Philippine Gay Culture: The Last 30 Years: Binabae to bakla, Silahis to MSM

Philippine Gay Culture: The Last 30 Years, is a two-part study that attempts to inaugurate an academic clearing in which issues of (male) homosexuality may be raised. Part One undertakes a perceptive investigation into the earliest incidences, varieties, developments, complexities and problems of the discourse of sexual orientation in the Philippines. By looking into sources written in the Spanish era, as well as a number of other texts that treat the question of sexuality in the past three decades, this book seeks to answer the question of why no liberation movement has been forthcoming from the various gay-identified sectors in the country. This interest leads the book into an examination of the conceptual history of local gay culture, and of the lack of fit between the different - and inevitably, conflicting - understandings of homosexuality and effeminacy, as these have been lived out by Filipinos in the metropolitan centers of the Philippines in the last 30 years. In the second part of this book, the author subjects three texts - written by Severino Montano, Orlando Nadres, and Tony Perez - to an autobiographical reading whose aim is to resituate their sexual politics at the center of the hermeneutic project. In doing so, the book argues for the desirability - and the necessity - of a gay literary criticism that will not only gloss over the question of self-representation and sexuality, and that will move away from the New Critical procedure that depersonalizes the text and all supposedly good-natured readings of it.