J. Neil C. Garcia

The only reason I can perfectly identify with the “garden variety” gay stereotype is that there is an undeniable sameness between us: we both are homosexuals. I am different in this difference, then, but it doesn’t quite matter because I am just as oppressed for it.

As I discuss the dominant pattern of male homosexuality as a psychosexual inversion (a view that takes homosexual males to be psychologically “inverted” females), for example, I will have to come face-to-face with a model of local subjectivity which is the Tagalog-Filipino binarized self: loob/labas (literally: “inside/

outside”).

This query led me to inquire into just who the gays were who comprised my generation, and it serendipitously dawned on me that a kind of “conflict” exists among the ranks of urban-dwelling gays in the Philippines, who are really a variegated, noisy, and helplessly provisional

“conglomeration” of people, whose inability to liberate themselves from homophobic oppression is not only because they have internalized it, but also because real forces in their lives, almost indistinguishable from who they think they are, make such alliances and “allo-identifications” difficult if not virtually impossible.