| Writing from the margins, in the first instance, is a subversive act. The realm of storytelling is a battleground in itself. As such, crafting narratives of and from sites of resistance is almost always an act of courage.
Genuine resistance, however, is neither futile nor sporadic. For it to be truly an emancipatory discourse, it must posit alternatives. Ultimately, it must persist.
Such, perhaps, summarizes the prospects for and limits of Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. Indeed, there were considerable gains when the first book was released in 1994. While questions were raised against its highly cosmopolitan setting and its bourgeois values, or against its limited representation of the Filipino gay, the anthology very well poses a challenge to what Antony Easthope describes as the universalizing tendency of the “masculine myth.”
Over a decade after, with the third volume released just last year, an interrogation of the kind of resistance put forward by Ladlad would now seem imperative. “Coming out,” after all, is at best liberating of the individual self. Ladlad, then, would have to situate itself in the collective struggle of the people for liberation.
The closet caves in
What sets Ladlad 3 apart from the two previous collections is that the title has taken upon itself a sense that is too big for it to handle. Ladlad is paglaladlad ng kapa, or unfurling one’s cape, which in gay parlance is a declaration of one’s repressed sexuality even when such entails a certain condemnation especially in a patriarchal class society like the Philippines’.
The recent disqualification of “political party” Ang Ladlad from participating in the party-list elections has become the book’s central issue. In his note to the compilation, English professor Danton Remoto, one of the its editors and the chair of the said lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT) group, declares that the “Pink Vote has arrived” and is now a “force to reckon with.”
One wonders, however, if there is indeed such a thing as a “Pink Vote.” The term, apart from audaciously supposing that LGBTs would automatically elect Ang Ladlad, fails to realize that a vast majority of the country’s over 4 million LGBT population is hounded not solely and primarily by issues of gender, but of poverty, unemployment, and ultimately, class oppression.
It is, of course, a noble attempt to bring the LGBT movement for emancipation to the legislative arena. History, however, would point to the limitations of parliamentary struggle, and that it will ultimately be the collective action of the oppressed sectors which will uplift them from their dire conditions.
Writing from the out side
For an anthology that claims to be a “collective effort by and for Filipinos” to “educate and enrich” the nationalist project, the issue on representation will inevitably be brought to fore. Literature professor J. Neil Garcia, also the book’s editor, points in his introduction to the compilation to literary excellence and “representativeness” as the two editorial policies that guided their selection. While the former is a question on the personal taste and preferences of the editor, Garcia admits that the latter is the more contestable issue. And that while Ladlad does not claim to represent the multitude of Filipino gays, Garcia nevertheless believes it is “representative enough.”
Writer and professor Rommel Rodriguez, himself a contributor to the third Ladlad, criticized in an earlier essay the two previous anthologies for their cosmopolitanism and undue focus on the experiences and interests of middle-class gays. But writing, according to Garcia, is “class-specific” and “a matter of privilege.” Which is precisely the reason why writers will finally have to decide which particular class to privilege in their discourse: if they will draw on the subversive potential of literature, or remain as appendages of statist thought.
Honorio Bartolome de Dios’s Gyera, for example, tells the story of a gay beautician killed by the military for assisting a New People’s Army member in his escape. The character is thus shown to have undergone some sort of political enlightenment, a willingness to take up arms; only, it remains unclear if such is merely a product of his fascination for the studly guerilla.
Boy Scouting by Michael Francis Andrada, meanwhile, is at best a graphic, almost violent assertion of the gay persona’s sexual explorations, especially in the face of various forms of violence against homosexuals, both symbolic and literal.
Condemnation of a patriarchal social order that has long pushed gays into the margins is also the subject of a number of poems, incuding Rodriguez’s Sanib, Christopher Cahilig’s Sa Iyong Kaarawan, Itay, and Roel Manipon’s Irreconcilable Differences. Raymund Garlito’s Kuwadernong Rosas and Alex Gregorio’s Alice and the Small Door, moreover, talk about the proverbial act of coming out.
Engendering resistance
Still, there are pieces whose images of gayness only reinforce gay stereotypes: the colorful butterfly and flamboyant parrot in Ian Casocot’s gay children’s story The Different Rabbit, the strange, almost crazy Zor in Andrew Drilon’s Happening, the vengeful and suicidal drag queen in Garcia’s Kitty and Vergil, and an Australian lawyer with a fetish for dirty underwear in Xerxes Matza’s The Collector.
As is the most apparent problem in the two previous collections, a number of poems in Ladlad 3 are mere yearnings for a love lost, or else are hopeless musings on how the state and its various patriarchal agencies spawn vicious modes of gender-based oppression. Gays, as always, are at the losing end.
In the final analysis, while narratives of gay liberation are always a welcome addition to the growing corpus of emergent literature in the country, the struggle for emancipation must never stop at mere celebrations of small victories.
True, Ladlad as an anthology has been able to negotiate a critical space in the creation of a relevant discourse through literary production. Still, stereotypes beg to be shattered, and the twin oppression of patriarchy and capitalism impeding gay liberation necessitates our fullest exposition and condemnation.
And if Ladlad were to figure more significantly in the lives of the oppressed majority, the people behind it must realize that no gay liberation will ever materialize if 70 percent of the masses remain fettered by chains of poverty and landlessness.
For the closet may be dark, but the outside world is darker.# Philippine Collegian
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