Notorious Kin: Filipino America Re-imagines Andrew Cunanan

Dear Regie,

I am geared towards calamity, fragile as baby teeth. Shards every hour of a failure to cope with every day. So much wine, I feel like I'm flying to Europe and I hate airplanes. . . .Versace was sucking bacon when he saw me. He tried to smoke his way out of a cordial conversation but I followed him like Magellan. He stretched and his head split, bullets the size of M&Ms tumbled toward him, dried icing thrown at a bride's face. His lids burst. The marble stairs hemorrhaged, sliced open to a purple sky, the salt a mile away. I became witness to his headline. I made that headline.

—Love Letter from Andrew Cunanan, Regie Cabico¹

We Filipinos always knew that Andrew Cunanan—with his telltale last name—was one of us. Despite the first news reports in the summer of 1997 of a racially unidentifiable suspect responsible for a series of gruesome murders, Cunanan fit our profile of one type of Filipino with his aspiring passions, charm, considerable intelligence, and calculating rage. Some of us felt an affinity on a certain level with Cunanan's background story. The mixed-race son of an immigrant Filipino and ex-Marine father and an Italian American mother, Cunanan grew up as an outsider to the enclaves of San Diego, California. A social chameleon who re-invented himself in situations where he was regarded as queer or foreign, Cunanan's name and image reminded us of friends, relatives, or former lovers. In some circles, we joked about being mistaken for him. For all of us, Andrew Cunanan remains a notorious symbol of the deadly consequences of crossing the lines of racial, sexual, and class boundaries that America creates.

Although we mourned the loss of the five victims he murdered, we still pause to consider Cunanan as more than just a headline. On a smaller and less violent scale, we could relate to what we imagine to have been his experience of being outside a group yet wanting to belong. We honed in on Cunanan's earlier actions as part of the processes of adaptation necessary for survival, although the news rendered his behavior as erratic and strange. His violent actions were excessive forms of the intricate and improvised steps we who are outside the norm perform daily in this cultural cha-cha with America—maintaining our own rhythm while adjusting to others, making sure not to step on too many toes, and feeling the need to add an extra swing in the hips for accent and flair. Beyond the multiple registers of affiliation we felt toward, and with, Cunanan during those three months of his killing spree, however, the media's mug shots and headlines of the "homicidal homosexual" reiterated the brown and queer as deviant and the white, heterosexual male subject as a powerful norm.²

In a counter-intuitive move, some of us clung onto Cunanan the chameleon precisely because of his potential to be simultaneously what Philippine literary scholar Oscar Campomanes has formulated as "everywhere and nowhere." ³ The inability to be recognized physically and culturally is a condition that many Filipinos share. We cover a broad spectrum with faces and features that evidence a history of lineal convergences—Malay, Chinese, Spanish, German, Japanese, Indian, Mexican, African American and indigenous, to name a few. Beyond just phenotype, Filipino cultural forms also evidence this polycultural history, from our language to cuisine, theatre, dance, and music.⁴ According to debates within Filipino America, this heterogeneous feature of Filipino-ness is both detrimental and critical. It is detrimental in that a lack of so-called positive images of Filipinos in American culture, coupled with a penchant to pass for other ethnicities (Latino, Asian, black or white), is what some fear causes our lack of political and social power in the U.S. and abroad. And, it is critical in that our ambiguous looks and multi-cultural history call into question notions of racial and cultural purity (and authenticity). Thus, by passing and being marked as white, Cunanan, the headline news...