of personal abuse—one which described painful histories in the lives of many gay men and women in the anglophone West—may have been dictated by the medical contingency of the gay-identified times.  In other words, as a new generation of self-aware homosexual men reached their early adulthood during the height of the AIDS crisis, these very same individuals could no longer appreciate the positive value of the term "gay" by which to describe themselves and their aspirations. ( And this positive ring to the word "gay"—for it ostensibly connotes happiness, among other equally bright and sunny things—was precisely part and parcel of the flowering of homosexual culture in the West in the whole of the 1970s).  Gay, by the end of the last decade, had been so closely associated with AIDS that one who had started to feel sexually inclined toward members of one's own sex did not necessarily become possessed of an urgent fellow-feeling for gays who had, by this time, become phobically branded as a "high-risk group." 

On the other hand, there were alternative gay representations that circulated in the symbolic spheres of American mainstream life, but these were invariably WASP-y figures who all belonged to the middle and upper middle classes, and were middle-aged.  Of course, America, as well as the rest of the increasingly transnational world, is becoming browner and younger with every new batch of FOBs (fresh-off-the-boat), and the philosophy of multiculturalism which is enshrined in the heart of governments in the West decreed that minorities be given equal access to state institutions and services (and, as it so happened, to political organizing as well).  Thus, those who couldn't see themselves in the tormented, albeit sometimes deliriously exciting world of the white, yuppified homosexual man in the works of such writers as Armistead Maupin, Edmund White and David Leavitt (who may be Jewish, but remains rather orthodox in all sorts of ways nonetheless), could now identify with and as queer. 

And so queers started taking center stage all over the United States, and in due time, in England as well.  The burgeoning field of Gay and Lesbian Studies—something that had barely even taken root in the more radical academic sites in America at this time—started revaluating the aegis under which it had functioned, and in some places at least, rechristened its framework and method from "Gay theory" to "Queer theory."  All of a sudden, sexuality was no longer just a matter of the gender of one's sexual object choice, but all other possible expressions of both the concepts "sex" and "choice."  Indeed, queer thought professes an unwavering mission to liberate the terms of the debate on sexual and gender oppression from the binary oppositions that had governed most discussions of sexual desire in Western sexological discourse: masculine/feminine, straight/gay, active/passive, young/old, monogamous/polygamous, white/black, etc.  With the idea of queerness comes the idea of difference, and this in turn worries easy, cut-and-dry distinctions such as these. 

What we must not forget, though, is that Western sexual debates have reached the stage of the "queer" only because they have run the whole gamut of historical change, one marked by struggles and recriminations, both outside gay and lesbian culture and inside it.  Third World lesbians and gays who became disechanted with the ethnocentric (read: selfish) ways of Western feminists and gay men registered trenchant complaints against their fellow sisters-and-brothers-in-arms.  Then followed the sado-masochists, whose particular expression of sexual pleasure diminished them in the eyes of conventional homosexuals.  Then bisexuals wanted their voices heard as well.  And the PWAs (People With AIDS) and their lovers joined the picture, at the heels of a motley crew of transgendered queens and dykes. 

The funny thing is I can almost foresee how in the Philippines, there will emerge men and women who will call themselves queers, instead of gays or lesbians.  And just like every other imported concept, this one will suffer the same fate of hybridization and appropriation.  Just look at what happened to the word gay itself: in the West, it can refer to both male and female homosexuals, and yet here, it refers only to the _bakla_.  And because it refers only to the _bakla_ , the word gay cannot be used to describe the _bakla_ 's lover (who is, on the contrary, straight as hell), or those who cannot be identified as _bakla_ precisely because they do not fit the _bakla_ profile of a "woman-hearted man" who strictly falls in love with the hopelessly heterosexual, macho man.  Here, the identity of the gay has been understood best as "Miss Gay Philippines: Five Prettiest" (the most prestigious beauty pageant for gays—precisely!—in our country where even the smallest barangay manages to have at least one beauty parlor with a resident _bakla_ beautician to cater to our people's tremendous need for quick, cosmetic fixes). 

Thus, the presence of the word queer in our culture cannot be taken to necessarily mean the presence of the politics that had engendered it in the West whence it came in the first place.  On the contrary, it is more likely that those who will use this word to call themselves will merely be like my "skinhead" neighbors who go to mass on Sundays with their parents, and who piously receive Holy Communion without fail! 

I don't even think it possible—or desirable—to aim for the emergence of queerness in the Philippines, at least not until the same conditions that made it possible in the West are themselves obtaining in our society.  Oh no, I don't mean the AIDS crisis. ( Although actually that may not be something anybody can do much about, seeing as how the sexual conservatism—and hypocrisy—of the Philippine Catholic Church has impeded the efforts of NGOs to disseminate the awareness and condoms which are essential in the struggle to fight this horrific disease).  I mean the same rigidification of gay and lesbian culture that had produced the queer reaction in the first place.  Because only a certain fixed group of people controlled the significations of gayness in the American West of the 1980s, there arose collectivities and communities that challenged it.  Without this initial empowering of no matter how specific a segment in the "queer" spectrum, the employment of queer politics in our case might just amount to a _burgis_ dilletantism of sorts. 

We must remember that although the queer idea that there are any number of expressions for sexual desire which the many different individuals who make up our world may possess at any one point in their ever-shifting lives may sound apolitical (because postmodern and fantastic) offhand, it nonetheless must be taken in view of the historical events that led up to it.  In other words, the _bakla_ movement (or gay movement or whatever other label that might prove most salutary for the moment) must first turn hegemonic and powerful enough, so that revaluations of and reactions against it—such as what "queer" mainly was vis-a-vis "gay"—might proceed with a measure of real urgency and commitment.  Even without the same cyncism toward identity and power which postmodernism represents in the West, Philippine society just might be able to produce its own version of queer politics by virtue of the fact that there already will have been enough reasons for it to exist. 

Finally, then, the queer and the _bakla_ might not be so different from each other, after all. 

##   _Gay villains_

_T_ HIS PAST WEEK has seen the nation's headlines getting hogged by stories of sexual abuse: two involving local politicians who are allegedly into pedophilia, and one involving a talent manager who got a kick out of taking video clips of—and in several cases, committing lascivious acts with—his gorgeous male models in the buff. 

These news stories wouldn't have found their way into this column if they had nothing to do with the issue of homosexuality.  And indeed, they do: implicated in all three stories are gay agents who allegedly either abetted the sexual abuse or actually committed it. 

Mayor Alonte of Biñan, Laguna, has been charged with rape by a sixteen-year-old female student, who claims that she was drugged by her gay dance partner.  When she came to, she was already naked and getting sexually assaulted by the mayor.  Congressman Jalosjos of Mindanao is the target of an investigation that stems from a complaint filed by an eleven-year-old girl.  According to the girl's testimony, it was her gay foster father who sold her for several thousands to the congressman.  And finally, Jojo Veloso of the modeling agency Philmoda, is currently in hot water for supposedly forcing aspiring male models to agree to be "genitally fondled" during their screen tests and pictorials. ( And strangely enough, there exists video footage that would seem to prove it all!) 

This column—and this columnist—will not attempt to defend these gay men.  If they are found to be guilty, then they should be punished like any other criminal under the law.  But so far, the treatment by local media of these stories has revealed a dangerous tendency in some practitioners to go overboard in depicting—nay, taking pleasure in depicting—the "criminal nature" of one of our culture's most easily identified and vulnerable minorities: the gays.  I am referring, in particular, to those late-night shows of one television network that by turns aired episodes on the scandal this past week. ( Now why am I not surprised?) 

As far as I can see it, the news reports about the two girls who were supposedly raped by pedophilic politicians are not as potentially harmful to the public perception of gays as the other story: after all, they say a lot more about how "sick" macho politics really is than anything else.  The scandalous video showing male models getting masturbated at the instigation and with the complete approval of their gay talent manager does, however, seem directly inimical to the interest of gays, if only because it would appear to reinforce an already existing stigma: gays are corruptors who prey on our country's gullible males.  And this these shows drove wittily home: by the way their treatment of the story went, and by the way actual footage was aired in between editorializing annotations, one became effectively convinced that _all_ gay talent managers in local showbusiness were if not into, then at least tolerant of, this sort of thing. 

In the child abuse stories, the gay agents acted as pimps for their rich and influential benefactors, but the ultimate villains are still straight—straight pedophiles, that is.  Thus, these middlemen's being homosexual, although clearly the most noteworthy feature of their identity, does not completely inform the nature of their crime: they themselves did not rape the young victims who, being female, are not exactly their cup of tea.  But the third story locates the villainous nature of its main character in the fact that he is a homosexual: Veloso did all the things he supposedly did precisely because he is gay.  And, paraphrasing these shows' hosts, he is just the tip of an otherwise monstrous iceberg set perilously adrift in the sea of our lives. 

There is one thing that has remained unsaid about this story: none of the male models who appeared in the video—which, if we are to believe the reports, is at least a couple of years old—came out to complain about what was supposedly "done" to them.  Why this was the case should give one pause.  We can simply put this down, like many commentators already have, to the fact that the models were just too embarrassed to admit what had happened to them, and also that they did get what they bargained for, after all: they were subsequently hired as models in the agency. 

But what I would want to discuss at this point is the bigger cultural context in which this story happened—and this none of these shows' hosts had apparently any intentions of discussing, precisely because it would undermine the humanistic, bourgeois moralism on which every other thing that comes out of their mouths rests. ( It would have also demanded a lot more complicated thinking from their writers—and evidently this was difficult to arrange). 

Just how sexually self-conscious are we as a people?  How complex is our sexual vocabulary?  How obsessively discursive are we when it comes to sexual matters? 

Not everybody will have a uniform answer to these questions, but there is a general pattern that may be gleaned from the answers that would likely come from the majority of our population: sex is not a highly theorized sphere of behavior in most Filipino lives.  For the longest time, polite culture has dictated that one not think, let alone talk, about sex hereabout, even as it can only be presumed that sex has always been around despite being unacknowledged or unspoken of (and also unthought?).  Only in the last decade, in fact, has it become possible for a new generation of Filipinos to even begin to discuss sexual facts and fictions unabashedly in school—and this is not even true for all the schools in the country, nor is it necessarily accomplished well by teachers who were themselves not taught the intricacies of sex education during their youth. 

Given this absence of a complex, institutional sexual discourse, it may be possible to say that sexual acts are being performed by many Filipinos rather unselfconsciously, which means that these acts do not necessarily become perceived by their actors as having anything to say about _who_ or _what_ they are.  This lack of correspondence between what one does and who/what one is does not only hold true where sexual matters are concerned.  There are a great number of other acts that despite being committed regularly by certain Filipinos are otherwise not definitive of their sense of identity.  Take graft and corruption, for instance.  Those government officials who commit it everywhere in our country and on all levels of the bureacracy do not even think they are corrupting themselves, or their very being, by doing what they do. ( And this example does not exhaust the point I am trying to make plain in this respect). 

This "negotiability" between act and personhood has been one of the most outstanding features of Filipino psychology. ( In fact, it has been one piece of evidence among many that we may not even have a "psychology"—at least, not in the same way that the West has it—in the first place).  I personally feel that for many of us—especially those whose socialization wasn't terribly affected by Western modes of thinking, feeling and behaving—external actions can remain perfectly provisional and performative vis-a-vis a deeper sense of self, which I am not loath to denominate (alongside the thinkers of _Sikolohiyang Pilipino_ ) as some kind of spiritual inner being, or _kalooban_.  A closer scrutiny of this "psychospiritual" structure would reveal that it remains relatively stable, precisely because it already privileges interiority over exteriority, inner being over outer act, and this privileging may be traced to the Catholic valorization of Spirit over Flesh.  Moreover, my own study of this structure has revealed to me its stubborn dimorphism and heterosexuality: there are essentially two kinds _of kalooban_ , male and female, and the former can only desire the latter (and vice versa). 

How does all this affect the present argument?  Simple: for many males in our culture, sexual acts, insofar as they remain detached from their sense of inner self, do not necessarily affect their self-concepts.  It is precisely because there is so much fluidity in the way the masculine, "heterosexual" man in our society can conduct himself, erotically as well as socially, that it has been possible for him to engage in sex with another man, and yet maintain that he is not "affected" by it at all.  Likewise, the lack of vocabulary and discourse on sex enables so many men in our society to perform sexual acts thoughtlessly, unselfconsciously, which somehow renders them "unreal" in the end: the familiar tableau of two boys mutually masturbating before a pornographic magazine inside a _bodega_ pretty much summarizes what I mean.  Neither of them will think much of what they did the minute they finished doing it—nor how what they did _might_ possibly affect their identity—precisely because they will not even so much as talk about it afterward.  Indeed, all things considered, it might as well not have happened at all. 

I suppose the difference in the case of the naked models on tape is that their acts cannot be "unthought" anymore precisely because they have been captured on video and preserved for all time (and with media's gleeful airing of its juiciest parts, disseminated and mass-produced as well).  It's much like those two boys intently playing with themselves again—except this time, a Peeping Tom hiding somewhere among the shadows had stealthily taken their picture, and recopied it over and over until some sicko who became fascinated with it decided to print it in the dailies.  Indeed, to the degree that sexuality is largely a matter of fantasy and desire, media should be held liable for voyeuristically showing cuts from this pornographic video (made a little more artful by editorial splicings, electronic blurrings and ghostings), and thus making available to their diverse viewership the chance to seize pleasure for themselves. 

Strangely enough, despite their sickeningly smug humanism, what these shows did and what they said were not exactly one and the same (and thus, their script writers did manage to perform a relatively complex deconstructive maneuver despite themselves): there they were, these show's freshly scrubbed anchorpersons, brimming with confidence and looking squeaky-clean as always, and using all their cosmetic wit to pontificate about the evils that are contained in, that are about, and that surround this video; and yet there _they_ were, the artfully spliced and tastefully "shaded" naked male bodies themselves, provocatively intercutting them.  This textual structure is known in literature as _praeteritio_ , and it is exemplified best by texts that spend a great deal of energy and time talking about what they are not going to do (and yet in talking about it they end up doing it anyway!) 

I know that the increasing sexological awareness of our society has suddenly, if painfully, exposed a lot of the abuse that has always been committed against its more powerless members (children, for instance).  But we have to admit that talking about sex is simply another way of "producing" more and more of it.  Because Filipinos have not to a great extent been selfconsiously sexual (that is to say, sexually selfconsious) as a people, their libidinal pleasures have not been as prolific and explosive as their Western counterparts.  But there is really no position from which to judge which pleasures are better or worse.  In the end, there's no way to know for sure if our grandparents' largely invisible sexual life wasn't actually a kinder one when compared to our own increasingly visible sexual biographies. 

I am finally not attempting to excuse Veloso from this charge. ( Needless to say, I am not in the position to do such a thing).  One need only remind everyone that Veloso is not in the least representative of who homosexuals are—in showbusiness or outside it—to nip any anti-gay hysteria in the bud.  Nonetheless, what I'm really trying to say here is that, in truth, there might not have been the same kind of brutally forceful and wicked abuse that we are being made to believe—by such respectable personages as have spoken on this matter thus far—operated in the making of that video. ( If there was brutal abuse in these procedings at all, it most likely was committed by ratings-hungry media personalities who have cashed in on the latest "sex and violence" stories without shame). 

I am just hoping that in appropriating Western sexual discourse—sexual harassment, pedophilia, sodomy, rape, etc.—our country may still be able to escape Western society's more self-repressive and pleasure-denying aspects.  I am hoping that despite the unstoppable sexualization of our lives, a little of the pre-sexological innocence of boys playing themselves silly inside an abandoned garage remains. 

##   _Was Rizal gay?_ 

_L_ ET ME MAKE one thing clear: I am not originating this topic in print, nor do I wish to create a controversy concerning our country's foremost national hero just when it seems timely (if not personally profitable) to do so.  As we all know, the coming year has been one designated for heroes in the Centennial Committee's calendar of activities, and on the 30th of December 1996, the country celebrated Rizal's 100th death anniversary.  Thus, it would seem that coming up with the most interesting things to say about such a personage as Rizal has never been more opportune and perfectly _de rigeur_ than today. 

Of all our heroes, Jose Protacio Mercado Rizal y Alonso Realonda stands as the fairest game.  There's a simple explanation for this: Rizal is the most popular figure in our country's young history as a nation.  Practically anywhere in the Philippines, there is bound to be a thoroughfare named after him, or a monument on which stands the standard bolt-upright figure of a larger-than-life man wearing a hat and an overcoat.  Rizal's availability to all sorts of appropriation is only the inevitable upshot of his greatness: from the millenarianists of Mount Banahaw to the Knights of Rizal, his name is being invoked, vainly or otherwise, as our country's possibly greatest child (and for the Rizalist cultists, as a demigod of sorts). 

Such is the price of heroism, then: like the founder of a religion, if not a philosophy, one's selfhood as a hero is laid bare to the vagaries of time and signification.  Rizal is like a text that has been read over and again, and as historical change pushes an ever-widening wedge between the life that wrote Rizal (in other words, the person that was Rizal), and the life that reads him (that is, the generation that praises and emulates him), Rizal's textual reality becomes more and more polyvalent and plural.  A hundred years after his death, Rizal is being celebrated as the greatest Filipino ecologist, economist, political scientist, agronomist, entomologist, futurist, and a host of other appellations I'm sure Rizal himself would have found it difficult to understand, and contemplating this "First Filipino's" greatness has become some kind of rite of passage for every single intellectual in this country who wishes to participate in the lucrative discourse of nationalism. ( Just recently, the Centennial Committee announced the holding of a literary contest in which the incredibly large sum of a million pesos is at stake for each of the categories of epic poetry, essay, novel and play.  One can almost guess at how frequently, if not extravagantly, the entries to this contest are going to utilize the fact and the fiction that is Rizal). 

I suppose Rizal had had this mythic popularity coming all along: among all of our country's heroes, no one wrote as prodigiously (and as passionately) about nationhood as he did.  Likewise, just a cursory view of his biography would show that he seemed to know exactly how to go about living the life of one who was to become a martyr to the cause of his people's freedom.  Indeed, there is just so much one can say about him if only because there is so much one can read by him, as well as _into_ the things that he did or is said to have done.  Nonetheless, the inquiry into Rizal's possible homosexuality is a relatively new take on this hero's much pondered "essence" and name.  And it is this scandalous if not irreverent question—Was Rizal a homosexual?—that I would wish to ponder at this point. 

As I said, I am not the first to raise such a query, and in a way this essay merely plans to take its cue from and find its direction in the column in which this issue was first raised in print.  I am referring, of course, to Isagani Cruz's recent piece on Rizal, titled "Bakla ba si Rizal?,"  which came out in _Filipino Magazine_ early this year. 

The answer to this question, if Cruz is to be believed, is a resounding and categorical _yes_.  And he offers what he calls "biographical evidence" in order to arrive at this question's affirmation.  First, Rizal was a _bakla_ because he was afraid of committing himself to the revolutionary cause.  Second, Rizal's _kabaklaan_ made itself apparent in his periodic failings in his relationships with the women with whom he was supposed to have been romantically linked.  Third, Rizal didn't go out to hit the sack with wenches in the brothels of Barcelona and Madrid, which was what the other _propagandistas_ in Spain regularly did.  Fourth, Rizal might not have even been the father of Josephine's benighted baby boy, since, paraphrasing the "feelings" of noted Rizalist scholar Ambeth Ocampo about the matter of Rizal's disputed paternity, Josephine might have been the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her cruel stepfather. 

Of course, these four conjectures hardly qualify as proof, being the end-products of what I can only describe as a largely catty evidential procedure that begs now to be challenged, if only for its underlying assumptions about what being a _bakla_ means: one, a _bakla_ cannot be a revolutionary because he is essentially a spineless coward; two, failing in one's relationships with women necessarily makes one a _bakla;_ three, a _bakla_ cannot possibly have sex with women, not even when the women in question are prostitutes; and four, to be a _bakla_ is to be impotent or at least incapable of impregnating a woman. 

The dubiousness of these assumptions hardly needs to be emphasized: according to them, _kabaklaan_ is the negation of everything good and desirable about masculinity, and is therefore devoid of its own inner substance and worth.  Indeed, even if I were championing the cause of the _bakla_ and would like to win someone as "big" and popular as Rizal over to my side, I would readily balk at Cruz's way of going about such a task.  His "biographical evidence" demonstrates nothing, other than the unflattering and sadly naive opinion he holds of who (or what) a _bakla_ is.  In saying that I do not find Cruz's method credible at the very least, I am of course also saying that there is a better way of making the project of ascertaining Rizal's sexuality work.  And this method involves, first and foremost, asking if the question itself is sensible, given the historical period in which I would wish it to make sense. 

Examining the categories one is using in one's study of such slippery social realities as sexuality and gender is the necessary first step, then.  This is because the categories we use are always culture-bound and historically specific, and as such are never neutral and "scientific," let alone universally reliable and insightful.  To ask if Rizal was a _bakla_ , one has, first and foremost, to be clear about what the concept _bakla_ meant at the time and place that Rizal lived in.  In other words, the way we understand _bakla_ today most probably was not the way people in these islands a century ago understood it.  This alone makes one's project more difficult than it might have originally appeared, for it requires one to undertake a more or less comprehensive study of the sex/gender system of mid-nineteenth century Philippines, in particular the sexual and gender categories that operated in the lives of the Tagalog _ilustrados_ , of whom Rizal was a part. 

My own tentative findings about the "social semantics" of the concept _bakla_ —in other words, the career this word has enjoyed in Philippine social history—would seem to indicate that, until recently, it didn't even connote an identity that is distinguished by its sexuality, but merely a quality of emotional wavering or uncertainty, something that anyone unlucky enough can have at any point in his or her life.  Until early in this century, in fact, _bakla_ wasn't so much a noun as a verb: one was _nababakla_ if he or she was not sure of his or her decisions, or if one was suddenly afraid of or confounded by the unexpected turn of events.  In contrast, nowadays, a _bakla_ is an effeminate male who wishes to have sex with "real men," or _tunay na lalake_.  Thus, the _bakla_ in our midst is a variety of male homosexual who can easily be recognized for his swishy ways, and whose sexual desire defines his innermost and most authentic sense of self. 

Obviously, during Rizal's time, there was no _bakla_ or effeminate homosexual: there may have been effeminate men (called, among others, _binabae, bayoguin, asog_ , and _bido_ ), but they were not defined as such by virtue of the desire they had, but only by their choice of occupations (feminine ones, like weaving, pottery-making, and the like), and their womanlike appearance and behavior.  In fact, the idea that people were different on account of the gender of the object of their sexual desire (in other words, that people were either homo- or heterosexual) was alien to our turn-of-the-century ancestors, who most probably desired and had sex with whomever they wanted at whatever point in their lives, without thinking of what such desires or acts had to say about their identities, their conceptions of who they essentially were. 

If we must be accurate about things, even in Europe itself, homosexuality was not a reality until it was officially invented in 1869—in Germany, by a sexologist named Kertbeny, to be precise.  Thus, even when Rizal had lived there at around the same time that the discourse of homosexuality was steadily being "normalized" and propagated, it is highly doubtful that he was influenced at all by the latest sexological revolutions that were being waged inside the psychiatric and sexological clinics in Europe's more technologically advanced countries (Spain most definitely not being one of them).  Therefore, Rizal could not have been a _bakla_ (the way we currently know this concept), nor a gay/homosexual, simply because these were categories of being that were not available during his time.  To call him gay or _bakla_ would be to commit a grave, anachronistic mistake, similar perhaps to calling him a "yuppie" or "skinhead."  Obviously, it would have been impossible for someone coming from that era to self-identify with the nuances and complexities of the many dizzyingly newfangled nomenclatures of our own time. 

All this doesn't mean, most certainly, that there were no men who had sex with each other previous to homosexuality's debut into the world.  We can only imagine how, from as early as prehistoric times, all over the planet, the male and female of the species had manifested both homosexual and heterosexual behaviors.  But to repeat what I have always been caught saying, engaging in homosexual sex is one thing, _being_ a homosexual is another.  Previous to the sexological production of the homosexual as a species of personality, there were men who loved other men, and women who loved other women, but they were not much different from everybody else (in fact, they most probably were everybody else!) 

The same thing must have been true in the Philippines at the turn of the century.  If the confession manuals from the early Spanish period were to be believed, it would seem that the newly converted natives of the islands were not much loath to the activity of mutually arousing one another—men with men, women with women, men with women, etc.—within such "harmless" contexts as _burlarse_ or "childish play."  We might even want to recall, in this regard, how scandalized the friars were when they first saw some men in the Visayas using all sorts of gadgets (more accurately, "penis pins") to make their sexual encounters more pleasurable. 

Needless to say, prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, the precolonial inhabitants of our islands enjoyed a kind of sexual innocence that only later on became corrupted when the colonial Church introduced the discourse of sodomy, which it propagated through the confessional.  Sodomy, however, was not the same as homosexuality, for it referred to a number of unprocreative, unconjugal, non-missionary sexual acts that anyone might be weak enough to sometimes commit (with men, women or animals) but that, because merely a variety of "unnatural sins" against the sixth commandment, didn't define one's psychological constitution or sense of self. 

If Rizal wasn't—because he couldn't have been—a _bakla_ or a gay/homosexual, just what exactly was he?  Might he have been a _binabae_ , which was a category of gender identity that he most probably understood?  Not likely, for there exists no mention of this appellation being tacked on him in any of the available accounts of his life. ( Of course, knowing how nationalistic zeal had damaged the objectivity of so many historians and chroniclers of heroes like Rizal, we cannot be too sure such accounts have not been sanitized to conform with the nationalist project of apotheosizing the greatest scion of the Filipino race!)  Most probably he was an _hombre_ , an _hombre ilustrado_ to be precise, which, on second thought, tells us nothing new about him at all. 

Ah, but let us remember that since Rizal couldn't have been a homosexual, it only follows that he couldn't have been a heterosexual either. 

What I want to stress at this point is this: previous to the invention of homosexuality, individuals were not heterosexuals either, for the simple reason that homo and hetero were inverse forms of the same sexual logic that had not existed before the regime of sexuality (that is, of sexuality as we know it) overtook our modern lives.  Indeed, while men and women throughout history had married and begotten children, they nonetheless were not defined along the lines of sexual object choice.  Thus, they were not cloven into the identities of homosexual and heterosexual.  Whatever sexual discourse that might have operated as a significant force in their lives didn't discriminate between those who were attracted to members of their own sex, and those who desired the opposite sex, athough perhaps it might have had something to say about the frequency in which they had sex, or the positions they adopted while doing it (these, of course, were the basic concerns that the discourse of sodomy busied itself with).  As individuals whose lives were not governed by the homo/hetero distinction, they were relatively free to commit homosexual and heterosexual acts without thinking how these acts affected their selfhoods. 

By contrast, in our own time, one can scarcely think of having sex with other men without at the same orgasmic moment becoming at the very least worried of what this might mean about who one really is, _deep inside_. 

Rizal and the other _ilustrados_ of his time were presumably socialized to think of marriage as _the_ logical social destiny.  But this had little to do with what they could actually experience sexually, within the privacy of their own lives.  Hence, if we cannot make use of the homo/hetero dichotomy with which to describe the sexual milieu in which Rizal lived, we might perhaps instead look at the organizing social principles that determined the relations one gender at that time could have with the other, or with itself. 

Just like in Europe, middle-class males and females in the Philippines during the time of Rizal were socialized separately from each other: boys went to boys' schools, girls to girls' schools, etc.  Thus, the basic social structure that determined the relations between the male and female genders of the _ilustrado_ class in nineteenth-century Philippines, can be called "homosocial": individuals were expected to develop bonds within each of the two genders, bonds that could be expressed in several ways.  Some of the ways, for example, in which men bonded with one another were through friendships or cliques, or memberships in fraternities or clubs.  Women bonded with one another within the realm of the home, in particular, the grantedly "feminine space" of the kitchen, where they were seen to become their own naturally gossipy selves, while the men talked endlessly about matters of consequence (such as the affairs of state) in the living room or _sala_. 

I am of course not really interested in male bonds per se, except perhaps where these bonds may be seen to express themselves sexually, as they often did in the heavily homosocial past.  Rizal and the other _propagandistas_ were all male, and they all bonded.  While their common ideological persuasion—their collective wish to enact reforms in the islands of their birth—provided a basis for this bonding, their gender was, in truth, the real common ground on which they stood, embracing one another, in fond solidarity, as it were.  Just where does the social end and the sexual begin, as far as these bondings and embracings were concerned?  I for one cannot tell.  All one might safely say in this regard is that in the absence of the paranoia-making discourse of homosexuality—a discourse that suddenly rendered suspect one's desires and largely unconscious longings to bond with others of one's own gender—men like Rizal most probably expressed their fellowship with one another in ways that did not, at times, exclude the genital. 

Is there proof to be had to make this proposition more tenable?  I'm afraid that after the nationalist historians (who were already the products of the regime of sexuality, and who therefore all too clearly knew the stigmatizing effects of homosexuality) had gone through and "cleaned up" every little scrap of Rizaliana, it might no longer be possible to ascertain anything in the extant records that vaguely suggests Rizal had sex (or wished to have sex) with men, such as any of his fellow _propagandistas_ , for instance.  In fact, such historians seem to have lost no time in accomplishing the opposite goal: from as early as I can remember, according to enlightened lore, Rizal was a hero made more heroic by his superabundant machismo, managing to have a girl fall helplessly in love with him everywhere in the world he went.  For sure, in retelling the life of this national hero, these historians were inscribing that life with some of their own values which they wished Rizal himself shared. 

I don't believe that biography is the only recourse one has to pin down certain vital "truths" about such a hero as Rizal.  The fortunate thing about him is that he wrote a great deal, and in many of his writings, he unwittingly laid bare his own personality.  I do not simply mean that he self-consciously wrote his own self, his own "identity" in his texts—in his two novels, for instance—but that in depicting life as he knew it, he was already providing some clues as to what kind of world it was that he lived in or would have wanted to live in, and thus, clues as to _who_ he was.  For example, it is possible to ascertain his attitudes toward the question of women and the revolution not just through his essays—the famous letter he sent to the "Women of Malolos," for example—but also through the characterizations he made of women in the _Noli Me Tangere_ and _El Filibusterismo_. 

At this point, I wish to carry out my own reading of a certain form of masculine bonding that I feel undergirds the central plots of his two novels.  In particular, I am interested in suggesting possible future trajectories with which to penetrate the world of Rizal's first novel, the _Noli_.  A caveat, in any case: the following is merely an "attempt" at delineating just what such trajectories might look like, and is therefore hardly sufficient in demonstrating the cogency, let alone the intricacy, of this approach. 

Elias and Ibarra are, in all of the _Noli_ , the most closely knit of characters.  Their bonding is such that they take turns saving each other's life, and, at times, appear to be alter egos of each other, polemicizing what are obviously Rizal's own conflicting views regarding the matter of sociopolitical reforms and armed revolution currently gripping the country.  This bonding is confounded by the revelation that Ibarra is the direct descendant of the man who had caused the downfall of Elias's own family, but is reinforced, if not ennobled, by Elias's immolation for Ibarra's sake at novel's end. 

It is possible to demonstrate the presence of an admiring male homosocial gaze in Rizal's depiction of Elias, Ibarra's significant other and greatest "lover"—for, lest we forget, here is a man who gives up his own life to save that of another.  And this admiration derives from Elias's enigmatic "difference": in his very first "intimate" encounter with Elias, in his house as he is "putting the finishing touches to a change of clothing," Ibarra is "surprised" by the "severe and mysterious figure of Elias."  After a brief conversation, in which Elias proves himself strangely eloquent, it becomes clear to Ibarra that this man is "neither a pilot ( _bankero_ ) nor a rustic," and he "gazes" at him and his "muscular arms, covered with lumps and bruises" ( _The Social Cancer_ , translated by Charles E. Derbyshire, pp.  211-212).  Thus, Elias's otherness is made more "desirable" (for all desire is desire for difference), because it touches on and is proximate to the same: Elias, despite being quite unlike Ibarra in obvious ways, "talks the talk" of someone who might have gone through the same "cultivation" as Ibarra did. ( And so, he is different enough to be desirable, yet not so different as to be completely unrecognizable). 

And we see this desire expressing itself in Rizal's narrative later on.  In the 49th chapter, "The Voice of the Hunted," we encounter the following descriptive paragraphs that spring at us in the midst of the long and highly polemical dialogues between the two "similar yet different" men riding the same beleaguered _banka_.  At first, Rizal frames the dusky and masculine figure in a romantic tableau: "Elias spoke passionately, enthusiastically, in vibrating tones; his eyes flashed.  A solemn pause followed.  The banka, unimpelled by the paddle, seemed to stand still in the water.  The moon shone majestically in a sapphire sky and a few lights glimmered on the distant shore." ( p. 316).  And then, this same earthy figure, standing just across the impeccably clean _ilustrado_ Don Juan Crisostomo Ibarra (who, I must add, has not been much convinced of the virtue in the other's position that bloody struggle is an inevitable thing), is transformed into a great manly shape: "Elias was transfigured; standing uncovered, with his manly face illuminated by the moon, there was something extraordinary about him.  He shook his long hair and went on..." (p. 325)

Now these are just a couple of instances in which a homosocial structure might be shown to inhere in Rizal's texts.  By citing them I do not mean to suggest that Rizal had intended for Ibarra and Elias to desire each other.  In truth, to the degree that homosociality was a social structure in which Rizal was raised and _from which_ he wrote his novels, he could not have intended its presence in his texts inasmuch as it was always already constitutive of them.  Nonetheless, these passages should cue us a little into the kind of milieu in which the men of Rizal's time and class worked—alongside one another—as friends, fellow-revolutionaries, enemies, rivals, lovers, or whatever else. 

It might also prove important to mention that Elias's "transfiguration" in this scene paves the way for his Christ-like sacrifice toward the end of the novel, in which he meets and instructs the boy Basilio (a boy whose features are "attractive," as Rizal's text goes), to whom he bequeaths the _Noli_ 's most memorable lines:" I die without seeing the dawn..." And it is likewise significant that it is this very same boy, Basilio who in the _El Fili_ becomes the ward and closest follower of Simoun.  In that novel, another homosocial configuration takes over the admiring and consummate friendship that existed between Elias and Ibarra, and this configuration is one of "spiritual" mentorship between an older man (the master) and his student. 

But what has happened to Maria Clara, Ibarra's romantic interest, while all this bonding is taking place on the suddenly romantic lake?  She is in her home, presumably, where women should properly be.  In the end, we can say that in all likelihood Rizal didn't think the revolution to be the proper place for women.  Like every other important affair, the revolution, for Rizal, was unmistakably male-inclusive.  How else should it be, after all, given the undeniable maleness required of every significant form of social intercourse in his time? 

On the other hand, male bonding as a form of relating did not cancel out romance with the opposite sex.  In fact, marriage proved essential to such a system, as women exchanged between households were, in effect, the "cement" that held masculine bonds in place.  However, as Rizal's vision of the revolution should show, there were spheres of social life which were shut off from all women, in which sexual encounters between men quietly, although not for that matter unpassionately, most probably took place. 

Finally, I wish to reiterate the point I made earlier on in this essay: the question "Was Rizal gay?"  has no answer, simply because it is misinformed.  Nonetheless, I think that the activity of asking this question has not been all that uninsightful and fruitless, in itself.  In his column for the _Philippine Daily Inquirer_ , Ambeth Ocampo stated that imputing to Rizal gayness is not the worst thing that has been done to this national hero.  To Ocampo, the worst thing that anybody has said about Rizal is that he was somebody whose heroism had been manufactured by the Americans. 

While I agree that it is quite simply terrible to even begin to suggest that Rizal's greatness derives less from his own deeds than from the propaganda of old Uncle Sam, I wish to register a specific demurral against Ocampo's sneaky implication that thinking Rizal might have been gay is, all things considered, still and all bad enough. 

If there is anything good that might be said to have come out of Isagani Cruz's cheeky column on the _kabaklaan_ of Rizal, it may be this: In pondering the mystery of whether our nation's foremost hero was a _bakla_ or not, we have discovered the truth, not so much about Rizal as ourselves.  And what is this truth?  It is simply that we cannot really be said to be accepting of the _bakla_ in our midst, to the degree that we cannot even begin to accept the possibility that someone we have been trained to look up to from as early as we can remember, could have been such an awful, awful thing. 

##   _Ladlad: the second unfurling_  *

_W_ HEN _LADLAD_ CAME out in 1994, no one expected, least of all its iffy editors, that it would accomplish all the things it did: go through several editions, make possible the teaching of gay literature classes in at least two major universities, be nominated for an international book award, become required reading in Philippine literature courses in the United States, and serve as the catalyst for the formation of a broad-based gay and possibly lesbian coalition in the country. 

But somehow, we all knew that it would not be the last of its kind.  Far from it, in fact: while doing the rounds giving interviews and readings in the different gay havens in the city, we realized only too clearly that more and more works that dealt with the issues of sexuality and homosexual politics and representation would inevitably find their way to publication in the coming years.  With _Ladlad_ , it became possible for many budding (or as we'd like to say, _bading_ ) writers to imagine an identity for which homosexuality and literariness didn't cancel each other out at all.  For the young writer who devoured, secretly or otherwise, his tattered and much fondled copy of _Ladlad_ , it no longer was a question of whether or not he should write about being gay.  Rather, the issue was, properly, one of excellence: how to make his own writings approximate the brilliance of the works he read in this liberating and remarkable book.  This second installment in what might hopefully become a series of biennial volumes of this anthology represents precisely a proof of this awakening—a sampling from the gorgeous harvest which that initial sowing of seeds made possible. 

Perhaps it would help us appreciate the importance of this book all the more if we contextualized it within what might be called a process of "sexualization" to which our society is being inexorably subjected.  This way, we can see that the textualization of gay lives which projects such as _Ladlad_ mean to undertake is precisely informed, and in that sense confounded, by the very same oppressive and homophobic ideology they seek to challenge and subvert. 

Only in the last half of this century did it become important for Filipinos in the Philippines to have a sexual orientation in the way this idea is, by now, commonly understood: as a question of the gender of one's sexual object choice.  In other words, although our predecessors were assumed and assumed themselves to be either male or female, it was only with the increased modernization of the institutions of media, medicine, academe and religion, that new generations of Filipinos were made to think they belonged to either a hetero- or homosexuality.  And what makes this historical shift significant is that this new "sexual awareness" has begun to lodge itself in the center of things as a most definitive aspect of personality.  Sex has become, paraphrasing Foucault, the secret that we all share, the truth that defines, in the deepest and most fundamental sense, who and what we are. 

Of course one might argue, rather plausibly, that this "sexualization of everyday life" cannot possibly be true for all Filipinos, especially those whose socialization was not terribly affected by Western ethnoscience and modes of thinking (such as Filipinos who live in the farthest _barrios_ in the countryside, where not even a single doctor may be found, let alone a dictionary of sexological terms).  Let us qualify what we have said previously, then: for _certain_ Filipinos, sexual orientation is real, and it is or has come to be, in the very least, an important aspect of their individuality.  As _Ladlad_ and all the other local works on gayness would seem to show, increasing numbers of our population are beginning to think of the implications their particular ways of desiring—especially where _who_ they desire is concerned—have on their sense of self.  It is also apparent that this emerging sexual self-consciousness is a site of both liberation and stigma.  With the way we are beginning to become interested in our distinct manners of loving—in other words, with the way sexuality is becoming more and more visible as a governing force in our lives—it becomes clear that while embracing the pleasures of this new sexual regime, we are likewise unwittingly assimilating the phobic and bigoted values that accompany the very idea of homo- and heterosexuality. 

Let us put it this way: by providing representations of same-sexual love, as such has been rehearsed within certain Filipino lives in recent years, _Ladlad_ is making available to gays both a means to positive self-identification and a method of repudiation.  In other words, this book has helped inaugurate a discourse that has both empowered and beleaguered homosexuals.  We need only closely observe the meaning of recent events: while many local gays are becoming more militant, holding rallies and opening up venues for community-formation, we have likewise seen a heightened sense of paranoid horror being bandied about in media and academe about the essential promiscuity, infectiousnness, and criminality of gays.  It's almost as though our own attempt at forging a language with which to liberate ourselves has lent itself to the opposite project: our renewed persecution.  We have revealed where we are, what pleasures we crave, who we desire.  And one after another parks and movie houses have been raided and padlocked, pictures of naked men that we allegedly abused have graced the front pages of tabloids, and stories of our inherent lack of worth have repeated themselves in the evening news. 

How should we think of this book, then?  Is it a good or bad thing for the gay cause? 

Our answer to this question is this: We cannot tell just what good or bad means, being that the significance of dissident acts cannot be fully apprehended until quite a while after they have occurred.  All we can say is that had we known what effects this anthology would produce, we would have still pushed through editing it simply because we had no choice: our lives had already been irreparably affected by homosexuality, and there really was no other way we could write except _in_ and _through_ our gayness.  In other words, we were homosexuals, in the same way that all our contributors were: because we desired the way we did, we knew we were different, and this difference caused us to suffer immensely, and we believed, unnecessarily.  And certainly, _Ladlad_ existed then, as it exists now, to remind ourselves and the rest of the world that there is nothing wrong about who or what we are, anyway.  Just like everyone, we are capable of love.  And this is all that matters. 

It might also prove illuminating to remember that even without becoming perceived as a homosexual, the _bakla_ was already a person that left more to be desired: being effeminate, he was the natural object of scorn in a masculinist society such as ours is and may have always been.  Nonetheless, even in the present context, we can see that our perception of homosexuality has been refracted through the lens of effeminacy—and this has influenced the way we have thought of the homosexual issue.  Because the _bakla_ , for all intents and purposes, is _the_ homosexual, the model for homosexual liberation has necessarily been built on the _bakla_ identity.  We already know just how deceiving this model is—for there are far too many kinds of homosexualities, in the same way that there are far too many kinds of gays to be neatly fitted into any one model—but it nonetheless represents a start.  Likewise, imagining for the _bakla_ a life to which he is otherwise not naturally entitled in the culture that has engendered him, bespeaks a kind of warmheartedness, an alternative vision for _kabaklaan_ : by celebrating the virtues of being effeminate, this book unpacks the thinking that has always abominated it. 

On the other hand, _Ladlad_ escapes the sexualizing imperative of which we speak because other than celebrate gayness as it is being lived by Filipinos who know they are gay because of the way they desire, it attempts to lay bare the areas of Filipino life in which the homo/hetero distinction does not and cannot operate: in the pre-sexological enclaves in which desire is kindled and exchanged like warmth against the intrusive cold.  Our society has not been uniformly sensitized to the nuances of the discourse of sexuality, to be sure, and this fact is never more clearly articulated than in this anthology.  There are not a few stories of casual sexual encounters involving perfectly regular (read: "straight") men in this book, and they make it difficult to define just what homosexuality is (except perhaps as the very ground on which heterosexuality rests).  Certainly, though, depicting these intimacies as narratives renders them sexual, eroticizes them somewhat, and, whether we like it or not, homosexualizes them yet again.  But this, as we said, is the necessary consequence of sexual discourse, especially one whose aim is to legitimate dissident desire. 

What _Ladlad_ perhaps seeks to offer is not an escape from homosexualization, but an alternative version of it: whether gays write about their lives or not, our society will become (as it already has) increasingly sexually self-conscious, and thus, increasingly homophobic as well.  What this book wishes to do is halt the progress of this process by demonstrating, through the power of words and the imagination whose habitation they are, the sundry creative and wonderful ways in which homosexuality can be lived and enjoyed. 

Pleasure is what _Ladlad_ , in the end, is all about. 

* _This essay is my introduction to the much-awaited sequel to_ Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. _ Just like that inital offering, Ladlad 2 has me and Danton Remoto as editors_. 

##  [ _Orlando Nadres's_   
_"Hanggang dito na lamang..."_   
_and the question of gay identity_ ](../Text/08_contents.xhtml#toc-ch28)

_I_ T STRIKES ME as queer that while the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) was staging Orlando Nadres's cultic gay play, "Hanggang dito na lamang at maraming salamat," for the past two weeks local media was playing host to yet another anti-gay battle.  This time, the antagonists were high-ranking officials of the Armed Forces and the Philippine National Police, on the one hand, and spokespersons from the different lesbian and gay organizations in the country, on the other. 

I don't believe for a second that PETA had planned to restage Nadres's play, as part of its 30th anniversary celebration, to coincide with the debate over "gays in the military."  Neither can it be said that powerful men in uniform had had this in mind all along. ( I doubt if our military's intelligence unit is gifted with such prescience—besides, I'm at a complete loss as to what it stands to gain by doing so).  The more likely explanation is that just like what happens in life sometimes, these two "related" events simply occurred alongside each other, and thus one need not think anything more of them. 

But there is a point in thinking more of them, I think.  In fact, given the murkiness in which Filipinos generally find themselves when mulling over the question of homosexuality, it might prove profitable to everyone concerned to look for some relevance in this coincidence.  To be more specific, there is a connection that may be said to exist between Nadres's play and the proceedings of the debate on whether or not gays should be allowed in the military.  This connection, I feel, may be found in the way both the play and the views that have so far been aired on the issue follow basically the same script.  However, since Nadres was an artist and not a general, his views are bound to be more enduring than even the most carefully phrased press statement, and, obviously, more humane as well. 

"Hanggang dito na lamang..." was first staged in 1974, a production made more memorable by the fact that Lino Brocka acted in it.  Its story goes like this: Fidel Palma is a middle-aged bachelor who lives by himself in a house located near a train station in a province somewhere in the south.  In the first scene, he is shown eagerly awaiting the arrival from Manila of Efren Reynoso, a teenager who calls him "uncle" and whose letter he is excitedly reading. 

In the next scene, we meet Julie (formerly Julius Caesar) Aquino, an outrageously dressed and coiffed gay beautician whose services Fidel has decided to avail himself of (his nails need some cleaning) before the arrival of his much-awaited "nephew."  We discover that Fidel is gay himself, only he has chosen not to let anyone other than Julie in on this fact.  After managing to read snatches from one of Efren's letters, Julie uncovers the reason for Fidel's anxiety: he is besotted with this young man whose education he has been subsidizing with the money he makes from his pawnshop.  Julie is shocked to learn, however, that his friend has not come out to his beloved, and he instructs the former to declare his intentions to the latter, or else be a martyr all his life.  Predictaby enough, Fidel dismisses such a thought. 

Efren arrives and it seems true that he doesn't know anything about the real nature of Fidel's affection for him.  In another scene, Julie and Efren meet and don't rub each other the right way at all: the former thinks the latter a snob, the latter abominates the former.  Left alone with Fidel, Efren explains why he hates Julie and his "kind": in his boarding-house one drunken night, one of them sexually took advantage of him.  As a consequence, he thinks these people shouldn't be allowed to exist.  But this isn't why he has come home.  He is home because he is about to get married to the classmate who had recommended him to work in her father's factory, and would like his Tiyo Fidel's blessings. 

Fidel can't bear the thought of losing the man he's been secretly loving all these years, and loses control of himself.  In a fit of rage and jealousy, he holds Efren close and forcibly kisses him.  Efren is struck speechless, and Fidel is reduced to tears. 

Later, Julie arrives at the scene with a white balloon in tow, fresh from his victory as "Miss Sward Philippines."  Fidel asks him to leave, but sensing something terrible has just happened, he insists on staying.  He tries to console his friend by saying that they can no longer change who they are and should simply accept the truth, and that there is no use crying over a love that never was.  Fidel fumes in self-hatred and takes his vexations out on Julie by wrestling him to the ground.  After a brief scuffle that proves disastrous to Julie's sequinned gown and blonde wig, he emerges from the floor and picks up the pieces of his devastated outfit, and leaves, squealing scornfully at Fidel, "Suffer, you flirt!" 

Efren returns to say good-bye to his uncle.  Fidel explains that he has loved him without expecting anything in return.  Efren attempts but fails to show compassion, and leaves.  Fidel, smiling softly to himself, lets Julie's balloon fly into the pitch dark sky. 

This play has been around for the past 23 years, enjoying a remarkable number of restagings by independent theater companies all over the country.  In a way, its continuing cultural presence should make us look at it a little more closely: it has endured all these years probably because it says something relevant about how our society has perceived gays, as well as how gays have perceived themselves. 

In a previous essay on "Hanggang dito na lamang...", I find that in it Nadres is depicting the popular distinction between the two kinds of homosexuals who exist in our midst: the overtly effeminate Julie, and the more covertly gay, respectable and masculine (if not paternal) Fidel.  But more than just depict them, Nadres also delineates their sometimes hostile relationship, which he shows to be grounded in the macho culture that chooses to scoff at effeminacy and to privilege "respectability."  He thus deconstructs the overt/covert dichotomy: Julie and Fidel are one and the same in the sense that they both suffer oppression at the hands of Efren, the type of man with whom they are slavishly fascinated, and are different only in their methods of coping.  Likewise, Nadres subscribes to the idea that homosexuals can't help being who they are: Julie believes he was born that way, and Fidel, after consulting all the books on the subject, ends up so confused that he simply accepts himself, albeit thinking that he doesn't have to let everyone around him know (and it is to this that Julie takes exception). 

I think it will be good to consider this play's opinion of what constitutes the gay identity, alongside the views propounded by the combatants in the latest war against gays.  Needless to say, implicit in all the pronouncements of the commentators on the debate of allowing gays in the military and police services are definitions of who or what gays are. 

For Nadres, gays are males who desire to have sex with "real men."  They may be as swishy and effeminate as Julie, or as quiet and masculine as Fidel.  Nonetheless, gays are different from other people, and this is largely because they were traumatized as children Julie was regularly beaten up by his father, Fidel was teased and shunned by his classmates), and were identified with their mothers early in life.  For Nadres, therefore, the genesis of gayness reads like a psychological case study, as he believes homosexuality to be a matter of distinct, subjective identity, lying somewhere deep inside an individual's self. 

That gays are either Julies or Fidels is an idea that inheres in this popular play for a good reason: it is an accurate representation of what most Filipinos actually think about the matter (and indeed, what most Filipino gays actually _are_ ).  Those generals who have spoken against having gays among their ranks have a similar same idea about gays: they are essentially their own species of persons, differently abled and gifted (or more accurately, burdened) with temperaments not suited for the rigors of military life.  They should therefore stick to professions already deservedly, identifiably, gay: hairstyling, fashion, the arts as a whole.  To these generals, the military life demands a character that gays, by their very constitution, just do not and cannot possess. 

On the other hand, at least one officer of the Philippine National Police, while holding to the same basic view, thinks otherwise about the issue: gays, precisely because of their peculiar nature, may prove useful to the police force when it comes to carrying out certain special duties.  In particular, this officer had in mind putting up a gay desk in every station, to take care of gay-related cases.  Or else, gays might prove invaluable as undercover agents, performing vital intelligence work. 

It is easy to undermine such a view, of course.  Those gays who have spoken publicly on the issue have invoked the fact that there are gays and there are gays: those poor generals must have been thinking of Julie and forgotten all about Fidel.  Masculine gay men are for real, no doubt.  And so, it may not be correct to limit gays to certain types, even if it means (for one police officer, at least) providing some basis to pigeonhole them into "special" occupations.  And definitely, the idea that you can prevent certain kinds of people from joining the professions of their own choosing (for which they are clearly qualified) is itself eminently vulnerable to attack: it is unconstitutional, cry some; it violates fundamental human rights, cry others. 

What has been missing in the debate so far is the fact that the identity of gays isn't the only thing at issue here.  It is rather the acts that are associated with this identity that are the crux of the whole thing.  If we look at Nadres's play again, we can clearly see that the core of the personhoods of Julie and Fidel isn't really their external appearance (they are not alike on this score, after all), but rather their internal make-up, in particular, their desire.  And it is this desire that propels their actions.  To frame the issue of having gays in the Philippine military within the purview of desire is to understand it in the way the Americans have understood it since the question was first raised by them several years ago: Should a person's sexual orientation/desire be enough grounds to bar him or her from pursuing a career in the military service? 

The sexual nature of this debate therefore complicates the ways in which it is to be appreciated.  For instance, I don't think the analogy about letting women into the armed forces holds true in this case: saying that because women are now admitted into the Philippine Military Academy, gays should also be allowed, overlooks the fact that women, by precisely being women, are in no position to subvert and redefine the very soul of the military institution.  And what is this soul?  It is one that feeds on the need of men to bond with one another exclusively.  It is nothing if not the soul of patriarchy itself. 

Over the last three decades, not a few gay thinkers in our country have turned the problem of homosexual oppression over and over in their minds, and have come up with nothing.  For the longest time, gay advocates have worked on this issue and not been able to make heads or tails of it.  The operative distinctions just didn't make sense: if homosexuality is a matter of sexual desire, and if sexual desire attends the activities of sex, then why is it only the _bakla_ who is "homosexual," and not his macho partner?  We need a change of tools, then.  Perhaps it's time we turned the tables around.  We have too often been supremely confident of the givenness of our homosexuality, and of the givenness of the heterosexuality of those we consider our significant others.  Perhaps we need to see just how arbitrary these givennesses are, how permeable they are to each other, how necessarily false they are up close. 

Patriarchy proclaims itself to be heterosexual inside-out.  And yet, is this really how it is?  Looking at its structure more carefully, we might be surprised to see that patriarchy is really a system of exchange between men, in which women do not really participate inasmuch as they are merely part of the commodities being exchanged.  At the heart of patriarchy, hence, are not really a man and a woman, but rather men locked in a friendly (and, as we shall see, often amorous) embrace. 

How does this affect the present argument about the entry (or non-entry) of gays in the military?  This is how: officially allowing homosexuality into the military has the potential to expose it for the thing that it really is.  Thus, it cannot happen short of destroying its identity altogether.  In other words, the military is already a sexually "same" (that is, _homo_ ) environment, in which men live and bond with one another exclusively, in which they develop a sense of responsibility for one another, in which they are encouraged to "love" one another.  Who can tell what sorts of desires, what sorts of acts spurred by these desires, circulate and are exchanged surreptitiously in such heavily male surroundings? 

In the United States, the current position of the federal government supports the ban on homosexuals in the military, and yet it sneakily allows homosexuality's existence (and even encourages it) by pursuing a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.  This policy stipulates that applicants need not declare their sexual orientation, and yet, once their homosexuality has been accidentally uncovered, it allows for their summary dismissal from the service.  Obviously, the policy wants to preserve the military's "heterosexual" image at all cost, and yet it secretly opens that nice little back-door to discreet, that is to say devious, homosexuals. ( And who might these be if not everybody else?) 

The military, to be fair, is not the only place where male-male bonds exist.  They are also found in other "homosocial" institutions, such as fraternities, seminaries, athletic clubs and social and personal cliques.  These social bonds also come by different names: mentorship, bureacratic solidarity, admiring friendship, heterosexual rivalry, etc.  Homosexuality has too often been seen as a minority issue, involving the lives of a distinct and small sector of the general population.  And yet, in truth, male homosexuality is merely one section of a continuum of intra-male sexual bonds.  Given the current crisis of definition attending the debate on a homosexualized armed forces, I think it is time we looked at some of these bonds. 

Nadres, in fact, while himself obviously trapped within his generation's mind-set about the homosexual as a _bakla_ , somewhat forces us to reconsider this very same notion.  In the play, Efren relates how a _bakla_ took advantage of his drunkenness and had sex with him.  And yet, because of Efren's violent reaction about the matter, Nadres makes us think twice about this act's real significance: why does he let this event affect him if he doesn't really think it's important?  In fact, why does he rush to get married right after this "accident"?  I think Nadres gestures at the possibility that homosexual acts are if not committed then secretly desired by "real men" too, only they need to do it under the cover and at the instigation of intoxication that effectively incapacitates them in every way (except, apparently, down there), and, in the case of Julie's partners, on the pretext of monetary compensation.  In either case, they get to have their cake and eat it, too: despite enjoying sex with other males, they don't have to suffer from the stigma of being labeled homosexuals, since they cannot really be said to "want" it.  And then, when it's all over, they get themselves hitched so that everything will be forgiven and forgotten. 

Indeed, the strength of "Hanggang dito na lamang..." lies in its succinct realism: it summarizes Filipino "male" sexuality by depicting, on the one hand, the exclusively homosexual identities of the overt and covert gays, Julie and Fidel respectively, and the non-exclusively homosexual (oddly called, by Filipino culture at large, as "heterosexual") identity of Efren, on the other.  Based on this play's empirically informed characterizations, the Filipino "real man," destined to a heterosexual conjugal fate, is nonetheless allowed to engage in momentary homosexual pursuits with the _bakla_ , if only because he cannot help it (because he's too drunk to put a stop to it, or he simply needs the cash). 

Therefore, this play should sober everyone up: it is possible to conclude that there already are male "homosexuals" in the Philippine military and police services, to the extent that there already are Efrens who periodically bump into "accidents" with the _bakla_ everywhere in this country where males enjoy so much sexual fluidity.  On the other hand, by simply being in a male homosocial institution, Filipino military men are already indulging in intra-male sexual bonding, a bonding that encourages the commission of acts that, strangely enough, are not commonly perceived for what they are.  And yet, because of the peculiarly Filipino masculine trait that allows the "real man" to unselfconsciously enagage in sexual acts with the _bakla_ , these very same men in the military are, if they are typical men at all, in fact, already doubly "homosexual," that is, doubly capable of committing homosexual acts—with themselves and with the _bakla, both_.  Given this broader picture of things, the debate on whether homosexuals should be allowed into the armed services or not may be said to be moot and academic, by its very nature: homosexuals are already there, and have been from the very beginning. 

On the other hand, maybe the point of this exercise is to get the military and police institutions to change their minds about _not_ allowing gays the likes of Julie into the service.  Although it would admittedly be a wonderful thing to see effeminate and outrageously queenly cops and military officers manning (?)  their posts, it might be wise to remind ourselves that, finally, this may simply be a question of sartorial taste. ( Besides, even the women who enter the PMA need to follow the prescribed plain and unaffecting accoutrement). 

I can't end this essay without tipping my hat off to Soxie Topacio of PETA, whose deft and sensitive direction of "Hanggang Dito na Lamang..." lent it more warmheartedness than Nadres's text might have originally called for.  The same goes to Bodgie Pascua, who played Fidel with just the right amount of hysterical pathos, and Phil Noble, who was simply divine as Julie.  Richard Quan looked right for the part of Efren (and looking right is, sadly, all that the role of Efren required). 

Strangely enough, after 23 years, Nadres's humanistic vision of a homosexuality beleaguered by its own demons, remains touchingly relevant.  Maybe the goal of Nadres, when he wrote it, was to make possible the time when the play might be viewed as a nostalgia piece, an example of tragic romance from a bygone age, rather than as the brutally frank and realistic social commentary that it was and stubbornly is. 

##   _Nature vs. nurture_

_I_ HAVE LONG wanted to devote a column to the discussion of homosexuality's origins, but until recently there wasn't anything happening around that warranted it. 

A couple of weeks ago, _The Philippine Daily Inquirer_ put out an essay in its op-ed page that for me raises questions—and hazards answers—about why there are homosexuals.  Titled "Abused," the essay was contributed by a certain "Peter" to the paper's _Youngblood_ section.  Obviously, this column aspires to shed light on the kind of thinking that this essay represents, both to understand why it exists and to challenge the assumptions from which it proceeds. ( While the former derives from a more anthropological attitude on my part, the latter goal only means to acknowledge the potential harmfulness this kind of published thinking may have on those who read it, and thus represents my attempt at intervention). 

To be brief, the essay is a first-person reflection on the contributor's not-even-twenty-year-old life.  It's a life that underwent a crucial transformation because of an incident of sexual abuse which the "I" persona suffered when he was barely into his teens.  A "respectable" "straight" man forced himself on him, and this sealed his fate and made him homosexual.  Not that he hadn't been one before this incident occurred—from a very young age he remembers being teased by neighborhood boys for his sissy ways—but the sexual abuse left a permanent scar on his life.  In any case, he tells the reader not to worry, because he is no longer a homosexual in the present time (despite those "homosexual tendencies" that he experiences now and then).  Instead, he prefers that people see him as a "survivor," who successfully made it through that difficult chapter in his life with the help of God.  Finally, one should not condemn gays when one sees them, because for all one knows, they were simply the victims of straights who are, ironically enough, sometimes the perpetrators of all sorts of perversions in society. 

I am inclined to be kind to this essay, if only for the self-deconstructive maneuvers it unwittingly performs.  The central conceptual distinction it sets up in the beginning—the distinction between gays and straights—is itself rendered problematic and dissolved by the avowal that the "I" was homosexual and isn't anymore (although he does get sexually attracted to other males in between whiles), and that the "straight" man who victimized him is capable of committing gay, definitely "un-straight" acts.  In a word, this essay "self-deconstructs": if straights can turn gay, if gays can turn straight, if straights can have gay tendencies and actually commit gay acts, then who exactly is "a gay," and who exactly is "a straight"? 

The essay's content is also, based on my more-than-just-nodding acquaintance with local popular wisdom on the matter, a typical one.  It admits to knowing homosexuality intimately, and yet moots that knowledge by superseding it: the person making the confession can do so only because he used to be gay, and by the grace of God has been able to transcend this problem and become straight (well, not completely).  It's as though, for homosexuality to even begin to appear in popular texts in this country, the theme of "conversion" is essential.  The mention of God towards the conclusion of this confessional piece likewise marks it as a peculiarly Philippine articulation: I don't know if anyone's noticed it yet, but almost everything we are ever capable of writing would seem to be infused with a kind of zeal of a piece with our religiosity.  In fact, while there are many things we can argue about regarding our idiosyncrasies as a culture, we all have to accept the truth that we are, generally and all things considered, a rather religious bunch. 

I have to take issue with the essay's basic assumption, however.  This is an assumption that already reveals its prejudice regarding the question of homosexuality: While obviously interested in furthering a "theory" to explain why gay people exist, it nonetheless remains quiet on the issue of why there are straights in this world.  This assymetrical investment of energies concerning the problem of sexual orientation is not this essay's alone, in any case.  In fact, until recently, most inquiries on the matter have not been very scientific precisely because they presume that heterosexuality is a self-evident, pre-given norm of desiring and behaving, and that it is homosexuality that needs to be explained because it represents a deviation from this norm, a form of perversion. 

If we have to follow the essay's argument, its "theory" on homosexual genesis goes this way: one is born straight and remains so until one is sexually abused by an older person of the same sex, which causes one to turn gay.  Nonetheless, one can revert to straightness if one so wishes.  But this theory suffers from an inconsistency which in effect nullifies it: it explains one sexual orientation (heterosexuality) using one model (nature), while the other sexual orientation (homosexuality) is attributed to a different model (nurture).  And then again, heterosexuality is also something that one can decide to have (which is an explanation that comes to close to nurture yet again). 

First of all, the idea that heterosexuality is a pre-given quality in humans, or something natural, mistakenly conflates sexuality with reproduction.  While it is true that there are basically two biological sexes and that it is their union that is responsible for procreation, sexual desire cannot be reduced to the biological imperative to propagate the species.  More often than not, the goal of sexual acts is pleasure, not procreation. ( And if only it were possible to come up with accurate surveys on the matter, this would surely be the conclusion we would draw).  Moreover, heterosexuality is just one possible arrangement, one possible "model" of relations between individuals of different sexes.  There are any number of ways in which males and females can relate sexually, without necessarily falling into the heterosexual trap that effectively limits sexual expression to the dyadic, the genital, the procreative and the exclusive. ( For heterosexuality is a form of historically specific sexuality that was really custom-built for the bourgeois couple of early industrialist society). 

Should we follow the essay's logic, and use its explanation for the origin of homosexuality to explain the phenomenon of heterosexuality, we will get a rather funny picture.  According to the essay's thesis, homosexuality is the product of an early childhood "programming," which for "Peter" (its pseudonymous author) was an occasion of sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of an older man.  This explanation is an example of a "nurture" theory, because it locates the origin of a particular sexual orientation in the environment and socialization process that surround an individual.  If we are to take this idea and extend it to heterosexuality (which we must, after all, do in order to be consistent), then we will be forced to surmise that all straights were sexually abused by older straights!  This kind of "nurture" theory therefore falls apart because it is simply too silly to even be likely. 

Its silliness and unlikeliness notwithstanding, the essay _does_ strike me as an honest articulation, if not by its author then by the culture which informs it and in which it occurs.  For it is true that there are, at this very moment, any number of nature and nurture "theories" that circulate around the issue of homosexuality, and in many ways, a lot of us subscribe to both without necessarily noticing it.  Converting sissy sons into burly machos through acts of physical brutality is a practice that proceeds out of the idea that sexuality can be learned and unlearned (nurture).  Calling gays members of the "Third Sex" is another way of saying that they were born that way: not of the first, nor of the second, but of the Third biological "sex" (nature).  Explaining away an adolescent son's feminine ways as merely a "phase" out of which he will eventually grow smacks of the nurture hypothesis.  Accepting and/or tolerating gay neighbors as "humans just like me "harkens to thoughts of a natural pre-givenness which we cannot condemn others for having. 

Perhaps there are two points that have to be made clear here.  First: Sexuality is just too complex (much like life, I guess) to be able to lend itself completely to any one or two or even a multiplicity of theories.  Even the much-touted search for a "gay gene" is bound to fail because genes, although determinative of certain qualities in an individual, are still subject to environmental conditioning that may or may not abet their eventual functioning. ( In fact, cancer-linked genetic configurations may or may not produce cancer, depending on whether the predisposing factors are present in an individual's life).  Likewise, to the degree that sexual orientation is a matter of fantasies and desires, explaining its origin may be similar to and as difficult as ascertaining individual tastes and preferences. ( Can science really explain why I sometimes like listening to classical music, eating sushi, seeing Keanu Reeves?  Will it be possible to explain why an otherwise straight man is sometimes sexually attracted to a gorgeous male specimen gracing the pages of _GQ?_ ) 

Second: In the absence of a plausible theory for homo/heterosexual origins, we might want to ask the question why we need to ask, and for the last century have needed to ask, what causes these things.  A lot of times gays themselves have no problem about their gayness—unlike their straight parents, perhaps, who are beside themselves with grief at the thought of their sons producing no progeny who will carry the family name. ( It should therefore be clear to all and sundry who is being selfish here).  Perhaps it would be better if we stopped thinking about why gays exist, and just started being nice to one another instead? 

In the end, I am not discrediting "Peter," nor his torturous reflection on his life.  If he feels certain it was abuse that turned him gay, I am not going to argue with him.  I am not even going to tell him that I do not believe he is no longer gay just because God told him so. ( After all, he already belies this very claim by saying that he still possesses "tendencies.")  But I am going to tell him this: Dear boy, there is nothing wrong about being gay anyway!  And maybe, by thinking of things in this way, he can finally reconcile himself to the events in his life, and find comfort in the knowledge that something beautiful and good might have actually come out of that otherwise horrible experience. 

I must admit, however, that the seduction of this essay lies in the idea of choice which "Peter" celebrates: he chooses to be straight even after learning about his gayness.  Although I am not entirely sympathetic to his choice (which, given his internalized homophobia, wasn't a completely free one, after all), I maintain that thinking of homo- or heterosexuality as something I can choose for myself strikes me as much more palatable than thinking that we are born this or that. ( I can be such a humanist!)  At the same time, however, I can perfectly understand why it is also important to insist on homosexuality's pre-givenness, as an antidote to the all-pervasive poison of heterosexuality's normativity, its "naturalness."  Finally, it may prove less significant to ascertain the "truth" behind such conflicting accounts on the origins of sexual orientation than to examine what effects they produce.  And the truth of the matter is, whether we are dealing with nature or nurture, most theories on the origins of homosexuality are out to make sure the time will come when homosexuals will no longer be in this world. 

The danger, I guess, in confessions of this sort, is that they would seem to offer an explanation for why homosexuals exist in the world, when all they are really saying is that according to a certain person (here a particularly sad and miserable one), this is how he believes he's been to homosexual hell and back.  From an individual belief of personal vicissitude, this essay readily morphs into a general theory of human sexual formation.  And by attempting to provide a commentary to this essay, by engaging its assumptions and implications, I must admit I have only fallen into this mode, and committed this selfsame misguided leap.  I should take back everything, then. 

But on second thought, maybe I shouldn't. 

##   _Sex and globalization_

_T_ HIS COLUMN COMES a week too late: by now, everyone's had her fill of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference and its animadversions, and indeed I do not plan to belabor the same pro- and anti- APEC points. 

I do, however, wish to examine an aspect of the debate hitherto uncriticized: the nexus of sex and globalization.  In particular, I would like to explore the implications of an increasingly transnational world for local sexualities. 

Let me begin by saying that a world of a difference exists between the material fact that local economies are already part of a global market economy, and the fact of cultural diversity.  To conflate the two would be too "materialist," surrendering the autonomy enjoyed by the sphere of culture to the overpowering determination of capital.  This persuasion typically translates into the following cause-and-effect explanation: because the West exercises a certain degree of control over the economies of the non-West, the latter will, in time, be transformed into and thus lose its distinct character to the former.  Another way to understand the inadequacy (thus, wrongness) of this position is to simply pause and look around oneself.  Everywhere one sees American images and products—from toothpaste, to clothes, to pop songs.  And yet, can one actually think one or one's culture has turned American because of them?  Unless one is extremely deluded and/or brown-American-wishful, obviously not. 

I can think of another example to prove what I mean: skinheads.  If I remember it right, sometime last year our neighborhood had them in great abundance: teenagers would romp about our street sporting the same "fuzzball" look, doubtless inspired by the style of the latest MTV stars.  And yet, I doubt if any of these frisky kids were Neo-Nazis (or even aware of what that word meant), who were the commonsensical referent of this particular coiffure in the West.  Indeed, it wasn't all that rare a thing for me and my family to see these Filipino "skinheads" going to mass, receiving communion and making _mano po_ to their parents and grandparents at the end of the service.  The thought of how readily Filipinos are able to accommodate a cultural form from the West without the slightest bit of awareness and appreciation of that form's original ideological content, can give one so much pause. 

On the other hand, I am not about to feign economic learning by attempting either to oust or extol economic globalization.  Unlike so many pretentious commentators who have been quick to display their ignorance these past weeks, I am too afraid to lose face on this score and will therefore leave that to the experts.  What I feel sufficiently equipped to make comments on, however, is the sexual politics of transnationalism, and what the disappearance of this particular discussion from either side of the APEC debate says about where everyone's real interests lie. ( Toward the end of this column, I intend to show that their avowed differences notwithstanding, the pro- and anti-APEC camps are actually already in agreement about certain things, especially where the management of sexuality is concerned). 

The first thing we must bear in mind is that with or without APEC, sexualities in the Philippines—and indeed, in all of the world—are already undergoing some kind of transformation. ( Economic trade is, after all, not the only kind of trade there is).  These global rearrangements of desire owe themselves primarily to the growing salience of Western biomedicine, particularly its increasing obsession with the demonized link between sexual behavior and health.  AIDS discourse would be one of the latest reincarnations of this obsession, and the epidemiological awareness this discourse has produced has already succeeded in policing pleasure for many people in those countries which were the first to recognize the need for behavorial modification in the struggle to control the spread of the Human Immune-Deficiency Virus. ( Incidentally, these were also the countries hardest hit by the pandemic in the beginning of the last decade).  In the Philippines, the youth are currently being subjected to a level of "bio-medico-sexual exposure" completely alien to the experience of their parents: TV and radio advertisements, "sex education" classes, pop songs, MTVs, and other media forms all aim to relay their message of "safer sex" to horny young Filipinos to a more or less efficacious degree. 

What makes this local adoption of a Western technology/form different from the case of the skinheads lies in the nature of the form and its intended effect: hairdo, no matter how kinky, is not sex, and the sporting of it cannot exactly be likened to the wearing of condoms.  To have your hair reduced to a skinhead does not necessarily mean, as we have seen, that you have also assumed the mind-set of the Neo-Nazi (invariably, the only reason you do it is to look—and feel?—"cool.")  To wear condoms, however, is arguably different, in view of the fact that it represents more than just a simple outward act, but also an awareness: given the fact that government and media have been unrelenting in their anti-AIDS campaigns, codom-wearing these days cannot be but linked to the idea of "safer sex." ( Or, more alarmingly for the bellwethers of the Catholic church, condom-wearing may well be the first purchase Filipino males have to the whole public concept of sex). 

In any case, AIDS-consciousness is not the only technology through which sex is regulated in the Philippines today.  Population management, women's reproductive rights, gay and lesbian liberationist discourse, as well as the medieval reactions of the church to these diverse but related issues, have all _visibilized_ sexuality to different, often contradictory, ends.  Whether we like or not, the final outcome of these processes is the creation of _new_ sexualities: pleasures and identities and behaviors that were not in evidence before these processes began, and that are in fact hybrid forms of local sexual patterns that have been transformed in the course of encountering Western forms of desire. 

An earlier sexological implantation from the West is the homo/hetero distinction, promulgated primarily by academe and mass media, beginning in the late fifties and early sixties.  With the introduction of such academic disciplines as psychology, psychiatry and guidance and counseling, and with the popularization of sexual representations in film and television, the idea that one could be classified as either a homo- or heterosexual started becoming real to many urbanized Filipinos during this time. 

But the local, "target" society of such implantations, as we have seen in the case of the "skinheads", manages almost always to modify what it receives from the outside.  In this case, when Filipinos started using the words "homosexual" and "heterosexual" to describe themselves, they failed to understand what exactly these words meant (labels of sexual orientation), and merely used them as substitutes for concepts they already knew.  Thus, as understood and applied by Filipinos, homosexuality is an attribute that only the effeminate man ( _bakla_ ) and the mannish woman ( _tomboy_ ) deserve, while heterosexuality is the exclusive province of the the masculine man and the feminine woman.  What makes this appropriation weird is that, in fact, these four identities sexually relate in ways that render contradictory and nonsensical the homo/hetero distinction.  For the funny thing is, the _bakla_ 's partner is the "real man," the _tomboy_ 's the "real woman," and yet, for Filipinos, only the _bakla_ and _tomboy_ can actually be considered homosexual. 

We can begin to understand why this kind of "misunderstanding" of the idea of sexuality in the Philippines exists.  While our culture may not completely appreciate the nuances of sexual orientation (which is something that, until recently, it didn't really feel it needed to think about or know anyway), it does understand one thing very well: that one kind of orientation is superior to the other.  And since the _bakla_ and the _tomboy_ have always been considered inferior to the "real man" and the "real woman," the arrival and subsequent mobilization of the homo/hetero distinction merely followed this pre-existing hierarchy.  In the _bakla_ 's case at least, his native culture's effeminophobia (the fear and hatred of effeminacy) simply foreordained and dictated the way the newly implanted prejudice called "homophobia" (the fear and hatred of homosexuality) would be mobilized: basically against the _bakla_ himself. 

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the globalization of sexual categories that originated in the West started a long time ago (or at least, way before the term "globalization" even gained currency among the pundits of local media).  The reconfiguration of desire that AIDS discourse is currently effecting in the bodies of people (especially the youth) all over the world, is simply the latest deployment of the massive sexual machine which countries in the non-West unwittingly imported, together with modern knowledge itself, toward the turn of the century.  As is the case with trade liberalization, I'm afraid there may be no turning back on this process of the ever-increasing sexualization of our lives. 

This is why we cannot take a simple pro- and anti- stand on this issue.  It's not as if opposing the APEC makes one any less guilty of the crime of sexual oppression.  If what we have always known about the left in this country still holds water, then those who cry out "Down with imperialist domination!,"  and "Down with APEC!"  may themselves precisely be exercising their own kind of imperialist persecution of the _bakla_and _tomboy_ , whom they have been quick to dismiss as victims of "bourgeois decadence" in the past.  To the extent that machismo is inseparable from Philippine leftist politics, the _bakla_ and the _tomboy_ should be wary of the utopia that it promises.  For, as gays who have recently bolted out of the movement would say, "Immediately after the revolution, the party will likely sweep us under the rug." 

Needless to say, it will simply not do to adopt a nationalist position on this question, as though a simple "nation-is-good" rhetoric will suffice in elucidating the complexities of social injustice. ( In other words, it is the height of naiveté to believe that the "nation" holds the key to every social problem in our midst).  As our culture's innate effeminophobia exemplifies, not everything native is good.  Moreover, the demonization of the West that the pro-communist, anti-APEC proponents were proudly bandying about the week of the summit, should strike us as ironic, given the fact that the communist ideology itself originated in Europe in the last century.  Filipino communists ought to be the first to admit that not everything foreign is bad, either. 

Examining the situation of sexual globalization further, we can see that disease and bigotry are not the only things that have been traded between the West and the non-West in recent years.  We must remember that because sexological oppression originated in the West, the many forms of resistance to and rebellions from it also came from there.  Gay and lesbian liberation, feminism, and all sorts of advocacies that seek to dismantle the regime of masculinist heterosexism, have likewise found their way to the countries that comprise what has come to be called the "Third World."  Thus, in a sense, the West has even helped the non-West: the native bias of Filipinos against effeminacy or _kabaklaan_ can now be challenged because gay liberationist discourse embraces every possible sexual and gender expression, including transgenderism and transsexuality, and allows them to achieve fruition.  Only because of the "sexual liberalization" that results out of the globalization of systems of knowledge, the _bakla_ can now fight back and neutralize his native-inspired subjugation, using the tools of anti-homophobic discourse. 

It remains true, however, that the flow of profits in this new global market will likely be one-way: from them to us.  In other words, despite my obvious reservations on the matter, I remain critical of the utopianist rhetoric of either side _or both_ sides of the debate.  To the degree that all sorts of investments—be they in the form of capital or desire—have been made by both proponents and critics of globalization, there may not exist any one way of adjudicating on this issue. 

In any case, the hecatombs of AIDS-related deaths should tell us this: certain things, like grief, are already tragically, irreparably, global. 

# Contents

  1.  Cover
  2.  Half Title
  3.  Author
  4.  Title Page
  5.  Copyright
  6.  Acknowledgments
  7.  Dedication
  8.  Contents
  9.  Preface
  10.  One: Queer pedagogies
    1.  Gay lit.  101
    2.  Sob stories
    3.  Advice to a beginning gay writer
    4.  Conversions
    5.  AYOR
  11.  Two: Queer geographies
    1.  Camiguin interlude
    2.  An American notebook
    3.  A Siquijor sojourn
    4.  Leyte on my mind
  12.  Three: Truth-tellings
    1.  Gay and Catholic
    2.  Volleyball memories
    3.  Three hours in a seminary
    4.  A dinner conversation
    5.  Growing old
    6.  Getting Tested
  13.  Four: Queer Readings
    1.  Myth and meaning
    2.  Gays and promiscuity
    3.  CMT and intra-male sexuality
    4.  Between shadow and light
    5.  Total eclipse
    6.  The gay-besotted woman
    7.  Villa re(dis)covered
    8.  Of legends and poetry
  14.  Five: Queering the pitch
    1.  The queer and the bakla
    2.  Gay villains
    3.  Was Rizal gay? 
    4.  Ladlad: the second unfurling
    5.  Orlando Nadres's Hanggang dito na lamang..." and the question of gay identity
    6.  Nature vs. nurture
    7.  Sex and globalization

