Post by ernesto thaddeus m. solmerano on Jun 9, 2008 22:53:41 GMT -5
Was Rizal gay?
by J. Neil C. Garcia
There is something malicious about this question—asked as it has been on various occasions by both scholars and wags, whose interest in the subject ranges from the blatantly political to the facetiously absurd. Indeed, of all Filipino icons, Rizal proves to be the fairest game as far as this as well as similar lines of inquiry are concerned: while I was attending an international poetry festival in Taipei late last year, a kind and inquisitive poet from Kuala Lumpur asked me if it was true that Jose Rizal was the father of Adolf Hitler! Apparently, a Filipino academic had delivered a paper in a conference in Malaysia a decade or two ago, and before an audience of Rizalists from the region, had bravely proposed such a quaint and unthinkable thing!
But far from being quaint or unthinkable, the idea that Rizal could have been a homosexual merits, I think, a braver and slightly more serious examination, though we must admit it is one which necessarily proceeds, even under the best of circumstances, out of a kind of scholarly malice—a malice that is inescapable, for it is the malice of presuming that such a question could have been intelligible or relevant to Rizal at all. In this short presentation, I will humor the question “Was Rizal gay?” if only to open up to discussion the various conditions under which this question could be sensibly asked, as well as the various conditions under which this question could be sensibly answered. In other words, I wish us to examine just what we must consider when we inquire into gender and sexuality, during Rizal’s “life and times,” as well as—it may be difficult to accept this at the outset—our own.
Sometime during the Centennial of Rizal’s martyrdom, Isagani R. Cruz, local pop-culture provocateur and professor of literature and Philippine studies at the De La Salle University, wrote a column for the now-defunct Filmag: Filipino Magazin, shockingly titled "Bakla ba si Rizal?"[1]
The answer to this question, if Cruz is to be believed, is a resounding and categorical “Yes!” And he offers what he calls “biographical evidence” in order to arrive at this question’s confidently affirmative answer.
First, Rizal was a bakla because he was afraid of committing himself to the revolutionary cause. Second, Rizal’s kabaklaan made itself apparent in his periodic “failings” in his relationships with the women to whom he was supposed to have been romantically linked. Third, Rizal, unlike his compatriots, didn’t go “wenching” in the brothels of Barcelona and Madrid (at least, not very often). Fourth, Rizal might not have even been the father of Josephine’s benighted baby boy, since—paraphrasing noted Rizalist historian Ambeth Ocampo’s feelings on the matter of Rizal’s “disputable paternity”—Josephine would seem to have been routinely sexually abused and consequently impregnated by her stepfather.
Of course, these four “conjectures” hardly qualify as proof. They are more likely the end-results of what I can only describe as a largely catty evidential procedure that begs now to be challenged, if only for its underlying assumptions concerning what being a bakla means: one, a bakla cannot ever be a revolutionary because he is essentially spineless and a coward; two, failing in your relationships with women makes you a bakla; three, a bakla cannot possibly have sex with women, not even when they are wenches; and four, to be a bakla is to be impotent or at least incapable of getting a woman pregnant.
The dubiousness—and utter stupidity—of these assumptions hardly needs to be emphasized: according to them, basically, kabaklaan is the negation of everything good and desirable in masculinity and is hence, devoid of its own inner substance and worth. Indeed, even if I were to champion the cause of the bakla and would like to win someone as “big” and popular as Rizal over to my side, I would nonetheless balk at Cruz’s way of going about such a task. His “biographical evidence” demonstrates nothing, other than the unflattering and sadly naive opinion he holds of who (or what) a bakla is.
In saying that I do not find Cruz’s method credible in the very least, I am of course also saying that there is a better way of making the project of ascertaining Rizal’s “gender and sexuality” work. And this method involves, first and foremost, asking if the question itself is sensible, given the historical period in which I would wish it to make sense.
Examining the categories one is using in one’s study of such slippery “realities” as sexuality and gender is the necessary first step, then. This is because the categories we use are always culture-bound and historically specific, and as such are never quite neutral and “scientific,” let alone universally reliable and insightful. To ask if Rizal was a bakla, one has, first and foremost, to be clear about what the concept bakla meant at the time and in the place that Rizal lived. In other words, the way we understand bakla today most probably was not the way people in these islands a century ago understood it. This alone makes one’s project more difficult than it might have originally appeared, for it requires one to undertake a comprehensive study of the “sex/gender system” of mid-nineteenth-century Philippines—in particular, the sexual and gender categories that operated in the lives of the Tagalog ilustrados, whom Rizal most certainly was. Needless to say, such study involves looking into a miscellany of Rizal’s own writings—letters, articles, novels, even an incomplete autobiography—and making these answer to a “historicist” critique. Among other things, an assiduous re-reading of them within a conceptual history of gender and sexuality will lend further credence to the argument that, as a national figure or “text,” Rizal is far from self-evident, despite the monolithic discourses which have come to subsume him over the last century of Filipino nationalism. Of these various but complementary discourses, it is those that make “presentist” assumptions about Rizal’s unproblematic masculinity and heterosexuality that call for the most avid unpacking here.
My own tentative findings about the “social semantics” of bakla—in other words, the career this concept has enjoyed in Philippine social history—would seem to indicate that, until recently, it didn’t even connote an identity that is distinguished by its sexuality, but merely a quality of emotional wavering, indecision or uncertainty—something that anyone unlucky enough can suffer from at any point in his or her life. Until early in this century, in fact, bakla wasn't so much a noun as a verb: one was nababakla if he or she was not sure of his or her choices, or if one was suddenly afraid or confounded by the unexpected turn of events.[2] In contrast, nowadays, a bakla is an effeminate male who wishes to have sex with “real men” or tunay na lalake. Thus, the bakla in our midst is a variety of male homosexual who can easily be recognized because of his swishy ways, and whose sexual desire defines his innermost and most authentic sense of self.
Obviously, during Rizal’s time, there was no bakla or effeminate homosexual: there may have been effeminate men (called, among others, binabae/yi, bayoguin, asog and bido), but they were not defined as such by virtue of the desire they possessed, but only by their choice of occupations (feminine ones, like weaving, pottery-making, and the like), and their womanlike appearance and behavior. In fact, the idea that people were different on account of the gender of the object of their sexual desire (in other words, that people were either heterosexual or homosexual) was alien to our turn-of-the-nineteenth-century ancestors, who most probably desired and had sex with whomever they wanted at whatever point in their lives, without thinking of what such desires or acts had to say about their identities, their conceptions of who they essentially were.
If we must be accurate about things, even in Europe itself, homosexuality was not a reality until it was officially “invented” in 1869—in Germany, to be exact, by sexologist Karl Maria Kertbeny.[3] Thus, even when Rizal had lived there at around the same time that the discourse of homosexuality was steadily being “normalized” and propagated, it is quite doubtful that he was influenced at all by the latest sexological revolutions that were being waged inside the psychiatric clinics in Europe’s more technologically advanced countries (Spain most certainly not being one of them.) A passage in El Filibusterismo, from the chapter titled “Manila Characters” illustrates how, to Rizal, the thought—the blatant image—of two men having an intimate relationship was not a particularly upsetting thing:
That respectable gentleman who is so elegantly attired is not a physician but a homeopathist on his own, sui generis: he believes totally in the similia similibus, the attraction of likes. That young Cavalry captain with him is his favorite disciple.[4]
The chapter from which this passage comes treats the Fili's reader to a menagerie of Manila's "queer" residents. This passage not only confirms the existence of same-sex-loving men in Hispanic Philippines, but the very casualness of its tone tells us that Rizal was not phobically affected by what it represented. In fact, the almost-funny "pun" he must have intended to make when he chose to denominate this doctor a "homeopathist,"[5] reveals he found the subject slightly amusing, or at least amusing enough that he chose not to abominate it, which he could very well have done, as abomination was something he often did in his writings, including this chapter itself. This would have arguably been the case had he been sufficiently “Europeanized” in the sexological sense—which is to say, had Rizal been sufficiently raised and trained in the newly inducted homophobic regime that had begun to take hold of the European imagination in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As the constructionist historian Arnold Davidson puts it, this regime of “sexuality” was made possible by the emergence, in Europe, of a new, psychiatric style of reasoning,[6] a manner of arguing about sexual personalities, orientations, “paraphilias” and other such “categories of being,” which arose alongside the various disorders—neuroses, psychoses, hysterias, and the like—that were being discursively produced by the different “biomedical” dispensations of the time.
Thus, Rizal could not have been a bakla (the way we currently know this concept), nor a gay/homosexual, simply because these were categories of being that were not available during his time. To call him gay or bakla would be to commit a grave anachronistic mistake, similar perhaps to calling him a “yuppie” or even—pundits in UP would hate me for saying this—a "Filipino."[7] Obviously, it would have been impossible for someone coming from that era to self-identify with the nuances and complexities of the many dizzyingly new-fangled nomenclatures of our own time.
All this doesn’t mean, most certainly, that there were no men who had sex with each other previous to homosexuality’s unfelicitous debut into the world. (One wonders just how accurate is this El Fili passage, coming as it does from the chapter that purports to present and introduce the typical “characters” of Rizal’s Manila). We can only imagine how, from the earliest times, all over the planet, the male and female of the species had manifested both heterosexual and homosexual behaviors. But to repeat that oft-repeated mantra of social constructionism, engaging in homosexual sex is one thing, being a homosexual is another.[8] Previous to the sexological “production” of the homosexual as a “species”—in Michel Foucault's formulation—of personality, there were men who loved other men, and women who loved other women, but they were not much different from everybody else (in fact, most probably, they were everybody else.)
The same thing must have been true in the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth century. If the confession manuals from the early Spanish period were to be believed, it would seem that the newly converted natives of the islands were not much loath to the activity of mutually arousing one another—men with men, women with women, men with women, etc.—within such "harmless" contexts and occasions as el burlarse, or "childish play."[9] We might wish to recall, in this regard, just how scandalized the proper frayles were, when they first saw rowdy men in the Visayas sporting all sorts of penile implants (penis pins and the like), which they gamely used in order to make their sexual encounters both bloodier and—they themselves gamely admitted, upon being asked—considerably more pleasurable.[10]
Needless to say, prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, the precolonial inhabitants of the Philippines enjoyed a kind of sexual “innocence” (or at least unselfconsciousness) that only later on became corrupted when the colonial Church introduced the discourse of sodomy, which for three centuries it propagated in the Philippines through the confessional. The discourse of sodomy, however, was not the same as that of homosexuality, for it referred to a number of non-procreative, extra-conjugal and/or sexually “non-missionary” acts that anyone might be weak enough to sometimes commit (with men, women, or animals) but that, because merely a variant of “unnatural sin against the sixth commandment,” didn’t define one’s psychological constitution, or sense of self.[11]
Moreover, the concept of sodomy was itself “utterly confused,” for not only were the varieties of acts it encompassed dizzyingly plural and shifting, it also functioned, in Europe’s “pre-sexological regimes,” as a most convenient stigmatizing weapon, a demonizing label with which it was practically impossible to identify, inasmuch as it was, in fact, an “empty category” into which the powerless were thrust by those who dictated the scope and signification of its use.[12] In the case of Hispanic Philippines—as historian John Leddy Phelan concludes—the resident Sangleyes or Chinese were the colonial administrators’ most convenient target for this xenophobia-driven charge, on whom the Spanish settlers in the islands depended for vital economic services.[13]
Strangely enough, in his annotations to Dr. Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas,[14] Rizal himself echoes the Sinophobic accusation of sodomy, unmindful of the bias in Morga’s account, which had obviously been “cribbed” from previous relaciones and cronicas, written by such dubious sources as Marcelo de Ribadeneira and Miguel de Benavidez[15]. While Rizal's intention in his annotations was clearly the unpacking of Spanish colonialist "fantasies" and racist misrepresentations of the Philippines in the available documents and histories, he didn't himself realize—rather, he didn't wish to realize—just how fantastic was the claim that the indios of the Philippines had been innocent of the “unnatural sin,” until they were corrupted by the foreigners, particularly the Chinese.
Typically, the argument used by the Spanish commentators in the early years of the Conquista was that there wasn't even a native word for sodomy among the indios of the Philippines, as though by virtue of this linguistic voiding of the “unspeakable crime” (or the nefandam libidinem), the many acts that constituted it could no longer be possible among them.[16] Of course, it is the Hispanic colonial archives themselves that can be shown to contradict this amazingly specious argument. In one “confession manual” or confesionario, written by the friar Gaspar de San Agustin and published in Manila in 1713, a question relating to “sins against the sixth commandment” went: Cun nagpuit, o cun nagpapuit, o cun nagcasala sa hayop.[17] This question, inquiring as it did into the penetrative or receptive position the penitent might have assumed during anal sexual intercourse—as well as into probable acts of bestiality on the side—unequivocally proves that Tagalog words existed, at this stage of Spanish evangelization, to refer to at least these three forms of sodomitic congress.
Nonetheless, Rizal's "denial" of the Filipino native's "innate capacity" to commit sodomy was, in the end, quite understandable, especially when we recall the fact that his general purpose in putting out and annotating Morga's Sucesos was that he wished to paint a bright and “noble” picture of his countrymen (and only incidentally, countrywomen)—something that might serve to locate the Philippines in an Enlightenment, “evolutionary” narrative of development to which he subscribed, as well as to rectify the vulgarly unflattering, “Quiaoquiapist” stereotypes that circulated in Spain and that personally afflicted him and the other reformists during this time.[18] In his study, "Rizal Reading Pigafetta," Resil Mojares makes a similar observation: in his edition of the Sucesos, we see Rizal effectively writing a “counterhistory,”[19] a marginal though no less arrogant text from someone who fancied himself capable of adjudicating between foreign and native perspectives, between “dubious” and “correct” knowledges about the Philippines. Predictably enough, such an undertaking was characterized by Rizal’s own nativist mystifications and expropriations of European Orientalist imaginings.
In any case, by furthering his own uncritical Orientalism, Rizal unwittingly bought into the same “Humanist,” colonialist logic against which he was trying to inveigh, countervailing his own project and contradicting himself now and again. For instance, in regard to Morga’s remark that the native men and women of the islands were sexually “incontinent,” Rizal argues that they simply saw no sin in sex, believing the act of reproduction, “like many other peoples… [as] a natural instinct.” Further, he states that the pagan indios weren't so much "loose" as possessing "an excess of naturalism," and that they were not fettered by "religious or moral prohibition."[20] Reading his textual "intervention," we realize that the contradiction is clear: while Rizal sees the unbridled sexual activities between native men and women—which were much remarked about and bewailed in the early Spanish accounts—as constitutive of a kind of natural innocence or “naturalism,” he cannot imagine that such an innocence could have allowed the same people to “wander through [sodomy’s] mistaken paths.” In other words, Rizal criticizes Morga by “denaturalizing” his moralistic account of sexuality, yet stops his argument short when it begins to dangerously wander into the “unnatural” (yes, Rizal unblinkingly accepts this adjective!) terrain of sodomy. This seems stranger since, reading further into the same annotation, we realize that Rizal understood sodomy to chiefly include conjugally “heterosexual” acts, as when he writes that the sodomitic Chinese and foreigners commit it with the “indio women, who are their wives.” This well-meaning “defense” by Rizal of his people is, of course, merely one out of so many others in the Sucesos, and we must remember that sodomy, while a social stigma against which Rizal obviously demurred, was, finally, only a matter of misguided or “mistaken” activities, and did not, in the way it was conceived during this pre-sexological period in Philippine history, constitute an intimate or definitive sense of identity. (Suffice it to say that sodomy was simply a discourse of acts, not selves.)
If Rizal wasn’t—because he couldn't have been—a bakla or a gay/homosexual, just exactly what was he? Might he have been a binabae/yi, which was a category of gender identity that he most probably understood? Perhaps not,[21] for not only was it highly unlikely that anyone of his class or stature could have voluntarily identified with what in this nineteenth-century masculinist culture was clearly a pejorative term of effeminophobic abuse, there exists no mention of this appellation ever being tacked on him in any of the available—which is to say, approved—accounts of his life. (Of course, it is healthy to stay suspicious regarding such “official” accounts: knowing how blind nationalistic zeal had damaged the objectivity of so many of Rizal’s commentators and chroniclers, we cannot be too sure these accounts have not been sanitized precisely to conform with the nationalist imperative to apotheosize the greatest scion of the Filipino race!) Most probably he was an hombre, an hombre ilustrado to be precise, which, on second thought, tells us nothing new about him at all.
Ah, but let us remember that since Rizal couldn’t have been a homosexual, it only follows that he couldn’t have been a heterosexual either!
What I wish to stress at this point is this: previous to the invention of homosexuality, individuals were not heterosexuals either, for the simple reason that homo and hetero were inverse forms of the same sexual logic that had not existed before the regime of sexuality (that is, of sexuality as we know it) overtook our modern lives. Indeed, while men and women throughout history married and begot children, they nonetheless were not defined along the lines of sexual object choice until the last quarter of Rizal’s century—and then, only in Europe at first. Thus, for the longest time, men and women were not cloven into the identities of “the homosexual” and “the heterosexual.” Whatever sexual discourse that might have operated as a minimally significant force in their lives didn’t discriminate between those who were attracted to members of their own sex, and those who desired the opposite sex, although it perhaps might have had something to say about the frequency in which they had sex, or the positions they assumed while doing it (these, of course, were the basic issues which the discourse of sodomy busied itself with.) As individuals whose lives were not governed by the homo/hetero distinction, they were relatively free to commit homosexual and heterosexual acts without thinking how these acts affected their selfhoods.
By contrast, in our own sexually self-conscious time, one can scarcely think of having sex with another man without at the same tremblingly pleasurable moment becoming at the very least “worried” of what this could mean about who one really is, deep inside.
Rizal and the other ilustrados of his time were presumably socialized to think of marriage as the logical social destiny. But this had little to do with what they could actually experience sexually, within the privacy of their own lives. Hence, if we cannot make use of the relatively recent homo/hetero dichotomy with which to describe the sexual and erotic milieu in which Rizal lived, we might perhaps look at the organizing social principles that determined the relations one gender at that time could have with the other, or—and this is extremely important—with itself.
Just like in the greater part of Europe, middle-class males and females in the Philippines during the time of Rizal were socialized separately from each other. Boys went to boys’ schools, girls to girls’ schools—a policy that was implemented by the Spanish colonial administration from the smallest parochial schools in the barrios to the biggest collegios and "normal schools" in Manila.[22] Interesting accounts of just what this arrangement entailed, in the lives of these students, may be found in Rizal’s El Filibusterismo, and in a rather candid column written by Felix Roxas, mayor of Manila from 1905 to 1917.
A contemporary of Rizal at the Ateneo Municipal, Roxas wrote for El Debate, a Spanish-language newspaper from the American colonial period. In a piece titled “The Danger of Coeducation,” he shares his memories of “the effects of puberty” on the young men of the Ateneo, and in particular recalls the embarassing time when, despite all measures, “human instinct... develop[ed] [and] passionate latters [were] addressed to each other by fellow classmates.” [23] On the other side of the gender divide, Rizal alludes to the existence of erotic affection in Manila’s all-female schools in a scene from chapter twenty-two of El Fili (titled "La Funccion"). In this scene, the narrator enters Paulita's mind, and verbalizes how the French word cocher (from "to ride" or "to mount"), reminds her "of certain terms which convent girls use among themselves to explain a sort of passion."[24] And of course, we must remember that even outside these “exclusive school” contexts, piety and propriety dictated that young men and women meet only under the assiduous supervision of spinster aunts and trusted yayas. Suffice it to say, such "unnecessary meetings" were generally frowned upon and discouraged.
Thus, the basic social structure that determined the relations between the male and female genders of the ilustrado class in nineteenth-century Philippines, can be called “homosocial”: individuals were expected to develop bonds within each of the two genders, bonds that could be expressed in several ways. Some of the ways, for example, in which men bonded with one another were through exclusive friendships, “discipleships” and cliques, or memberships in fraternities and clubs (La Liga Filipina would be one of the more illustrious examples of an “all-boys club” that existed during the period of the Propaganda movement). Women bonded with one another within the realm of the home, in particular, the grantedly “feminine space” of the kitchen, where they were seen to become their own naturally gossipy selves, while the men talked endlessly about matters of consequence (such as the affairs of state) in the entresuelo or sala.
I am of course not really interested in male bonds per se, except perhaps where these bonds may be seen to express themselves sexually, as they often did in the heavily homosocial past. Rizal and the other propagandistas and their European patrons and supporters were all male, and they all bonded. Vicente L. Rafael, examining the records and photographs of the period, notices the overtly “masculine” texture of such bondings: not only did Rizal and his compatriots organize themselves into a mutual-aid association called Indios Bravos ("Brave Indians"), they also took pains to further "masculinize" their bodies by lifting weights and engaging in sports like fencing and the martial arts, if only to offer an alternative to the Orientalist stereotypes circulating in Europe concerning the Philippine indios' perceived "lack of virility."[25] Thus, while their common ideological persuasion—their collective wish to enact political reforms back in the Philippine islands—provided a basis for this bonding, their gender was also, in truth, the real common ground on which they confidently stood, embracing one another, in fond solidarity, as it were. Just where does the social end and the sexual begin, as far as these bondings and embracings were concerned? I for one cannot tell. All we might safely say in this regard is this: in the absence of the paranoia-making discourse of homosexuality—a discourse that suddenly rendered suspect one’s desires and hitherto unselfconscious longings to bond with others of one’s own gender—men like Rizal most probably expressed their fellowship and camaraderie with one another in ways that did not, at times, exclude the genital.
We know, reading the voluminous correspondence between Rizal and the Austrian ethnologist Ferdinand Blumentritt—as well as, to a lesser extent, between Rizal and the other “reformists” living in Spain and elsewhere on the continent—just how appropriate is this figure of los abrazos or "embrace." Indeed, this was how Rizal and those dearest to him usually ended their postcards and letters to each other: "I embrace you."
We also know, especially as regards Rizal and Blumentritt, just how affectionate and loving this epistolary discourse could become, so much so that they would write (jokingly) how they are “desperately in love” with the other,[26] would keep sending photos, bric-a-brac, mementos and flowers (!) to the other,[27] would say that they would "dare everything" for the sake of the other,[28] would profess that they were always thinking of the other,[29] or would suffer disturbing dreams about the other. In one letter, Rizal relates that his strange dream of his “dear brother and friend” ended with him “waking up tired and sweating; it was very hot on the bed.”[30]
While it may be a mistake to read anything more into such declarations of intimacy between the younger Rizal and the “brotherly” Blumentritt—whose strongest point of affinity with one another would seem to be, to all intents and purposes, an intellectual one—we must nonetheless remember just how such bonds between men at that time constituted a continuum, and how this continuum conceivably stretched from one form of affection to the other, such as fraternal intimacy to romantic love. How else can we explain the ease with which Rizal and Blumentritt could call each other “dear,”[31] or declare that they "love" each other in their letters, without any sense of shame?
On the other hand, there exists one letter, written by Rizal, in which an intimation of a kind of shame creeps in, though it is one which he quickly brushes off[32]: in it, he would seem to be defending the “intimate fraternity which [they] profess mutually” against “enemies [who do not] understand this sentiment [because they] don’t have a delicate sentiment” and are “rude.” Writing “you honor me enough by calling me dear friend," Rizal refuses to discuss the matter further in this letter to Blumentritt—"I have no more comments to make"—and merely says, "Perhaps you may undertand me." Not in so many words, Rizal would seem to be saying that he and his beloved friend are being "intrigued" by some Spaniards back in Madrid, and while in this letter he denies its veracity, he nonetheless cannot do so plainly, and merely appeals to the hope that Blumentritt "may understand" what he cannot quite bring himself to say.
This denial and the verbal difficulty in which it is couched do not, in themselves, mean anything: the intrigue may or may not have any basis in fact, despite or precisely because Rizal mentions it in such an atypical fashion (atypical because Rizal, in his letters, is rarely at a loss for words). What this letter does make clear is that such possibility (a sexual one) existed for the kind of "sentiment" Rizal and Blumentritt shared, if only because it was found cogent both by the "rude Spaniards" and by Rizal, who acknowledges it enough by writing Blumentritt about it. (And of course, we see that Rizal, at the same careful moment that he acknowledges the rumor's existence, turns suddenly inarticulate in his disavowal of it.)
Is there proof to be had to make this and other such “intriguing” propositions more tenable? I’m afraid that after the nationalist historians (who were raised in the American colonial system, and thus were all too clearly aware of the stigmatizing effects of homosexuality) had gone through and “cleaned up” every little scrap of Rizaliana, it might no longer be possible to ascertain anything in the extant records that vaguely suggests Rizal had sex (or wished to have sex) with men, such as with any of his compatriots, for instance.[33] In fact such historians seem to have lost no time in accomplishing the opposite goal: from as early as I can remember, according to enlightened lore, Rizal was a hero made more heroic by his spectacularly abundant machismo, managing to have a girl fall helplessly in love with him everywhere in the world he went. For sure, in retelling the life of this national hero, these historians were inscribing that life with some of their own values, which they wished Rizal himself had shared—even if Rizal clearly hadn't.
And then, there may yet be some hope left. In a personal conversation with Ocampo a couple of years ago, he mentioned that there are still bits of Rizaliana out there that can offer us an alternative picture of our country's most beloved hero. In particular, he was referring to a few hard-written illustrations or "sketches," apparently drawn from life by the good doctor, of his patients' penises in various stages of tumescence, in a notebook to be found in a collection housed in the Newberry library in Chicago. The notebook itself has already been perused and copied by a number of Rizal archivists and scholars[34]; it's indeed very telling how none of them has mentioned the fact that such "interesting" drawings even exist.[35] Even as these drawings may not signify anything more than a conscientious physician’s clinical documentation of the cases he was managing (how curious that a number of them should have to be “venereal,” however), Ocampo does make the oft-repeated point clear that most Filipinos have yet to see Rizal plainly, or “without the overcoat.”
Needless to say, to the extent that Rizal is a national hero, the full range of his “human complexity” has largely been glossed over by nationalist hagiographic discourse, for the sake of emphasizing the unimpeachable “greatness” of his heroism. Of course, Ocampo wasn’t the first person to realize this, or even to articulate it in public. A graduate student of the University of Santo Tomas, Ante Radaic, bravely offered an alternative picture of Rizal in a series of thoughtful articles that came out in the Weekly Women's Magazine in 1962.[36] In "The Fears of Rizal: Life and Love," Radaic attends to Rizal's published Memorias de un estudiante de Manila, and surmises how he must have suffered from a kind of “inferiority complex,” borne out of his painfully keen awareness of his own physically diminutive size. To Radaic, this peculiar “melancholy” rendered him miserable throughout most of his childhood and adolescence, and it subsequently compelled him to overcompensate by excelling not only in his studies but in every other aspect of his finally amazing and “monumental” life.
That Filipinos don’t know the “complete picture” was, likewise, precisely the point raised by Rizal’s own younger sister, Maria, in an interview with Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil (then Guerrero-Cruz) in the Evening News, shortly after the end of the Second World War.[37] In this interview, Maria confides that his famous older brother kept certain “secrets,” to which only his immediate family was privy, such as the fact that one of his shoulders was markedly lower than the other and that his face was slightly prognathous. Rizal painstakingly “hid” these apparently hurtful truths by wearing specially tailored suits and by presenting only his most flattering “profile” every time he posed for a photograph.
I don’t believe conventional biography or even autobiography is the only recourse we have if we wish to pin down certain vital “truths” about such a historical personage as Rizal. As Leon Ma. Guerrero points out in his translator’s preface to the book, The Young Rizal, Rizal apparently subjected his only existing autobiography—the aforesaid Memorias—to "considerable revision," implying that he was willfully cultivating a persona in his own writings.[38] What's worth noting is that these emendations were not strictly stylistic. Some were blatantly substantive, especially the erasure and substitution of certain names and facts, ostensibly for the purpose of concealing his identity, already effectively dissimulated by the pen name "P. Jacinto" on the manuscript's title page.
In particular, Guerrero points out an interesting erasure in the second chapter, “My Life Away from My Parents—My Troubles," referring to the nickname by which the young Rizal was teased, by his burly boy classmates in Biñan. Alberto and Tomas F. Barretto, who published the Spanish edition of Memorias in 1949, had decided—rather erroneously, as Guerrero declares in an endnote—to put "Calambeño" (one who hails from Calamba) in place of the original word which had been "crossed out... so thoroughly" in the manuscript. Guerrero doubts if this was indeed the case, because "Calambeño does not seem to be, as an epithet, sufficiently opprobrious to have called for an excision."[39] Moreover, its cursives’ three tall strokes are not consistent with the discernible two tall strokes of the original word that Rizal used. Reading about this biographical “mystery” now, we are left wondering what this word could have been, which proved to be so derogatory and “opprobrious” that it needed to be scored over and over by its writer.[40]
The clue is that whatever it was, it had something to do with the roughhousing and bullying that Rizal regularly suffered at the hands of his taller and bigger classmates, who dwarfed and overpowered him at play, and whom he tried to beat in classroom contests instead. Like most childhood taunts, this one must have conferred on its victim a most annihilating feeling of “shame,” an affect within which an early sense of self most probably developed, which the writer of these memoirs, already a young adult, scornfully repudiates. (Rizal writes: “I have no desire to spend my time counting the beatings I received or picturing my emotions when I suffered.”[41]) In his essay-series, Radaic concedes that autobiographies are far from factual and are necessarily interested texts, in Rizal’s case most trenchantly so.[42] It is easy to see this "interestedness" in the final and longest chapter of his memorias, a chapter made memorable by the fact that it is the most “fictive” chapter of all, employing dialogues and lyrical descriptions that are lacking in the previous sections of these quaint childish memoirs, which are full of “exclamations and apostrophes.” (It is here that Rizal recounts, in a sentimentally mannered fashion, his youthful infatuation with the fourteen-year-old Segunda Katigbak.)
Suffice it to say, the fortunate thing about Rizal is that he wrote a great deal, and in many of his writings, he unwittingly laid bare his own personality. I do not simply mean that he self-consciously wrote his own self, his own identity, in his texts—in his two novels, for instance—but that in depicting life as he knew it, he was already providing some clues as to what kind of world he lived in, as well as what kind of person he was in relation to such a world: clues like, for example, his surprising awareness of male-to-male sexual emasculation in the opening scene of his little-known satire, “The Vision of Fray Rodriguez,”[43] as well as his own attitude toward the question of women and the revolution—his famous letter to the "Young Countrywomen of Malolos" comes to mind, as well as his characterization of women (and men) in both the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. (Of course, among Rizal’s “fictive females,” the most curious are the two Doñas, Victorina and Consolacion, both unflattering caricatures of grasping, shallow, silly, conniving and despicable women.) Other clues may be found in his correspondences with friends and compatriots, a revealing example of which is his vociferous letter to Blumentritt, in which he viciously excoriates a certain Doña Antonia Rodriguez, whom he calls “a despicable whore” because she has had multiple affairs with all manner of men, from Catalans to Alsatian Jews.[44] Rizal writes this to caution Blumentritt against ever writing or associating with her. In the process he professes such hatred for her that he can bring himself to say that “to be outraged by her is an honor.” Definitely, this letter reveals a kind of prudish masculinist misogyny on the part of the otherwise charitable and liberal-minded hero.
At this point, I wish to carry out my own reading of a certain form of masculine bonding that I feel undergirds the central plots of his two novels. In particular, I am interested in suggesting possible interpretive trajectories into the world of Rizal’s first novel, the Noli Me Tangere. A caveat, in any case: the following is merely an attempt at delineating just what such trajectories might look like, and is therefore hardly sufficient in demonstrating the cogency, let alone the intricacy, of this approach. Let me just say that I am not originating this “method”: the famous study, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, written in the mid-80s by American feminist critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, actually inaugurated the vibrant field of gay or “queer” studies in the United States. In her study, Sedgwick argues that male homosexual behavior is but one instance of male homosocial desire—other social practices, other bondings between men exist alongside it, forming a continuum that constitutes patriarchy itself. Thus, this theory posits desire to be in fact a social force—which is to say, it exercises certain social effects—rather than just a personal issue of private, arguably “psychological” wants.
Before the invention of homosexuality, realizing the existence of this continuum was much easier, for its practices visibly moved into and reinforced each other, as the literary evidence Sedgwick cites clearly demonstrates. Looking at a selection of important English Romantic Gothic and Victorian texts from the mid-eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, she discovers that in the typical plot of “heterosexual” rivalry—the ever-present "erotic triangle"—men's homosocial desire proves stronger precisely because it takes a "detour" through the same beloved woman.[45] In other words, men's desire for women is merely a "strategy" to pursue their desire for each other. With the pathologization of homosexual acts, however, this very structure was suddenly shaken, and a paranoia began to overtake men's bonds. This has led to the twentieth-century stigmatization of homosexuality, its paranoid "othering." Presumably, it is by the stigmatizing and disavowal of this one segment that the rest of the male homosocial continuum—patriarchy's most essential structure—could be kept inviolate and “safe.”
And so, on to reading...
Elias and Ibarra are, in all of the Noli, the most closely knit of characters. Their bonding is such that they take turns saving each other’s life and, at times, appear to be alter egos of each other, polemicizing what are obviously Rizal’s own dialectical views concerning the matter of sociopolitical reforms and armed revolution currently gripping the country. This bonding is confounded by the revelation that Ibarra is the direct descendant of the man who had caused the downfall of Elias’s own family, but is reinforced—if not ennobled—by Elias's immolation for Ibarra's sake at novel's end.
It is possible to demonstrate the presence of an admiring male homosocial gaze in Rizal’s depiction of Elias, Ibarra’s significant other and greatest “lover”—for, lest we forget, here is a man who gives up his own life to save that of another. And this admiration derives from Elias’s enigmatic “difference”: in his very first “intimate” encounter with Elias, in his house as he is “putting finishing touches to a change of clothing,” Ibarra is “surprised” by the “severe and mysterious figure of Elias.” After a brief conversation, in which Elias proves himself strangely eloquent, it becomes clear to Ibarra that this man is “neither a pilot (bankero) nor a rustic," and he "gazes" at him and his "muscular arms, covered with lumps and bruises."[46] Thus, Elias's otherness is made more desirable (for all desire is desire for difference), because it touches on and is proximate to the same: Elias, despite being quite unlike Ibarra in obvious ways, nonetheless talks the talk of someone who might have gone through the same "cultivation" as Ibarra did. (And so he is different enough to be desirable, yet not so different as to be completely unrecognizable.)
And we see this desire expressing itself in Rizal’s narrative later on. In the forty-ninth chapter, “The Voice of the Hunted,” we encounter the following descriptive paragraphs that spring at us in the midst of the long and highly polemical dialogues between the two “similar yet different” men riding the same beleaguered skiff. At first, Rizal frames the dusky and masculine figure in a romantic tableau, one enchanted evening:
Elias spoke passionately, enthusiastically, in vibrating tones; his eyes flashed. A solemn pause followed. The banca, unimpelled by the paddle, seemed to stand still in the water. The moon shone majestically in a sapphire sky, and a few lights glimmered on the distant shore. (p. 316)
And then, this same earthy and mysterious figure, standing just across the impeccably clean ilustrado, Don Juan Crisostomo Ibarra (who, I must add, has not been much convinced, up to this point, of the virtue in the other’s position that bloody struggle is an inevitable thing), is transformed into a great manly shape: “Elias was transfigured; standing uncovered, with his manly face illuminated by the moon, there was something extraordinary about him. He shook his long hair and went on...” (p. 325).
Now these are just a couple of instances in which a homosocial structure might be shown to inhere in Rizal’s texts. By citing them I do not mean to suggest that Rizal had intended for Ibarra and Elias to desire each other. In truth, to the degree that homosociality was a social structure in which Rizal was raised and from which he wrote his novels, he could not have intended its presence in his texts inasmuch as it was always already constitutive of them. Nonetheless, these passages should cue as a little into the kind of milieu in which the men of Rizal’s time and background worked—alongside one another¾as friends, compatriots, fellow-revolutionaries, enemies, rivals, or whatever else.
It might also prove important to mention that Elias’s “transfiguration” in this scene paves the way for his Christ-like sacrifice toward the end of his the novel, in which he meets and instructs the boy Basilio (a boy whose features are “attractive,” as Rizal’s text goes), to whom he bequeaths the Noli's most memorable lines: "I die without seeing the dawn..." And it is likewise significant that it is this very same boy, Basilio, who in the El Fili becomes the ward and closest follower of Simoun. In that novel, another homosocial configuration takes over the admiring and consummate friendship that existed between Elias and Ibarra, and this configuration is one of mentorship between an older man (the master) and his student. (Rizal’s fortuitous description of the elegantly dressed homeopathist and his favorite “disciple” walking the cobbled streets of Manila just now comes to mind.)
But what has happened to Maria Clara, Ibarra’s declared romantic interest, while all this intimate bonding is taking place on the suddenly romantic lake? She is in her home, presumably, where women should properly be. Even Elias’s ostensible love interest, the enigmatic Salome, must finally be exiled from the novel’s plot—as well as from the novel itself, in its published form—because Rizal's affectional world is, quite simply, a world dominated and made fascinating by men. In the Noli's missing chapter, "Elias and Salome," the ineffectuality of men's bonds with women and the potency of men's bonds with one another, may be seen to be clearly expressed. In the first and only time we read about them and their "friendship," Elias is already saying goodbye to Salome, for he has "lost his liberty" to the man who has saved his life (Ibarra), and must now follow him to "discharge this debt."
In this triangle of loving reciprocities, the woman is the weakest link, finally reduced to looking longingly on, “listening to the sound of [Elias’s] footsteps, which gradually die[d] away.”[47] In the end, we can say that in all likelihood Rizal didn’t think the revolution to be the “proper” place for women. In fact, in his “To my Young Countrywomen...,” he may be seen to typify the patriarchal view that, even or especially in times of social ferment, women are to be defined in male terms—as supportive mothers to their revolutionary sons, toward whom (like the legendary women of Sparta) their ultimate loyalties and responsibilities must be directed.[48] Like every other important affair, the revolution, for Rizal, was unmistakably male-inclusive. How else should it be, after all, given the undeniable maleness required of every significant form of social intercourse in his time?
On the other hand, we must understand that male bonding as a form of relating did not cancel out romance with the opposite sex. Patriarchy’s “traffic in women” is incontrovertible proof of men’s power, for it reduces women to exchangeable commodity between one group of men (fathers) to another (husbands). Marriage is essential to this system, in which women exchanged between households function as a kind of social adhesive to secure men’s bonds, and keep them firmly in place. Thus, while Rizal included women and romance in his novels, his vision of the revolution—as well as of fraternality and possibly community—nonetheless shows that there were spheres of social life which were shut off from women.[49] Within these exclusively male spaces, male homosocial desire reigned supreme, and encounters between men quietly, though not for that matter unpassionately, took place.
Finally, I wish to reiterate the point I made earlier on: the question “Was Rizal gay?” has no answer, simply because it is misinformed. Nonetheless, I think the activity of raising such an inquiry has not been all that uninsightful and fruitless. As we have seen, it leads us to asking if the question of Rizal’s sexual orientation—as well as other similar questions—is, in the first place, the right kind of question to ask. We must remember that not just gender and sexuality but the subject—the "person"—herself cannot be presumed to be the same across periods and cultures. Thus, looking into forms of intimacy in the late Spanish and early American period in the Philippines necessitates the writing of what Foucault has called a “genealogical critique.” This is a kind of conceptual history that traces the origins of seemingly natural and timeless essences like sex, the psyche and even identity itself to discourses, practices and institutions which may be demonstrated to have a history, an unmistakable material base.
Especially in relation to such difficult questions as gender and eroticism, we must remember what Judith Butler, the foremost theorist of the socially constructed subject, has said: sex is not a biological template, a “given” upon which gender rests—as its random and oftentimes inequitable elaboration—but rather, a “performativity.” Butler’s performative thesis takes all sex, gender and sexuality (and the identity they collectively evoke and represent) as the discursive effects of ritualistic performances of idealized “norms”; moreover, it is these performances and not an innate gender “core” that in fact “produce” their subject, precisely as their effect.[50] Thus, according to Butler’s theory of performativity, sex and identity itself are “regulatory fictions” forcibly enforced across time, materializing the very “bodies that matter,” the very subjects they supposedly merely describe. This performativity must be seen not as any singular or single deliberate “act,” but rather as a process, a reiterative and citational practice by which “discourse produces the effects that it names.” It is in this sense that we may see identity as being what ones does, rather than what one is. In a manner of speaking, we are not what we are; we are what we do.
What I have attempted to do in this exploratory essay is partially situate certain social performances of masculinity during Rizal’s time within a “homosocial” context—homosociality being, for my purposes, a heuristic that refers merely to easily observable social bonds. As such, the concept of homosociality does not presume to lay claim to any psychic (or psychosexual) dimensions, which I am not prepared to do, since indeed that would be courting more danger than I am willing to face. In any case, I can say that the real work lies ahead: carrying out a more detailed social history of the sex/gender system of the period in question, a clear description of which would provide what, in the case of Butler’s study of twentieth-century gender and identity in the hegemonic West, the “heterosexual matrix”— which is to say, the mode of intelligibility, the signifying structure or regulative discourse which renders certain acts and performances intelligible, while denying this very same intelligibility to others.
For Butler, this matrix has three constituent parts, all of which function as binarisms. This “structuralist” insight, thanks to countless other feminist thinkers, is already well known: there are two sexes (male and female), two genders (masculine and feminine), and two “essential” sexualities (heterosexual and homosexual). Of course, according to heteropatriarchy, the ideal combinations can only be: male, masculine and heterosexual; female, feminine and heterosexual. Already, one wonders if a comparable matrix obtained in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, and if it was in any way stable, coherent or hegemonic across the different social classes and ethnic groupings in the archipelago. On second thought, given the lack of normalizing techonologies in the backward Filipinas of Rizal's time, this "matrix" most certainly couldn't have been all that stable or hegemonic. (Certainly, as we've already clarified, it couldn't have been heterosexual either, despite the "male/female" binarism that may have obtained on the level of genital sex).
In parting, let me recur to my paper’s controversial question, which proves fruitful in another sense. Allow me to elaborate. Sometime in the Centennial year (1998), in his column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Ambeth Ocampo stated that imputing to Rizal gayness is not the worst thing that’s been done to this national hero. To Ocampo, the worst that anybody has said about Rizal is that he and his greatness are fabrications by the Americans.
While I agree it is simply terrible to think this of Rizal, I also wish to register a specific demurral against Ocampo’s unwitting implication that thinking Rizal might have been gay is, all things considered, still and all bad enough.
If anything good came out of Isagani R. Cruz’s cheeky column on Rizal’s kabaklaan, it would be this: in pondering the mystery of whether our nation’s greatest hero was a bakla or not, we have discovered the truth, not so much about Rizal, as ourselves. And what truth is this? It’s simply that we cannot be said to be accepting of the bakla in our midst to the degree that we cannot begin to accept the possibility that someone we have been taught to admire from as early as we can remember, could have been such an awful, awful thing.
Notes
I am indebted to Dr. Milagros Guerrero, for alerting me to the existence of Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil’s interview with Maria, Rizal’s younger sister, and to Benedict Anderson, for his helpful comments on this essay’s draft. I would also like to express my gratitude to Raquel Reyes for urging me to “beef up” my work on Rizal, and to Fr. Albert Alejo, for his kind words as moderator in the UP Asian Center’s Symposium on Eroticism in colonial Philippines. Needless to say, any errors and inadequacies in this piece are entirely my own.
*Read at the symposium, "Making Love: Eroticism in Colonial Filipinas," Asian Studies Center, University of the Philippines, Diliman, 2 July 2002. An earlier version of this essay first appeared in J. Neil C. Garcia, Closet Queeries (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, 1997); this latest version appeared in Pilipinas: An International Journal of Philippine Studies (No. 41, 2003).
[1]Isagani R. Cruz, from the column, Kritika, “Bakla ba si Rizal?", Filmag: Filipino Magazin, Vol. 4, no. 192 (25 November 1996): 19.
[2]For a history of this as well as “similar” terms (like binabae/yi, bayot, etc.), see my Philippine Gay Culture: the Last Thirty Years (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1996), 52-65.
[3]See Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Plume, 1995), 54. Ironically, the same sexologist “invented” heterosexuality eleven years after he first coined “homosexual” to describe the erotic acts performed by men with men, and women with women.
[4]Jose Rizal, El Filibusterismo, translated by Ma. Soleded Lacson-Locsin (Manila: Bookmark, 1998), 231.
[5]Homeopathy is a form of medicine which was founded in the late eighteenth century by Hahnemann, a German physician from Leipzig. Its key doctrine is similia similibus curantur—Latin for "likes are cured by likes"— taken to mean that the best way to treat a particular disease is by administering to the patient “small doses of drugs which would produce in the person symptoms closely resembling those of the disease being treated.” (See The Oxford English Dictionary, Second edition, Volume VII, p. 338).
Of course, none of this explains why Rizal chose to make this doctor a homeopathist, unless perhaps because he was trying to be euphemistic about his “subject,” primarily by using a pun: “homeopathy,” “homeopathist,” “homeopathic” are phonetically resonant terms in relation to the kind of behavior this character likes to engage in, especially with the young cavalry officer. The “homo” refers to same- or like-ness, while “pathic,” from the Latin pathicus, was a term used to refer to “a man upon whom sodomy is practiced.” See The Oxford English Dictionary, Second edition, Volume XI, p. 339.
[6] Arnold Davidson, "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality," in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, edited by Edward Stein (New York: Routledge, 1992), 89-132.
[7] I must clarify that I make this statement not so much to be anti-nationalist as to recognize the fact that the signifier “Filipino,” during Rizal’s time and especially in the Europe he sought to “locate” himself in, almost always referred to the Creoles or criollo, meaning Spanish people who were living in the Philippines. In a personal essay, “Kalutang,” the late National Artist N.V.M. Gonzalez recalls how frustrating it was for him to realize this. See N.V.M. Gonzalez, Work on the Mountain (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995), 51.
[8] For fuller discussions of constructionist accounts of sexual orientation, see the other essays in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, especially those by Ian Hacking, Steven Epstein and Lenore Teifer.
[9] Sebastian de Totanes, Arte de la Lengua Tagala y Manual Tagalog (Sancto Tomas, 1745), 143-146.
[10]Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, Found in The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Emma Blair and James Robertson, eds. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1903-09), Volume 16, 130.
[11]For early modern understandings of sodomy, see Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford University Press, 1992).
[12] Goldberg, 14-18.
[13] John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565-1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 186-187.
[14] Antonio de Morga, Historical Events of the Philippine Islands, English Translation of Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, annotated by Jose Rizal (Manila: Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission, 1962.)
[15] Ribadeneira's and Benavidez's accounts were written in or around 1601 and 1605 respectively, while Morga's Sucesos was published in Mexico in 1609. These incidents of “cribbing,” especially from Ignacio de Santibañez’s and Juan de Plasencia’s chronicles, are rampant
by J. Neil C. Garcia
There is something malicious about this question—asked as it has been on various occasions by both scholars and wags, whose interest in the subject ranges from the blatantly political to the facetiously absurd. Indeed, of all Filipino icons, Rizal proves to be the fairest game as far as this as well as similar lines of inquiry are concerned: while I was attending an international poetry festival in Taipei late last year, a kind and inquisitive poet from Kuala Lumpur asked me if it was true that Jose Rizal was the father of Adolf Hitler! Apparently, a Filipino academic had delivered a paper in a conference in Malaysia a decade or two ago, and before an audience of Rizalists from the region, had bravely proposed such a quaint and unthinkable thing!
But far from being quaint or unthinkable, the idea that Rizal could have been a homosexual merits, I think, a braver and slightly more serious examination, though we must admit it is one which necessarily proceeds, even under the best of circumstances, out of a kind of scholarly malice—a malice that is inescapable, for it is the malice of presuming that such a question could have been intelligible or relevant to Rizal at all. In this short presentation, I will humor the question “Was Rizal gay?” if only to open up to discussion the various conditions under which this question could be sensibly asked, as well as the various conditions under which this question could be sensibly answered. In other words, I wish us to examine just what we must consider when we inquire into gender and sexuality, during Rizal’s “life and times,” as well as—it may be difficult to accept this at the outset—our own.
Sometime during the Centennial of Rizal’s martyrdom, Isagani R. Cruz, local pop-culture provocateur and professor of literature and Philippine studies at the De La Salle University, wrote a column for the now-defunct Filmag: Filipino Magazin, shockingly titled "Bakla ba si Rizal?"[1]
The answer to this question, if Cruz is to be believed, is a resounding and categorical “Yes!” And he offers what he calls “biographical evidence” in order to arrive at this question’s confidently affirmative answer.
First, Rizal was a bakla because he was afraid of committing himself to the revolutionary cause. Second, Rizal’s kabaklaan made itself apparent in his periodic “failings” in his relationships with the women to whom he was supposed to have been romantically linked. Third, Rizal, unlike his compatriots, didn’t go “wenching” in the brothels of Barcelona and Madrid (at least, not very often). Fourth, Rizal might not have even been the father of Josephine’s benighted baby boy, since—paraphrasing noted Rizalist historian Ambeth Ocampo’s feelings on the matter of Rizal’s “disputable paternity”—Josephine would seem to have been routinely sexually abused and consequently impregnated by her stepfather.
Of course, these four “conjectures” hardly qualify as proof. They are more likely the end-results of what I can only describe as a largely catty evidential procedure that begs now to be challenged, if only for its underlying assumptions concerning what being a bakla means: one, a bakla cannot ever be a revolutionary because he is essentially spineless and a coward; two, failing in your relationships with women makes you a bakla; three, a bakla cannot possibly have sex with women, not even when they are wenches; and four, to be a bakla is to be impotent or at least incapable of getting a woman pregnant.
The dubiousness—and utter stupidity—of these assumptions hardly needs to be emphasized: according to them, basically, kabaklaan is the negation of everything good and desirable in masculinity and is hence, devoid of its own inner substance and worth. Indeed, even if I were to champion the cause of the bakla and would like to win someone as “big” and popular as Rizal over to my side, I would nonetheless balk at Cruz’s way of going about such a task. His “biographical evidence” demonstrates nothing, other than the unflattering and sadly naive opinion he holds of who (or what) a bakla is.
In saying that I do not find Cruz’s method credible in the very least, I am of course also saying that there is a better way of making the project of ascertaining Rizal’s “gender and sexuality” work. And this method involves, first and foremost, asking if the question itself is sensible, given the historical period in which I would wish it to make sense.
Examining the categories one is using in one’s study of such slippery “realities” as sexuality and gender is the necessary first step, then. This is because the categories we use are always culture-bound and historically specific, and as such are never quite neutral and “scientific,” let alone universally reliable and insightful. To ask if Rizal was a bakla, one has, first and foremost, to be clear about what the concept bakla meant at the time and in the place that Rizal lived. In other words, the way we understand bakla today most probably was not the way people in these islands a century ago understood it. This alone makes one’s project more difficult than it might have originally appeared, for it requires one to undertake a comprehensive study of the “sex/gender system” of mid-nineteenth-century Philippines—in particular, the sexual and gender categories that operated in the lives of the Tagalog ilustrados, whom Rizal most certainly was. Needless to say, such study involves looking into a miscellany of Rizal’s own writings—letters, articles, novels, even an incomplete autobiography—and making these answer to a “historicist” critique. Among other things, an assiduous re-reading of them within a conceptual history of gender and sexuality will lend further credence to the argument that, as a national figure or “text,” Rizal is far from self-evident, despite the monolithic discourses which have come to subsume him over the last century of Filipino nationalism. Of these various but complementary discourses, it is those that make “presentist” assumptions about Rizal’s unproblematic masculinity and heterosexuality that call for the most avid unpacking here.
My own tentative findings about the “social semantics” of bakla—in other words, the career this concept has enjoyed in Philippine social history—would seem to indicate that, until recently, it didn’t even connote an identity that is distinguished by its sexuality, but merely a quality of emotional wavering, indecision or uncertainty—something that anyone unlucky enough can suffer from at any point in his or her life. Until early in this century, in fact, bakla wasn't so much a noun as a verb: one was nababakla if he or she was not sure of his or her choices, or if one was suddenly afraid or confounded by the unexpected turn of events.[2] In contrast, nowadays, a bakla is an effeminate male who wishes to have sex with “real men” or tunay na lalake. Thus, the bakla in our midst is a variety of male homosexual who can easily be recognized because of his swishy ways, and whose sexual desire defines his innermost and most authentic sense of self.
Obviously, during Rizal’s time, there was no bakla or effeminate homosexual: there may have been effeminate men (called, among others, binabae/yi, bayoguin, asog and bido), but they were not defined as such by virtue of the desire they possessed, but only by their choice of occupations (feminine ones, like weaving, pottery-making, and the like), and their womanlike appearance and behavior. In fact, the idea that people were different on account of the gender of the object of their sexual desire (in other words, that people were either heterosexual or homosexual) was alien to our turn-of-the-nineteenth-century ancestors, who most probably desired and had sex with whomever they wanted at whatever point in their lives, without thinking of what such desires or acts had to say about their identities, their conceptions of who they essentially were.
If we must be accurate about things, even in Europe itself, homosexuality was not a reality until it was officially “invented” in 1869—in Germany, to be exact, by sexologist Karl Maria Kertbeny.[3] Thus, even when Rizal had lived there at around the same time that the discourse of homosexuality was steadily being “normalized” and propagated, it is quite doubtful that he was influenced at all by the latest sexological revolutions that were being waged inside the psychiatric clinics in Europe’s more technologically advanced countries (Spain most certainly not being one of them.) A passage in El Filibusterismo, from the chapter titled “Manila Characters” illustrates how, to Rizal, the thought—the blatant image—of two men having an intimate relationship was not a particularly upsetting thing:
That respectable gentleman who is so elegantly attired is not a physician but a homeopathist on his own, sui generis: he believes totally in the similia similibus, the attraction of likes. That young Cavalry captain with him is his favorite disciple.[4]
The chapter from which this passage comes treats the Fili's reader to a menagerie of Manila's "queer" residents. This passage not only confirms the existence of same-sex-loving men in Hispanic Philippines, but the very casualness of its tone tells us that Rizal was not phobically affected by what it represented. In fact, the almost-funny "pun" he must have intended to make when he chose to denominate this doctor a "homeopathist,"[5] reveals he found the subject slightly amusing, or at least amusing enough that he chose not to abominate it, which he could very well have done, as abomination was something he often did in his writings, including this chapter itself. This would have arguably been the case had he been sufficiently “Europeanized” in the sexological sense—which is to say, had Rizal been sufficiently raised and trained in the newly inducted homophobic regime that had begun to take hold of the European imagination in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As the constructionist historian Arnold Davidson puts it, this regime of “sexuality” was made possible by the emergence, in Europe, of a new, psychiatric style of reasoning,[6] a manner of arguing about sexual personalities, orientations, “paraphilias” and other such “categories of being,” which arose alongside the various disorders—neuroses, psychoses, hysterias, and the like—that were being discursively produced by the different “biomedical” dispensations of the time.
Thus, Rizal could not have been a bakla (the way we currently know this concept), nor a gay/homosexual, simply because these were categories of being that were not available during his time. To call him gay or bakla would be to commit a grave anachronistic mistake, similar perhaps to calling him a “yuppie” or even—pundits in UP would hate me for saying this—a "Filipino."[7] Obviously, it would have been impossible for someone coming from that era to self-identify with the nuances and complexities of the many dizzyingly new-fangled nomenclatures of our own time.
All this doesn’t mean, most certainly, that there were no men who had sex with each other previous to homosexuality’s unfelicitous debut into the world. (One wonders just how accurate is this El Fili passage, coming as it does from the chapter that purports to present and introduce the typical “characters” of Rizal’s Manila). We can only imagine how, from the earliest times, all over the planet, the male and female of the species had manifested both heterosexual and homosexual behaviors. But to repeat that oft-repeated mantra of social constructionism, engaging in homosexual sex is one thing, being a homosexual is another.[8] Previous to the sexological “production” of the homosexual as a “species”—in Michel Foucault's formulation—of personality, there were men who loved other men, and women who loved other women, but they were not much different from everybody else (in fact, most probably, they were everybody else.)
The same thing must have been true in the Philippines at the turn of the nineteenth century. If the confession manuals from the early Spanish period were to be believed, it would seem that the newly converted natives of the islands were not much loath to the activity of mutually arousing one another—men with men, women with women, men with women, etc.—within such "harmless" contexts and occasions as el burlarse, or "childish play."[9] We might wish to recall, in this regard, just how scandalized the proper frayles were, when they first saw rowdy men in the Visayas sporting all sorts of penile implants (penis pins and the like), which they gamely used in order to make their sexual encounters both bloodier and—they themselves gamely admitted, upon being asked—considerably more pleasurable.[10]
Needless to say, prior to the arrival of the Spaniards, the precolonial inhabitants of the Philippines enjoyed a kind of sexual “innocence” (or at least unselfconsciousness) that only later on became corrupted when the colonial Church introduced the discourse of sodomy, which for three centuries it propagated in the Philippines through the confessional. The discourse of sodomy, however, was not the same as that of homosexuality, for it referred to a number of non-procreative, extra-conjugal and/or sexually “non-missionary” acts that anyone might be weak enough to sometimes commit (with men, women, or animals) but that, because merely a variant of “unnatural sin against the sixth commandment,” didn’t define one’s psychological constitution, or sense of self.[11]
Moreover, the concept of sodomy was itself “utterly confused,” for not only were the varieties of acts it encompassed dizzyingly plural and shifting, it also functioned, in Europe’s “pre-sexological regimes,” as a most convenient stigmatizing weapon, a demonizing label with which it was practically impossible to identify, inasmuch as it was, in fact, an “empty category” into which the powerless were thrust by those who dictated the scope and signification of its use.[12] In the case of Hispanic Philippines—as historian John Leddy Phelan concludes—the resident Sangleyes or Chinese were the colonial administrators’ most convenient target for this xenophobia-driven charge, on whom the Spanish settlers in the islands depended for vital economic services.[13]
Strangely enough, in his annotations to Dr. Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas,[14] Rizal himself echoes the Sinophobic accusation of sodomy, unmindful of the bias in Morga’s account, which had obviously been “cribbed” from previous relaciones and cronicas, written by such dubious sources as Marcelo de Ribadeneira and Miguel de Benavidez[15]. While Rizal's intention in his annotations was clearly the unpacking of Spanish colonialist "fantasies" and racist misrepresentations of the Philippines in the available documents and histories, he didn't himself realize—rather, he didn't wish to realize—just how fantastic was the claim that the indios of the Philippines had been innocent of the “unnatural sin,” until they were corrupted by the foreigners, particularly the Chinese.
Typically, the argument used by the Spanish commentators in the early years of the Conquista was that there wasn't even a native word for sodomy among the indios of the Philippines, as though by virtue of this linguistic voiding of the “unspeakable crime” (or the nefandam libidinem), the many acts that constituted it could no longer be possible among them.[16] Of course, it is the Hispanic colonial archives themselves that can be shown to contradict this amazingly specious argument. In one “confession manual” or confesionario, written by the friar Gaspar de San Agustin and published in Manila in 1713, a question relating to “sins against the sixth commandment” went: Cun nagpuit, o cun nagpapuit, o cun nagcasala sa hayop.[17] This question, inquiring as it did into the penetrative or receptive position the penitent might have assumed during anal sexual intercourse—as well as into probable acts of bestiality on the side—unequivocally proves that Tagalog words existed, at this stage of Spanish evangelization, to refer to at least these three forms of sodomitic congress.
Nonetheless, Rizal's "denial" of the Filipino native's "innate capacity" to commit sodomy was, in the end, quite understandable, especially when we recall the fact that his general purpose in putting out and annotating Morga's Sucesos was that he wished to paint a bright and “noble” picture of his countrymen (and only incidentally, countrywomen)—something that might serve to locate the Philippines in an Enlightenment, “evolutionary” narrative of development to which he subscribed, as well as to rectify the vulgarly unflattering, “Quiaoquiapist” stereotypes that circulated in Spain and that personally afflicted him and the other reformists during this time.[18] In his study, "Rizal Reading Pigafetta," Resil Mojares makes a similar observation: in his edition of the Sucesos, we see Rizal effectively writing a “counterhistory,”[19] a marginal though no less arrogant text from someone who fancied himself capable of adjudicating between foreign and native perspectives, between “dubious” and “correct” knowledges about the Philippines. Predictably enough, such an undertaking was characterized by Rizal’s own nativist mystifications and expropriations of European Orientalist imaginings.
In any case, by furthering his own uncritical Orientalism, Rizal unwittingly bought into the same “Humanist,” colonialist logic against which he was trying to inveigh, countervailing his own project and contradicting himself now and again. For instance, in regard to Morga’s remark that the native men and women of the islands were sexually “incontinent,” Rizal argues that they simply saw no sin in sex, believing the act of reproduction, “like many other peoples… [as] a natural instinct.” Further, he states that the pagan indios weren't so much "loose" as possessing "an excess of naturalism," and that they were not fettered by "religious or moral prohibition."[20] Reading his textual "intervention," we realize that the contradiction is clear: while Rizal sees the unbridled sexual activities between native men and women—which were much remarked about and bewailed in the early Spanish accounts—as constitutive of a kind of natural innocence or “naturalism,” he cannot imagine that such an innocence could have allowed the same people to “wander through [sodomy’s] mistaken paths.” In other words, Rizal criticizes Morga by “denaturalizing” his moralistic account of sexuality, yet stops his argument short when it begins to dangerously wander into the “unnatural” (yes, Rizal unblinkingly accepts this adjective!) terrain of sodomy. This seems stranger since, reading further into the same annotation, we realize that Rizal understood sodomy to chiefly include conjugally “heterosexual” acts, as when he writes that the sodomitic Chinese and foreigners commit it with the “indio women, who are their wives.” This well-meaning “defense” by Rizal of his people is, of course, merely one out of so many others in the Sucesos, and we must remember that sodomy, while a social stigma against which Rizal obviously demurred, was, finally, only a matter of misguided or “mistaken” activities, and did not, in the way it was conceived during this pre-sexological period in Philippine history, constitute an intimate or definitive sense of identity. (Suffice it to say that sodomy was simply a discourse of acts, not selves.)
If Rizal wasn’t—because he couldn't have been—a bakla or a gay/homosexual, just exactly what was he? Might he have been a binabae/yi, which was a category of gender identity that he most probably understood? Perhaps not,[21] for not only was it highly unlikely that anyone of his class or stature could have voluntarily identified with what in this nineteenth-century masculinist culture was clearly a pejorative term of effeminophobic abuse, there exists no mention of this appellation ever being tacked on him in any of the available—which is to say, approved—accounts of his life. (Of course, it is healthy to stay suspicious regarding such “official” accounts: knowing how blind nationalistic zeal had damaged the objectivity of so many of Rizal’s commentators and chroniclers, we cannot be too sure these accounts have not been sanitized precisely to conform with the nationalist imperative to apotheosize the greatest scion of the Filipino race!) Most probably he was an hombre, an hombre ilustrado to be precise, which, on second thought, tells us nothing new about him at all.
Ah, but let us remember that since Rizal couldn’t have been a homosexual, it only follows that he couldn’t have been a heterosexual either!
What I wish to stress at this point is this: previous to the invention of homosexuality, individuals were not heterosexuals either, for the simple reason that homo and hetero were inverse forms of the same sexual logic that had not existed before the regime of sexuality (that is, of sexuality as we know it) overtook our modern lives. Indeed, while men and women throughout history married and begot children, they nonetheless were not defined along the lines of sexual object choice until the last quarter of Rizal’s century—and then, only in Europe at first. Thus, for the longest time, men and women were not cloven into the identities of “the homosexual” and “the heterosexual.” Whatever sexual discourse that might have operated as a minimally significant force in their lives didn’t discriminate between those who were attracted to members of their own sex, and those who desired the opposite sex, although it perhaps might have had something to say about the frequency in which they had sex, or the positions they assumed while doing it (these, of course, were the basic issues which the discourse of sodomy busied itself with.) As individuals whose lives were not governed by the homo/hetero distinction, they were relatively free to commit homosexual and heterosexual acts without thinking how these acts affected their selfhoods.
By contrast, in our own sexually self-conscious time, one can scarcely think of having sex with another man without at the same tremblingly pleasurable moment becoming at the very least “worried” of what this could mean about who one really is, deep inside.
Rizal and the other ilustrados of his time were presumably socialized to think of marriage as the logical social destiny. But this had little to do with what they could actually experience sexually, within the privacy of their own lives. Hence, if we cannot make use of the relatively recent homo/hetero dichotomy with which to describe the sexual and erotic milieu in which Rizal lived, we might perhaps look at the organizing social principles that determined the relations one gender at that time could have with the other, or—and this is extremely important—with itself.
Just like in the greater part of Europe, middle-class males and females in the Philippines during the time of Rizal were socialized separately from each other. Boys went to boys’ schools, girls to girls’ schools—a policy that was implemented by the Spanish colonial administration from the smallest parochial schools in the barrios to the biggest collegios and "normal schools" in Manila.[22] Interesting accounts of just what this arrangement entailed, in the lives of these students, may be found in Rizal’s El Filibusterismo, and in a rather candid column written by Felix Roxas, mayor of Manila from 1905 to 1917.
A contemporary of Rizal at the Ateneo Municipal, Roxas wrote for El Debate, a Spanish-language newspaper from the American colonial period. In a piece titled “The Danger of Coeducation,” he shares his memories of “the effects of puberty” on the young men of the Ateneo, and in particular recalls the embarassing time when, despite all measures, “human instinct... develop[ed] [and] passionate latters [were] addressed to each other by fellow classmates.” [23] On the other side of the gender divide, Rizal alludes to the existence of erotic affection in Manila’s all-female schools in a scene from chapter twenty-two of El Fili (titled "La Funccion"). In this scene, the narrator enters Paulita's mind, and verbalizes how the French word cocher (from "to ride" or "to mount"), reminds her "of certain terms which convent girls use among themselves to explain a sort of passion."[24] And of course, we must remember that even outside these “exclusive school” contexts, piety and propriety dictated that young men and women meet only under the assiduous supervision of spinster aunts and trusted yayas. Suffice it to say, such "unnecessary meetings" were generally frowned upon and discouraged.
Thus, the basic social structure that determined the relations between the male and female genders of the ilustrado class in nineteenth-century Philippines, can be called “homosocial”: individuals were expected to develop bonds within each of the two genders, bonds that could be expressed in several ways. Some of the ways, for example, in which men bonded with one another were through exclusive friendships, “discipleships” and cliques, or memberships in fraternities and clubs (La Liga Filipina would be one of the more illustrious examples of an “all-boys club” that existed during the period of the Propaganda movement). Women bonded with one another within the realm of the home, in particular, the grantedly “feminine space” of the kitchen, where they were seen to become their own naturally gossipy selves, while the men talked endlessly about matters of consequence (such as the affairs of state) in the entresuelo or sala.
I am of course not really interested in male bonds per se, except perhaps where these bonds may be seen to express themselves sexually, as they often did in the heavily homosocial past. Rizal and the other propagandistas and their European patrons and supporters were all male, and they all bonded. Vicente L. Rafael, examining the records and photographs of the period, notices the overtly “masculine” texture of such bondings: not only did Rizal and his compatriots organize themselves into a mutual-aid association called Indios Bravos ("Brave Indians"), they also took pains to further "masculinize" their bodies by lifting weights and engaging in sports like fencing and the martial arts, if only to offer an alternative to the Orientalist stereotypes circulating in Europe concerning the Philippine indios' perceived "lack of virility."[25] Thus, while their common ideological persuasion—their collective wish to enact political reforms back in the Philippine islands—provided a basis for this bonding, their gender was also, in truth, the real common ground on which they confidently stood, embracing one another, in fond solidarity, as it were. Just where does the social end and the sexual begin, as far as these bondings and embracings were concerned? I for one cannot tell. All we might safely say in this regard is this: in the absence of the paranoia-making discourse of homosexuality—a discourse that suddenly rendered suspect one’s desires and hitherto unselfconscious longings to bond with others of one’s own gender—men like Rizal most probably expressed their fellowship and camaraderie with one another in ways that did not, at times, exclude the genital.
We know, reading the voluminous correspondence between Rizal and the Austrian ethnologist Ferdinand Blumentritt—as well as, to a lesser extent, between Rizal and the other “reformists” living in Spain and elsewhere on the continent—just how appropriate is this figure of los abrazos or "embrace." Indeed, this was how Rizal and those dearest to him usually ended their postcards and letters to each other: "I embrace you."
We also know, especially as regards Rizal and Blumentritt, just how affectionate and loving this epistolary discourse could become, so much so that they would write (jokingly) how they are “desperately in love” with the other,[26] would keep sending photos, bric-a-brac, mementos and flowers (!) to the other,[27] would say that they would "dare everything" for the sake of the other,[28] would profess that they were always thinking of the other,[29] or would suffer disturbing dreams about the other. In one letter, Rizal relates that his strange dream of his “dear brother and friend” ended with him “waking up tired and sweating; it was very hot on the bed.”[30]
While it may be a mistake to read anything more into such declarations of intimacy between the younger Rizal and the “brotherly” Blumentritt—whose strongest point of affinity with one another would seem to be, to all intents and purposes, an intellectual one—we must nonetheless remember just how such bonds between men at that time constituted a continuum, and how this continuum conceivably stretched from one form of affection to the other, such as fraternal intimacy to romantic love. How else can we explain the ease with which Rizal and Blumentritt could call each other “dear,”[31] or declare that they "love" each other in their letters, without any sense of shame?
On the other hand, there exists one letter, written by Rizal, in which an intimation of a kind of shame creeps in, though it is one which he quickly brushes off[32]: in it, he would seem to be defending the “intimate fraternity which [they] profess mutually” against “enemies [who do not] understand this sentiment [because they] don’t have a delicate sentiment” and are “rude.” Writing “you honor me enough by calling me dear friend," Rizal refuses to discuss the matter further in this letter to Blumentritt—"I have no more comments to make"—and merely says, "Perhaps you may undertand me." Not in so many words, Rizal would seem to be saying that he and his beloved friend are being "intrigued" by some Spaniards back in Madrid, and while in this letter he denies its veracity, he nonetheless cannot do so plainly, and merely appeals to the hope that Blumentritt "may understand" what he cannot quite bring himself to say.
This denial and the verbal difficulty in which it is couched do not, in themselves, mean anything: the intrigue may or may not have any basis in fact, despite or precisely because Rizal mentions it in such an atypical fashion (atypical because Rizal, in his letters, is rarely at a loss for words). What this letter does make clear is that such possibility (a sexual one) existed for the kind of "sentiment" Rizal and Blumentritt shared, if only because it was found cogent both by the "rude Spaniards" and by Rizal, who acknowledges it enough by writing Blumentritt about it. (And of course, we see that Rizal, at the same careful moment that he acknowledges the rumor's existence, turns suddenly inarticulate in his disavowal of it.)
Is there proof to be had to make this and other such “intriguing” propositions more tenable? I’m afraid that after the nationalist historians (who were raised in the American colonial system, and thus were all too clearly aware of the stigmatizing effects of homosexuality) had gone through and “cleaned up” every little scrap of Rizaliana, it might no longer be possible to ascertain anything in the extant records that vaguely suggests Rizal had sex (or wished to have sex) with men, such as with any of his compatriots, for instance.[33] In fact such historians seem to have lost no time in accomplishing the opposite goal: from as early as I can remember, according to enlightened lore, Rizal was a hero made more heroic by his spectacularly abundant machismo, managing to have a girl fall helplessly in love with him everywhere in the world he went. For sure, in retelling the life of this national hero, these historians were inscribing that life with some of their own values, which they wished Rizal himself had shared—even if Rizal clearly hadn't.
And then, there may yet be some hope left. In a personal conversation with Ocampo a couple of years ago, he mentioned that there are still bits of Rizaliana out there that can offer us an alternative picture of our country's most beloved hero. In particular, he was referring to a few hard-written illustrations or "sketches," apparently drawn from life by the good doctor, of his patients' penises in various stages of tumescence, in a notebook to be found in a collection housed in the Newberry library in Chicago. The notebook itself has already been perused and copied by a number of Rizal archivists and scholars[34]; it's indeed very telling how none of them has mentioned the fact that such "interesting" drawings even exist.[35] Even as these drawings may not signify anything more than a conscientious physician’s clinical documentation of the cases he was managing (how curious that a number of them should have to be “venereal,” however), Ocampo does make the oft-repeated point clear that most Filipinos have yet to see Rizal plainly, or “without the overcoat.”
Needless to say, to the extent that Rizal is a national hero, the full range of his “human complexity” has largely been glossed over by nationalist hagiographic discourse, for the sake of emphasizing the unimpeachable “greatness” of his heroism. Of course, Ocampo wasn’t the first person to realize this, or even to articulate it in public. A graduate student of the University of Santo Tomas, Ante Radaic, bravely offered an alternative picture of Rizal in a series of thoughtful articles that came out in the Weekly Women's Magazine in 1962.[36] In "The Fears of Rizal: Life and Love," Radaic attends to Rizal's published Memorias de un estudiante de Manila, and surmises how he must have suffered from a kind of “inferiority complex,” borne out of his painfully keen awareness of his own physically diminutive size. To Radaic, this peculiar “melancholy” rendered him miserable throughout most of his childhood and adolescence, and it subsequently compelled him to overcompensate by excelling not only in his studies but in every other aspect of his finally amazing and “monumental” life.
That Filipinos don’t know the “complete picture” was, likewise, precisely the point raised by Rizal’s own younger sister, Maria, in an interview with Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil (then Guerrero-Cruz) in the Evening News, shortly after the end of the Second World War.[37] In this interview, Maria confides that his famous older brother kept certain “secrets,” to which only his immediate family was privy, such as the fact that one of his shoulders was markedly lower than the other and that his face was slightly prognathous. Rizal painstakingly “hid” these apparently hurtful truths by wearing specially tailored suits and by presenting only his most flattering “profile” every time he posed for a photograph.
I don’t believe conventional biography or even autobiography is the only recourse we have if we wish to pin down certain vital “truths” about such a historical personage as Rizal. As Leon Ma. Guerrero points out in his translator’s preface to the book, The Young Rizal, Rizal apparently subjected his only existing autobiography—the aforesaid Memorias—to "considerable revision," implying that he was willfully cultivating a persona in his own writings.[38] What's worth noting is that these emendations were not strictly stylistic. Some were blatantly substantive, especially the erasure and substitution of certain names and facts, ostensibly for the purpose of concealing his identity, already effectively dissimulated by the pen name "P. Jacinto" on the manuscript's title page.
In particular, Guerrero points out an interesting erasure in the second chapter, “My Life Away from My Parents—My Troubles," referring to the nickname by which the young Rizal was teased, by his burly boy classmates in Biñan. Alberto and Tomas F. Barretto, who published the Spanish edition of Memorias in 1949, had decided—rather erroneously, as Guerrero declares in an endnote—to put "Calambeño" (one who hails from Calamba) in place of the original word which had been "crossed out... so thoroughly" in the manuscript. Guerrero doubts if this was indeed the case, because "Calambeño does not seem to be, as an epithet, sufficiently opprobrious to have called for an excision."[39] Moreover, its cursives’ three tall strokes are not consistent with the discernible two tall strokes of the original word that Rizal used. Reading about this biographical “mystery” now, we are left wondering what this word could have been, which proved to be so derogatory and “opprobrious” that it needed to be scored over and over by its writer.[40]
The clue is that whatever it was, it had something to do with the roughhousing and bullying that Rizal regularly suffered at the hands of his taller and bigger classmates, who dwarfed and overpowered him at play, and whom he tried to beat in classroom contests instead. Like most childhood taunts, this one must have conferred on its victim a most annihilating feeling of “shame,” an affect within which an early sense of self most probably developed, which the writer of these memoirs, already a young adult, scornfully repudiates. (Rizal writes: “I have no desire to spend my time counting the beatings I received or picturing my emotions when I suffered.”[41]) In his essay-series, Radaic concedes that autobiographies are far from factual and are necessarily interested texts, in Rizal’s case most trenchantly so.[42] It is easy to see this "interestedness" in the final and longest chapter of his memorias, a chapter made memorable by the fact that it is the most “fictive” chapter of all, employing dialogues and lyrical descriptions that are lacking in the previous sections of these quaint childish memoirs, which are full of “exclamations and apostrophes.” (It is here that Rizal recounts, in a sentimentally mannered fashion, his youthful infatuation with the fourteen-year-old Segunda Katigbak.)
Suffice it to say, the fortunate thing about Rizal is that he wrote a great deal, and in many of his writings, he unwittingly laid bare his own personality. I do not simply mean that he self-consciously wrote his own self, his own identity, in his texts—in his two novels, for instance—but that in depicting life as he knew it, he was already providing some clues as to what kind of world he lived in, as well as what kind of person he was in relation to such a world: clues like, for example, his surprising awareness of male-to-male sexual emasculation in the opening scene of his little-known satire, “The Vision of Fray Rodriguez,”[43] as well as his own attitude toward the question of women and the revolution—his famous letter to the "Young Countrywomen of Malolos" comes to mind, as well as his characterization of women (and men) in both the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. (Of course, among Rizal’s “fictive females,” the most curious are the two Doñas, Victorina and Consolacion, both unflattering caricatures of grasping, shallow, silly, conniving and despicable women.) Other clues may be found in his correspondences with friends and compatriots, a revealing example of which is his vociferous letter to Blumentritt, in which he viciously excoriates a certain Doña Antonia Rodriguez, whom he calls “a despicable whore” because she has had multiple affairs with all manner of men, from Catalans to Alsatian Jews.[44] Rizal writes this to caution Blumentritt against ever writing or associating with her. In the process he professes such hatred for her that he can bring himself to say that “to be outraged by her is an honor.” Definitely, this letter reveals a kind of prudish masculinist misogyny on the part of the otherwise charitable and liberal-minded hero.
At this point, I wish to carry out my own reading of a certain form of masculine bonding that I feel undergirds the central plots of his two novels. In particular, I am interested in suggesting possible interpretive trajectories into the world of Rizal’s first novel, the Noli Me Tangere. A caveat, in any case: the following is merely an attempt at delineating just what such trajectories might look like, and is therefore hardly sufficient in demonstrating the cogency, let alone the intricacy, of this approach. Let me just say that I am not originating this “method”: the famous study, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, written in the mid-80s by American feminist critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, actually inaugurated the vibrant field of gay or “queer” studies in the United States. In her study, Sedgwick argues that male homosexual behavior is but one instance of male homosocial desire—other social practices, other bondings between men exist alongside it, forming a continuum that constitutes patriarchy itself. Thus, this theory posits desire to be in fact a social force—which is to say, it exercises certain social effects—rather than just a personal issue of private, arguably “psychological” wants.
Before the invention of homosexuality, realizing the existence of this continuum was much easier, for its practices visibly moved into and reinforced each other, as the literary evidence Sedgwick cites clearly demonstrates. Looking at a selection of important English Romantic Gothic and Victorian texts from the mid-eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, she discovers that in the typical plot of “heterosexual” rivalry—the ever-present "erotic triangle"—men's homosocial desire proves stronger precisely because it takes a "detour" through the same beloved woman.[45] In other words, men's desire for women is merely a "strategy" to pursue their desire for each other. With the pathologization of homosexual acts, however, this very structure was suddenly shaken, and a paranoia began to overtake men's bonds. This has led to the twentieth-century stigmatization of homosexuality, its paranoid "othering." Presumably, it is by the stigmatizing and disavowal of this one segment that the rest of the male homosocial continuum—patriarchy's most essential structure—could be kept inviolate and “safe.”
And so, on to reading...
Elias and Ibarra are, in all of the Noli, the most closely knit of characters. Their bonding is such that they take turns saving each other’s life and, at times, appear to be alter egos of each other, polemicizing what are obviously Rizal’s own dialectical views concerning the matter of sociopolitical reforms and armed revolution currently gripping the country. This bonding is confounded by the revelation that Ibarra is the direct descendant of the man who had caused the downfall of Elias’s own family, but is reinforced—if not ennobled—by Elias's immolation for Ibarra's sake at novel's end.
It is possible to demonstrate the presence of an admiring male homosocial gaze in Rizal’s depiction of Elias, Ibarra’s significant other and greatest “lover”—for, lest we forget, here is a man who gives up his own life to save that of another. And this admiration derives from Elias’s enigmatic “difference”: in his very first “intimate” encounter with Elias, in his house as he is “putting finishing touches to a change of clothing,” Ibarra is “surprised” by the “severe and mysterious figure of Elias.” After a brief conversation, in which Elias proves himself strangely eloquent, it becomes clear to Ibarra that this man is “neither a pilot (bankero) nor a rustic," and he "gazes" at him and his "muscular arms, covered with lumps and bruises."[46] Thus, Elias's otherness is made more desirable (for all desire is desire for difference), because it touches on and is proximate to the same: Elias, despite being quite unlike Ibarra in obvious ways, nonetheless talks the talk of someone who might have gone through the same "cultivation" as Ibarra did. (And so he is different enough to be desirable, yet not so different as to be completely unrecognizable.)
And we see this desire expressing itself in Rizal’s narrative later on. In the forty-ninth chapter, “The Voice of the Hunted,” we encounter the following descriptive paragraphs that spring at us in the midst of the long and highly polemical dialogues between the two “similar yet different” men riding the same beleaguered skiff. At first, Rizal frames the dusky and masculine figure in a romantic tableau, one enchanted evening:
Elias spoke passionately, enthusiastically, in vibrating tones; his eyes flashed. A solemn pause followed. The banca, unimpelled by the paddle, seemed to stand still in the water. The moon shone majestically in a sapphire sky, and a few lights glimmered on the distant shore. (p. 316)
And then, this same earthy and mysterious figure, standing just across the impeccably clean ilustrado, Don Juan Crisostomo Ibarra (who, I must add, has not been much convinced, up to this point, of the virtue in the other’s position that bloody struggle is an inevitable thing), is transformed into a great manly shape: “Elias was transfigured; standing uncovered, with his manly face illuminated by the moon, there was something extraordinary about him. He shook his long hair and went on...” (p. 325).
Now these are just a couple of instances in which a homosocial structure might be shown to inhere in Rizal’s texts. By citing them I do not mean to suggest that Rizal had intended for Ibarra and Elias to desire each other. In truth, to the degree that homosociality was a social structure in which Rizal was raised and from which he wrote his novels, he could not have intended its presence in his texts inasmuch as it was always already constitutive of them. Nonetheless, these passages should cue as a little into the kind of milieu in which the men of Rizal’s time and background worked—alongside one another¾as friends, compatriots, fellow-revolutionaries, enemies, rivals, or whatever else.
It might also prove important to mention that Elias’s “transfiguration” in this scene paves the way for his Christ-like sacrifice toward the end of his the novel, in which he meets and instructs the boy Basilio (a boy whose features are “attractive,” as Rizal’s text goes), to whom he bequeaths the Noli's most memorable lines: "I die without seeing the dawn..." And it is likewise significant that it is this very same boy, Basilio, who in the El Fili becomes the ward and closest follower of Simoun. In that novel, another homosocial configuration takes over the admiring and consummate friendship that existed between Elias and Ibarra, and this configuration is one of mentorship between an older man (the master) and his student. (Rizal’s fortuitous description of the elegantly dressed homeopathist and his favorite “disciple” walking the cobbled streets of Manila just now comes to mind.)
But what has happened to Maria Clara, Ibarra’s declared romantic interest, while all this intimate bonding is taking place on the suddenly romantic lake? She is in her home, presumably, where women should properly be. Even Elias’s ostensible love interest, the enigmatic Salome, must finally be exiled from the novel’s plot—as well as from the novel itself, in its published form—because Rizal's affectional world is, quite simply, a world dominated and made fascinating by men. In the Noli's missing chapter, "Elias and Salome," the ineffectuality of men's bonds with women and the potency of men's bonds with one another, may be seen to be clearly expressed. In the first and only time we read about them and their "friendship," Elias is already saying goodbye to Salome, for he has "lost his liberty" to the man who has saved his life (Ibarra), and must now follow him to "discharge this debt."
In this triangle of loving reciprocities, the woman is the weakest link, finally reduced to looking longingly on, “listening to the sound of [Elias’s] footsteps, which gradually die[d] away.”[47] In the end, we can say that in all likelihood Rizal didn’t think the revolution to be the “proper” place for women. In fact, in his “To my Young Countrywomen...,” he may be seen to typify the patriarchal view that, even or especially in times of social ferment, women are to be defined in male terms—as supportive mothers to their revolutionary sons, toward whom (like the legendary women of Sparta) their ultimate loyalties and responsibilities must be directed.[48] Like every other important affair, the revolution, for Rizal, was unmistakably male-inclusive. How else should it be, after all, given the undeniable maleness required of every significant form of social intercourse in his time?
On the other hand, we must understand that male bonding as a form of relating did not cancel out romance with the opposite sex. Patriarchy’s “traffic in women” is incontrovertible proof of men’s power, for it reduces women to exchangeable commodity between one group of men (fathers) to another (husbands). Marriage is essential to this system, in which women exchanged between households function as a kind of social adhesive to secure men’s bonds, and keep them firmly in place. Thus, while Rizal included women and romance in his novels, his vision of the revolution—as well as of fraternality and possibly community—nonetheless shows that there were spheres of social life which were shut off from women.[49] Within these exclusively male spaces, male homosocial desire reigned supreme, and encounters between men quietly, though not for that matter unpassionately, took place.
Finally, I wish to reiterate the point I made earlier on: the question “Was Rizal gay?” has no answer, simply because it is misinformed. Nonetheless, I think the activity of raising such an inquiry has not been all that uninsightful and fruitless. As we have seen, it leads us to asking if the question of Rizal’s sexual orientation—as well as other similar questions—is, in the first place, the right kind of question to ask. We must remember that not just gender and sexuality but the subject—the "person"—herself cannot be presumed to be the same across periods and cultures. Thus, looking into forms of intimacy in the late Spanish and early American period in the Philippines necessitates the writing of what Foucault has called a “genealogical critique.” This is a kind of conceptual history that traces the origins of seemingly natural and timeless essences like sex, the psyche and even identity itself to discourses, practices and institutions which may be demonstrated to have a history, an unmistakable material base.
Especially in relation to such difficult questions as gender and eroticism, we must remember what Judith Butler, the foremost theorist of the socially constructed subject, has said: sex is not a biological template, a “given” upon which gender rests—as its random and oftentimes inequitable elaboration—but rather, a “performativity.” Butler’s performative thesis takes all sex, gender and sexuality (and the identity they collectively evoke and represent) as the discursive effects of ritualistic performances of idealized “norms”; moreover, it is these performances and not an innate gender “core” that in fact “produce” their subject, precisely as their effect.[50] Thus, according to Butler’s theory of performativity, sex and identity itself are “regulatory fictions” forcibly enforced across time, materializing the very “bodies that matter,” the very subjects they supposedly merely describe. This performativity must be seen not as any singular or single deliberate “act,” but rather as a process, a reiterative and citational practice by which “discourse produces the effects that it names.” It is in this sense that we may see identity as being what ones does, rather than what one is. In a manner of speaking, we are not what we are; we are what we do.
What I have attempted to do in this exploratory essay is partially situate certain social performances of masculinity during Rizal’s time within a “homosocial” context—homosociality being, for my purposes, a heuristic that refers merely to easily observable social bonds. As such, the concept of homosociality does not presume to lay claim to any psychic (or psychosexual) dimensions, which I am not prepared to do, since indeed that would be courting more danger than I am willing to face. In any case, I can say that the real work lies ahead: carrying out a more detailed social history of the sex/gender system of the period in question, a clear description of which would provide what, in the case of Butler’s study of twentieth-century gender and identity in the hegemonic West, the “heterosexual matrix”— which is to say, the mode of intelligibility, the signifying structure or regulative discourse which renders certain acts and performances intelligible, while denying this very same intelligibility to others.
For Butler, this matrix has three constituent parts, all of which function as binarisms. This “structuralist” insight, thanks to countless other feminist thinkers, is already well known: there are two sexes (male and female), two genders (masculine and feminine), and two “essential” sexualities (heterosexual and homosexual). Of course, according to heteropatriarchy, the ideal combinations can only be: male, masculine and heterosexual; female, feminine and heterosexual. Already, one wonders if a comparable matrix obtained in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, and if it was in any way stable, coherent or hegemonic across the different social classes and ethnic groupings in the archipelago. On second thought, given the lack of normalizing techonologies in the backward Filipinas of Rizal's time, this "matrix" most certainly couldn't have been all that stable or hegemonic. (Certainly, as we've already clarified, it couldn't have been heterosexual either, despite the "male/female" binarism that may have obtained on the level of genital sex).
In parting, let me recur to my paper’s controversial question, which proves fruitful in another sense. Allow me to elaborate. Sometime in the Centennial year (1998), in his column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Ambeth Ocampo stated that imputing to Rizal gayness is not the worst thing that’s been done to this national hero. To Ocampo, the worst that anybody has said about Rizal is that he and his greatness are fabrications by the Americans.
While I agree it is simply terrible to think this of Rizal, I also wish to register a specific demurral against Ocampo’s unwitting implication that thinking Rizal might have been gay is, all things considered, still and all bad enough.
If anything good came out of Isagani R. Cruz’s cheeky column on Rizal’s kabaklaan, it would be this: in pondering the mystery of whether our nation’s greatest hero was a bakla or not, we have discovered the truth, not so much about Rizal, as ourselves. And what truth is this? It’s simply that we cannot be said to be accepting of the bakla in our midst to the degree that we cannot begin to accept the possibility that someone we have been taught to admire from as early as we can remember, could have been such an awful, awful thing.
Notes
I am indebted to Dr. Milagros Guerrero, for alerting me to the existence of Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil’s interview with Maria, Rizal’s younger sister, and to Benedict Anderson, for his helpful comments on this essay’s draft. I would also like to express my gratitude to Raquel Reyes for urging me to “beef up” my work on Rizal, and to Fr. Albert Alejo, for his kind words as moderator in the UP Asian Center’s Symposium on Eroticism in colonial Philippines. Needless to say, any errors and inadequacies in this piece are entirely my own.
*Read at the symposium, "Making Love: Eroticism in Colonial Filipinas," Asian Studies Center, University of the Philippines, Diliman, 2 July 2002. An earlier version of this essay first appeared in J. Neil C. Garcia, Closet Queeries (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, 1997); this latest version appeared in Pilipinas: An International Journal of Philippine Studies (No. 41, 2003).
[1]Isagani R. Cruz, from the column, Kritika, “Bakla ba si Rizal?", Filmag: Filipino Magazin, Vol. 4, no. 192 (25 November 1996): 19.
[2]For a history of this as well as “similar” terms (like binabae/yi, bayot, etc.), see my Philippine Gay Culture: the Last Thirty Years (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1996), 52-65.
[3]See Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Plume, 1995), 54. Ironically, the same sexologist “invented” heterosexuality eleven years after he first coined “homosexual” to describe the erotic acts performed by men with men, and women with women.
[4]Jose Rizal, El Filibusterismo, translated by Ma. Soleded Lacson-Locsin (Manila: Bookmark, 1998), 231.
[5]Homeopathy is a form of medicine which was founded in the late eighteenth century by Hahnemann, a German physician from Leipzig. Its key doctrine is similia similibus curantur—Latin for "likes are cured by likes"— taken to mean that the best way to treat a particular disease is by administering to the patient “small doses of drugs which would produce in the person symptoms closely resembling those of the disease being treated.” (See The Oxford English Dictionary, Second edition, Volume VII, p. 338).
Of course, none of this explains why Rizal chose to make this doctor a homeopathist, unless perhaps because he was trying to be euphemistic about his “subject,” primarily by using a pun: “homeopathy,” “homeopathist,” “homeopathic” are phonetically resonant terms in relation to the kind of behavior this character likes to engage in, especially with the young cavalry officer. The “homo” refers to same- or like-ness, while “pathic,” from the Latin pathicus, was a term used to refer to “a man upon whom sodomy is practiced.” See The Oxford English Dictionary, Second edition, Volume XI, p. 339.
[6] Arnold Davidson, "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality," in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, edited by Edward Stein (New York: Routledge, 1992), 89-132.
[7] I must clarify that I make this statement not so much to be anti-nationalist as to recognize the fact that the signifier “Filipino,” during Rizal’s time and especially in the Europe he sought to “locate” himself in, almost always referred to the Creoles or criollo, meaning Spanish people who were living in the Philippines. In a personal essay, “Kalutang,” the late National Artist N.V.M. Gonzalez recalls how frustrating it was for him to realize this. See N.V.M. Gonzalez, Work on the Mountain (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995), 51.
[8] For fuller discussions of constructionist accounts of sexual orientation, see the other essays in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, especially those by Ian Hacking, Steven Epstein and Lenore Teifer.
[9] Sebastian de Totanes, Arte de la Lengua Tagala y Manual Tagalog (Sancto Tomas, 1745), 143-146.
[10]Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, Found in The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Emma Blair and James Robertson, eds. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1903-09), Volume 16, 130.
[11]For early modern understandings of sodomy, see Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford University Press, 1992).
[12] Goldberg, 14-18.
[13] John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565-1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 186-187.
[14] Antonio de Morga, Historical Events of the Philippine Islands, English Translation of Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, annotated by Jose Rizal (Manila: Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission, 1962.)
[15] Ribadeneira's and Benavidez's accounts were written in or around 1601 and 1605 respectively, while Morga's Sucesos was published in Mexico in 1609. These incidents of “cribbing,” especially from Ignacio de Santibañez’s and Juan de Plasencia’s chronicles, are rampant