Closet Queeries

The thought of how readily Filipinos are able to accommodate a cultural form from the West without the slightest bit of awareness and appreciation of that form’s original ideological content, can give one so much pause.

But to repeat what I have always been caught saying, engaging in homosexual sex is one thing, being a homosexual is another.

Needless to say, prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, the precolonial inhabitants of our islands enjoyed a kind of sexual innocence that only later on became corrupted when the colonial Church introduced the discourse of sodomy

Until early in this century, in fact, bakla wasn’t so much a noun as a verb: one was nababakla if he or she was not sure of his or her decisions, or if one was suddenly afraid of or confounded by the unexpected turn of events.

we have to admit that talking about sex is simply another way of “producing” more and more of it. Because Filipinos have not to a great extent been selfconsiously sexual (that is to say, sexually selfconsious) as a people, their libidinal pleasures have not been as prolific and explosive as their Western counterparts.

bakla—in other words, the career this word has enjoyed in Philippine social history—would seem to indicate that, until recently, it didn’t even connote an identity that is distinguished by its sexuality, but merely a quality of emotional wavering or uncertainty, something that anyone unlucky enough can have at any point in his or her life.

This “negotiability” between act and personhood has been one of the most outstanding features of Filipino psychology.

And yet, queerness is at the same time, not about sexuality or gender at all: while historically “queer” has been used as a term of abuse for gays and lesbians, it is, strictly speaking, an adjective that denotes strangeness of any sort.

to be queer is not necessarily to be un-straight, for even straights are considered queer if they violate the conventional form of sexual relations

I have nothing to say about that, except perhaps this: that a man can fall in love with a woman does not necessarily foreclose the possibility that he can fall in love with a man as well. (For the two kinds of love can and indeed do cohabit in many of us, after all).