J. Neil C. Garcia

The only reason I can perfectly identify with the “garden variety” gay stereotype is that there is an undeniable sameness between us: we both are homosexuals. I am different in this difference, then, but it doesn’t quite matter because I am just as oppressed for it.

As I discuss the dominant pattern of male homosexuality as a psychosexual inversion (a view that takes homosexual males to be psychologically “inverted” females), for example, I will have to come face-to-face with a model of local subjectivity which is the Tagalog-Filipino binarized self: loob/labas (literally: “inside/

outside”).

This query led me to inquire into just who the gays were who comprised my generation, and it serendipitously dawned on me that a kind of “conflict” exists among the ranks of urban-dwelling gays in the Philippines, who are really a variegated, noisy, and helplessly provisional

“conglomeration” of people, whose inability to liberate themselves from homophobic oppression is not only because they have internalized it, but also because real forces in their lives, almost indistinguishable from who they think they are, make such alliances and “allo-identifications” difficult if not virtually impossible.

This study will unabashedly begin from the assumption that it is virtually impossible to adequately represent an abject political position without occupying this position in the first place.

In other words, one of the founding premises of this work is the conviction that a history of Filipino gays will not only be politically incorrect, but also profoundly inaccurate and distorted, to the degree that it is told from the point of view of somebody who is not gay.

It should, however, be added that such insistence on “authenticity” and

“subject-positionality,” though admittedly smacking of academic correctness, means only to address the ostensibly political absence of gay scholars in the veritable field of research in which they should logically be found.

For the purposes of this introduction, the word “gay” may be regarded as the signifier for the collective identity of genitally male individuals whose love objects are other “genital males.” It is really more than just a synonym for

“male homosexual,” however, as it is simultaneously a given and an imagined category of being and becoming, which signifies a certain teleology of identity that eventuates in its liberation from the shackles of homophobia.

As we know, homophobia is the socially endorsed, prejudiced hatred and persecution of gays and lesbians (homosexual women), because of their same-sexual orientation.

Homophobia may be institutional or personal: the first is borne out by the hypocritical and untenable belief that sexual behavior should always be yoked onto procreation, which in turn assures the existence of the conjugal family; the second is largely the product of ignorance of and noncontact with “avowed homosexuals.”1 Obviously, the institutional fear of “purely pleasurable” or

“unprocreative” sexuality privileges heterosexual unions at the same time that it reduces the bodies of women to their reproductive capacity; thus homophobia

In other words, just because gays have been able to textualize themselves, it does not necessarily mean such textualizations are ultimately “good” for them. The theoretical concern over the violent dynamics of subversion and containment has been expressed by various oppositional intellectuals all over the world, and the implications of this so-called

“containment theory” are intriguingly relevant to this project, too; hence, they can only deserve some discussion of their own.