 A few years ago, I edited the book titled Aura, The Gate Theme in Philippine Fiction in English. It is an anthology of Filipino short fiction works in which representations of male homosexuality may be found. At the heart of this book is the problem. How does Philippine fiction in English address the male homosexual question? As the editor, I decided early on that homosexuality in these stories may be imaged and understood in terms of desire, behavior, self-hood or self-awareness which are all indicative of the gay theme. Before an inquiry like this can proceed, however, there are a few conceptual clarifications that need to be made. We begin with the idea that gender is analytically separable from sexuality. Male, female, masculine, feminine are gender distinctions, while homo, hetero, bi are sexual categories. They don't necessarily converge or line up neatly. Both are social constructions. To be specific, we need to see that the most popular local term for the male homosexual, the word bakla, started out as an ungendered adjective to denote a state of confusion or fear. Then, during the Spanish period, it slowly became synonymous with the local gendered terms for womanish or feminine men except that unlike the words that it came to eclipse, for example, bayogin, binabae, and asog, it carried with it the force of macho insult. With Americanization upon the arrival of the psychological and psychiatric style of reasoning that, among other things, implanted sexological categories, bakla was slowly but securely homosexualized. So much so that it is now understood as a synonym for male homosexual, although in most cases, as it occurs in popular culture, it still carries with it earlier ideas of effeminacy and even transgenderism. The bakla is, therefore, by now only a partially homosexualized identity, partial because only he, and not his love object, the real man, gets imputed with orientation, despite their mutual indulgence in an enjoyment of homosexual sex. We might say that gender identity in the Philippines is mostly premised on a claim, actually an article of faith that privileges depth, psychospiritual plenitude, cornice, or kalaoban, external acts can be counter veiled by the primacy of this interiority. The sexualization of local concepts of gender accompanied English-based education in the Philippine colony at the beginning of the last century. Since then, Filipinos have been increasingly socialized in Western modes of gender and sexual identity formation, courtesy of a sexualization that rode on different but complementary discourses, public hygiene, juvenile delinquency, guidance in counseling, physical education, family planning, civics, feminist empowerment, gay and lesbian advocacy, and finally, HIV AIDS. This has resulted in the deepening of sexuality's perverse implantation into the local soil, characterized by the popularizing of the homo-hetero distinction. The history of male homosexual representation in Philippine anglophone fiction can be traced back to Assegar Ciavillia's autobiographical stories that first came out in the American edition of his book, Footnote to Youth. Soon after, Filipino fictionists, men, as well as women, narrativized different versions of the gay theme. Aside from Villia, there are three other national artists for literature in aura. Among them is Edith L. Tiempo, who was the first Filipino woman fictionist to write about the gay theme. In particular, she may be said to originate the trope of the mysterious that would come to characterize the fictional treatment by most Filipino women writers of this subject. Tiempo wrote three stories in the 1950s that were about the haunted middle-aged male character who is invariably unexistentially anguished, socially estranged, and lonely bachelor. And in the case of two, works as an embattled educator in the provincial public school system. The point of these fictive works by Tiempo would seem to be the presentation and partial unraveling of the enigmatic nature of this ontology, which by its definition, the stories cannot exactly name. They do, however, indicate it in a number of evocative ways, as have submerged, have expressed things, as a grotesque, dwarf-like apparition, as a nightmare of wrinkled lengths of boys' trousers, even as telling quotes admonishing the reluctant reader to love, despite the suffering that love must entail, from the very gay WH audience's famous poem, Kanzone. Tiempo's Mr. Rosales, Agujo and Choteban, do not seem to be frankly effeminate in their gender self-presentations, although this may precisely be one of the reasons they, as already sexually repressed and desperately uninvolved characters, are even more especially tormented. In any case, they do not seem to be aware of the source of their inner turmoil, or at least what's apparent is that they do not wish to confront it, but this repressed unconscious, nonetheless mortifies, haunts and terrifies them. Tiempo's skill in poetic understatement comes into play in these stories, as may be evidence in their suggestive and symbolic titles, namely the dam, the dimensions of fear, and the chambers of the sea, as well as in her candor in assuming and presenting the male homoerotic gaze, particularly in the seaside story of Choteban, who is shown to furtively look at the malefisher folk's bodies, dripping wet and glistening darkly in the sunlight. And yet, because their energy is focalized around the mystery of these characters' secret personal afflictions, despite the attention they devote to the erotic aspects of the homosexual topic, these stories really do very little to explore, even as they seek so compassionately to understand its underlying dynamics. Enviem Gonzalez inaugurated with his 1959 novel Bamboo Dancers the allegorical project that treats homosexuality as a unique cultural in particular national trope, basically for cultural and gendered doubleness. This allegorizing project in the imaging of the male homosexual character finds it counterparts in the novels of Jessica Hagedorn and Inochka Roska. Hagedorn's Joey Sands is probably the most interesting figure in her controversial book from the 1990s, Dog Eaters. Sands is a half Filipino, half African American disc jockey and hustler who's had to live by his wits in the dog eat, dog world of Subic and Alangapo. Port cities just outside the largest American overseas naval base where, as can only be expected, brothels and bars that cater to the libido of vacationing American soldiers are everywhere to be found. As is the typical case with this novel's other protagonists, the personal sob story of Sands serves as a convenient occasion to narrate both the important events in recent history of the Philippines and the author's political and social commentary on its culturally damaged society as well as its hopelessly corrupt government, here the Marcus dictatorship. And yet, despite the gravitas of the symbolic burden, there is genuine pathos in this character's tragic flaw, one which Hagridorn dramatizes and explores effectively enough. Having been betrayed by the honey-lipped and adventurous tourists once too often, Sands, who is surprisingly self-aware as far as his sexual orientation is concerned, has turned helplessly jaded and finds much to his regret that he can no longer afford to believe in the impassioned declarations and promises of love that are uttered by the next besotted but ultimately faithless stranger. On the other hand, Rosca's grotesque vision of homosexuality takes it to be a perversion, perfectly in keeping with the abomination that was the reviled conjugal dictatorship. The central characters in her novel from 1992, Twice Blessed, are the incestuous bus-bus twins, Hector and Katerina, whose ignominy, ambition, and bottomless greed are meant to serve as a fictional mirror for the unspeakable qualities obscene dealings and actuations of the reviled dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his frivolous wife, Imelda. In one particularly interesting chapter, Hector seduces and consummates his lust with his sister's fiancé, the decrepit and desperate Armand Gloriosa, an unnaturalness that is merely par for the course in this novel, whose world, the allegorical Philippines routinely sees and seemingly tolerates or even accepts the most grotesque of realities and behaviors, even or especially as they are performed by its iniquitous elite. We must note that these characters perverted nature is even made more twisted because they don't seem to be aware, not in the slightest, of the contradictions that it engenders in their everyday lives. Because the norm in our neocolonial society is that males should identify with but not desire each other, it becomes relatively easy for us to infer that while this culture's fundamental social structure is formed around the archetypal male-to-male bond, females are still necessary in order to keep the self-same bond from turning queer, that is to say, becoming homosexual. In this way we may say that misogyny and the denial of male homosexuality are from this perspective alone really of the same homophobic piece. Among others, this is arguably the insight we see from the story after this or exile by Elsa Martinez Coscoluela in which the violence inflicted on the Bacla or its one equivalent, the Bayot, may be seen to derive from the same oppressive ideology that subjugates, commodifies, and savages women. In Coscoluela's Magisterial Family drama, it's the frightening and utterly cruel patriarch of the affluent Negros family, the Aragons, that literally destroys the lives of the forbearing mother, dutiful daughters, and much abused gay son. On the other hand, male homosexual bonding also characterizes the world that Gisela Lopez, the seemingly blasé narrator of Coscoluela's other, arguably more interesting Boston set story all about me in habits. Only by story's end does it dawn on this misplaced and rambling Filipino overseas student who's there to live on her own in the U.S. just to escape her womanizing father's imperatives how simply impermeable to her female presence is the all-male world of Boston's outstanding writers, actors, and artists. Simply put, though she may fancy herself to be a female proof rock bored, procrastinating, intelligent, and existentially afflicted, Gisela plainly and woefully doesn't possess the proper anatomical parts to qualify as a bona fide member of this city's brilliant avant-garde, one of whom she had hoped would finally be sexually interested in her. There is a humorous story in ORA, however, in which the confused and or embattled gay man engages for mostly practical reasons in a romantic or even conjugal relationship with a woman. In Lena Espinamor's eponymous story, Onga is an abandoned Chinese orphan whose adoptive Cebuano family doesn't really totally accept him. Perhaps this is why, despite being an overtly sissy biot, he decides to marry a woman and have children with her in the end. At least this way, he can make and have his own family. It's very interesting to note that, other than the allegorical inflection of the homosexual theme, the trope of the unspeakable of gayness as enigma has persisted just as noticeably across the decades as well. Tiampos Morose and inwardly troubled characters appeared in her fiction from the 1950s and yet, in the succeeding year's stories by other women writers, we still see their updated variants. The mysterious question at the heart of Afele di Malanta's The Plain Face of Truth published in the early 1970s is precisely how to broach itself. The plot is essentially this. An opportunity for infidelity is presented Pete. The story's married main character and what's truly odd is that he doesn't take it. The reason is ordinary enough. He is obsessively devoted to the love and memory of another woman, Amelia, who is nevertheless not his wife. Ultimately, what proves to be unique about the Malanta story is that, courtesy of some flashback scenes, Amelia is revealed to be, in fact, Pete's own secret, deep, and sexually inverted self, traceable to the kind of dominant mothering he had received as a child. An almost similar tale is afforded us by the Philippines' foremost cantadora, Hilda Cordero-Fernando, in her story High Fashion, a retelling of the classic Waldian fable, The Nightingale and the Rose. This time, however, the trade-talented effeminate Couturier's wishful alter ego isn't quite a phantasm of his own fanciful making, but is rather his favorite female model, the ungrateful socialite Edwina. On the other hand, we see a light and subtle handling of dramatic details by Christina Hidalgo in her quiet and tale-like short story about the strangely troubled man called Fernando, who's calling to the priesthood he eventually rejects, precisely because of a terror living inside himself that he can't quite name. Likewise, Katrina Tuvera, in her story Flight, aptly and effectively gestures toward unspeakable sense of horror and shame that her haunted uncle character must suffer just because he is what he is. As in the earlier works of Tiempo, in both Hidalgo and Tuvera stories, metaphors of fugitive and vague things, an unknown androgynous dancer in the former, a nameless bird-taking wing in the latter, served to embody the idea of gay hauntedness. In aura, the only exception to the general rule of reticence and or indirection that has predominated the aesthetic approach Filipino women writers have adopted toward the topic of gayness is Marivisa Leven, possibly the youngest among the women in my survey. In her funny and witty story, Beau Café, Sully then decides to supplant the familiar image of the long-suffering and eternally oppressed gay figure by crafting the witty and feisty character of Dean, a plucky part-time drag queen who succeeds with just minimal compromising in getting what he wants from his trick and all too much of father, who is incidentally a decorated general of the Philippine armed forces, at the same time that he hatches the ultimate revenge on a faithless and heterosexually compliant lover. Nonetheless, just as absent in this otherwise frank story or as with the other stories, candid scenes of homosexual sex which merely gets summarized or reported in the text and is not at all dramatized. While preliminary, this study does make it possible to draw a set of provisional inferences. First, depictions of the gay character by Filipino women writers generally figure him into something other than himself, a national allegory, a symbol for cultural ambivalence, a metaphor for moral and political perversion, etc. Second, compared to Filipino male authors, Filipino women fictionists seem most comfortable working within the topologies of mystery and hauntedness. This is quite possibly a generational thing. The earlier and older writers obviously did not find it easy to bring themselves to even just imaginatively approach the reality of gayness, let alone of homoerotic desire. Moreover, gay existence, as many of these women writers imagine it, is mostly an unremittingly miserable affair. Finally, we can say that the deconstructive or symptomatic interpretive strategy that will read between the lines and interrogate the text for what it represses is necessary to make sense of many of these works. On the other hand, comparing these stories with those written by avowedly gay fictionists, for instance, those that may be found in the path-breaking series Ladlad and Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing, certain critical differences become readily apparent. First, taking the issue of homosexuality to be a self-evident and fictional given, the stories written by gay Filipino authors are free to mind the gay experience, by creatively exploring its complexities and by situating this experience within broader social contexts. Next, in these stories, the frank and incontrovertible literal truth of the gay experience is neither metaphorized nor sublimated in favor of a larger allegorical, often nationalistic project that ironically subjects it to institutional forgetting precisely by domesticating, despecifying, and eliding it. And then, in these newer and more politically conscious works, we discover a determination to confront the realities that attend the homosexual situation, which can and indeed do constitute gripping and altogether urgent narrative visions all their own. In the literary texts written by Filipino gay writers, at last, gay life is understood to be a complex admixture of joys and sorrows, triumphs and defeats, adversities, and consolations.