Tony Perez’s Cubao 1980: The First Shout of Gay Liberation in the Philippines
by There are few places in Asia and the Pacific where homosexuality is visible and accepted as in the Philippines where gay literature successfully emerged.
Although poems and stories were written and published in magazines and newspapers by and for gays in the 1980’s, it was not until the 1990s when books with gay related titles were published. Danton Remoto and Jose Neil Garcia, noted academicians and newspaper columnists, have emerged as two of the most outstanding gay poets and essayists in the country today. Remoto’s Skin, Voices, and Faces appeared in 1991 and Garcia’s Closet Quivers was published in 1992.
Nicolas Pichay’s Ang Lunes na Mahirap Bunuin and Margarita Go-Singco Holmes’s A Different Love: Being Gay in the Philippines were published in 1993 and was followed by Ladlad: An Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing, edited by Garcia and Remoto in two volumes, in 1994 and 1996. In addition Remoto published Seduction and Solitude, his collection of essays in 1995, Black Silk and Pajamas: Poems in English and Filipino in 1996, and X-Factor: Tales Outside the Closet in 1997, while Garcia published Our Lady of the Carnival: Poems in English and Philippine Gay Culture: The Last Thirty Years in 1996, Closet Queries in 1997, and Slip/Pages: Essays in Philippine Gay Criticism in 1998.
But while all of these gay writings “celebrate the virtues of being effeminate” as Dr Jose Neil C Garcia puts it, Cubao 1980: Ang Unang Sigaw ng Gay Liberation sa Pilipinas by Tony Perez did not. His characters, Butch and Tom along his brother, abominates male homosexuals, and Butch even shouted atop the Araneta Coliseum: “Puking ina n’yo-mga bakla kayo,” which is utterly similar when Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe called homosexuals as “worse than dogs and pigs” because of their “unnatural perversion.”
Historically, the Stonewall Inn Riots were the beginning and the defining moments of the gay liberation movement. Although Mattachine existed in the 1950s and the 1960s, it was on June 27, 1969 when the Stonewall Inn Riots and the Gay Liberation Front happened because of the enormous social vitality-the hippies, yippies, drug culture, youth culture, rock and roll, civil rights movement, second wave of feminism, and the Black Propaganda movement. The term “gay power” was a re-visioning of “black power,” and the term “gay liberation” was a tribute to the existing “women’s liberation.”
In his article Gay Liberation: Back to the Future, Michael Bronski said that “If we are going to read, write, and review realistic fiction, one of the criteria to judge it is how realistic it is representing the cultural presence of race and ethnicity.” In Cubao 1980: Ang Unang Sigaw ng Gay Liberation sa Pilipinas, Perez failed to include cultural presence of male homosexuals who “bespeaks a kind of warm-heartedness” – kind, caring, and loving individuals. In addition, Perez failed to show realistic representation of his subject because what he wrote is not an account of his personal experience as homosexuals unlike the first women writers who wrote about their struggles for gender equality.
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