AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities

10. Bading na Bading: Evolving Identities in Philippine Cinema

TEN BADING NA BADING Evolving Identities in Philippine Cinema Ronald Baytan Homosexualizing the Bakla The homosexual occupies a paradoxical position in Philippine cinema. On the one hand, he is everywhere—as a beautician, dancer, talent manager, guest relations officer, couturier, artist, teacher, dancer. On the other hand, his life in all its lived complexity is perpetually absent in the national cinema because of the Filipino hetero-patriarchal culture’s fear of seeing two men expressing affection for each other. This study focuses on representations of bakla, the dominant Filipino male homosexual identity, in Philippine cinema. Simply put, bakla denotes a man who is effeminate and woman-hearted, who may cross-dress, and who desires a masculine man, the lalake. Through the years, the bakla has refashioned his identity by variously naming himself as bading (a phonologically more sonorous euphemism for bakla), sward, atcheng, and gay. The bakla, the ontological other of the privileged macho lalake (male), is the most visible homosexual figure in Philippine mass media. But who is the bakla? Frederick Whitam notes two important things associated with the Filipino bakla: effeminacy and transvestism.1 Martin Manalansan makes the same observation: “while the bakla conflates the categories of effeminacy, transvestism, and homosexuality and can mean one or all of these different 182 . RON A LD BAY TA N contexts, the main focus of the term is that of effeminate mannerism, feminine physical characteristics . . . and cross-dressing.”2 Michael L. Tan adds this view: “The term bakla, while used loosely now to refer to homosexuals, was most probably used to refer to gender, rather than sexual orientation, with an emphasis on effeminacy.”3 Tan sheds light upon one major difference between the two entities: the bakla being a gender term and homosexual a term for sexual orientation. But the distinction is not as simple as the quote may suggest. As a former colony of the United States of America, the Philippines has experienced what Neil Garcia calls “the perverse implantation, Philippine version.”4 While bakla may have originally been a gender term, it has been homosexualized with the coming of Western (read: American) psychiatric and biomedical discourses in the twentieth century. The bakla has gone through resignifications in light of Western psychiatric discourse and has acquired the medical connotations of the term homosexual. The bakla’s identity was further complicated by the entry of Western ideas of “gay” into the country from the late 1960s onwards. The bakla’s appropriation and localization of gayness is one of the most visible proofs of the implantation of Western homo/sexual discourse in the Philippines. What is interesting about the phenomenon of gayness in the country is that both bakla and “gay” have been irrevocably transformed because of this meeting/ mating. First, local bakla have embraced the term “gay” as an equivalent of bakla to refer to themselves. Tan writes, “The terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘gay’ are now used in many Philippine languages, usually as synonyms for bakla.”5 It is quite common to find articles on homosexuality to contain all three words used interchangeably. Second, “gay” has also come to signify homosexual identities other than the bakla, particularly the Westernized masculine-acting and non-transvestic ones who previously had no place and no name in the traditional local gender mapping. The bakla has become a hybrid. While formerly denoting an effeminate, transvestic homosexual identity, in the last twenty years bakla has become more complicated than ever: (1) there are now masculine men who call themselves bakla (and gay, too), and (2) there are now self-identified bakla who seek other bakla as partners when historically the bakla’s sex-object choice was the lalake, the masculine heterosexual man. Further complications arise because, as Romeo Lee shows, there are also gay men who self-identify as homosexual but are in heterosexual relationships.6 The bakla/gay distinction also reflects divisions across class lines. Tan notes that “many middle-class Filipino men may identify as ‘gay’ but not as bakla because the latter are seen as low-income, effeminate males.”7 E VOLV I NG I DE NTITI ES I N PHI LI PPI N E CI NE M A . 183 Philippine Cinema and Gayness In 1971, Lino Brocka—one of the Philippines’ National Artists for Film— made a name for himself with Tubog sa Ginto (Goldplated),8 the story of a married and closeted homosexual named Don Benito who has an affair...