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The Haunting of Gay Manila

Global Space-Time and the Specter of Kabaklaan


Bobby Benedicto

rida in Specters of Marx, reminds us of the instability of the present and its openness to ghosts or those figures that can disembark from the past and appear in a time in which they clearly do not belong.1 This interruptive character of specters has been taken up enthusiastically in some literary circles, with Derridas term hauntology providing a means to speak of that elusive space between presence and absence, life and death, the non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present.2 Specters have also been deployed in the study of nationalisms and, by extension, globalization processes; little, however, has been said about how specters disturb the everyday practices of globalization and the often hyperbolically imagined states of being-present, instantaneity, simultaneity, or real time.3 This article draws on this disruptive character of specters to investigate the conceptions of nowness and newness that underpin the production of Manilas post-2000 bright lights gay scene and to provide a critical glimpse at the anxieties of some of its primary inhabitants, namely, the young, urban, middle- and upper-class Filipinos (among whose numbers I am guiltily counted) who, I argue, are marked by a longing for and a precarious sense of belonging in an imagined gay globality.4 The article reads this slice of life in the homeland alongside the experiences of the Filipino gay diaspora, in part through Martin Manalansans ethnographic work on gay Filipinos in New York.5 By making comparisons across space and time, my aim is to foreground the role of location and emplaced class/gender/ racial hierarchies in conditioning notions of global space-time and the effects of such notions on how subjects inhabit the borders between global/local forms of sexual identification. I argue that the scenes discursive attempts to reemplot Manila within a putatively foreign narrative of gay modernity (re)produce and are produced through a fraught relationship with preexisting representations of
GLQ 14:2 3 DOI 10.1215/10642684-2007-035 2008 by Duke University Press

Time is out of joint. This line from Hamlet, quoted repeatedly by Jacques Der-

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homosexuality, particularly with the image of the bakla, a highly contested term that is sometimes read as a synonym for gay but is more accurately, though no less problematically, depicted as a sexual tradition that conflates homosexuality, transvestism or effeminacy, and lower-class status, and which is embodied by the caricatured figure of the parlorista, the cross-dresser working in one of Manilas many low-end beauty salons. I explain kabaklaan (being-bakla, bakla-ness) and the politics inscribed in it more thoroughly below; suffice it to say here that the unsettled arrival of Manilas gay scene in the present of gay globality can be read as an event predicated on the abjection of the bakla and on the wishful relocation of its image to a different space-time, to an elsewhere and an elsewhen. By underscoring this relocation, I do not mean to argue that kabaklaan is in fact disappearing; what I hope to show is that it is being dis-appeared through strategies of invisibilization and discipline authorized by the local market, which participates in setting the contours of gay identity and its cultural visibility.6 Such strategies stand in sharp relief when set against the recuperative model adopted by Manalansans diasporic informants, who are largely unseen by the U.S. gay market and who recover kabaklaan to negotiate the violences that accompany their dislocation. This contrast, fleshed out in the succeeding section, is neither straightforward nor absolute. In the same way that the recuperations engaged in by subjects in the diaspora are always in progress, the strategies of erasure I discuss are part of a never-to-be-completed task, since the dream of burying kabaklaan is belied by its ability to make its presence felt, either through the practices of others or through the anxieties of the scenes privileged inhabitants. Indeed, kabaklaan continues to permeate the city materially and psychically; it is lodged in cultural memory and as such is inextricably tied to the production of modern gay subjectivities, not as contemporary but as Derridas revenant, that ghost that keeps returning despite assiduous attempts to conjure it away by consigning it temporally and spatially to the past/home. This article is thus also an effort to rethink the relationship between the local and the global in terms of spectralization. For Derrida, spectralization is the incarnation of the autonomized spirit in an aphysical body: There is no ghost, there is never any becoming-specter of the spirit without at least an appearance of flesh. . . . For there to be ghost, there must be a return to the body, but to a body that is more abstract than ever.7 I want to take this description somewhat literally and to treat the bakla as an abstraction, reflecting the scenes physical and psychic distanciation from the real embodiments of kabaklaan. It must be noted, however, that the value of Derridas spectrology lies in its refusal to distinguish clearly between abstraction and corporeality, allowing us not only to imagine the

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figure of the ghost but to figure it as both classed and gendered. This makes it possible to stress the continuing importance of the body of the bakla as a feared image, an imagined site where the class and gender anxieties of the men reconstituting Manilas gay scene are condensed and expelled as incongruous to the blueprint set by an increasingly global imagination. What this implies is that global/local relations, despite the terms flirtation with a binarized cartographic schema, cannot be mapped easily onto bodies and cities. Within spaces like Manila, axes like class enable dissimilar relationships with global circuits that in turn condition affective connections to home and to the images, bodies, and subjectivities with which it has been articulated. The spectrality of the bakla is thus particular to the scene, a term I deploy to refer to a loose assemblage of transformations tethered to (localizable) neoliberal mechanismsincluding fashionable bars and clubs, gym franchises, glossy publications, Internet portalsand to the individuals given privileged access to such mechanisms. The scene serves as the site where gay globalization plays out as an internalized project that is at least minimally teleological, necessitating a sense of history as well as an imaginative planetary geography built via the suturing together of other, distant city spaces and body spaces (e.g., clubs in ostensibly global cities, international party circuits, celebrity DJ networks, the defined (white) torso, even fictional bars and characters) under the universalized, mediatized, and commercialized sign of gay.8 As such, gay globality refers not to actual global gay spaces or subjects but to a spatial imagination founded on claims and hegemonic representations driven by the market and sustained by a networking of (urban) scenes that separately, though similarly, depend on the erasure of othered gay men, both in Manila and in those cities read as epicenters of the gay globe. In Manila, the dominant position of kabaklaan in discourses on homosexuality makes it the prime object for such an erasure. This article examines how attempts to efface the bakla reify exclusionary class and gender protocols and how gay Manilas march toward gay globalitys elusive modernity is tracked by the baklas shadowy presence. I examine these processes through textual analyses of popular texts and spaces that are part of Manilas scene-assemblage, including gay lifestyle magazines, statements about the launching of gay venues and events, and Web sites for personal ads. I intersperse these readings with my own experiences as a (mobile) child of the bright lights, in part to make clear my own investments, but, more important, to provide an inroad to the investigation of the complicit relationships between elite postcolonial subjects and violent social hierarchies. The persistent presence of the I within the readings I provide is an attempt to

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go beyond the now-routinized practice of self-disclosure; it stems from a refusal to discount knowledge acquired outside official data gathering and a desire to account for insider knowledge. The article thus responds, at least partially, to the injunctions of proponents of autoethnography, particularly the call to acknowledge the social inscription of selfhood and negotiate the terms of our own insertion into extant identity categories.9 It also shares with autoethnography the problem of deciding if and when personal accounts can be used as bases for claims about ones own community.10 In this article, I attempt to negotiate the thorny transition from the personal to the social by foregrounding points of resonance between my own experiences and the sites and texts noted above. The article thus fails to provide the thick description common to (auto)ethnographic writing and chooses instead to thread through multiple sites and texts. In choosing to do so, my aim is not to unpack singular elements but to sketch out a theoretical architecture that speaks to the desires, anxieties, and violences that mark efforts to reemplot Manila within a sexualized planetary geography. The remainder of this article looks at how this geography relies on the imagined and conflated borders between bakla and gay, past and present, local and global. It focuses, however, on the way these borders are unsettled and exceeded by lived experiences of mobility.

Bakla /Gay: (Im)possibilities for Border Crossing


While there is some consensus about the articulation of lower-class status and effeminacy in the figure of the bakla within the popular Filipino imaginary, the various and often conflicting ways this figure is deployed by Filipinos in the Philippines and abroad has resulted in multiple academic interpretations. It has been understood as a subculture (Tan), a form of psychosexual inversion (Garcia), the embodiment of an outside cultural other (Johnson), mimicry par excellence (Cannell), and an alternative modernity (Manalansan).11 These various ways of understanding kabaklaan have multiple points of convergence and divergence. My aim here, however, is not to review this literature or to engage debates about how kabaklaan is best understood, but to show how kabaklaan can be read using the lens of Manilas contemporary gay scene, which has increasingly reached out to a global network, both directly through linkages with international party circuits and indirectly through media references and comparisons to gay scenes in other cities. I focus on Manalansans contribution, which speaks most directly to the issues of globalization and mobility and their effects on the complex relationship that simultaneously binds and separates kabaklaan and modern gay subjectivity. In Global Divas, Manalansan unpacks the dynamics between bakla and

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gay and argues for a view of kabaklaan as an enduring social category recuperated by the Filipino gay diaspora in order to carve out spaces in New York City and in the U.S. social imaginary. Central to his argument is the notion that the borders between bakla and gay are porous and that immigrants are able to draw on the former to negotiate identity and difference, particularly through the linguistic practice of swardspeak and, to a lesser extent, cross-dressing. Swardspeak is a vernacular language used by Filipino gay men in Manila and overseas that reconfigures elements from Filipino, English, and Spanish and that is spoken with a hyperfeminized inflection. Manalansan argues that deploying swardspeak indicates resistance to assimilation and reflects Filipino gay mens struggles with notions of belonging in the context of their abject relationship to the (Philippine) nation and to the American (mostly white) gay community.12 He argues, moreover, that swardspeak has a blurry relationship with class, noting that while some people contend that swardspeak is a communication style prevalent among lower-class queers who work mostly in beauty parlors . . . (his) informants, who are neither from the lower class nor work in beauty parlors, consider swardspeak to be a more democratic system of linguistic practice.13 In contrast to Filipino gay mens experiences in New York, swardspeak is fast becoming a dying language in Manilas gay scene. Many younger gay men never learned it, and those who did have begun abandoning its use. Similarly, the practice of cross-dressing is increasingly rare, and the gay uniform of tight T-shirts and jeans greeted so warily by Manalansans informants has become the norm. The past few years have seen a dramatic shift away from practices of kabaklaan, a change manifested not just as a generational difference but as individual choice. Indeed, groups of gay men I have encountered who cross-dressed and spoke swardspeak as recently as the late 1990s have dropped both practices, simply saying that such things were no longer fashionable. Given that Manalansan hinges much of the appropriative capacities of his informants on recuperating such practices, one has to wonder: how can the intersections of global/local forms of sexual identification be conceptualized in places like Manila where a seemingly overt desire to approximate hegemonic representations of global gayness overwrites putatively local practices? Any attempt to answer this question must begin by acknowledging that the nuances of the diasporic experiences of Manalansans informants are what make possible the underplaying of class-consciousness, which in turn is what allows kabaklaan to serve as an acceptable source of adaptable practices. As Manalansan himself argues, Class issues . . . are subordinated by the immigrant experience, with many middle- and upper-class migrants forced by economic circumstances

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and exclusion from racialized gay spaces to abandon or at least temporarily forego investments in class identity.14 Some of Manalansans informants note, for instance, that having menial jobs forced them to interact with Filipinos who were not of the same class background; others noted how they established ties with the broader Filipino gay community as a response to the feeling of not belonging in the bars and clubs in the gentrified sections of Manhattan.15 The first point to be made here is that the interdictory character of gay globality is made clear for Filipinos in New York, since their proximity to one of its imagined centers allows them to recognize their difference, experience exclusion based on that difference, and discover that the global gayness ascribed to the city is a claim that excludes Filipinos, among many otherable queer subjects. The second point is that the downward mobility experienced by migrant Filipinos enables the sublimation of class and foregrounds national identity and belonging. The combination of these factors conditions strategies of resistance; it is what offers the possibility of disparate individuals jointly reinscribing practices of kabaklaan to negotiate (displaced) sexual subjectivity. This paradox where one becomes local by entering global/foreign space is captured succinctly by one of Manalansans informants, who says: Akala ko pumunta ako ng America para maging gay . . . ngayon alam ko na nagpunta ako sa America para maging tunay na bakla (I used to think that I came to America to be gay, but then I realized that I came to America to be a real bakla).16 What can be gleaned from this quotation is that distance plays a crucial role in navigating the rocky terrain of gayness and kabaklaan, particularly by exposing the contradictions between spatial imaginations and the real effects of cultural dislocation. Here America takes on a key role as the site onto which dreams of mobility are projected. However, as Johnson forcefully argues, Filipino discourses on America cannot be taken as references to the literal space of America. Rather, America serves as a primary idiom through which the world is thought and imagined.17 Similarly, Fenella Cannell, in her work on bakla in the Bicol region, notes that the outside world consumed via Manila-based films is the world of the wealthy American outside at one remove, mediated . . . through a portrayal of the life of the national elite who have access to it.18 Such observations point to the much-discussed close articulation of Filipino and American culture.19 It must be noted, however, that while notions of gay globality in Manila operate within a history of slippage through which America comes to stand in for the world, it also reconfigures the largely binarized colonial imaginative geography by adopting a global metrocentric gay cartography. This is made evident by the now ubiquitous appearance of references such as the following: Pretty soon partying in Manila will be at par with the parties of New York, Miami, Palm

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Springs, Montreal,20 or Our lifestyles these days . . . look like something fished out fresh from the streets of Castro in San Francisco or Oxford in Sydney.21 Experiences of exclusion in places like New York can thus be read as more than examples of how America becomes undone; rather, they are instances wherein the underbelly of a key citys gay scene is made visible and distinct from its seductive global gay simulacrum. Manilas movement into this global simulacral circuit is itself an act of subscription, a falling upward made possible by the fact that the scenes of gay globality are seen only from a safe distance, insulated from the exclusionary mechanisms faced by Filipino migrants in the imagined centers of the gay globe, which threaten dreams of belonging. 22 As counterintuitive as it seems, Manilas geographic separation from such sites allows its residents to be more fully interpellated into global gay identity than their diasporic counterparts, since the absence of a shared experience of displacement/exclusion is also the absence of any impetus to perform kabaklaan and to recover it from its subordinated position within local exclusionary systems based on the abjection of lower-class status and effeminacy. This absence constitutes the very appeal of global gayness by turning it into an ostensibly open category that can be overlaid onto various cities through the production of our own gay clubs, gay publications, gay bodies. By referring to global gayness as an open category, I do not mean to say that it has no sociohistorical content; rather, that contentits articulation with upward mobility and urban masculinityis taken as something transplantable. Put differently, Manila offers an inversion of the picture of global-local relations presented by Manalansan, for in the absence of the racial-economic politics of being-diasporic, it is gayness that is recuperated, mimicked without the threat of nonbelonging, and mobilized as the alternative modernity, contrasted as it is with the historically dominant, multiply marginalizing position of the bakla in Filipino discourses on homosexuality. Indeed, the struggle of gay men in Manila has often been cast in terms of finding ways to perform homosexuality without being coded as bakla. In 2004 Manilas first glossy gay magazine was launched. In the editors note for the second issue, Richie Villarin writes: We cannot remain oblivious to your market. . . . These were very powerful words, I thought, not because it came from one of our possible advertisers, but because its about time someone said so. This is an acknowledgment, a validation that the pink community is gaining recognition as an important part of society whose contributions cannot be ignored.

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And why shouldnt it be recognized? We are everywhere. We are no longer confined to the stereotypical image of the parlorista.23 This quotation is indicative of the overall thrust of the neoliberal reconfiguration of Manilas gay cityscape; the closing line We are no longer confined to the stereotypical image of the parlorista echoes popular conceptions of the bakla as a confining image, a script all homosexual men were once obligated to follow or a screen through which all homosexual men were once viewed. The queer rally ing cry We are everywhere thus takes on a different meaning; it situates the bakla in a specific place (the parlor) and casts validation as the recognition of our newfound mobility, our presence in places other than kabaklaan. This new place includes not just the heterosexual spaces of Manila but the marketplace of gay globality. The past few years have been marked by an overwhelming sense that something new has arrived, particularly with the opening of two clubs: Bed in 2003 and Government in 2004. Both clubs were designed to cater to a market aware of global parallels, manifested in everything from the spatial design to the imported lighting and sound technologies to the mirroring of foreign gay events (e.g., single-release parties such as Madonnathon timed to coincide with similar celebrations abroad even if the single has not been released locally). Not only did the opening of both clubs provide a space for many younger gay men who saw preexisting queer spaces as cheap and seedy, it also allowed Manila to begin stepping into a global gay cartography, first by being able to invite foreign DJs and second by hosting the emerging CircuitAsia party scene, which, on holding its first event in Manila in 2005, was met by local gay organizers with a doubly triumphant language, one that heralded the arrival of the gay globe in Manila and Manilas arrival in the gay globe. Government: It is truly an exciting time for Manilas gay community! . . . We are so excited with the sleepless parties that are coming up; but more seriously, we are more thrilled with the positive economic impact their events will bring to our community. Bed: It has been a time of growth and new experiences ever since the opening of Bed in 2003. With the advent of CircuitAsia we are delighted to see that the clubbing community has likewise grown. It is our intention to support CircuitAsia in an effort to promote Manila as a world-class party destination locally and internationally. Icon: This is an event that is long overdue. Finally, CircuitAsia brings world-class entertainment that Filipinos truly deserve. We now have the chance to showcase to the world, the very best that the Philippines can offerclaiming our rightful place in the international circuit party arena.24 Such comments demonstrate the rhetorical

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force of globality, the world, and world-class-ness, all of which slip through despite the regional imaginary summoned by the name CircuitAsia.25 The spatial reconfiguration implied by such testimonials, moreover, is also a temporal one, laden as they are with references to the long wait Manila has endured and the newness of being-global. Concomitantly, the high-speed movement along the path of global gayness is a movement toward the present, toward contemporaneousness with other cityscapes coded as gay. In this way, gay or gay-as-modern operates as a historical signifier that reorganizes the temporality of homosexuality and society according to a sequence that places gay culture as a reference to the present, to the nowa present defined in global terms.26 It must be noted, however, that despite the references the testimonials above make to Manila and the Philippines, the nowness/newness of gay is not acquired uniformly by the nation or the city or by gay men in general. Rather, it is reached via the vehicle of gay community, written under tropes of diversity but delimited by the market and its accession to the image of the global gay. This accession is exhibited forcefully by Generation Pink, a glossy gay magazine launched in 2005. The exclusionary power of newness embodied by its name was made even clearer by its introduction as the newest quarterly publication especially developed for lifestyle-conscious, shop-savvy, socially-aware, party-loving and liberal individuals. The specificity of this generational niche, however, is belied by the erasure of difference through representation. The disclaimer about its market comes in fine print and is buried under features that speak broadly about who the Filipino gay man is and that announce events such as the White Party (borrowed from the U.S. party circuit) as milestones for the LGBT community.27 Such slippages perform the unintended cultural work of converting market-specific texts into generalized ontological claims about all those who belong to this time . . . the time of the times, the time of this world . . . this world, this age and no other.28 It is through such claims that kabaklaan is being written as the past, not through direct admonition but through the very absence of the bakla from the sites that embody the now of Manilas gay history. Thus, ironically, the mythologized sites/sights of kabaklaan are largely missing from the gay scenes selfrepresentations in Manila. Here a personal anecdote seems useful: when I began researching Filipino gayness a few years ago, I expected to recognize myself in the literature on homosexuality in the Philippines, but was taken aback at how alien the gay world described by others was. The literature was ripe with references to places I had never been, events and practices I never took part in, and beliefs about spirituality and gender inversion that to mea gay man born and raised in

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Manilawere entirely foreign. When I first picked up Manalansans work, I found myself skipping to the English translations of the quotations from his informants, using them as a guide to understand what was supposed to be my own language, swardspeak. Faced with this universe of homosexuality that seemed so distant from the global gay Manila I was deeply invested in, I began thinking that the difference was a matter of time, that it could be accounted for by the datedness of the literature and the speed of transformations. Later on, however, I began encountering work that still spoke of gay Manila in terms I thought were anachronistic, and it became increasingly clear that the alienation with which I greeted the literature was the product not only of the presence of different worlds within the city (now a banal observation) but of the pressure to make these disparate worlds legible to the foreign gaze by employing the communal signs of gay, Filipino, and Manila.29 The contemporaneousness of the worlds of global gayness and kabaklaan in Manila meant that the gap between them was not a question of chronology but of competing temporal imaginations. Put differently: I could see the world of kabaklaan only through my peripheral vision because my sights had been limited and trained by my being-present in what I considered global time.

Haunted by a Past That Is Always Present


Homi Bhabha asks: What is the now of modernity? Who defines this present from which we speak?30 In Manila, it is those whose imaginations and practices are tied to the market-driven city-system of gay globality who can speak of the present, a present from which the scene can narrate local history and reinforce the complementarity between the local and the global in a transparency that creates a new set of challenges and erasures.31 Gay visibility is thus marked by a kind of tunnel vision, whereby what is seen/the scene is composed of those elements that can exhibit global isomorphism; the rest is veiled, silenced by virtue of its links to the past. The erasure engendered by gay visibility is thus contingent on the splitting of temporalities. It works only under the premise that kabaklaan can be confined to the annals of a specifically local and implicitly out-dated culture. Such premises, however, are doomed by the instability of the plot of modernity and are perpetually plagued by the presence of the past in the present. Indeed, kabaklaan persists, both in cultural memory and in its continued practice by other(ed) Filipino gay men. It makes real what Derrida calls the frightening hypothesis of a visitation by continuing to pop up in mainstream media, where the parlorista remains fixed as a source of comic relief. It is resurrected in homophobic language and still performed on the streets of Manila, if not through

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the body of the parlorista then through the disarticulated appearances of femininity and lower-class status in figures that seek entrance into the spaces created by the scenes reorganization of gay culture. The speed of Manilas gay reconfiguration should thus not be taken to mean the obsolescence of kabaklaan but as part of the desire to imagine its obsolescence. This imagination, however, is subverted by the claims of diversity necessitated by the liberal politics attached to modern gayness. This politics opens the scene to traces of kabaklaan, which enter discreetly like uninvited guests through passages laid bare by the putative openness of gay culture. Hence, through the interstices of the virtual and physical spaces of gayness, femininity and lower-class status make their apparitional debut. Such apparitions are cause for flightsometimes literally, as when gay men abandon Web sites and clubs increasingly frequented by men seen as cheap or establish borders within those spaces to avoid engaging with individuals who do not conform to privileged class or gender codes. Web sites with personal ads, for instance, are marked by a distinct emphasis on class markers. Guys4Men.com, a global site that now serves as the primary Internet hub for gay men in Manila, is the most vivid example of how lower-class status and femininity seep into new gay spaces and are subsequently evaded or managed. I was living in Toronto when Guys4Men first became popular in Manila. I discovered it through an old friend from university, who sent me an excited message in the middle of 2004 telling me to visit the site, since it was the new, hot thing in Manila. I soon discovered, however, that although the site contained pictures of bared torsos and had its share of men looking for one-night stands, it was less about sexual encounters than about the establishment of social linkages among similarly situated men. The majority of users came from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, evidenced most significantly by shared links to Manilas network of exclusive private schools and universities. The site functioned mostly to reproduce that network within a gay subset, with many ties eventually carried over into nonvirtual spaces. The establishment of this community was aided in part by the relatively small number of users from Manila. With usually no more than a few dozen of us online at any given time, the site appeared to be a tightly knit space, and, although it was structured as a venue for personal ads, it functioned similarly to now-popular networking sites such as MySpace. 32 By the time I moved back to Manila in 2005, the number of users of Guys4Men had grown exponentially, reaching a total of forty-eight thousand in 2006.33 Though this growth and the reasons for it are interesting in their own right, what is worth noting here is the democratization of the sites membership, reflected most vividly in the dramatic shift in overall class profile. Although this shift cannot be

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evidenced by statistical data, middle- and upper-class users routinely remark on the increasing presence of lower-class men, legible as class positioning is through multiple codes, including linguistic (English proficiency, certain linguistic styles), geographic (location in areas coded as ghetto), and visual (dress style, background imagery in shared photos). Users have responded to the entrance of the underclass by employing language as an index of desirability. As a casual user of the Web site, it has become impossible not to notice the increasing number of profiles that guard against lower-class status through statements such as the following: Its a real turn-off to see or hear dudes who cant even put together a decent English sentence, or Id love to have a decent conversation with someone who has sense . . . someone who can stimulate my brains before my groin. . . . someone who speaks fluent English without trying. One profile puts the link directly: Im looking for someone who has a good general background . . . someone cultured. Im looking for someone who can carry a good, sensible conversation (especially, but not exclusively, in English, because unfortunately for this country, having a good command, or at least an understanding of the language, is a very accurate gauge). More insidiously, some members profile pages mockingly quote the messages they receive written in broken English, in order to ward off users with similar language skills. Put simply, when one ad states that good English is a turn on, it does more than insist on a common language for Web-based communication; it recalls the upper-class status attached to English language skills and codes it as desirable, consequently reproducing gay Manilas construction and idealization of gayness as class-specific.34 Similar strategies are employed to police gender lines. When I first started visiting the Web site, ones masculinity was rarely, if ever, questioned. Today the majority of profiles come equipped with the caveat no effem, a response to a parallel increase in the number of users who do not conform to the hypermasculinity increasingly prescribed by local representations of homosexuality. The term effem serves as a blanket reference to a wide spectrum of feminine gay men, including those who practice cross-dressing or are female-identified as well as those who simply fall short of the idealized hypermasculinity. In some cases, the rejection of effems works hand in hand with the abjection of lower-class status, particularly when directed against those who cross-dress, given the centrality of that practice within kabaklaan. But in light of the relatively small number of users who do cross-dress or are female-identified in Guys4Men, the ubiquity of the disclaimer no effem serves as a generalized rejection of all traces of femininity. In fact, many such disclaimers are now supplemented with warnings against fakers

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or those who pretend that they arent effem. One profile reads: If we meet up and you dont match up to the hunky pic you sent, I swear Ill hurt you. Even user photos are not trusted as evidence of masculinity, with many men following up photo exchanges with such questions as Are you effem? and Are you sure youre not effem? As such, one now finds profiles that come out as masculine, either through statements (e.g., Im not effem . . . Im not into that) or through the staged performance of hypermasculinity. One friend who used to cross-dress and unapologetically identify with hyperfeminine celebrities now posts an image of himself wearing a baseball cap and holding a soccer ball, despite his complete lack of interest in the sport. I once thought of asking him if he posted that picture in response to accusations of being effem and whether it was effective in that regard, but I held myself back, wary of causing embarrassment. Such idealization of hypermasculinity is noteworthy in this context, given how the historical dominance of kabaklaan has instituted a fear that ones homosexuality would be interpreted as female identification. Moreover, the hypermasculinity displayed in Filipinized virtual gay spaces presents a sharp contrast to the feminized image of Filipino gay men (and other Asian men) overseas. Guys4Men inverts that exoticized and eroticized image with a virtual spectacle of (re) masculinized Filipino homosexuality more often associated with hegemonic representations of global gayness. This spectacle, however, seems even more anxious than its foreign counterparts, determined as it is to smoke out the last vestiges of a suspected inherent femininity (Are you really not effem?). The exhibition of performed and confessed masculinity spawned by such suspicion, coupled with the abjection of lower-class status through language, is a startling example not only of the disciplining power of Manilas gay reconfiguration but also of its instability, of the need to constantly secure and resecure gender and class privilege within the spaces of the scene. In some ways, Guys4Men is a site for disarticulating lower-class status from femininity, with many of those who are abjected through class lenses being the most vocal about the undesirability of effems. Such disarticulation, however, only works to fix the multiple marginality of the bakla and its imagined presence as the absolute condensation of both undesirable elements. Indeed, even when broken apart, these elements are separately policed through the disciplining strategies outlined above and, when such strategies fail, can then be evaded. For instance, many of those early users whom I interacted with when I discovered Guys4Men have begun abandoning the Web site. In the fall of 2006, another friend sent me a message about Guys4Men, this time informing me that it was time to delete your account. This suggestion did not require any explanation. It

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was presumed that I understood the context of the warning: the others had caught up with us; it was time to move, to find a new now. The seeds of a similar movement can be detected in gay clubs, with many former regulars opting instead to hold house parties with what one host referred to as the right crowd and the right address. I remember when I first realized that something was changing. It was 2005, and I had just returned from a year overseas. I went to one club with a friend who had also been away, and almost immediately we found ourselves exchanging knowing glances, an acknowledgment of the shared sense that something was different. What happened here? my friend asked. Where has everyone gone? It was not as though the place had been emptied. It was as crowded as I remembered, but in the space of one year, the crowd had morphed into what middle- and upper-class Filipinos refer to as jologs, an untranslatable pejorative that refers roughly to aspirational masses (the masa), the shadow of bourgeois Manila culture. Though I am embarrassed to admit this now, I seconded my friends rhetorical question, as if to confirm that the crowd that night could not be part of everyone. A week later, we found ourselves at another gay club, and though we felt more at ease at that second, slightly glossier setting, we were still out of the loop and hence continued to wonder where everyone was. It was at that second club a little later on that I met someone who invited me to a private party in one of the residential villages just off the business district. There I found men who more closely resembled the gay Manila I remembered or at least imagined and invested in. Once again I found myself in the midst of a network of similarly situated men, men who spoke with the same style of English and Taglish (Tagalog-English), dressed similarly in designer jeans and T-shirts, and displayed the same gym-built masculinity. There, in the midst of clones of clones of clones (copies without originals), I felt comfortable, at home in familiar territory. One guest told me that similar parties occurred every weekend and that I should come more often. The clubs, he said, were now only worth going to during special events. Later on I would learn that there were other parallel parties being thrown around the city, with only slight variations in age and interests. In some ways, these changes simply mirror the emergence of an A-list scene; what is interesting to note, however, is that access to such exclusive spaces (protected by secrecy and the privacy of residences) has little to do with traditional class markers such as income levels and more to do with language skills, shared cultural references, and dress stylethose markers that signal not wealth per se but proximity to global gayness. These strategies designed to find refuge from the monster rejects of the

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brave new species are supplemented by the appropriation of kabaklaan through the murky shift to a language of drag and trans.35 Room is made for gender outlaws if they are able to work within the modern gay script. It is thus unsurprising that while the new gay clubs disassociate themselves from the famed bakla beauty pageants, they can nonetheless provide a stage for occasional drag shows. Similarly, cross-dressing or effeminacy seem to fit in seamlessly if embodied by figures linked to high fashion. 36 These spaces, however, are not spaces for the bakla but for its metamorphosed form, its reincarnation under the likeness of bodies and subjectivities that are unironically made legible by their very foreignness. But the translation of kabaklaan, it must be stressed, is a fraught endeavor. Though its conceptual core of cross-dressing and effeminacy is shared by subjects in radically different contexts, the pool of meanings assembled over its long, painful history cannot be erased through the use of other categories.37 The translation of bakla into palatable modern counterparts, however, is an enterprise that many parties have become involved in, including those who practice kabaklaan, seen for instance in online discussion forums where individuals struggle to determine which trans term best describes them and in the increasing number of articles in the popular press that speak of a transgendered community in lieu of a bakla one.38 The translation into a vocabulary of trans and drag may be taken as an attempt to preserve kabaklaans conceptual core while emptying it of its injured past. In that sense, one might read it as a form of resistance, an unwillingness to bear the burden of historical abjection. The pragmatic politics that accompany such translation is a critical area I examine elsewhere. 39 What I wish to stress here is that the abjected position of kabaklaan cannot be reduced to a nominal inscription; it is a response to the performance of femininity and lower-class status that shapes what Derrida might call the spirit of kabaklaan. It is this spirit that persists and constitutes the local, abjected realm. The translation of this spirit is an attempt to relocate it outside that realm and hence dilute the challenge that realm poses to our being-global by rewriting its (gendered) elements as something more relevant to this present from which we speak. Such a strategy, however, does little to curtail the exclusionary violence practiced online and offline, predicated as such violence is on the memory of the identity of the bakla (the ghost is a who, says Derrida) that pervades the scenes narration of the present and that is reflected so directly by Villarins declaration that we are no longer confined to the stereotypical image of the parlorista.40 This memoryat work even here in my own ability to write about the bakla as a point of disidentificationenables us to see (and hence police) kabaklaans traces in the bodies and practices of others.

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In effect, Manilas sites of gayness are treated to the sporadic yet routine reappearance of kabaklaan in figures that are not-quite bakla. But kabaklaan is there, recognized even though hardly anyone will claim being its embodiment; it is seen via the frequency of a certain visibility or the visibility of the invisible.41 We might then say that the celebration of the newness of Manilas gay scene is predicated on the interplay of visibility/invisibility, on the belief that we, the privileged components of the scene-assemblage, have left the bakla behind, a fragile belief betrayed by our ability to see and hunt down its traces. Such sightings speak directly to the spectralization of kabaklaan, how it is becoming palimpsestic or, in ghostly terms, being improperly buried.42 Indeed, like a palimpsest, Manilas gay scene bears the marks of its local history, which cuts through, never fully erasable, always legible despite attempts to overwrite it with something else, something new. This struggle between history and erasure situates the bakla somewhere between there and not-there, past and present, appearance and disappearance, life and death. It is still visible, but increasingly translucent, excluded by or dubbed with a gay modernity made seductive by the possibility of rescuing same-sex desire from the doubly damning alignment of femininity and lower-class status. This possibility rests on complicity with the current landscape of global neocolonial domination, on the desire to occupy that aspirational space previously inhabited by the colonial collaborator.43 Like the collaborator, the scene is neither colonizer nor colonized but both at the same time; weits purveyorsare estranged from yet rooted in the homeland, only precariously belonging to the present of gay globality. It is this fragile belonging, threatened by the baklas rival claim to Filipino homosexuality, which reproduces the bakla as specter, as the others intolerable other.

Phantom Global Gayness


I have thus far presented the globalization of gay Manila as an imaginative spatiotemporal project that anachronizes kabaklaan. The distorted character of this present, however, is also effected by its relationship to a phantasmic future, to the paradoxical vision of a present that is not-yet. For Derrida, specters are also promises of things to come, injunctions that order us to summon the very thing that will never present itself. This perhaps is a way to speak of the dream of gay globality, marked as it is by the impossibility of belonging, an impossibility made most visible in the act of travel, when the postcolonial subject attempts to eliminate the distance between here and there only to encounter his own otherness. Much more needs to be said about such exclusions, but here I would like to point out that

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even in Manila where Filipinos are not subjected to the same exclusionary protocols faced by the diaspora and where elite subjects can draw privilege from class and gender codes, gay globality remains nonactualizable. The aspirational transformations that underpin the semblance of gay globality do not constitute the imitation of a preexisting real but an inching toward a nonreplicable idealized model rooted in a history of colonial desire that involves intersections of class, gender, and race. Bhabha writes: The question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecyit is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image.44 It is in this sense that we might say that the subjects of this article, despite their/our introjection of global gayness, will always be chasing the phatic image; we can only ever be aspirants, almost the same but not quite.45 Manila itself seems bound to a perpetual state of movement, fated to never arrive in the present, hinged as that present is on a map of modernity that periodizes the city as somewhere behind, almost but not quite global. Thus, between the city and the gay globe and between the scenes inhabitants and the global gay sits a perpetual gap, a lag, a diastema, failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being out of joint.46 The aspiration that underpins this gap can, I argue, be fruitfully rethought in terms of spectralization. Derrida speaks of the illusions produced through the new speed of apparition . . . of the simulacrum, the synthetic or prosthetic image, and the virtual event.47 We might start thinking here of how the high-speed global circulation of gay, seen for instance in the widespread consumption of pirated gay programming in Manila, is implicated in the process of introjection, in our ability to imagine other, distant worlds, to re-present to ourselves people and objects we cannot see . . . and to finally act accordingly.48 Here the market once again takes center stage; it operates as the audiovisual vehicle through which images/apparitions travel.49 But the market, it must be stressed, is more than a transmitter. It is also constituted by neoliberal mechanismsincluding but not limited to the clubs, parties, magazines, and Internet portals I have named herewhich facilitate the impossible yet seductive task of materializing the distant image. In this sense, we might say that our dis-appearing of kabaklaan works alongside a parallel invisibilization, the veiling of the impossibility of global gayness through the speed of global interpellation, which not only facilitates identification but reconfigures distance. Gay globality becomes a space that is virtually accessible; it is there, seemingly within reach, bridgeable by a few more transformations (a few more erasures), so close that we have begun announcing its arrival. Gay globality thus also walks the line between presence and absence. It

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is a trajectory made seemingly plausible by the proximity effected by its mediatized apparitions. The subscription to this trajectory is what engenders the task of bordering off kabaklaan; it also creates a specular circle or a paradoxical hunt whereby global gay Filipinos require the presence of the bakla in order to assert their difference from locality and secure a sense of global belonging. Derrida mocks: Come so that I may chase you! You hear! I chase you. I run after you to chase you away from here.50 Therein lies the final, ironic snag: our inability to exorcise kabaklaan is the effect not only of its material persistence but of our perverse desire to see its presence, since the memory of being doubly damned and confined in the classed and feminized image of the bakla allows us to extract pleasure from being approximations of global gayness. The ghost of the bakla is thus inextricably tied to us, for better or worse united.51 Going back to Hamlet, Derrida reworks to be or not to be by claiming that the verb to be is always prefigured by the specter. I am would mean I am haunted: I am haunted by myself who am (haunted by myself who am haunted by myself who am . . .).52 This perhaps becomes doubly resonant for the subjects of this article, inasmuch as our search for a new subjectivity is compelled and propelled by specters from the past-present and the future-present. This dual haunting is a double-sided ethical demand. It requires us to take seriously Derridas injunction to encounter what is strange and other about the specter of the bakla and at the same time to account for our complicity in the continued life of modernitys trajectories under the sign of gay globality. This second task requires us to put into words the phantom character of gay globality, its status as a fantastic destination grounded on racial, class, and gender exclusions that take shifting configurations in different locations. By foregrounding the impossibility of gay globality, made clear to the excluded migrant but obscured by Manilas bright lights, we might finally begin stepping off the linear path and addressing the violent hierarchies we ourselves reproduce in the process of gay world making.

Notes
1. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999), 14. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 2. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xix. 3. On specters and nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, The Specter of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (New York: Verso, 1998); also Pheng

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Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 4. I use the term bright lights scene as a reference to the fast-track gay nightlife often associated with upmarket bars, clubs, and events. The term bright lights has been used to refer to other high-end segments of urban nighttime economies, most famously in Jay McInerneys Bright Lights, Big City (New York: Vintage, 1984). 5. Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 6. See Gabriel Giorgi, Madrid en Trnsito: Travelers, Visibility, and Gay Identity, GLQ 8 (2002): 5960. 7. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 12526. For a more detailed discussion of incarnation and the body in Derridas work on spectrality, see Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: The Living-On [sur-vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial Globalization, in Becomings, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 176200. 8. It should be noted, for instance, that characters from Queer as Folk are routinely referred to in conversations and publications, owing to the viral spread of piracy, increased broadband access, and the general saturation of the Philippines with American media (as, for example, in Crookshank, And Everything Turns White, Generation Pink Online Exclusive, www.generationpink.com/4_whiteparty.asp [accessed October 16, 2006]). 9. This specific injunction was made by Franoise Lionnet. See Lionnet, Autoethnography: The An-Archic Style of Dust Tracks on a Road, in Autobiographical Voices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 115. For other key statements on autoethnography, see Mary Louise Pratt, Transculturation and Autoethnography: Peru 1615/1980, in Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 2446; Deborah Reed-Danahay, ed., Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (New York: Berg, 1997). 10. For a critique of autoethnography, see James Buzard, On Auto-Ethnographic Authority, Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (Spring 2003): 6191. 11. Michael Tan, From Bakla to Gay: Shifting Gender Identities and Sexual Behaviors in the Philippines, in Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World, ed. Richard G. Parker and John H. Gagnon (New York: Routledge, 1995); J. Neil C. Garcia, Performativity, the Bakla, and the Orientalizing Gaze, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1 (2000): 26581; Mark Johnson, Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines (Oxford: Berg, 1997); Fenella Cannell, Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a brief review of these texts and other works on bakla, see Manalansan, Global Divas, 3544. For the relationship of bakla to Southeast Asian cosmologies, see Johnson, Beauty and Power, 2532.

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12. Manalansan, Global Divas, 4647. 13. Manalansan, Global Divas, 48. 14. Manalansan, Global Divas, 32. 15. Manalansan, Global Divas, 11516, 97. 16. Manalansan, Global Divas, 97. 17. Johnson, Beauty and Power, 55. 18. Cannell, Power and Intimacy, 206. 19. The close articulation of Filipino and American culture is discussed by Manalansan in (Re)Locating the Gay Filipino, Journal of Homosexuality 26 (1993): 5372. In this earlier article, he intriguingly argues that this articulation has produced a border culture without territorial contiguity, sustained primarily by the widespread use of the English language and American popular culture. 20. Paul Agoncillo, Circuit Meister, Icon Magazine, JulyAugustSeptember 2005, 55. 21. Jonas Bagas, Priding the Party, Icon Magazine, JulyAugustSeptember 2005, 10. 22. While the example discussed here is New York, others have demonstrated how Filipinos (among other Asians) are excluded through the tightly structured (racial) hierarchy that pervades gay scenes in countries most often associated with global gayness. See Peter Jackson, Thats What Rice Queens Study! White Gay Desire and Representing Asian Homosexualities, in Diaspora: Negotiating Asian-Australia, ed. Helen Gilbert, Tseen Khoo, and Jacqueline Lo (Queensland: University of Queens land Press, 2000), 18188. 23. Richie Villarin, Editors Note, Icon Magazine, JanuaryFebruaryMarch 2005, 6. 24. Testimonials, www.circuitasia.com/testimonials.asp (accessed October 16, 2006). 25. Indeed, the promotional materials of circuit parties make no claims about Asia; instead they boast of the repertoire of DJs in the city-system of gay globality and declare that the entire world is (now) our venue (Testimonials). Within the Philippines, there are only nascent references to a regional imaginary, mostly confined to pragmatic foreign policy language. I suspect that this has to do with the archipelagos peculiar Spanish-American colonial history, which has produced a contemporary culture that struggles to find commonalities with the rest of Asia and that tends to look to the United States for both cultural and political models. One could argue, however, that a sense of Asian-ness is growing, given increased consumption of East Asian popular culture in the mid-2000s. 26. Giorgi, Madrid en Trnsito, 62. 27. Crookshank, And Everything Turns White. 28. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 49. 29. See, for instance, the fascinating work of Dana Collins, Identity, Mobility, and Urban

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Place-Making: Exploring Gay Life in Manila, Gender & Society 19, no. 2 (2005): 18098; and Michael Kho Lim, When the Politics of Desire Meets the Economics of Skin (paper presented at the First International Conference of Asian Queer Studies, Bangkok, Thailand, July 79, 2005). 30. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 244. Quoted also in Giorgi, Madrid en Trnsito, 59. 31. Giorgi, Madrid en Trnsito, 59. 32. This section combines my own usage of this Web site with readings of personal ads I consider indicative of general trends. It takes on Internet research methods that stress the role of usage and social context in reading Internet-based texts. See Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (London: Sage, 2000). 33. This data was acquired from the owner of the Web site, who also confirmed that the majority of members from Manila joined between 2004 and 2006. 34. These quotations are taken from publicly posted profiles on www.guys4men.com (accessed October 20, 2006). 35. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization (London: Polity, 1998), 92. 36. For instance, it seems unproblematic for the gay scene to include individuals such as Bryanboy, the now globally famous Filipino socialite-blogger. His cross-dressing practices have been rearticulated with his new-moneyed obsession with luxury items and function as a form of cultural capital visible in modern gay culture. See Bryanboy.com. 37. See Manalansan, Global Divas, 2426. 38. See the forum TransGENDER vs TRANSsexuals, www.guys4men.com/viewthread .php?tid=56365 (accessed October 16, 2006). For an article that marks the transition from bakla to trans, see Francis Gomez, R-E-S-P-E-C-T: A Personal Essay on the Filipino Transgendered Experience, Manila Times, June 25, 2006. 39. The issue of translation is further discussed in a different section of the research project from which this article stems (Bobby Benedicto, Lightspeed Sexualities: (Re) locating Gay Manila in Global Space-Time [PhD diss., University of Melbourne, forthcoming]). 40. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 41. 41. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 100. 42. Avery Gordons reference to the improperly buried stresses how ghosts emerge as a result of bodies being denied ground. Here we might think of how the hegemonic narrative of gay globality is haunted as a result of its own abjection of the bakla, even after its death has been proclaimed. See Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16. 43. Giorgi, Madrid en Trnsito, 59. 44. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 45. 45. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 122.

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46. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 64. 47. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 54. 48. Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 7. 49. For a discussion of the audiovisual vehicle, see Paul Virilio, The Last Vehicle, in Looking Back on the End of the World, ed. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 10619. 50. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 140. 51. Bauman, Globalization, 94. 52. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 133.

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