The Haunting of Gay Manila: Global Space-Time and the Specter of Kabaklaan

Time is out of joint." This line from Hamlet, quoted repeatedly by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, reminds us of the instability of the present and its openness to ghosts or those figures that can "disembark from the past and appear in a time in which they clearly do not belong."¹ This interruptive character of specters has been taken up enthusiastically in some literary circles, with Derrida's term "hauntology" providing a means to speak of that elusive space between presence and absence, life and death, "the non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present."² Specters have also been deployed in the study of nationalisms and, by extension, globalization processes; little, however, has been said about how specters disturb the everyday practices of globalization and the often hyperbolically imagined states of being-present, instantaneity, simultaneity, or "real" time.³ This article draws on this disruptive character of specters to investigate the conceptions of nowness and newness that underpin the production of Manila's post-2000 "bright lights" gay scene and to provide a critical glimpse at the anxieties of some of its primary inhabitants, namely, the young, urban, middle- and upper-class Filipinos (among whose numbers I am guiltily counted) who, I argue, are marked by a longing for and a precarious sense of belonging in an imagined gay globality.⁴

The article reads this slice of life in the "homeland" alongside the experiences of the Filipino gay diaspora, in part through Martin Manalansan's ethnographic work on gay Filipinos in New York.⁵ By making comparisons across space and time, my aim is to foreground the role of location and emplaced class/gender/ racial hierarchies in conditioning notions of global space-time and the effects of such notions on how subjects inhabit the borders between global/local forms of sexual identification. I argue that the scene's discursive attempts to reemplot Manila within a putatively "foreign" narrative of gay modernity (re)produce and are produced through a fraught relationship with preexisting representations of homosexuality, particularly with the image of the bakla, a highly contested term that is sometimes read as a synonym for gay but is more accurately, though no less problematically, depicted as a sexual tradition that conflates homosexuality, transvestism or effeminacy, and lower-class status, and which is embodied by the caricatured figure of the parlorista, the cross-dresser working in one of Manila's many low-end beauty salons. I explain kabaklaan (being-bakla, bakla-ness) and the politics inscribed in it more thoroughly below; suffice it to say here that the unsettled arrival of Manila's gay scene in the present of gay globality can be read as an event predicated on the abjection of the bakla and on the wishful relocation of its image to a different space-time, to an elsewhere and an elsewhen.

By underscoring this relocation, I do not mean to argue that kabaklaan is in fact disappearing; what I hope to show is that it is "being dis-appeared" through strategies of invisibilization and discipline authorized by the local market, which participates in setting the contours of gay identity and its cultural visibility.⁶ Such strategies stand in sharp relief when set against the recuperative model adopted by Manalansan's diasporic informants, who are largely unseen by the U.S. gay market and who recover kabaklaan to negotiate the violences that accompany their dislocation. This contrast, fleshed out in the succeeding section, is neither straightforward nor absolute. In the same way that the recuperations engaged in by subjects in the diaspora are always in progress, the strategies of erasure I discuss are part of a never-to-be-completed task, since the dream of burying kabaklaan is belied by its ability to make its presence felt, either through the practices of others or through the anxieties of the scene's privileged inhabitants. Indeed, kabaklaan continues to permeate the city materially and psychically; it is lodged in cultural memory and as such is inextricably tied to the production of "modern" gay subjectivities, not as contemporary but as Derrida's...