Taiwan's gays have had some bad press in recent weeks, with an over-publicized raid, a club closure and a deportation. So it's perhaps appropriate to look at a book that surveys a community of gay men who exhibit the qualities of resilience, determination and even panache. Global Divas, a study of Filipino gay men in New York City, is just such a book.
Filipinos are among the world's most energetic and high-profile emigrants and migrant workers. In the US they form the second biggest Asian-American group after the Chinese, with 1.9 million residents. They are the most numerous employees of the UN after American citizens and career diplomats. Moreover, they're seen as good-humored and possessing a fun-loving exuberance, at least in the popular imagination.
These qualities, together with other attributes, are considered and assessed with admirable caution and wit in this accessible, though formally academic, book. Martin Manalansan undertook his survey for a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the 1990s. Now it's published, appropriately updated to 2001, in book form.
Manalansan states his general position early on. These men, he believes, are neither heroes of a struggle for liberation nor victims of oppression. Instead, they are people formed through a struggle to adapt, and who "oscillate between exuberance and pathos, and between survival and loss."
He begins by looking at the characteristic argot of urban gay Filipinos known as "swardspeak," a "vagabond tongue," he says, that's characterized by a desire to simultaneously hold on to a foreign identity and adapt to a cosmopolitan modernity. It contains words such as "bakla," Tagalog for gay, and "drama," as in the phrase "What is your drama?" This could equally well mean "What is your job?" or "What is your situation?" or "What are your problems?" Then there is "biyuti," meaning anything from actual beauty to one's physical self or state of mind. "My biyuti was ruined!" for example, might mean in the appropriate context "He spoilt my day!"
One interesting aspect of the use of swardspeak is that it flourishes both in situations where a gay identity can't easily be displayed, such as back in the Philippines, and in situations, such as in the US, where some migrants live without the appropriate immigration papers, Both situations, in other words, have something in common and both lead to a speech style that has in it elements of dissimulation, albeit elements of wit and humor as well.
The author points out that Filipinos in general have been subjected to a range of patronizing descriptions and he's not averse to parading these, even though he clearly doesn't approve of them, let alone agree with them.
One of the best known of his sources here is Pico Iyer's 1988 travel book Video Nights in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not So Far East. There the Filipinos are characterized as prime victims of a pseudo-Americanization. Virtuoso performers in American musical and performance styles, they have been culturally colonized so that they're left with the dubious heritage of disco, rock and roll, and the beauty pageant. As a result, Manalansan writes, the gay Filipino migrant arriving in New York embarks not so much on a beginner's course in Americanization as on the continuation of an already ongoing engagement with the world's most powerful state.
He then progresses to the perception of Asians in general, and Filipinos in particular, in a specifically gay sexual context. This is treacherous territory indeed. It contains many racist suppositions, manifestly untrue of the vast majority of individuals, but nonetheless widespread among the many Westerners who believe that masculinity consists of being a metaphorical killer in bed, and as often as not an actual one elsewhere.
The Catholic undertow to much Filipino gay life is also discussed. One important example the author gives is that of the traditional Santacruzan pageant. He witnessed a gay version of this normally religious event -- which celebrates the discovery of the True Cross by the Roman Emperor Constantine's mother Helena -- staged in New York in 1992.
Everything was transposed from the sacred to the sexualized, he relates, until the very last stage of the ceremony when suddenly the ritual figures of Helena (Reyna Elena) and the Empress (Emperatriz) appeared exactly as they would have in the Philippines, complete with garlands of flowers and an antique crucifix. The gay world was suddenly replaced by Catholicism and laughter at a profane parody by a wave of religious nostalgia.
New York is typically seen by these Filipinos as being "American" both in the sense that everything is bigger, more plentiful and wider ranging, and also in the sense of being defined by products that can be bought and consumed. "Gay life in New York was like a big vending machine," as one of the interviewees put it.
While he was conducting these interviews the author was also working for two agencies helping AIDS patients. It wasn't easy to keep emotion out of either work, he says. He was so moved by one man, soon to die, that he didn't feel he could include his case in this book. The patient insisted that he did. At least that way he could finally become a celebrity, he said.
Humor is pervasive, though not entirely confined to Filipinos. "We've had 300 years in the convent and 30 years of Hollywood," one laconic observer says of his country's history. And the author tells the story of being accosted with a friend, who was in fact Latino, outside a gay bar by a drunk with the words "I have never seen two Oriental homos before." The Latino friend preserved his cool and, quick as a flash, replied politely, "Excuse me, but we prefer the word
`ornamental.'"
There's a lot of academic material in Global Divas -- cross-references, engagement with post-colonial theory and the like. But more than half the book consists of discussion of the experience of Manalansan's 58 interviewees, and there's plenty there to interest the general reader, especially one alert to the style of one of Asia's most flamboyant peoples.
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