Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
1:05 PM |
I Remember the Ugliness of the Old Dumaguete Presidencia
Sometimes I cannot believe the Dumaguete Presidencia used to look like this, and just only a few years ago, before it was finally restored beginning in 2018. The original 1937 design by the great architect Juan Arellano totally disappeared over the ensuing decades with ugly additions and renovations. And what is the plaza now used to be a parking lot, often with dump trucks right in the middle of everything. Growing up in Dumaguete, I used to bewail how ugly our City Hall was, and I had no idea that beneath all that ugliness was an old gem waiting to be restored. Today, it is the National Museum of the Philippines Dumaguete. [Photo from DumagueteInfo Net Service]
9:00 AM |
Reminiscences of a Former Ms. Silliman Inside Man
The current online storm that has broken over the handling of Ms. Silliman 2024—which, as of this writing, has yet to get to coronation night—might puzzle some Dumagueteños, especially the newly arrived to our quaint shores, who might think this is just some small campus beauty pageant that is as negligible as other similar pageants—so why the incessant buzz about it, even from supposedly sophisticated individuals who should know better? This column is a chance to understand why there is a hullabaloo.
Our new friends aside, all the rest of Dumaguete would know why for many Ms. Silliman stands just outside that usual category of “beauty pageant,” and why no one compares it to similar enterprises like Miss Dumaguete or Miss Negros Oriental [or your dozens of town or barangay pageants sprinkled all over the island]. For many Ms. Silliman is uniquely its own thing, an erstwhile celebration of “campus beauty” that is also the epitome of “school spirit”—and “smarts.” There is a reason why it is fondly referred to as a “quiz bowl disguised as a beauty pageant,” which is often said in jest whenever uttered in protest when a more beautiful candidate once again ends up first runner-up to the one who sparkled the most in the Q & A and who bags the crown. It also has a unique history, and a magnificent list of winners—including Palanca Hall-of-Famer Elsa Martinez Coscolluela!—that has made it one of the central events that define the Silliman University Founders Day celebration every August. [Now, it also takes being a Dumagueteño to know how ultimately central Founders Day is to the life of the small city; it is so significantly Dumaguete, it’s even bigger than all the rest of the usual local festivals and holidays. ] Ms. Silliman’s reputation as a unique signifier of Silliman excellence is so entrenched in the Dumaguete cultural mindset that its crowning every year becomes something everyone looks out for.
Truth to tell, I had been so happily out-of-touch with what has been going on with Ms. Silliman this year. I’d been sick for most of mid-August, and had no real strength to navigate the exasperations of people on social media. But as soon as I recuperated and faced the current shenanigans of Facebook, I could not help but feel immediately overwhelmed with all the gossips and pushbacks centering on the current organization handling the annual show. A lot of allegations have been thrown and the landscape has become a total mudbath—all of which I have no real desire for recounting, although I did laugh when the Ms. Silliman pubmats came out and made the case for what not to do if you don’t want your event to look tacky.
But the one thing that caught my eye though was their first poster for coronation night, and I couldn’t believe it. Whoever approved that poster has a complete misunderstanding of what Ms. Silliman is all about. The taste level was already suspect to begin with, but to pose these Silliman women like girls in a harem was also something else.
Also the theme emblazoned on the poster: “A reminiscence of bravery and pioneering advocacies to shape the future.” What in tarnation does that mean? It is a tagline so contradictory and convoluted, it is virtually empty of meaning. For those alumni who used to be proud of “Silliman English,” this is the epitaph.
As a Sillimanian, I felt violated. Because if you are a Sillimanian, there are many enduring traditions that do help define your memories of campus life—dorm life, cultural immersion, a love or hate relationship with cafeteria food, classroom shenanigans, intramural madness, campus publication glory, Founders Day fever—but there is only one that ever feels gilded for many: the Ms. Silliman Pageant.
I’ve served in various capacities in Ms. Silliman pageants of yore, both as a student organizer and then as a faculty adviser. Today, I may no longer believe in pageants as a cultural institution and have actively turned my back on all forms of participation [including judging], but there is one thing about the Ms. Silliman Pageant that gives me pause: the fact that it has served as an earnest laboratory for creativity and event-organizing for a large swathe of the student population—student leaders and creatives who work tirelessly for barely any recompense to hone their skills in whatever it is they’ve showed promise in. That they do this for one of the oldest pageants in the world—it is older than even the Miss Universe—is something still compelling for me. I no longer believe in pageants, yes—but I believe somehow still in Ms. Silliman.
Plus there’s the nostalgia. I was the head scriptwriter for the 50th Ms. Silliman Pageant in 1997, with Michael Ocampo as Chairman, which without doubt was the biggest gamechanger in the pageant’s history, and necessitated the move from the gymnasium to the Macias Sports Complex. The controversy of including a swimwear portion aside, the marketing for that pageant was mind-blowing, it actually galvanized not just the campus but the entire city; hence, there will always be two eras of Ms. Silliman: pre-1997 and post-1997.
I was also the one who later on advocated to separate the talent portion from the coronation night, and to add it to the pre-pageant instead. [I just had enough of coronation nights that lasted until 2 AM because the talent portions ran too long.]
In the 2000s, when I was adviser to the pageant, I wrote an entire history of the Ms. Silliman Pageant to preface the new guidelines we wrote, which we intended to be the pageant bible for future Ms. Silliman Committees to use.
I wrote about how it started as a student morale booster and popularity contest instigated by the campus paper in the post-World War II years, which is why the runners-up are called the Miss Cover Girl and the Miss Headline Girl.
I wrote about why the Pan Hellenic Society invented the pre-pageant, to set the pageant apart with its insistence on the intelligence, and articulation, of the candidates. [This is why many people refer to Ms. Silliman as a “quiz bee” disguised as a beauty pageant, and why speech always seem to trump beauty in the final consideration.]
I wrote about why it lost the word “beauty” from the complete title, and why it became “Ms.” instead of “Miss.” [This was Nursing Dean Ma. Teresita Sy-Sinda’s idea—to curb the inherent sexism that is couched in the suggestion of a “miss.” She was the Honorary Chair of the 50th iteration of the pageant, and insisted on this—hence that usage for many years, until this edict has somewhat been forgotten in recent iterations.]
And, finally, I wrote about why the advocacy angle had to be inculcated—because the new guidelines were made in a time when there was a huge push to relegate the pageant to the dustbin of history. It was because, with feminism resurgent everywhere, many people really began questioning the concept of a Ms. Silliman to be outdated—and to be honest, it really is.
The new guidelines we wrote followed a Ms. Silliman Pageant controversy that erupted over cheating allegations [the final question in the pre-pageant was leaked to a favored candidate and that candidate was so incensed by that act she told everyone], and another pageant where only three candidates vied for the crown, rendering all as title-holder and runners-up at once. [The College of Nursing’s Ma. Teresita Sy-Sinda, who had been the pageant’s honorary chair a few years back, reacted to what was happening by banning all her students from joining the pageant for many years, and some college deans followed her suit. We even briefly flirted with the idea of opening the competition to candidates fielded by campus organizations, because we could not get candidates from the colleges and units anymore. I remember being so desperate I begged the Graduate School, which never usually fielded candidates, to join—and I succeeded on that count! The pageant was really dying at that time, hence the need for the guidelines.
Moses Joshua Atega had an alternative ready should Ms. Silliman cease to exist: the Silliman University Campus Goodwill Ambassador, which pitted both men and women, and was designed to compete with similar winners from other schools. The whole enterprise lasted for one year, with Gabriel Enriquez winning in 2003, and begat one other competition from St. Paul University. [Plans to do a Campus Goodwill Ambassador pageant at the Negros Oriental State University, Foundation University, and other schools faltered—hence the final derby fielding all these campus winners did not materialize.]
In my strict version of the advocacy thing in the guidelines we wrote sometime in the mid-2000s, I even wanted the candidates to propose an entire calendar of activities for her chosen advocacy, para dili pang-pageant lang.
Whatever happened to that pageant bible? If it’s lost, is this why the new Ms. Silliman organizing committee seems to be lost on what to do?
I've been sick since the start of my birthday. A terrible stomach flu, which has me hostaged near the CR. But I have not missed a single meeting I've committed to so far, which I'm kinda proud of. Yesterday, I made myself get up from bed to go to an important one at Foundation University. Promptly came home right after to soothe the tummy pains. Hoping for wellness to come soon.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
“Sports is beautiful but it’s also brutal.”
~ E.J. OBIENA, pole vaulter, Paris Olympics 2024
In the light of Carlos Yulo’s Olympic wins in gymnastics in Paris [and in remembrance of Hidilyn Diaz’s watershed win in weightlifting in Tokyo in 2021], there was a burst of online chatter about the state of competitive sports in the Philippines. About the hardships our athletes have to go through to train and to participate in competitions, often with the most measly and most grudging of government support. About how ironic it is that our Olympic wins have come from sports not usually seen as “appropriate” for the gender of the athlete that won them. And about how support for these sports always seem to pale in comparison to certain other sports that enjoy not just widespread appeal but also consistent corporate largess.
And then people began side-eyeing basketball.
To quote improv comedian and comics artist Jay Ignacio: “Eh, kung i-modify natin ang gymnastics na kailangan ma-syut sila sa loob ng basketbol ring tuwing di-dismount, makakaakit kaya iyon ng mas maraming sponsorship?” And then from screenwriter and poet Jerry Gracio: “Pagkatapos nating manalo sa Olympics sa mga sports na hindi basketball, tiyak, magtatayo tayo ng maraming maraming basketball courts.” Mostly played for laughs, of course—but the undertone of many of these posts was serious. Other social media posts were more upfront: “Hindi lang [sana] puro basketball,” wrote historian Kristoffer Pasion, echoing many others who wrote the same sentiment in a variety of ways. Like the actress Agot Isidro, who posted: So pwede na ba natin bawasan ang sponsorship at funding ng basketball at idagdag na lang sa gymnastics, boxing, and weightlifting?”
Why single out basketball? I think there’s an unspoken reason why, and I proceeded to share my thoughts, and my story, on X [formerly Twitter] in a long thread. Within mere hours, the post blew up.
* * *
This is a slightly extended version of what I posted on August 5 on X:
For the longest time, basketball has really been symbolic of the Filipino macho, celebrated not just for the great sport that it is, but also for showcasing a performative masculinity that many Filipino men ascribe to.
As a child, I remember the grownup men around me drinking beer and thumping their chests [or their potbellies] as they cheered for their favorite basketball teams on TV, and arguing with each other over who was the best player—Robert Jaworski or Alvin Patrimonio? When I went to school, most of my male classmates were all the same. And I remember feeling left out, because basketball did not interest me at all, and I had no real interest to play it. So automatically that made me “queer.” Not wanting to play basketball was a silent mark people judged me by.
I actually remember, around the age of 11 or 12, making an effort to like basketball. I began watching the PBA on TV. I decided to have a “favorite” team: Ginebra San Miguel—because the men I knew were rabid fans. I studied the moves of the game, I studied the players. All in the effort to be accepted into this boisterous camaraderie of men I felt ostracized from... But I felt like an impostor. It just was not me. I pretended to be such a basketball “fan” for months and months, until I could not pretend anymore. I remember finally saying to myself, “Who cares if I’m not as manly as these men I know?” and gave up on liking basketball altogether.
There was also the fact that in high school, being forced to play basketball for P.E. classes was always a humiliating torture. I just could not dribble, I just could not shoot baskets. I felt so self-conscious whenever I had to play this darned game just for the grade. And then to hear your classmates tittering around the court about you because how was I a “man” in a basketball-crazy country and not know how to play basketball? Baling bayota uy, klaro kaayo, they’d laugh.
And this is why I hated basketball when I was a kid. I don’t hate it as much anymore as a grownup, but I do know that basketball as a social phenomenon in the Philippines has long been weaponized in a quiet gender warfare that marked so many boys and men as “unfit” or “unmanly,” just because basketball was not something we loved.
Which is why when I first saw the Brgy. Lo-oc gays the other year do “gay basketball,” playing a good game while donning tutus and other queer-affirming costumes, I felt so much joy. It felt like a corrective. It took away the thorn of machismo associated with the game, and for the first time in my life I actually enjoyed the sport.
End post.
* * *
I was soon bombarded with an avalanche of responses. As of August 6, that X thread has had 602K views, 8.7K likes, 1.9K reposts, and God knows how many responses. I hit a nerve. I knew my experience was not exactly unique, but I had no idea it would resonate so hard among many people. The responses were variations of these: “I feel seen!” or “This is my childhood!” or “Somebody finally said it!”
The number of responses of course are directly proportional to the acknowledged popularity of the sport—the feeling that in our culture, we are surrounded by this great and unquestioned worship of basketball (“It’s part of our Filipino culture!” some of the indignant responses went), that for me to write this post, I have articulated what so many people have felt but could not say—perhaps for fear of backlash, and perhaps for fear of confirming for others what they wanted hidden.
I will not deny the massive popularity of basketball, and why so many people love it. My TV screen—with its endless seasons of NBA or PBA games—confirms it. Going around any neighborhood and seeing basketball courts everywhere, built well or improvised, confirms it. The fact that I can utter a mononym—“Jaworski”—and be understood by many confirms it. The fact that Coke abandoned Coke-Go-for-Goal in its singular advocacy for nurturing football in the country in favor of forming the Coca-Cola/Powerade Tigers PBA team starting in 2002 confirms it.
Basketball is like an inevitability for life in this country—somehow, one way or another, you will be touched by it. There’s also this that can be taken as a reason for its popularity: it’s sheer accessibility. One response went: “Basketball is the sport that will always resonate to Filipinos. It is like a moth to a lamp. Basketball is so accessible: may 15x15 [feet] na open space ka, good to go ka na, isang bola, sampung katao agad ang mag-eenjoy. At the same time, [it’s] fast paced. It is one of the most social contact sports out there.” So true.
I am not a sports historian or a cultural anthropologist or a psychologist, but I can also understand why basketball became very popular for many Filipinos. The sport was introduced to us by the Americans, and made popular by them by spreading it via the public school system they set in place. That American imprimatur probably helped, and in a sense they thoroughly ingrained the sport in us. The things is, basketball as a game is truly a marvel to behold and beautiful to see when one begins to analyze its strategies and possibilities of execution—and many basketball fans would attest to this as the very reason for their abiding love for it. And then with the PBA becoming the only sports televised for widespread consumption in the Philippines for many decades, one can see why basketball has only grown in popularity over the years. That popularity could only beget more popularity, a bandwagon effect that is about conformity aside from also being about being sports-minded and being entertained.
Here is the turn: it has also been mostly basketball with male athletes we have seen popularized. And because these male athletes are on TV, they have become the equivalent of gods. We worship at the altar of the sport, and consequently we have also begun worshipping—and reflecting—the gods that play it. And then it happened: the sport somehow became closely connected, semiotically speaking, with an idea of Filipino manhood. To ascribe fandom to the game or to play the game itself—no matter our personal limitations—somehow became prerequisite for defining manhood for many Filipino boys. Not all, but many.
My father was a basketball coach for a school in Northern Mindanao where he taught as a young man, and the brood that he eventually raised with my mother was six boys total, and no girls. Sometimes family friends would jokingly point out that he perhaps purposely bred an entire basketball team for him to coach. I must admit that my relationship with my father—which was partly estranged for a time—had probably colored my view of the game. (He loved watching PBA endlessly.) But truth to tell, my father never forced me or my brothers to play (and a significant number of us are quite tall for the average Filipino male!). But because of what I’ve posted on X, I have been getting so many responses detailing intense parental or familial pressure—usually from elder male relatives—to play the game to prove their manhood, and eventually courting disappointment when they failed.
In my case, it was the men in all the neighborhoods I grew up in that somehow signaled to me that to participate in this fandom or to play the game was the only way I could get into their brotherhood. And like what I’d written, my schoolmates also did the same in varying degrees. It was not always overt. It can be very subtle. I somehow learned to read from social cues what was expected of me, and proving my “straight malehood” through basketball was certainly up there. (Given that I was a closeted boy who did not want to be found out added to the tension.)
And it’s not just the boys, it’s the girls, too. One response I got was from a woman who truly loved to play basketball, but when she was a student in a Catholic girls school, she and her schoolmates were forbidden by the nuns to play the game lest they turn into lesbians! Our culture has definitely coded sports in gendered ways for so long, and we don’t even question why.
Basketball as a code for “straight malehood” can be insidious in the way it expresses itself. You will get snickers and you will hear the whispers of people “confirming your sexuality” just by how you take to the game. One such response I got on X was from a man who told me this story: that as a boy he was aware he was being tested by friends regarding his sexuality when they asked him to name two of his favorite NBA teams. He replied: “Boston and Celtics!” Alas, he didn’t know that those two were one and the same team—and so he invariably outed himself because of that response.
Another person told me that a new male employee at the company he worked in casually asked him to describe himself in terms of positions in a basketball game—whether he was a point guard, or a shooting guard, or whatnot—and he knew that the question was loaded to test him whether he was “man enough” to know what basketball was. When he couldn’t answer, he heard the co-worker later whisper to others: “Bakla nga!”
The same trajectory happened to another man who responded: “I was a senior in high school, there was a party, and my friends wanted to play basketball after dinner, but kulang ng isang player yung isang team. Kinukulit ako ng buong tropa so I had to pretend like I was f*cking asleep just to get them off my back. I heard one whisper: ‘Bakla nga.’”
Another one told of a time he and other gay boys in his high school class were grouped together as one basketball team by their P.E. teacher—and the fact that they actually played a good game did not matter, because they were really teamed together to be the butt of jokes running through the game. The hoots and jeers and laughs they had to contend with at their display of flamboyance and effeminacy while running around a basketball court were humiliating—but they endured. That P.E. teacher was being cruel—but I doubt anyone had the temerity to call him out. He was just being a man of the culture.
Others still remember being told that “sayang yung height mo,” just because they did not want to play. Another respondent recalled that a P.E. teacher coerced him into joining the basketball team because of his height, and then proudly announcing to his mother that he had consequently “saved the boy” from being seen as “gay” by other people.
Others have had opportunities denied them simply because of the basketball they were required to play in school. The journalist Ryan Edward Chua [who is now out] recalled: “I hated basketball so much and the shame and humiliation that came with not being able to play it. Once in grade school P.E., we had to play basketball for our final exam. I refused to join and chose to get a failing mark.”
Why this common disdain by many gay men for the sport? It is not the fear of “balls hitting them,” although many people have suggested that to be the case. In high school, I may have hated basketball but I loved soccer and volleyball. I wasn’t scared of balls coming my way and hitting me. So many other gay men attest to this, so it really is something else about basketball that bothers them—and the only answer I can muster is how coded it is with toxic and performative masculinity. It is that machismo that we reject, not really the game itself. The same machismo that has largely been violent to men like me who could not pass the ephemeral standards of manhood, like the mere liking of basketball.
So yes, basketball is coded as a “masculine” and “heterosexual” sport in our culture. And so is boxing. Volleyball and gymnastics, on the other, are somehow considered feminine sports. So if you were male, and you played these last two sports, you were definitely rendered sexually suspicious. (Remember all that old gossip about Carlos Yulo being gay?) The ridiculousness of these assumptions are titanic.
* * *
Like so many others, when Carlos Yulo won his first gold medal in gymnastics, I felt so much of me moved by an intensity of feelings. I cried when he cried on the sidelines when the final scores were tallied and announced. I could feel the weight of the mountain of expectations set on his shoulders—and the mountain of his personal frustrations as well—somehow melt in his utter disbelief at his win, but also in his eyes somehow a glimmer of vindication of what he could do and set out to do despite all the setbacks. In a sense, at that moment, I projected my own life and frustrations and hopes to his spectacular win, and it felt good to know that somehow we are always capable of overcoming the most monstrous of our challenges when we face it.
Later, when I had time to think more about the impact of Caloy’s win, I found it sufficiently validating that the gold medals we have won so far at the Olympics were won by athletes who defied the stupid gendered preoccupations of sports. Hidilyn Diaz, a woman, won a gold medal in weightlifting—which is taken as a male sport by most of us. And Carlos Yulo, a man, won two gold medals in artistic gymnastics—which is considered a female sport by most of us as well. I love the irony, and it’s a very telling rebuke to our outdated sexual politics. But will Filipinos learn from this realization? I can only hope so.
But the power of seeing Caloy clutching his gold medals is tremendous, and I hope it will have good repercussions in the way we view sports. The power of a winning image cannot be discounted. Many Filipinos saw on television and on the Internet Carlos Yulo powering through those gymnastics moves, and win, and I hope that that is enough for many to change their mindset about what kind of sports is good for them or for their kids, regardless of the gendered way we think about it. (It helps that Caloy is being celebrated now, especially financially. Sometimes that helps. I remember a time when careers were heavily gendered—for example, being a nurse for many decades before in the Philippines was considered only as a career for women. That changed eventually in the 1980s and 1990s when widespread economic difficulties forced many Filipinos to seek greener pastures abroad, and one sure way to do that was to be a nurse. Suddenly we had a flood of men suddenly taking up nursing. And now we don’t even blink twice anymore when we encounter a male nurse. It has become commonplace.)
So Caloy’s win can be a watershed moment in how Filipinos view gender in sports. Children, especially at a certain innocent age, are not usually mindful of the politics of sexuality and gender in everything; they just do what they want to do—although eventually, when they grow older, they do get socially conditioned to think of things in a certain way, with all the biases from adults and from the culture eventually absorbed and ingrained. So if these children will want to pursue certain sports that’s not part of their gender expectations, I hope their parents have become enlightened enough—because of Caloy and Hidilyn—to let them pursue these. And I hope their localities will have the sufficient facilities to meet their athletic needs. The children with dreams will always be there. Let’s hope their parents and their communities can be there for them as well. And let’s hope we will have moved on from gendering sports unnecessarily, and from having more ligas shoved down our throats.
I think there’s an unspoken reason why so many people are side-eyeing basketball these days in the light of Carlos Yulo’s Olympic wins in gymnastics. For the longest time, basketball has really been symbolic of the Filipino macho, celebrated not just for the great sports that it is, but also for showcasing a performative masculinity that many Filipino men ascribe to.
As a child, I remember the grownup men around me drinking beer and thumping their chests [or their potbellies] as they cheered for their favorite basketball teams on TV, and arguing with each other over who was the best player—Robert Jaworski or Alvin Patrimonio? When I went to school, most of my male classmates were all the same. And I remember feeling left out, because basketball did not interest me at all, and I had no interest to play it. So automatically that made me “queer.” Not wanting to play basketball was a silent mark people judged me by.
I actually remember, around the age of 11 or 12, making an effort to like basketball. I began watching the PBA on TV. I decided to have a “favorite” team: Ginebra San Miguel—because the men I knew were rabid fans. I studied the moves of the game, I studied the players. All in the effort to be accepted into this boisterous camaraderie of men I felt ostracized from... But I felt like an impostor. It just was not me. I pretended to be such a basketball “fan” for months and months, until I could not pretend anymore. I remember finally saying to myself, “Who cares if I’m not as manly as these men I know?”
There was also the fact that in high school, being forced to play basketball for P.E. classes was always a humiliating torture. I just could not dribble, I just could not shoot baskets. I felt so self-conscious whenever I had to play this darned game just for the grade. And then to hear your classmates tittering around the court about you because how was I a “man” in a basketball-crazy country and not know how to play basketball? Baling bayota uy, klaro kaayo, they’d laugh.
And this is why I hated basketball when I was a kid. I don’t hate it as much anymore as a grownup, but I do know that basketball as a social phenomenon in the Philippines has long been weaponized in a quiet gender warfare that marked so many boys and men as “unfit” or “unmanly,” just because basketball was not something we loved.
Which is why when I first saw the Brgy. Lo-oc gays the other year do “gay basketball,” playing a good game while donning tutus and other queer-affirming costumes, I felt so much joy. It felt like a corrective. It took away the thorn of machismo associated with the game, and for the first time in my life I actually enjoyed the sport.
I am reboxing what constitutes my literary archive [publications in magazines, manuscripts, etc.] because the rain got to my old box — which miraculously held because I had the foresight to store everything in a strong archival box. Had to replace it though because of surface water damage. It occurred to me that younger writers don’t have the privilege anymore of having their stories, poems, essays, etc. published in actual magazines. [Except luckily for Graphic Reader!] My generation might be the last to have this privilege.
1:05 PM |
I Remember the Ugliness of the Old Dumaguete Presidencia
