Portrait of the bakla as fearless

Let me begin with what needs to be said before this review unfolds. One, I’m a fag hag, and once long ago was asked: “Kailan ka nag-umpisa maging bakla?" and had no answer but a bongga shoulder shrug. Two, I grew up with Mama’s gay friends, and they were and are the most intelligent people I know, brilliant intellectuals who will not walk the circles of the academe or the literati because they are obviously smarter than that, but who will be generous with time and conversation for little ol’ me. Three, I keep a very tight circle of friends, some of whom are gay men, though a lesbian couple have become the kindest and most understanding of my friendships. Four, I studied gay literature, read it periodically, and I think Ladlad I, Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing (1994, Anvil Publishing) by Danton Remoto and Neil Garcia remains one of the more powerful publications in Philippine literary history, for many reasons other than just that it’s a paglaladlad.

These informed my gut reaction to the book God Loves Bakla (2010, Central Books) by Raymond Alikpala. For one thing, I could not for the life of me get over the book’s title, half the time thinking it a strange turn of phrase, using bakla as if it were Juan or Juana, him or her, in that title; the other half thinking it nothing but an effort to shock people. The latter would mean it’s a step back in the development of local gay writing, to the early years when everything was about shock and awe and noise, literally wearing fuchsia, screaming “I am gay, deal with it!" in various voices. Luckily, I am the kind of person who will read any book, watch any movie, see every exhibit, before knocking it. And when I speak of luck here, I don’t mean it’s lucky for God Loves Bakla or for Alikpala. I mean lucky for me. Because soon after I began the first chapter of the book, I realized that this was the perfect book to knock our socks off and make us see what is lacking in our recent literature, gay and otherwise: daring. And when I say Alikpala dares, I mean that he names names and points a finger at people and places, a rarity really, even with the rise of creative non-fiction, the testimonial and the memoir as valid literary forms on our shores. Here, where we tiptoe around mentioning institutions for fear that we’ll lose possible jobs, here where naming names is taken to mean that you’re burning bridges, or just walang utang na loob, a book such as God Loves Bakla can only be infinitely powerful as a judgment on us who can’t do what it does. Because we might mention places, but it’s to romanticize them; we will mention people, but it’s to pay tribute to them always. Meanwhile in the individual narratives that make up this memoir of coming out as a gay man, Alikpala speaks of places and people from the perspective of critical assessment, without fear, with nothing to lose. Because the point becomes obvious soon enough, God Loves Bakla isn’t about winning us over; it’s about winning the battle. The battle of every Filipino gay man in the face of conservative middle-class Philippines, the bastion of which resides in our nuclear families, which Alikpala mentions in his afterword as the driving force behind the book, even when or maybe precisely because they said no to its publication. That’s cliché enough in third world Pinas, where family is reason not to write about our lives, not to write about the more important truths we live with. In God Loves Bakla, this family is crucial to the process of Alikpala’s becoming, as education in the Ateneo de Manila University was, as entry into the Jesuit Seminary was, as the law profession was. These spaces were named, as were teachers and bosses and mentors, with many names too too familiar. As I went from chapter to chapter, it was clear that God Loves Bakla isn’t just a narrative about Alikpala’s life in the closet and his search for identity; it’s also the story of these spaces and how it could be redefined for us by a gay voice. This is to say that this is also the story of Ateneo as an exclusive school for boys that creates a space for, at the same time that it disallows, homosexuality. Of college life in the throes of historical change that was Martial Law and the challenges that this imposed on the individual. Of the Jesuit Seminary as a space of God and restriction but also of love and freedom. Of law school and the law profession as a safe haven for financial stability that would make any person feel like a man. Except of course for someone like Alikpala, who went through these spaces and always only thought that it was not enough, that this wasn’t what defined him. He always had God in the midst of the uncertainty, but this wasn’t a source of quiet as it was reason for an even bigger crisis: how can I be gay, and love God? The answer of course is that it need not be a contradiction. And so in this book, the struggle for identity is tied not just to homosexuality but to historical circumstance and religion – at least the version(s) of it practiced in real terms in Manila. This bigger world is the context of one gay man’s struggle for self-knowledge and affirmation, and his slow process of coming out. And when he finally exits the closet elsewhere in the world, among strangers, within a culture not ours, it’s almost a statement in itself on our limits as a nation. And as a people who, for all intents and purposes, will always sell ourselves as friendly and hospitable and open. Except that we are told in the story of Alikpala that this isn’t true, that his was a time and a place when homosexuality in this country wasn’t acceptable, and no amount of personal achievement could remove the uncertainty: he was not normal, which is really to say that he wasn’t us. With every chapter of God Loves Bakla, a literal space and moment and place in Alikpala’s life comes alive. Every chapter Alikpala ends with the feeling of incompleteness, of not quite being happy. And this is ultimately what you glean from this book, a search for happiness more than anything else, one that can only be familiar for anyone who struggles with contradictions, whose search for identity is lived and complex, whose notion(s) of self are tied to family and nation and all the other contradictions and conservatisms these imply. In the end, when Alikpala says God Loves Bakla, it’s because in truth the homosexual struggle within this book’s pages creates, in no certain terms, a concrete valid label that corresponds with a real person who is alive. Who lives. But in truth, bakla, more than living, Alikpala has struggled, sought God, seen identity, and ultimately survived. Cue Gloria Gaynor. - GMANews.TV