Haunting of Gay Manila

The Haunting of Gay Manila: Global Space-Time and the Specterof Kabaklaan

Bobby Benedicto

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 14, Number 2-3,2008, pp. 317-338 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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The haunTing of gay Manilaglobal Space-Time and the Specter of Kabaklaan

Bobby Benedicto

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

rida in Specters of Marx, reminds us of the instability of the present and its open-

ness 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 Derrida’s 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 spec-

ters 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 concep-

tions of nowness and newness that underpin the production of Manila’s 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 Fil-

ipinos (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 experi-

ences of the Filipino gay diaspora, in part through Martin Manalansan’s ethno-

graphic 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 scene’s 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

318 glQ: a JouRnal of leSBian and gay STudieS

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 Manila’s

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 Manila’s 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 Manalansan’s 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 dis-

cuss are part of a never-to-be-completed task, since the dream of burying kabak-

laan is belied by its ability to make its presence felt, either through the practices

of others or through the anxieties of the scene’s 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 Derrida’s 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 scene’s physical and psy-

chic distanciation from the “real” embodiments of kabaklaan. It must be noted,

however, that the value of Derrida’s spectrology lies in its refusal to distinguish

clearly between abstraction and corporeality, allowing us not only to imagine the


The haunTing of gay Manila 319

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 recon-

stituting Manila’s 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 term’s flirta-

tion with a binarized cartographic schema, cannot be mapped easily onto bodies

and cities. Within spaces like Manila, axes like class enable dissimilar relation-

ships 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) neolib-

eral mechanisms — including fashionable bars and clubs, gym franchises, glossy

publications, Internet portals — and 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, necessitat-

ing 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 homo-

sexuality 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 Manila’s march toward gay globality’s elusive modernity is tracked by the

bakla’s shadowy presence. I examine these processes through textual analyses of

popular texts and spaces that are part of Manila’s 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

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 acknowl-

edge 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

one’s own community.10 In this article, I attempt to negotiate the thorny transi-

tion 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 Phil-

ippines 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 (Can-

nell), and an alternative modernity (Manalansan).11 These various ways of under-

standing kabaklaan have multiple points of convergence and divergence. My aim

here, however, is not to review this literature or to engage debates about how kabak-

laan is best understood, but to show how kabaklaan can be read using the lens of

Manila’s contemporary gay scene, which has increasingly reached out to a global

network, both directly through linkages with international party circuits and indi-

rectly through media references and comparisons to gay scenes in other cities. I

focus on Manalansan’s contribution, which speaks most directly to the issues of

globalization and mobility and their effects on the complex relationship that simul-

taneously binds and separates kabaklaan and “modern” gay subjectivity.

In Global Divas, Manalansan unpacks the dynamics between bakla and



gay and argues for a view of kabaklaan as an enduring social category recuper-

ated 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 lin-

guistic 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 men’s 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 peo-

ple 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 men’s experiences in New York, swardspeak

is fast becoming a dying language in Manila’s 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 Manalansan’s 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 indi-

vidual 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 Manalan-

san 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 over-

writes putatively “local” practices?

Any attempt to answer this question must begin by acknowledging that the

nuances of the diasporic experiences of Manalansan’s 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

and exclusion from racialized gay spaces to abandon or at least temporarily forego

investments in class identity.14 Some of Manalansan’s 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 strate-

gies 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 Manalansan’s 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 obser-

vations 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 geog-

raphy 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



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 Expe-

riences 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 city’s gay scene is made visible and distinct from its seduc-

tive “global gay” simulacrum.

Manila’s 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, Manila’s

geographic separation from such sites allows its residents to be more fully inter-

pellated 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 sociohistori-

cal content; rather, that content — its articulation with upward mobility and urban

masculinity — is 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

Manila’s first glossy gay magazine was launched. In the editor’s 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 it’s 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.

And why shouldn’t 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 recon-

figuration of Manila’s 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 Manila’s arrival in the gay globe. Government: “It is truly an exciting

time for Manila’s gay community! . . . We are so excited with the ‘sleepless’ par-

ties 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 entertain-

ment that Filipinos truly deserve. We now have the chance to showcase to the

world, the very best that the Philippines can offer — claiming our rightful place in

the international circuit party arena.”24 Such comments demonstrate the rhetorical



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 move-

ment 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 temporal-

ity of homosexuality and society according to a sequence that places gay culture

as a reference to the present, to the ‘now’ — a 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 uni-

formly 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 individu-

als.” 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 gen-

eralized 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 Manila’s gay history. Thus, ironically, the mythol-

ogized sites/sights of kabaklaan are largely missing from the gay scene’s self-

representations 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 me — a gay man born and raised in


Manila — were entirely foreign. When I first picked up Manalansan’s 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 encoun-

tering 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 lit-

erature 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 leg-

ible to the foreign gaze by employing the communal signs of “gay,” “Filipino,” and

“Manila.”29 The contemporaneousness of the worlds of global gayness and kabak-

laan 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 pres-

ent, 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 prac-

tice by other(ed) Filipino gay men. It makes real what Derrida calls “the fright-

ening 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


the body of the parlorista then through the disarticulated appearances of feminin-

ity and lower-class status in figures that seek entrance into the spaces created by

the scene’s reorganization of gay culture. The speed of Manila’s gay reconfigura-

tion 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 gay-

ness. 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 gay-

ness, femininity and lower-class status make their apparitional debut.

Such apparitions are cause for flight — sometimes 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 mes-

sage 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 link-

ages among similarly situated men. The majority of users came from middle- and

upper-class backgrounds, evidenced most significantly by shared links to Manila’s

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 Guys-

4Men 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 site’s membership, reflected most

vividly in the dramatic shift in overall class profile. Although this shift cannot be


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, back-

ground imagery in shared photos).

Users have responded to the entrance of the underclass by employing lan-

guage 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: “It’s a real turn-off to

see or hear dudes who can’t even put together a decent English sentence,” or “I’d

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: “I’m looking for someone who

has a good general background . . . someone cultured. I’m 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 insidi-

ously, 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 Manila’s 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, one’s 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 hypermascu-

linity 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 dis-

claimer “no effem” serves as a generalized rejection of all traces of femininity. In

fact, many such disclaimers are now supplemented with warnings against “fakers”


or those who “pretend that they aren’t ‘effem.’ ” One profile reads: “If we meet

up and you don’t match up to the hunky pic you sent, I swear I’ll 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

you’re not effem?” As such, one now finds profiles that “come out” as masculine,

either through statements (e.g., “I’m not effem . . . I’m 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 one’s homo-

sexuality would be interpreted as female identification. Moreover, the hypermas-

culinity displayed in Filipinized virtual gay spaces presents a sharp contrast to

the feminized image of Filipino gay men (and other Asian men) overseas. Guys-

4Men inverts that exoticized and eroticized image with a virtual spectacle of (re)

masculinized Filipino homosexuality more often associated with hegemonic rep-

resentations 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 per-

formed 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 Manila’s 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 pres-

ence as the absolute condensation of both undesirable elements. Indeed, even

when broken apart, these elements are separately policed through the disciplin-

ing 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 discov-

ered 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


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 acknowledg-

ment 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 friend’s rhetorical question, as if to confirm that

the crowd that night could not be part of “everyone.” A week later, we found our-

selves 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 dur-

ing 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 cul-

tural references, and dress style — those markers that signal not wealth per se but

proximity to global gayness.

These strategies designed to find refuge from “the monster rejects of the


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 unsurpris-

ing 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 foreign-

ness. 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 trans-

lation of bakla into palatable “modern” counterparts, however, is an enterprise

that many parties have become involved in, including those who practice kabak-

laan, 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 kabaklaan’s 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, predi-

cated as such violence is on the memory of the identity of the bakla (the ghost is

“a who,” says Derrida) that pervades the scene’s narration of the present and that

is reflected so directly by Villarin’s declaration that “we are no longer confined to

the stereotypical image of the parlorista.”40 This memory — at work even here in

my own ability to write about the bakla as a point of disidentification — enables us

to see (and hence police) kabaklaan’s traces in the bodies and practices of others.


In effect, Manila’s sites of gayness are treated to the sporadic yet routine reap-

pearance 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 Manila’s 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, Manila’s 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 land-

scape 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; we — its

purveyors — are estranged from yet rooted in the homeland, only precariously

belonging to the present of gay globality. It is this fragile belonging, threatened by

the bakla’s rival claim to Filipino homosexuality, which reproduces the bakla as

specter, as the other’s intolerable other.

Phantom global gayness

I have thus far presented the globalization of gay Manila as an imaginative spa-

tiotemporal 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 prom-

ises 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 vis-

ible 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


even in Manila where Filipinos are not subjected to the same exclusionary proto-

cols faced by the diaspora and where elite subjects can draw privilege from class

and gender codes, gay globality remains nonactualizable. The aspirational trans-

formations that underpin the semblance of gay globality do not constitute the imi-

tation 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 prophecy — it is always the produc-

tion 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 scene’s 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/appa-

ritions travel.49 But the market, it must be stressed, is more than a transmitter. It

is also constituted by neoliberal mechanisms — including but not limited to the

clubs, parties, magazines, and Internet portals I have named here — which facili-

tate 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 paral-

lel invisibilization, the veiling of the impossibility of global gayness through the

speed of global interpellation, which not only facilitates identification but recon-

figures 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


is a trajectory made seemingly plausible by the proximity effected by its media-

tized 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. Der-

rida 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 sub-

jects 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 Der-

rida’s 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

modernity’s 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 glo-

bality, made clear to the excluded migrant but obscured by Manila’s bright lights,

we might finally begin stepping off the linear path and addressing the violent hier-

archies we ourselves reproduce in the process of gay world making.

notes

1. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Bas-

ingstoke, 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


Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Litera-

tures 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 McInerney’s 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 Tránsito: Travelers, Visibility, and Gay Identity,” GLQ

8 (2002): 59 – 60.

7. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 125 – 26. For a more detailed discussion of incarnation and

the body in Derrida’s 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), 176 – 200.

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 Amer-

ican media (as, for example, in Crookshank, “And Everything Turns White,” Gen-

eration Pink Online Exclusive, www.generationpink.com/4_whiteparty.asp [accessed

October 16, 2006]).

9. This specific injunction was made by Françoise Lionnet. See Lionnet, “Autoethnog-

raphy: The An-Archic Style of Dust Tracks on a Road,” in Autobiographical Voices

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 115. For other key statements on autoeth-

nography, 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),

24 – 46; 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 Author-

ity,” Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (Spring 2003): 61 – 91.

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 Post-

modern 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): 265 – 81; 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 (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a brief review of these texts and other

works on bakla, see Manalansan, Global Divas, 35 – 44. For the relationship of bakla

to Southeast Asian cosmologies, see Johnson, Beauty and Power, 25 – 32.


12. Manalansan, Global Divas, 46 – 47.

13. Manalansan, Global Divas, 48.


15. Manalansan, Global Divas, 115 – 16, 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): 53 – 72. 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, July – August – September 2005,

55.

21. Jonas Bagas, “Priding the Party,” Icon Magazine, July – August – September 2005,

10.

22. While the example discussed here is New York, others have demonstrated how Fili-

pinos (among other Asians) are excluded through the tightly structured (racial) hier-

archy that pervades gay scenes in countries most often associated with global gay-

ness. See Peter Jackson, “That’s 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), 181 – 88.

23. Richie Villarin, “Editor’s Note,” Icon Magazine, January – February – March 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 Philip-

pines, 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 archipelago’s

peculiar Spanish-American colonial history, which has produced a contemporary cul-

ture 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 Tránsito,” 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


Place-Making: Exploring Gay Life in Manila,” Gender & Society 19, no. 2 (2005):

180 – 98; 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 7 – 9, 2005).

30. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 244. Quoted

also in Giorgi, “Madrid en Tránsito,” 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, 24 – 26.

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]).



42. Avery Gordon’s 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 (Minne-

apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16.


44. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 45.

45. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 122.




48. Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota 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), 106 – 19.


51. Bauman, Globalization, 94.


Documents

Haunting of Gay Manila