Most funding agencies thought our interest had nothing to do with feminist politics. At worst they think we are people from the urinals and bug-infested moviehouses; at best they thought our project was bourgeois and that we were bohemians having a good lay all the time – didn’t we wish!
Reading my Bisaya pieces and the few lesbian poems I had written to college students in Davao, friends in the Writers Guild, who seemed to equally enjoy them as much as the students, call them “scatological”. It makes me uncomfortable. At the same time, I get the sense that though I find nothing obscene in what I write, homosexuality is still perceived as perverted sexuality. And that sex is still viewed as obscene. Therefore, if I wrote something about sex or lesbian sexuality, and read it, too, I said a dirty joke. That’s why the students and the men in tow were laughing. Good thing is, the girls seemed to enjoy the jokes more than the boys, if jokes they were.
Early in my writing days, I remember my dismay upon discovering that a piece I sent as fiction to a weekly magazine was not printed in the short story pages – because it did not comply with the prescribed number of pages – but was printed as essay, as a literary piece, which it was, but I recall my fear of people thinking what I wrote was confessional and not fictional. That brought me to my first brush with What makes for legit writing?
What I wrote in that piece was cute as cute could go, believe me, but real life did bite in the form of a censure by relay from a PO (political officer, I was then a volunteer human rights worker churning out anti-Cory and anti-status quo propaganda) saying how could I publicize something as scandalous as that (about making love with just a few chairs or a bench, and no moon hanging under the ceiling). At the time the feminists hadn’t deployed the concept of the personal being political yet – or not as stridently as we did later – and people hardly talked and wrote about how we get beaten by our spouses and partners inside or outside the struggle, how much more of how we make love, so it kind of shamed me – the censure and the kind of writing that I did then –.
Comfort came in the form of a mentor-friend who happened to be highly literate not just in Marxism but other texts as well. She told me not to overreact because she didn’t even see sex in that piece, and I guess there wasn’t, just the mention of it, though ever the paranoid that I am, I did wonder if she said that not so much to allay my fears as to drive home the point that I did not matter and that that piece did not deserve the attention I was trying to summon to it.
Then about a decade after, I tried sending a “similar” piece to a progressive publication asking for literary contributions. I sent it not so much in the hope of getting it published as finding how people trained in an era of the personal-is-political and adequate funding for training men in feminism would respond. I used another name, because one or two of them must know me by my byline for having contributed another story which they wanted to publish. Well, I did get the expected reply of Sorry, we cannot publish the kind of article you sent in, but for the hello-have-nice-day-tone to it. You would think I was not taking their organization and noble causes seriously that I should send in to them something like that. Anyway, the point is, these were people who thought of themselves as progressives, as activists educated in basic feminist theory, and these were also highly literate people: the same people, I reckoned, who know themselves as the intelligentsia and must have enjoyed The Vagina Monologues and, maybe, perdoname for the unfair comparison, Eve Ensler, Henry Miller’s Tropics of Cancer. The reply came from a male editor. Had it come from one of the female editors, I would have not been any less surprised. I remember how, when the Kris Aquino and Joey Marquez STD non-event got publicized, this progressive paper’s feminist ed complained of how sensational media give undue coverage to people who like to launder their dirty linen in public when there are more pressing issues facing the day. This, even as Gabriela was ardently hailing and claiming the ex-President’s daughter’s brave front for telling on her boyfriend. The one comment on the Kris-Joey event that made me happy, ironically, came from gay critic-friend Douglas who pointed out how Kris betrayed her class by publicizing what also happens in the bedrooms of the upper crust.
Earlier, too, Douglas and I had this brief stint at what we thought was envelope pushing in the field of sexual politics. We pledged to write about what we know about the seamy side of life. We set up hags and fags magazine as counterpoint to for him magazine. Our claim was, that “we know sex, good and bad, and we are not afraid to tell.” Our hfm was supposed to be an antidote to the sexism and exploitative pornography that gays and girls seem unable to escape.
The response was hilarious. Some parents thought we were selling vibrators to their virgin daughters. One gay reader, thinking I was a fag, texted asking for advice where to buy gay sex mags like the one we produced. Some of our White and Peruvian friends said we were reenforcing the notion that homosexuals are decadent and immoral. Their Belgian and Filipina wives said if our motive was to shock, we succeeded, but if we wanted to educate or make people more acceptable, we failed. Douglas was indignant. "That your foreigner friends and their well-traveled wives used the word "acceptable" at all shows their ignorance! Wala gani nashock ang semi-illiterate nga mga bayot ug mga househelps sa Digos!" Of course, the more comprehending ones said it is good that we describe life as it is, about time someone told that oral sex is done outside the pages of Playboy, even as they advised their daughters against appearing in our magazine as it might affect their employment status at middle-brow Ateneo. Sad that our paper had to fold up: We had no funding as most funding agencies thought our interest had nothing to do with feminist politics. At worst they think we are people from the urinals and bug-infested moviehouses; at best they thought our project was bourgeois and that we were bohemians having a good lay all the time – didn’t we wish! – while they were deep into poverty alleviation, peace, indigenous peoples’ rights, training men in gender sensitivity and that sort of thing. But sadder was the notion that being always on the dark side of the road, we were not bringing any lights into the world at all. Some even believed we were part of the exploitative pornography that sex magazines are all about. “Why don’t you just contribute to hfm (the glam glossie for him magazine)?,” artists raised in liberation politics, missing our mag, advised. “Then you need not burden yourselves with administrative and printing costs.”
Apan dunay usa pa ka mahinungdanong pangutana: Magbinisaya diay? Unya linumpen pa gyud nga Bisaya, unsang klase man na, tula ba na?
Bisan sauna ra nga di pa ko kamao mobisaya, I always asked myself: Wherefore this writing thing? And always I would ask fellow writers, Do you think of the market when you write? Si Don Pagusara, gaimagine tingali og gilangawng mga isda sa Bangkerohan: Unsang market? Si Lydia Ingle nikatawa: Oh, she means the audience. You mean the audience? I nodded yes, the audience. But I really meant the market, ang talipapa, ang tindahan sa kanto, the fish and meat stalls, the mass market, ang tapukanan sa mga kabarangay, ang bularan sa mga way-eskuyla. Dangerous for art, isn’t it? Leave populism to politicians and NGO activists; the writer, the artist is something else.
I happen to believe that art is not a luxury. And that there is not one legit language, not English, not even Tagalog (or Filipino, as Jun Cruz Reyes would insist), and in Davao, it’s not even Cebuano. In the first place, I’m not Bisdak, I’m not tubong Dabaw, excusez-moi. Dili ko Cebuano, hinulman ra sad nako ning pulonga: borrowed, purloined, kay Ilonggo takon ya. Language, pour moi, is like citizenship, open to appropriation: malleable, up for anyone’s claim, migration policies and troubles with travel visas notwithstanding. If fine language (and by that we mean say cherry, not virgin cunt; say kinatawhan, dili otin) is all there is to poetry, then that’s like saying the tilapia vendor, the warehouse laborer, the housewife and the run-of-the-mill computer science or nursing graduate have no access to poetry and no access to whatever power poetry claims to wield.
Now that’s the kind of luxury I don’t want any part in.
Just as Lorde speaks of the bridge between the intolerable now and the tomorrow that is dream and vision, I want to speak of the bridge, too, and the breach that is my tongue.
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