Ladlad

Introduction

Unfurling lives: an introductionAny anthology is primarily a question of editorial policy: which poems, stories, plays and essays have we, as editors, chosen to include here?

And so I am announcing it now lest the message be misunderstood and mistaken for another: this is an anthology of contemporary Philippine writing by and about gays. Outside this categorical imperative, we as editors have needed to exercise our individual freedoms in discriminating towards those texts which we, by virtue of literary kinship and affinity—and most certainly, taste—liked in particular. Of course, this procedure moves in the opposite direction, too.

This, however, is hardly an enviable position, for as the works started pouring in, we also had to suffer from the pangs of remorse and guilt: there are still other works which need to be given the same creative and popular space as the ones included in this book. Almost certainly, a second volume is in the offing, and the pull towards disinterest and ennui hardly really wielded its woeful influence on us in the process of putting this collection together. It has to be said now that, quite the opposite, we have found it a great joy, rewarding in ways more than the obvious, reading through the bulk of submissions for this project. No longer is it simply apparent that gays are beginning to write about themselves, to reproduce textually their lives, to narrativize their loves and longings, glees and sadnesses. At least, if only within the landscape of this anthology, the silence of the closet has finally been dispersed, like a cloud that has burst over the now-shimmering expanse of green foliage and pink flowers, sanctifying everything in the cool morning air of our common redemptions.

There is another thing any introduction to any anthology has to, procedurally, accomplish: justify the presence of the book in the first place! This I have been given, or perhaps I have willed it on myself somewhat, the singular honor to pronounce, and I am a little sorry to say that I can only mince words about it. Homosexuality, an issue particularly crucial to this book, has not, after all, until recently, been seen as a significant enough basis for any serious discussion, much less as grounds for coming out with a book whose heart and soul it is. And yet, the painful irony is that while this opinion dominates the spaces of our lives, we as gays have never been for one second made unaware of our being homosexuals, of our “difference” from the ideal person who it seems always gets foisted on us by our families, so-called friends, colleagues, and in media even. This ineluctably paradoxical situation—of the outside world (labas) disowning that secret and most intimate part of ourselves, and of our inner world (loob) screaming out in frustration the truth that cannot, without much sacrifice and mortification, set us free—has provided the all-time tension of our lives. And where there is tension, there can only ultimately be release. This book, though it has taken a long time coming, may precisely be seen as something of a release. And such a beautifully withheld one at that!

And why for the longest time mayn’t gays discuss their homosexuality and the identity that this gives them in common? The answer may be much more easily arrived at using the itinerary of pedantry’s abstraction—as, say, “because there exists a psychosocial taboo that represses homosexuality in order to legitimate heterosexuality as the naturalized norm”—but as this anthology proves otherwise, the answer is really more concretely personal and real than that. To talk about one’s homosexuality is really to come out into the open for who one is, and this person who comes out is not really very different from other people, except that they will not hear of it. It is the heterosexual institutions and their subjects that insist on demonizing homosexuals, on calling them deviant, depraved, perverse, sinful, and not the homosexuals themselves; or at least, not originally. As a consequence, gays have generally not come out because to do so would be to expose themselves to persecution and anguish in a proverbially bigoted world.

The writers who comprise this book may best be regarded as a community, and it is not an inaccuracy to say that there have always been gay communities in this city, and presumably elsewhere, too. A community is simply a group of people who support one another, whose lives connect in a number of vital senses, who are friends first and foremost. My and Danton’s community, for instance, would be our friends at Cine Café, Katlo and The Library Foundation, and for me specifically, the newly organized student gay-rights group, the U.P. Babaylan. Every time our community meets, we all try to reaffirm ourselves in howsoever small and insignificant ways that we can. I can almost compare ourselves to the country of dainty china in The Wizard of Oz, precious and beautifully dear, which meets every so often in order to mend each other up, as each figurine gets to go through quite a lot of disuse and abuse in the outside world. We see this book, therefore, as emblem of the growing expansiveness of this community of fragile and healing souls, each affirming the other, a community of friends visible and real only to themselves. For by the morning, the magnificent illusion vanishes, like the ghost of some enchantment whose magic is not nor can ever be absolute, lest it turn irremediably potent and therefore susceptible of ugliness, deviltry and decay. For us, any small opportunities to bond with our fellow homosexuals are really quite priceless and relief enough.

There is a slight qualification to be made here, however: it may not be very accurate to say that gays have generally been invisible, for as anybody can tell you, there have always been gays slaving away in the beauty parlors and dressmaking shops, or as the screaming clowns in so many of our local movies, and even as the flighty twittering movie reporters themselves. This fact is crucial to the statement this book wishes to make about who homosexuals are and what are the things that they want and only deserve, because, apparently, a conflict exists between these two kinds of images.

The gays who are marked in our culture as bakla are also, for the longest time, the only gays who have come out; which is to say, who are grantedly homosexual in orientation and understood by all as such. On the other hand, the gays who are not engaged in identifiably bakla occupations, who are not irreducibly bakla in appearance and comportment, and who more or less describe the profiles of the writers in this book, are precisely the invisible gays who have escaped from the more coercive effects of homophobic domination. Although historically there has always been a conflict between these two kinds of homosexuals, this book proves that this originates from without rather than within the homosexual communities themselves. The inclination to oppress, to displace conflict and violence among the gays themselves, is a bad habit taught us by the heterosexual world. Hence, the bridging of the gap between the overt and the covert gays must first be negotiated around this important epiphany before it can truly come to pass.

There is a “cultic” play written by the noted playwright Orlando Nadres (who left gay theater slightly more orphaned several years ago) that demonstrates the formation of an alliance between the covert and the overt gays. The two central characters in Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Salamat are Fidel and Julie, both homosexuals yet different in the way they project themselves to the world: Fidel, trained as a child to be “respectable,” maintains that he is not like his “vulgar” beautician friend Julie who, throughout the play, attempts to “out” him in front of the handsome and virile Efren, the man whom he has been supporting through school and has secretly been in love with. The difference between Fidel and Julie is a screaming one, then: the former is a “kindly old man,” while the latter is a “faggot, with hair dyed red” (tellingly, these casting specifications are by Nadres himself).

In this play, therefore, Nadres may be said to articulate the mainly class-specified conflict between these two gay characters who are also simply analogues of what everyone knows exist in reality: the masculine-looking and -acting closet gays, and the obviously effeminate and/or feminine gays. Nadres solves the seemingly insurmountable problem of disparity and the conflictual relationship that normally obtains between these two kinds of homosexuals, and gestures towards a gay movement by causing Fidel, in the play, to identify with Julie out of necessity: faced with the appalling homophobia of the man to whom he had devoted so much of his life, Fidel has had to admit that he and Julie are one and the same. It is he, after all, who has yet to unfurl the mythical and motley cape (ladlad ng kapa) which in our culture is the unmistakable symbol for the admission of one’s homosexuality, first and foremost, and one’s effeminacy and/or femininity, secondly:

FIDEL: Ako ay ganito, kaya hanggang dito na lamang at maraming salamat. Kay Julie ko lamang inamin ang tunay kong pagkatao. Dahil hirap na hirap na ako. Wala akong makausap tungkol dito. Walang makakaunawa tungkol sa bagay na ito kundi ang katulad namin ni Julie … Kami-kami lamang. Mga lihim na pag-uusap! Mga pabulong at panakaw na pagtatapatan. Talagang hindi ko ito ipagtatapat sa’yo pero … nangyari na … biglang-bigla, natanggal ang aking maskara … alam kong iiwasan mo na ako. At ngayon nga’y magpapaalam ka na sa akin.

This is the passage that for me best explains the political nature of Coming Out: it is not a personal affair, for to come out is always to come out into something. In this play, Nadres locates the space outside the closet as the space occupied by the overtly homosexual identity of Julie—an agonized space, admittedly, marked by so much cruelty and “unreality” (for as binabae, the most Julie can be is a joke of/an unreal, woman). Yet, it is also the space that has hollowed a spot for Fidel to exist: a place for Fidel to covertly be himself, to bond and reinvent and affirm with others like himself. A place to love and be loved.

And love is what Fidel comes out for, as Julie himself thinks it to be the only decent thing to do. Julie is also Fidel in this regard, for their difference from society’s norm of authentic existence has made them the same—homosexuals. The play is Nadres’ version, hence, of the world according to the oppressed sector called “the homosexuals,” the overt/covert distinction notwithstanding. In fact, in the end, the distinction doesn’t quite matter to the homosexuals themselves, for it is simply another labeling mechanism which the heterosexual power-brokers use to objectify and contain them.

Just like Julie and Fidel, homosexuals need to bond with each other, since that is already a way of Coming Out. Just like Julie, we in the book are ministerial that the act of affirmation be made not just with ourselves, but with an Efren, who in larger social terms would be our families, society, the Other which we care enough about because it holds our happiness and life in its hands—in other words, this book’s implied audience.

Nonetheless, all of the gay contributors to this anthology believe that if homosexuals are ever to achieve a sense of pride and dignity, it first has to be nurtured within the homosexual community, and only consequently without it. Our friends who are homosexual and gay with us, who come out to us, are like Fidel in this story. We quite already know who and what we are, and yet that is not enough. For while we fulfill the very basic human need for self-realization, we do this out of knowing that this is all that we can do, for we want to do more. While we reinvent ourselves within the hollowed circle that we create with our presence, it is true that our desire lies beyond the circle’s grasp. We want our parents and relatives to know and to love us despite, as we do already love them despite. We want our colleagues at work to know that we like to talk about men, not women, and that we don’t want to have to be forced to invent a story detailing our manly prowess over bottles of beer that we don’t feel we necessarily have to take to make us feel good. We want our church to sanctify our relationships, not with marriage, perhaps, but with the seal of universal love and brotherhood. We want to tell our lovers that we love them, in the presence of people we care about. We want to love freely and without remorse. We want innocence about our crime. We deny the charge that our very life is a crime. We want out of the closet that could kill, if not is already, slowly, progressively, killing us by rendering us unreal. Not to come out, not to admit to oneself and to one’s community one’s sexuality is the real unreality, for it means an erasure of self. How something as unimportant as one’s s****l orientation has become a most vital part of the self is anyone’s guess. The great gay historian Michel Foucault says it has something to do with the discourse of “biopower” or the maximization of life which, towards the turn of the century, became the hegemonic discourse on s*x, the new “regime of truth.” Or perhaps the very repression of sexuality has been responsible for its very own production.

Nevertheless, I am rather aware that this book’s poetic renditions of homosexual desire—that is not strictly s****l, as we can see—yet partake of another mechanism of labeling. And so, I would like to say now, here, that this book’s vision—if at all it is defensible to say that there is one such vision in it—may not necessarily be the dream of all homosexuals, as there are differences within the same. Fidel and Julie are merely the markers, but between them is a spectrum of individual homosexual differences that must also be allowed to breathe, in the bright open spaces which gays may no longer be stopped from laying claim to as their own.

The ultimate question the play raises connects acutely with the situation of gays today: there are Julies and Fidels in our midst. What we have seen in Nadres’ play is not what we see around us, though. What we see in our daily lives is not really just the overtness of one kind of homosexuals, and the covertness of the other. For what is apparent in our society at this juncture is that the covert does not even exist, inasmuch as he cannot be located by the overt, and brought out into the “closed,” open sphere of the gay community. In fact, there has yet to be a substantially viable homosexual community, as there has yet to be friendships to be forged between Julies and Fidels. By calling this collection Ladlad, and by being most aware of the insuperable links any piece of gay writing can only have with kabaklaan, we hope to have answered, at least in part, Nadres’ challenge to the gays: Be as uncompromising about your principles as Julie is to his gayness. But Nadres likewise makes it clear that this does not necessarily preclude vulnerability.

In one of the play’s many brilliant moments, Nadres makes Julie admit the sadness that he hides underneath all the screams and flaming gestures, which identifies him completely with Fidel’s own pent-up anger and despair, the release of which will, a little later on into the scene, see Fidel manhandling Julie. Nadres then depicts the political and strategic desirability of using Julie as a model for the gay movement, when he makes Julie emerge from the floor of Fidel’s childish rage and frustration, in tatters yet brimming with pride. For this short and noble moment, Julie is Nadres’ ghost incarnated: Hanggang Dito … is finally a celebration of gay resistance and pride, pure and simple.

The urgency of forming a community that embraces all kinds of homosexuals—be they the selectively out Fidel or the unabashedly and uncompromisingly out Julie—is clear in Ladlad, where themes on kabaklaan intersect if not merge with the homoerotic self-avowals of those “other gays” whose primary anguish concerns their desire, and the difficulty of pursuing it to its fulfillment. The acceptance and declaration of one’s homosexuality is already always a transgressive and dangerously empowering act, for it partakes of the same courageous spirit that can still transform society for the better. In this connection, it has to be said that the thought of a backlash, though daunting enough, has not dissuaded the gays who with this book are coming out of and for themselves, because between remaining closeted and expressing oneself, it is silence that is always the less noble way to live—and love.

The analogy for this can only be properly a personal one, again: Coming Out is always better than dying in the musty depths of the closet of non-existence. And the personal connects with the public are once seen in the shrill, disabusing light of the homogenizing experience of oppression: whether one chooses to become identifiably bakla or not—for some petty, bourgeois reasons or other—one remains essentially unhappy and conscious of one’s marginalization. In other words, we can only acknowledge that the closet of gay history is our closet, too, and to emerge from its castrating and silencing depths is tantamount to the beginnings of our liberation. Likewise, our hope is that with this book, Philippine history’s closet will empty a little, if in the least allow a booster of air and light into the breathless inanimation and dolor which are what closetedness reduces one to be. Should much more persecution follow this declaration of gayness within the many imaginative and real (which is to say, historic) spaces where there used to be none, then we are only sorry for not being able to fight fire with a much shriller, more eerie and discomfiting backfire.

In the West, the AIDS pandemic and its homosexualization have seen the revitalizing of the homosexual communities where the already difficult problem of homophobic discrimination has joined forces with, and found legitimation in, the initial identification of AIDS with male homosexuality. AIDS, the so-called “gay plague,” has admittedly diminished the ranks of the gays literally, but it has not lessened their morale nor the spirit of the Gay Movement in general. On the contrary, the bitter loss of lives and the persecution that has been spurred by AIDS have spawned a new radicalism among gays (and even lesbians). Perhaps nowhere has this progressive reaction been more unmistakably felt than in the literary and artistic communities, where the prevailing spirit of political correctness has proven to be nourishing of, and become the new haven for, the new and burgeoning field of literature and cultural knowledge by and about homosexuals.

Although there has not been evidence that AIDS will become homosexualized any time soon in the Philippines (as it was in the United States and Europe), the need to open a sober and more academic clearing for homosexual issues has long been overdue. Homosexuality in the Philippines as in elsewhere has largely been demonized and obsessively rendered into an unsuitable topic for any serious discussion, literary or otherwise. This has been the case for the longest period already, even as it is becoming more and more apparent to everyone that homosexual men and women constitute an important minority in our society. We need only open the television or read the tabloids to discover the palpability of the bakla sensibility permeating the very texture of our lives. Swardspeak and the notably gay affectations which many women are now seen to be deploying, as well as the recent resurgence of gay and lesbian organizing within several Metropolitan Manila campuses and NGOs, only point to the intransigence of homosexuality and the growing awareness among many gays and lesbians of their homosexual identity. Should we not also cite the increasing visibility of gays within the hollowed spaces of our lives: a gay father, brother, uncle, cousin, nephew or son; a lesbian friend; a homosexual professor. It is no wonder how the West has seen our society, in particular, as “tolerant” of the tomboy and bakla, although in reality tolerance is definitely not necessarily the case with our culture’s attitude towards homosexuality..

In fact, as far as Ladlad, the first Philippine gay anthology would indicate, the rhetorical pronouncements of “tolerance” are precisely just that, rhetoric. And it is this rhetoric that has been used to legitimate the countless instances of discrimination against homosexuals in terms of employment and career specification, political misrepresentation, and symbolic (un)production. Gays do apparently exist in our society, but they have either been minoritized in their occupation, or silenced (that is, closeted) about their identities in case they are not. Among the urban poor, it may be noted that a marked increase in wife beatings always goes hand-in-hand with gay bashing, as machismo has somehow institutionalized such forms of behavior. It isn’t any less strange for husbands to batter their wives than for fathers and uncles to beat effeminate boys up in order to masculinize them. In terms of textual production, homosexuals also have not been given an equal chance to explore, invent, and reproduce their subjectivity in their writings or whatever mode of expression they want, which is why the dominant representation of the homosexual has continually been a ridiculously funny one. A joke. Stereotypes of the loud and funny faggot (as well as the darkly moody and vengeful tomboy) have, for a long time now, been the only images heterosexuals have had of homosexuals; and more tragically, the only images homosexuals have had of themselves.

Until this book.

Other than offering gays alternative self-knowledge, Ladlad should also ultimately prove that the homosexual story is not really the story of any one life, but of many; and that the concerns of the contemporary gays who constitute its authors and characters are at once singular and plural in styles, persuasions and themes. The same way that our lives are at once funny and sad, overt and covert, inside (loob) and outside (labas) in social significance, and in relation to the deepest part of ourselves.

Finally, then, it is plain to see that it is we—the gays for whom this anthology has primarily been painstakingly dreamt of, nourished, birthed and re-birthed over and over—who have fashioned from the fibers and filaments of our dreams and loves, the soft and smooth fabric of brilliant sundry pink, green, yellow and blue, all colors that can ever be made to approximate the beauty which is our veritable source, for the future’s one grand unfurling of lives let to fly unchallenged in the breeze.

J. NEIL C. GARCIA

Sta. Cruz, Manila

12 January 1994