Gay bashing at Cinemalaya

What a grand way to start my Cinemalaya Film Festival experience. I never had the chance to take full notice of this independent filmfest until this fifth round. I was always interested, always had the intention, but never seemed to have found time in the past to really be religious about it.

Saturday, 19 July, the first full day of the Festival run, ended as a field day for gay bashing. Ironic really, the Festival actually has a program on “LGBT Specials,” I’m presuming because there has been in the past years so much independent filmmaking of the “gay narrative.” There is also a Lino Brocka retrospective, which included an early work called “Tubog sa Ginto,” which was one of the first Filipino gay-lit I owned back when I was far much younger than today.

I decided to see “Tubog sa Ginto” and one full-length in competition, “Astig.” I’ve long known Tubog is “bleak” in terms of essaying the gay identity, but I was nonetheless excited to see it. There were rumors in the past that Time had not been kind to surviving reels of Brocka’s 1971 work. It came as no surprise that I’d feel heavy and slightly disgusted after the screening - it’s all about latent homosexuality that had no other logical conclusion but addiction to male flesh and suicide. But to put it in context, Tubog after all hailed from the dark ages of 1971.

Fast forward to 30-plus years, I experience Astig. I had no foreknowledge of any homosexuality-related angle in this film. Truth to tell, I took interest on Astig because of some of the actors. I have much respect for Dennis Trillo’s, Arnold Reyes’ and Sid Lucero’s acting prowesses. (Okay, they’re just my kind of “eye candy” too.) It was produced by no less than Boy Abunda, who being an out celebrity, supposedly many in the gay community also respect. I would also learn that co-alumnus and friend Maxie was involved in this (Cinemalaya? Astig?) when he personally thanked me for my “support” while I was queued at Tanghalang Abelardo. I do get a warm feeling for supporting friends’ endeavors, I’m parochial. But after the screening, my distaste for this film had me almost forget that feeling.

Astig is not really a gay film. There’s nothing in this film that bottom-lined same-sexual experience or attraction as theme, either structured to triumph gay love or “punish” characters for daring to express such. But it was gratuitous on gay sex as a plot device as well as embellishment for its urban jungle milieu. Thirty-plus years after Tubog sa Ginto, gay sex is still the necessary evil that corrupts or ruins the Astig a.k.a. “Survivor” of the urban jungle. So much for progress in filmic narrative.

Astig put minor gay (or at least homosexually inclined) characters at crucial points in the intertwined episodic narrative, where the leads were able to demonstrate overwhelmingly the Marianas Trench of their desparation. Gay sex was so filthily portrayed in this film - the poisonous carrot that was to be the moral ruin of the beatified heterosexual male, and the penultimate challenge in an Amazing Race to define what it meant to be Astig.

So we get Boy (Edgar Allan Guzman), a reseller of stolen merchandise, who although admitted to have received oral sex when he wanted it, took to the deep end upon giving oral sex to an unfeeling, opportunistic gay man, who was just too flamboyant with an abanico - the *tsk-tsk* shame-of-it-all in exchange for 600 pesos to close a fund gap for his teenage wife’s hospitalization.

And we also get Roland (Arnold Reyes), a Chavacano, who found himself too mortified but desperate enough not to resist the sexual advances of a property buyer, just to close a deal for what seemed to be unsaleable property. And just to sweeten the moral ruin angle here, the “discreet” gay man would just have to be part of a hoodwinking scheme. Of course, it wasn’t in the best spirit of the moral ruin angle to portray the fiasco as something Roland can be redeemed - reselling real estate is not as simplistic as exchanging cash for property papers.

What could Cinemalaya be about in consideration of all this? What does it say as to its claim of being the platform to “boldly articulate and freely interpret the Filipino experience with fresh insight and artistic integrity” (quoted from the website)? Oh, it was bold alright. But short-sighted and narrow-minded. It was very articulate of heterosexism and homophobia, not of the urban social milieu, but of the unenlightened heuristics of the author and producer. Considering Tubog has already walked through this manner of narrative, it’s definitely not fresh. And to consider also the overwhelmingly gay viewership it received on its Tanghalang Abelardo screening night, Astig just effed and gave most of us the finger: “This is for all the scourge you brought upon us!” How’s that for artistic integrity?