Wellspringsof gay lingo

Science and geography are also wellsprings of Philippine gay lingo.

Shopping malls are famous cruising places in whatever continent and country. One such mall is Harrison Plaza, located in the heart of Manila. The distance from Harrison Plaza to Dakota Street (note the colonial American names) is quite lengthy. Thus, in the 1970s, a man with a big sex organ was called “Dakota Harrison.”

“Ahas” means “snake” in Tagalog. The root word for this is “anaconda.” A sample sentence is: “You are so anaconda. You stole my jowa (boyfriend).” Synonyms for this would be “serpentina” and “Medusa.” To have pointed lips implies somebody who loves to sow intrigues.

At present, more and more straight-acting gays and gays from the professions are coming out of the closet, giving a literary, sophisticated quality to gay language. Waiting for a taxicab is no longer a dull activity. It has now become, “Let’s go, let’s take a Taxina Hong Kingston so we’ll reach our destination faster!” The allusion is to the Asian-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston.

A dumb person in the Philippines is called “bobo” or “boba.” In the academe, she would be called “Bo-Vita Sackville West,” the alleged lover of modernist writer Virginia Woolf. “Psycho-ningning” is somebody on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She is also called a “Blanche Dubois.”

The late Filipino essayist Chitang Guerrero Nakpil, who wrote such elegant essays, has her name emblazoned in gay lingo on two counts. First, if the customer in a restaurant wants to get the “chit,” or the bill for the food. Second, if the gay man is in a fighting mood, or “guerrero” from the Spanish word “guerra,” which means “war.”

However, this carnivalesque has been appropriated by the heterosexual mainstream. Gay lingo has now become more widespread. Even the most straight-acting heterosexual can now ask, “Was the movie your type?” He can now use the word “type,” which is a signal for gay discourse, without feeling that his masculinity has been diminished.

Movie stars, media people, academics, even politicians now use a gay word or two to prove a controversial point or to score some points with the masses. But the words they use are outdated, for like an organism, gay language in the Philippines changes and grows every day, as if it wants to outpace the straight majority that desperately wants to contain – and control – it.

What are the implications of Philippine gay lingo?

One, it is a way of fictioning the nation. What is otherwise dismissed as a trivial and dross aspect of popular culture has been used to language the existence of a particular group of people.

Two, this gay language is the homosexuals’ way of fictioning their integration into society, in their own terms. There is the notion, then, of wholeness – that this society is not shattered but even made whole by the assertion of this powerful discourse.

Third, the serious is satirized; the trivial is treated with seeming seriousness. In a way, then, this is a grand burlesque: language as an act of subversion.

Thus, homosexuals in the Philippines now have a way of languaging their desire. By implication, they now have a way of languaging their lives. This bricollage of disparate elements is an act of subverting the existing, heterosexual power relations. In a sense, the Filipino gay empire has struck back at the center, using a language full of slippages and cracks – a language at once sophisticated and vulgar, serious and light, timely and timeless.

*      *      *

Now let us leave the ivory tower of academic language and go to the heart of the matter – the world of fiction where stories live. This is an excerpt from ‘Riverrun,’ my novel to be published on April 14 by Penguin Random House South East Asia. Printed copies and e-copies of the novel will be sold in South East Asia and the rest of the world.

How does one fall in love?

Luis was my seatmate in Grade One. He sat on my left side while Vivian sat on the right. Even on the first few days of school, I was already confused. I liked Vivian – she was tall and bright and kind, even if she had scabies on her legs, pink raised bumps with a clear top filled with fluid. But I also liked Luis. Not only was he tall and bright and kind, there was also an almost electric energy around him that I felt whenever I saw him.

When I was in Grade One I didn’t know what it was called. Just that I wanted to be with him in Gardening class, drawing water from the pond in front of the Principal’s Office, then watering our garden plots bursting with leaves of pechay and appendages of eggplants. Just that I wanted to stare at him when he recited in class, giving the square roots of numbers and answering questions in multiplication with almost the speed of light. Or so I thought, being in that state between admiration and levitation. Just that I wanted to walk with him on the way home, looking at the playground swarming with children, the commissary filling up with customers in the late afternoon, the cogon grasses beginning to flame with sunset’s vermilion and gold.

He was the last person I thought of before I slept, Luis of the smooth skin and the face aureoled with light. And he was the first person I thought of upon waking up, making up scenes in my mind about how the weekday would turn up. Or if it was a Saturday, I would invite Luis for a game of pelota in the court beside the humongous hangar, then we would have snacks of hopia, thin flaky pastry filled with purple yam, and soda in the commissary while around us, the small, pink flowers of the acacia fell, one by one.

(Danton Remoto is the Head of School and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. He can be reached at [email protected])

Comments can be sent to [email protected]