header image

HOME

This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

Interested in What I Create?



Bibliography

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

entry arrow9:48 PM | 'Ladlad': 30 Years of Unfurling the Cape and Paving the Way



Finally, it’s out! My essay on the 30-year legacy of Ladlad, the pathbreaking anthology of Philippine gay writing by J. Neil C. Garcia and Danton Remoto, now out on Spot.ph. An excerpt:


In 1994, I was nineteen, a twink lost in the world the way only someone who came of age in the 1990s could be. I had no idea I was a twink—that was queer nomenclature I would only come to know in my worldly thirties and the world had evolved enough to have specific names for what used to be an identity no one talked about in polite circles. I had no idea either what to make of the surging tempests I had inside of me as I braved the hormones of adolescence and took in, without a map, the hazy landscape of desire you could not deny a young man at the beginning of his prime.

This was three years before Ellen DeGeneres famously came out on American television via her eponymous sitcom and unleashed a cultural touchstone for what Oscar Wilde used to describe, a hundred years before, as “the love that [dared] not speak its name.” [Actually, it was his lover Lord Alfred Douglas who penned this line in a poem, but the phrase was used in Wilde’s gross indecency trial which would decisively blanket in silence all manner of things gay, until cracks appeared in 1969 because of the Stonewall Riot.] This was four years before Will & Grace would grace our television screens and pave the way for mainstream acceptance of characters who just happened not to be heterosexual. In the Philippines, the show was carried by Studio 23, a UHF channel that largely escaped conservative notice simply because it was a smaller station and catered to a niche audience.

In the Philippines, at least in popular culture, to be gay was defined largely by the movies—and for about 50 years since Nemesio E. Caravana toyed ever so lightly with the notion of queer attraction in Kaaway ng Babae (1948), to be gay for the Filipino was to live out a phase awaiting eventual heterosexual conversion, such as in Tony Cayado’s Kaming Mga Talyada (1962). Or to wallow in guilt and ennui (and camp), such as in Danny Zialcita’s suite of queerness in Si Malakas, Si Maganda, at Si Mahinhin (1980), Mahinhin vs. Mahinhin (1981), T-Bird at Ako (1982), and Lalakwe (1985). Or to identify with Dolphy’s definitive caricature of the sissy in Jack and Jill (1954), which would generate decades-long copycats in many movies starring Roderick Paulate, Joey de Leon, and Herbert Bautista. In 1994, Paulate famously played twins separated at birth in Maryo J. de los Reyes’ Bala at Lipstick, where one twin is a tough guy and the other an enterprising shrill running a beauty parlor.

The year also saw Mel Chionglo release Midnight Dancers, a spiritual sequel to Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988), which also largely defined the Filipino gay experience as one that is seen largely through the eyes of (an often straight) male stripper. The early 1990s were not a good time to find complex gay representation in Filipino pop culture.

I was a budding cineaste then and definitely heard of Chionglo’s film—which came to me in bootleg VHS through God knows what source. (Perhaps a neighborhood video store?) I must have played that movie a hundred times on the family VCR, always discreetly and in the dark cloak of night—hoping my Born Again mother would not rouse from her sleep and catch me.

It was with the same delicious trepidation that I would come across a copy of the first Ladlad, which described itself in its subtitle, and in such an arrestingly forward manner, as an “anthology of Philippine gay writing.” There was no mistaking it for anything other than what it declared itself to be. The simplicity of that admission would create such an upheaval that thirty years later it would be difficult to ignore the fact that for many gay people in the Philippines, the publication of this book could very well be our own version of the brick thrown at Stonewall Inn.

Read the rest at the link. Happy Pride, everyone!

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich




GO TO OLDER POSTS GO TO NEWER POSTS