The Macho Machine: Male Sexual Commodification in Philippine

Realist Film

Reuben Ramas Cañete

positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 19, Number 2, Fall 2011, pp.
347-364 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

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The Macho Machine: Male Sexual Commodification in Philippine Realist Film

Reuben Ramas Cañete

Introduction

The filmic depictions of labor commodification due to the structural dislo-

cations within the Philippine political economy since the 1980s have often
emphasized the traumas associated in separating (often women) migrant
workers from family members, resulting in both social crisis and domestic
economic dependency on these laborers’ foreign exchange earnings. The Flor
Contemplacion Story1 is one such case. Little attention, on the other hand, is
paid to equally filmic depictions of male labor commodification within the
domestic sphere of consumption as a result of a migrant labor economy and
the material empowerment of politically minoritized groups within Philip-
pine society. It is in this area that this study shall attempt, through a read-
ing of Philippine realist films of the 1980s and 1990s, to locate the political
economy of what it calls “the Macho Machine” through a transformed post-
colonial and postmodern position within cultural theory.

positions 19:2  doi 10.1215/10679847-1331751

Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press
positions 19:2  Fall 2011 348

By interlinking an understanding of the social, political, economic,

ideological, and psychosexual contexts that inhabit the parameters of this
Machine, we may understand why Philippine filmic homoerotica uniquely
clusters both hetero and homo audiences as a mass market phenomenon.
This article defines the Macho Machine as a series of institutional spaces,
agencies, and what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the habitus2 that propel the
production, dissemination, and consumption of the youthful sexy male body
that is typically — though ambivalently — referred to as “macho.” This sys-
tem has become highly visible owing to the proliferation of films and videos
that typify its phenomenal specificities as a macho-­oriented category, its pri-
mary category of desirability being the insertive “top” male, whose eroti-
cized productivity is consumed by a public composed of both heterosexual
females and homosexual men.
Operating within certain critical assumptions of queer cinema, this arti-
cle assumes that the term homoerotic conveys a specific “practisanal” and
subjectivized category of identity formation, specifically, of the desire to
view and semiotically partake of the pleasure of male bodies. This must
be refunctioned into a postcolonial context in which psychosexual factors
of contemporary Philippine society are taken into account, thus tying our
understanding of the economy of homoerotic desire not only among a cer-
tain delimited public (like queers) but also among a heterogeneous public
of heterosexual females, as well as fellow aspiring machos. In addition, the
social, economic, and political aspirations of its own “object,” the youth-
ful male, is also excavated to link its own desires with that of its audience,
producing a matrix of hegemonic force-­relations that this article has termed
“tripartite relations.”
Basically put, tripartite relations involve mutually engaged social, sexual,
and economic relationships among homosexual men (baklas), heterosexual
women (babaes), and their common denominator, the insertive “top” bisexu-
ally behaving male (machos). This relationship, founded upon earlier sexual
models such as the babaylan-­lalaki-­babae relations of precolonial Philippine
culture, assigns crucial epistemic categories by which these three sexual iden-
tities are socially stabilized and made operant despite (or because of) a domi-
nant patriarchal culture that actively negates homosexual lifestyles: the macho
sexually serves the bakla in return for social status or financial capital, which
Cañete ❘ The Macho Machine 349

is then spent upon both his personal improvement as a desirable male, and
upon his family; the babae serves to explicitly stabilize the sexual identity of
the male by bearing children by him and serving as the bakla’s true Other;
and the bakla supports the macho as a neutered querida (“other woman”), who
fulfills the macho’s needs for affection and advice, is the source of the macho’s
income, and benefits from the macho’s sexual profligacy. These transactions
are often delineated in the plots of three realist films made between 1987 and
1998: Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1987),3 Mel Chionglo’s Sibak (1993),4 and
Burlesk King (1998),5 also by Mel Chionglo.6
This article attempts to chart the specific categories by which these rela-
tions occur within a common delineated space: the filmic space of cinema,
and the territory of male commodification in the sexual economy from
which documentation of homoerotica is taken, the gay bar. This transcrip-
tion of homoerotic narratives from urban space to filmic space carries with
it specific modes of representation that these two filmmakers encode in the
convention of realist drama, when “documenting social evils” (particularly
prostitution) was a rallying cry for progressive artists. These three films were
written by the same scriptwriter, Ricardo “Ricky” Lee, whose (heterosexual)
commitment to social reform and political progressivism was shared by (a
gay) Brocka and other members of the Concerned Artists of the Philippines
(CAP). These films should therefore be seen as a specific metanarrational
logic that highlights the urban consumption of homoerotica primarily as
a “prostitution problem,” and not necessarily as a liberative, transgressive
strategy that privileges the increasingly visible and financially empowered
bakla as a positive role. This explains the realist mode of its filming as a
quasi-­documentary that feasts upon the exploitation of male bodies for
profit, and the social costs in entails. However, its detailed documentation
of macho dancer-­callboy lives also serves to stimulate audiences who desire
viewing male bodies. Hence, these films serve as a double-­bladed device:
they condemn the practice, and yet potentially encourage its consumption
by its sheer depiction.7
What is thus needed is an analytical model that grounds filmic and social
homoerotica as a phenomenon (or “problem”) within specific socioeconomic
conditions, one that explicates its representation of male commodification
as material/sexual negotiations between male agents and female/gay audi-
positions 19:2  Fall 2011 350

ences, in a way confirming — if not in an inverted manner — Laura Mul-

vey’s contention of scopophilia as a primary category of filmic desire (men
now becoming objects of desire for women/gays).8 It is important to note
that this introduction of male homoerotica is a radical departure from filmic
representations of Philippine masculinity since the postwar period. Before,
male sexual iconography in Philippine film was codified through the action
genre, in which aggressive masculinity was the idealized hallmark, and its
male embodiment was exemplified through dress (the “low waist gang” of
Fernando Poe Junior), hairdo (Joseph “Erap” Estrada’s pomaded brush-­up),
and physical violence. By the 1980s, however, this masculine image was
augmented with filmic representations that specifically sexualized the male
body, which paralleled the development of the live gay entertainment indus-
try that catered to the expatriate gay community, as well as increasing num-
bers of financially empowered gay Filipinos and financially independent
Filipinas.9

Feeding the Machine

What distinguishes the period since 1986 as a fruitful time for such represen-
tations must be initially traced to the liberal possibilities reaped after the first
EDSA Revolution, when media censorship had been relaxed under President
Corazon Aquino to allow critical insights into the dysfunctional Philippine
social economy left behind by Marcos. Such a breathing space, however, must
also be seen as an expansion of the initial foray into urban filmic realism
pioneered by Brocka and Celso Ad Castillo during the mid-­1970s, when such
films as Burlesk Queen10 and Maynila sa kuko ng liwanag (Manila in Twilight)11
set the tone by excavating the Philippine metropolis’s gritty underbelly of sex
entertainers, angst-­ridden urban blue-­collar workers, and corrupt law enforc-
ers. Understood as metanarratives of the system of sexual exploitation allowed
under martial law to keep the general adult population pacified, these films
had already lain the groundwork of sexual commodification of rural inno-
cents, and the corrupt (because haphazard) praxis of urban life that the macho
dancer films of the 1980s would reiterate.
However, the crucial transformation of this discourse to privilege the
commodified macho rather than the innocent country lass should be seen
Cañete ❘ The Macho Machine 351

in the transformation of the social economy after 1986, when the restoration
of civil liberties and democracy also led to an increase in export labor over-
seas as a result of the unstable economy of the coup-­afflicted Aquino period
(1986–92), a situation that would only accelerate under Aquino’s successor
Fidel Ramos (1992–98), and still dominates the Philippine economy today.
This abrupt transformation of filmic male identity can be seen in Macho
Dancer, where Pol (played by Alan Paule) begins his filmic existence as a
macho lover under a U.S. Air Force paramour (Mel Davidson), who intro-
duces him to the pleasures of the blow job. This scene, of Pol’s bare torso
heaving sweatily under the tongue of his white lover amidst white sheets,
opens the film and immediately establishes its dominating theme: Filipino
sexual power captured by the orifices of Others.12 Separated from his para­
mour because of the U.S. serviceman’s transfer of duty (and bereft of the
financial subsidy that he enjoyed under their company), Pol goes to Manila to
augment his peasant family’s income, a transfer supervised by Greg (Bobby
Sano), a family acquaintance and Pol’s friend. Greg introduces him to the
dark, seedy world of the tourist belt gay bar whose space is prototypically
constructed according to the liminality of both homo and eros: protected
by a corrupt policeman who nonetheless raids it when circumstances are
unfavorable, managed by openly bakla/bayot bar managers/“mothers” (Joel
Lamangan and Charlie Catalla), and frequented by primarily bakla/bayot
clients of all persuasions (straight-­acting, aka silahis, fully effeminate, etc.).
These constructs would be repeated, with minor alterations, as the “real
relations of production” in the films Sibak: Midnight Dancers (whose bar
manager role is played by Soxy Topacio) and Burlesk King (with Laman-
gan again reprising his role as the “fag hag” manager). Even the mode of
the macho “initiate’s” introduction into the gay bar world is repeated via
an “old hand” motif; the old hands are elder brothers (played by Gandong
Cervantes and Alex del Rosario) in the case of Sibak and another boyhood
friend (played by Leonardo Litton) in Burlesk King.
The device of gazing at male bodies is not the sole prerogative of the client
alone. In both Macho Dancer and Sibak, the establishing shot of the gay bar
show scene is viewed from the perspective of the initiate: Pol gazes raptly,
open-­mouthed, at a group of machos in a floor show masturbation act, a
gaze matched by Sonny (played by Lawrence David) as he watches his first
positions 19:2  Fall 2011 352

floor show in Sibak.13 This staring and momentarily “taken aback” episode
introduces to audiences the realization of the male protagonist’s future task
(to bare oneself as a macho dancer), and the mesmerizing if illegal vision
of men performing highly eroticized movements and acts. Pol’s own body
would be subject to surveillance and inspection, as the club managers “size”
him up, and discover with glee: “Dakota!!” (Filipino gay shorthand mean-
ing “he’s got a big dick!”). This initiation ceremony, repeated with Sonny
in Sibak, and finally with Harry (played by Rodel Velayo) in Burlesk King,
attests to the necessary physical qualifications of machos as demanded by
club managers, as well as the impromptu “sizing up” skills required of these
managers to distinguish “healthy” from “rotten” meat — and to have the
“first crack” at touching their newly offered merchandize.
The macho’s accommodations in the city are complicated by poverty and
anonymity, as Pol in Macho Dancer and Harry in the early part of Bur-
lesk King discover, and hence need the friendship of coworkers and fellow
machos to house them: Pol finds “bed space” in the downtown apartment
of fellow macho dancer Noel (played by Daniel Fernando); while Harry
lives with James (Litton) in a shanty. The homosocial bonds that are thus
established as coworkers performing sexual acts together onstage are rein-
forced as housemates living together, the spaces of physical intimacy are thus
blurred twice, closing the distantial space made by modernist alienation,
and (in what seems to be a typically Filipino catachrestic gesture) individual
privacy is banished in favor of the mutually trusted (masculine?) spaces of
male social bonding. In Sibak, the presence of familial domestic space in
the city does not, in itself, signal normalcy. It is a space that is contested and
invaded by firstly, the tension between the entertainer-­wife of one brother
and her in-­laws, the neighborhood toughs who publicly question the broth-
er’s masculinity (everyone in the neighborhood, of course, knows that they
are all macho dancers, including their parents), the traumatic separation of
father and mother due to infidelity, the sheltering and violent removal of a
runaway thief, and finally, the entrance of oppressive force by the vigilante
squad, whose violent after-­effects finally dissolve the remaining family.
By contrast, Pol’s physical separation from his unsuspecting family,14 and
their continued isolation in the tenanted farm, guarantees familial harmony
Cañete ❘ The Macho Machine 353

upon Pol’s eventual return.15 This option of domestic normalcy is lacking

from the very beginning of Harry’s life, as he, an Amboy (Asian-­American)
in Olongapo City, was abandoned by his abusive U.S. father and brought
up by another elder relative (Junee Gamboa), believing that his mother
(Elizabeth Oropesa) was dead. His only motivation for continuing now is
to find and kill his father. This audacious leap at Freudian ambivalence and
mimicry may be credited to the more sophisticated writing of Lee in the
late 1990s, when there was a freedom to reconsider the by-­then tiresome
formulaic repetition of macho subjectivity as untroubled from the inside and
threatened from the outside.
But, following Adorno,16 we realize that the “culture industry’s” rationale
is to produce films that popular audiences can “comprehend” and enjoy as
films in themselves. Thus the plot of Burlesk King reverts back to a pat-
ented formula of familial reconciliation and acceptance, as Harry rediscov-
ers his mother as alive and well (and self-­employed as a street prostitute, at
that!), and rediscovers his father now dying of AIDS and finds it in his heart
to forgive him. Filmic instrumentalization17 also plays a part in the nar-
rational intervention of the babae as a heteroerotic stabilizer that prevents
the conversion of the macho into the bakla/bayot, a device first encoded in
Pol’s sexual liaison with Bambi (Jacklyn Jose), a female prostitute, and then
repeated in the form of Brenda (Nini Jacinto), another prostitute, in the case
of Harry. The return of domestic harmony in Harry’s life is symbolized
by the gathering of familial bonds from the abjection of his liminal space:
dancer-­prostitute son reunites with prostitute mother who wholeheartedly
accepts her prostitute daughter-­in-­law within the household.18 This highly
unconventional turn of the family theme bespeaks of the more advanced
(i.e., more efficient) stages of economic reification — and a gradual real-
ization of the diversity of the nuclear household — in the late 1990s, when
there is no seeming escape from the abjection of urban poverty (unlike the
still-­intact state of Pol’s family in Macho Dancer, in which developing urban
blight is kept at a distance via a bus ticket). By contrast, Sibak refuses to
resolve its narrational plot with the triumph of the Filipino family. Here, the
fatal conditions of the decrepit city ultimately fragment the family (parental
separation, spousal separation for overseas work, and murder), leaving as the
positions 19:2  Fall 2011 354

film’s coda the perpetual image of a pair of inward-­looking macho dancers

(Danny Ramos and Richard Cassity standing in/for David and del Rosario)
gyrating away into the darkness.
This refuge into film noir (the use of darkly lit interior scenes that focus
attention only on the main characters “onstage,” darkly lit night street shots
that often frame its subjects in shadows, and the theme of urban violence
and death) is the specific paralogic of Filipino homoerotic-­as-­realist film.
It brings to the fore the filmmaker’s/scriptwriter’s declaratory depiction
of social evils (exploitative prostitution and urban poverty) resulting from
state corruption (symbolized by the ever-­present police/vigilante squad), a
struggle for (positivist?) humanist redemption that can only be achieved, as
Macho Dancer and Sibak would argue, in counter-­violence: vengeance for the
deaths of friends/lovers and brothers by these very same abjected machos. In
Macho Dancer, Pol is dragged into a two-­fold dilemma created by the same
vice-­ridden protector cop; he is roughed up by the cop’s thugs for prevent-
ing street children from running drugs, and he is involved in the rescue of
Noel’s sister Pining (played by Princess Punalan) from a white slavery den
operated by the same crooked cop, resulting, amidst the getaway chase, in
the gangland execution of Noel in a dark, monsoon-­drenched back alley.
Pol retaliates from this double negation by gunning down the policeman
(the filmic “source of evil”) as he leaves his apartment in the style universally
recognized by Manileños as a “Sparrow execution,” a term that the tabloids
refer to in the subsequent scene.19 In Sibak, Sonny, distressed at the execution
of his brother Dennis (Cervantes) by cop-­led vigilantes when he was caught
stealing car radios, and the entry of these same “demons” into their house-
hold to look for additional suspects of the theft ring, explodes with rage. His
pent-­up anger over urban poverty, sexual separation (more on this later on),
his brother’s death, and the roughing up of his beloved mother is directed
against the thugs, and in the ensuing struggle, he grabs the gun of one and
shoots him repeatedly, screaming “mga putang ina nyo!” (Your mothers are
whores!) — a displacing sign, no doubt, but one that reverberates in the kin-
esthetic sensibility of the urban Filipino macho now run amok.
This turn toward an “eye for an eye” narrative between oppressed macho
and corrupt oppressor is absent from Burlesk King, in which random vio-
lence is the source of a macho’s death. A gang of anonymous drinkers,
Cañete ❘ The Macho Machine 355

already known to Harry and James from a previous altercation, return for a
second encounter in another now dry, dark alley, at a time when Harry was
incapacitated by a shabu20 dose, and repeatedly stab James to death, ignor-
ing Harry, who views the incident with stoned distance, lying on the grimy
floor. The murderers are never caught (since no one, not even Harry, recog-
nizes them), and Harry does not make any effort to locate (not to mention
exact vengeance from) them. The incident’s after-­effect was apparently the
stabilization of Harry’s heterosexuality, allowing him the psychic strength
to kick his drug habit (overnight, it seems) and to reconcile himself with his
domestic affairs.
Burlesk King’s failure to locate macho oppression on a structural inad-
equacy (corrupt government) results in a quasi-­documentary of gay bar per-
formative culture that is, appropriately enough, the most homoerotic element
of the realist film genre: the imagery of gyrating, gesticulating, caressing,
acrobatic, and genital-­cupping buffed and oiled/sweaty bodies that delin-
eate and unite the sexual identities and desirabilities of “all” macho dancers
within the interior space of the gay bar.21 This desirability for the macho’s
body is filmically pursued (for profit): the bar’s floor managers hustle their
wards/wares to clients, firstly as “tippers” by slipping a high-­denomination
bill into a macho’s briefs as the dancer gyrates his body inches away from
one’s face, and then as “table companions” whose drinks are priced at a pre-
mium.22 The dancer entertains the client with stories/sagas and jokes — in
other words, establishes and maintains a companionship role by using his
body strategically to entice the client to stick with him and prolong their sex-
ual (because economic) contact. This “economics of the body” hyper­inflates
the macho’s value and allows padding of the client’s bill with additional
goods and services running the gamut from on-­site massage, to additional
food orders, and finally to masseur/sexual services outside the bar (usually
in a motel); the client ends up settling an often substantial “bar fine” with
the manager.23 Again, this entire enterprise is premised on the desirability
of the macho’s body and character (based on the “table interviews”) vis-­à-­vis
a bakla/bayot/babae’s own sexual qualifiers of what a desirable “rentable
macho” ought to have. On the part of the macho, the socioeconomic inter-
course with clients (in exchange for the sexual one) assures him a substantial
rise in income, as well as a sexual “release valve,” a presumption that one’s
positions 19:2  Fall 2011 356

youthful sexual energies need release/expenditure in the company of some-

one whose sexuality is opposite to one’s own.
Pol’s integration into the Macho Machine was facilitated by such a trans-
action, concluded with an unnamed wealthy-­looking client (played by no
less than noted thespian/director Antonio Mabesa), a formal connection
or “plugging in” of his manhood facilitated by his client’s desiring orifice
through the blow job. Sonny’s introductory experience, on the other hand,
showed that he had already formed his sexual habitus in the regional center
(ostensibly Cebu City), and his pointed counting of cash “paid for services
rendered,” as I have remarked in another article, 24 disabuses the notion that
baklas/bayots having sex with machos is a “free act.” He nonetheless exhib-
its his “ignorance” of the ground rules when, with his first client in the
upper-­floor massage parlor of the Manila-­based Club Erotica, he stumbles
around looking for his elder brother for advice on what “to do with his
client” — a failure of a narration whose only function is to facilitate the
voyeuristic camera’s panning shot in an actual gay massage parlor. Finally,
Harry is “thrust” metaphorically into his first paid encounter with a pair of
foreigners in the VIP room of Club Exotica (a tongue-­in-­cheek takeoff of
Sibak’s Club Erotica, no doubt) by their appeals for a “private show,” and the
reassuring presence of his “beloved” friend and fuck buddy James.
The reconfiguration of the macho body as a functioning desirable dancer,
aside from his “external” duties, is the focus of all three films. Particularly,
the educations of the initiates (Pol, Sonny, and Harry) are painstakingly
shown, facilitated by more experienced, senior dancers (Noel, Joel and Den-
nis, and James) who inculcate, guildlike, the moves that a macho dancer
ought to exhibit on the dance floor. The films portray the diversity of the
macho dancer’s skills; Pol, for example, dances at first in a macho ensemble,
and then, taking a cue from the bath and soap number of Noel and Dennis
(played by William Lorenzo), upgrades himself to “live show” performer
under the guidance and sexual partnership of Noel. Sonny’s credentials as
a macho dancer, on the other hand, are proven by his winning the “Macho
Dancer of the Month” prize as a solo performer (apparently without any
competition, as the filmic narrative concentrates only on his performance);
and Harry (who establishes his sexual reputation as a bottom/“receiving-
­end” macho in the film) eventually excels both in paired/grouped orgy
Cañete ❘ The Macho Machine 357

mode (as a bottom), as well as the competitive solo stripped performance

that marks Burlesk King’s finale, and its title’s raison d’être.
It is also clear from these films that the hierarchy of filmic narrative brings
with it a structure of visibilities: supporting — if not more real macho — 
“actors”/performers such as Roscoe Martin, Ron Michaels, Elcid Esteban,
Jun Medrano, Jason Aragon, Danny Ramos, Richard Cassity, John Men-
doza, Tonio Ortigas, Dante Gomez, Jonathan Paguio, Jhim Tarrosa, or Jude
Molato, whose characters are barely sketched and whose bodies, it seems, do
all the talking. Collegial moments at the “back room” or at the bar’s side
areas, composed mostly of work banter or of the occasional fisticuffs and
narratives of their sad plights as poor, uneducated, drifting selves, whose
bodies are their only assets, fill the social space outlined for them in these
films, and reinforce the notion that the resulting commodification of their
own bodies is as a result of their inevitable desperation for income: a dirty
job, yes, but still a well-­paying one. Their own consent to the exploitation/
reification of their bodies by sexed/gendered/empowered Others, therefore,
is complicit, as much as the formation and utilization of these bodies has
been left in the care of their managing Others, “organic intellectuals” (club-
­employed costume makers, gym instructors, dance instructors, makeup
artists, screenwriters, filmmakers, and young actors), and the imagining
public.
The interlinkage of macho labor as its own “commodity” and the finan-
cial capital offered by desiring but discriminating publics in a condition
of “external” sexual/economic negotiation (individualist “rent capitalism”
occurring outside the boundaries of the gay bar, where the economic field
is more open for “direct selling” and bargaining) is also a phenomenon
explored in all three films. Noel and Pol hire themselves out to a Japanese
director who films a gay sex video for extra income; Sonny accedes to be
picked up at a shopping center by a bakla/bayot client for an extended bac-
chanal in a posh motel suite (and presumably paid for his labors); and Harry
and James are paid to participate in a heterosexual couple’s orgy. These acts,
occurring outside the field of supervision of the gay bar, inject an entre-
preneurial spirit that defies the structural identity of capitalism as a simple
case of oppressive (gay bar) employer versus oppressed (macho) labor. Rather,
the openness and heterotopia unveiled by these “external forms” of macho
positions 19:2  Fall 2011 358

entrepreneurship indicate the more permutative and ambiguous realms that

momentarily “free” macho labor from his structural “oppression” and allow
him the potential to be in control of how he uses his own body for empower-
ment, pleasure, and profit.
Some will, of course, complain that the macho in this situation is never
“truly” free, that his freedom to sell his own body already structures him
as a negative nonproducer of social value; in other words, he can’t improve
society by selling himself, any more than he can improve it by allowing
himself to be sexually retailed by the gay bar. This classic Marxist assertion
is dependent upon the definition of labor as that which strictly produces
material goods of social value. These material goods circulate among a large
and requisite public/“market,” thus justifying their existence (and that of
its manufacturing force — its “productive public”) by its sheer social neces-
sity. Poststructuralist critiques have shown how erroneous this assertion
is by deconstructing the premise of socialist industrialism on universalist-
­positivist-­logocentric grounds, and by questioning how, in the formation
of the subjectivity of labor, it had assumed that mass, uniform production
was the laborer’s lot, who had to, in order to protect “his” own interests,
establish a broad solidarity of fellow laborers. What needs to be asked is this:
Is the quantification of labor as a physical manufacture of goods the only
consideration to an economy, or should a laborer’s qualification of his labor
as “service” produce a different economy, one based on specific segmented
consumption?
If so, we then also have to disabuse the notion that entrepreneurship,
whether of an object like soap, or of a reified human body like a prostitute’s,
acts in the absence of a fulfilled, regulated niche in the market, and thus in
the presence of an unfulfilled, unregulated sector — and indeed, exploits the
opening that state control has been unable (or unwilling) to impose on the
“body economic” of consumption. The general failure of classic Marxism
in accounting for the dynamics of consumption (insisting, instead, upon its
epistemic control of production) allows entrepreneurship to thrive, in theory
and practice, even in the most regulated communist states. And consump-
tion, as we have historically realized in advertising, is the field where desire
can produce its own market where none previously existed. The technology
to enchant, entrance, and seduce a public through a billboard or a television
Cañete ❘ The Macho Machine 359

ad acts, in the same way, as an ideologically conscious political narrative that

performs its propaganda in the news broadcast of the government television
channel, or the official announcement in the state-­owned newspaper. It was
this power to direct consumption in the culture industry that Adorno had so
rightly feared from both totalitarianism and an unfettered capitalism, and
it is the specific power of sexual desire and identification, played out in the
contemporary billboard wars of underwear companies, that currently ani-
mates consumption by redirecting its gaze from a “product” (male briefs) to
an “image” (muscular, handsome young men). What differentiates this pro-
cess at the level of the macho “hooker” is the subcultural/subversive manner
of its deployment: not large-­scale, omnipresent, and spectacular, but small-
­scale, locale-­specified, provisional, individualistic, and temporal, such as a
revealingly dressed and well-­built young man lounging idly in the viewing
decks of a Manila shopping mall, walking away when security guards patrol
nearby, eyes locking into passing “fellow shoppers” long enough to register
the nonverbal cue “Are you interested in me?”

Me, Macho; You, Others

I would like to point to a final sign that ties up the relational grid outside
the overbearing emphasis of economic determinism, allowing these notions
to float up and disrupt the grand narratives that have been so carefully con-
structed to privilege the economic/material over the psychic/sexual. This
is the matter of the ambivalence of the macho’s subjectivity, and how this
relates to his life processes. This ambivalence is traced to the double alle-
giance that the macho has over two lovers: an insertive homosexual relation
with the bakla/bayot, and an insertive heterosexual relation with the babae.
In all three films, this tangled web results not in eventual resolution of one
versus the other, but in a cohabitation of both. The macho’s trans­action with
the bakla is often seen as material (specifically financial), as well as psycho-
sexual (a reassurance that, as an insertive partner, he is still the lalake in the
union). His relation with the babae, however, is both psychosexual and pro-
creative. This results in an enforcement of the tripartite relations between
bakla/bayot and babae “clients”/lovers with the macho, whose insertive
dependability is paramount to “epistemic stability.”
positions 19:2  Fall 2011 360

One can see, for example, the need for “compulsory heterosexuality” with
Pol and Harry, through their taking in of female partners Bambi and Brenda
and engaging in apparently sincere heterosexual copulation acts with them.
However, and this marks the decisive turn of the macho’s sexual subjectivity,
the surreptitious entry of homoerotic desire on the part of the macho is also
abundantly seen, starting with Noel’s unguarded kiss to Pol after drunkenly
breaking down in despair at Pining’s unknown fate, a homoerotic gesture
that, for the first time, Pol knows is not job related but personally meant
(Noel, after all, had sexual desires for Pol, which had been suppressed until
that moment). Thus Pol’s subsequent execution of Noel’s killer was more
than just socio-­political street justice; it carried with it the unleashed rage of
a just-­realized lover. Sonny’s flagrantly homosexual (though “top”) desires,
on the other hand, have been marked in Sibak, not only by the failure to
“find” (and thus pair) a female leading lady for him but also, in his onscreen
sexual liaison with the bakla Michelle (played by R. S. Francisco), by a union
that explodes with heated intensity when they perform a fifty-­second-­long
copulation scene, and affectionately treat each other as boyfriend-­girlfriend,
both in bed and in public, until Michelle’s inevitable departure for Japan
to work as a transvestite entertainer. This homoerotic turn is matched by
Sonny’s eldest brother Joel (del Rosario) and his double (bi?)sexual life, one
with his wife, and the other with his bakla lover (played by Nonie Buen-
camino). On more than one occasion, both “spouses” meet (the babae, again,
knowing of the existence of the bakla lover for some time now), their lives
conflating and colluding, as when Joel’s lover comforts his wife in her emo-
tional unsettlement before her leaving for Japan as an entertainer (to the
extent of using his car to chaperone her to the airport), and promising her
that he will take good care of her husband and children, like the depend-
able, moneyed querida-­cum-­godfather that he is. The character of James in
Burlesk King mimics that of Noel: protective, insertive, and intimate with
his charge, machos whose sublimated love for fellow machos merits for them
the filmic death penalty.
The martyrlike treatment of this “unsettling” sexual hybridity of the
macho-­desiring macho (what in current Filipino gay lingo is now derisively
termed batong bakla, literally, stone-­hard gay) shows that, for all their declared
intentions of showing society’s ills and liberating the minds of its audiences
Cañete ❘ The Macho Machine 361

to rethink and enact radical — even revolutionary — change, Brocka’s and

Chionglo’s films, united by the scriptural presence of Lee, tend to rigidify tra-
ditional Philippine tripartite psychosexual relations among indulgently effem-
inate but materially empowered gays; femininely intersubjected, procreative
but passively disenfranchised women; and masculinely powerful, desirable,
but dependent machos, ignoring the bakla-­bakla or babae-­tomboy tandems
that threaten to destabilize and/or “Westernize” its discourse. The murder
of the macho homosexual — and the invisibility of the lesbian — apparently
functions to reassure the emergent bakla-­bayot/babae consuming sectors that
the continuation of its interests and values remain unthreatened: a negation
of homosexual machos in exchange for top macho bisexuality.

Conclusion

What may lead to an understanding of the nature of effeminization of the

macho body as a commodity product is the tenacity of sexual capital in
determining the economic conditions of production: as filmic products of
the Macho Machine, they elide to a broad range of parallel products/services
that are inhabited by the same icons, these troubled/troubling machos. Also,
as hindsight has shown us, age is a cruel judge of macho career success, and
thus the more rapidly one succeeds financially within the various cogs of the
Machine, the easier one can rest after “retiring” (average retirement age of
a macho: thirty).25 That this success is owed to a nexus of Other publics — 
themselves subalterned by the chaotic macro-­economy26 — who desire a
macho’s body as these Others’ fetish may be owed, in the last analysis, to the
symbolic mutilation/partition of prime male meat to feed on an ever-­present
(if occasionally suppressed) sexual hunger of an unfulfilled, effeminized,
and diffracted politic, one that, in the instant it achieves its desire also fulfills
the political goals of its object, which is the central social power of the sexed
male. The macho thus becomes a serialized, sacrificial masculine commod-
ity willingly produced by its own self-­reflexive labor in the dark abattoir
of the Macho Machine, a Machine located within the urban darkness of
postcolonial postmodernity, driven by the desires of materially empowered
and sexed Others, and whose power to give is also (ironically but inevitably)
complicit with its desire to be taken.
positions 19:2  Fall 2011 362

Notes

  1. The Flor Contemplacion Story (dir., Joel Lamangan, 1995).

  2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1984).
  3. Macho Dancer (dir., Lino Brocka, 1987).
  4. Sibak (Midnight Dancers) (dir., Mel Chionglo, 1993).
  5. Burlesk King (dir., Mel Chionglo, 1998).
  6. This hypertopia between babae, bakla/bayot, and machos makes illegible and seemingly
unnecessary the most oppressed and invisible sexual category in the Philippines, the les-
bian tibo. The emergence of Filipino gay subculture in the 1970s also permitted the tibo
to emerge, along with the bakla, but was assigned a category that is feared and loathed by
almost all the other agents for its “threat” to the dominant episteme (manly women that are
power rivals of males, creative rivals to baklas/bayots, and potentially sexual attractions to
other females) and its “irrelevance” to the established macho-­oriented sexual order. In the
rare instances when “she” appears in homoerotica, as in Macho Dancer, the unnamed tibo
(played by Marie Barbacui) is assigned primarily ignored supporting roles (“extras” as the
dismissive industry term would call them), such as gay bar bouncers, bartenders, and “sani-
tized” masseuses to the machos. This apparently intentional liminality of the tibo within
an already constricted space may be seen as an inability of (predominantly bakla/bayot)
filmmakers to deal with her sexual/power position in a positive, productive way.
  7. This may be partly explained by the queer identities of its filmmakers: both Brocka and
Chionglo were publicly gay, and as such, their sexual subjectivity may have played a large
part in the treatment of its material.
  8. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6 – 18.
  9. The bakla/bayot has, since the early 1990s, ceased to become an object of patriarchal deri-
sion and abjection, and has instead become a role model of individual material improvement
and community cultural dominance through the ubiquitous Filipino space of the street
corner beauty parlor, a transformation signaled by the emergence of hairstyle moguls such
as Ricky Reyes, who was a regular Malacañang Palace visitor during the Ramos administra-
tion. This is paralleled with the bakla/bayot’s dominance in the fashion and entertainment
industry (Rene Salud, German Moreno, Boy Abunda) in elite socialite circles (Louie Cruz),
and stage/film directing (Antonio Mabesa, Behn Cervantes, Anton Juan, Lino Brocka, Mel
Chionglo, Joel Lamangan, etc.).
10. Burlesk Queen (dir., Celso Ad Castillo, 1977).
11. Maynila sa kuko ng Liwanag (Manila in Twilight) (dir., Lino Brocka, 1975).
12. That the first scene involved a brown Filipino ecstatically “agonizing” under the merciless
mouth of the white U.S. citizen also cues us semiotically to the then-­raging debates about
the social costs of the U.S. military bases, an issue that was resolved only in 1992 with the
Cañete ❘ The Macho Machine 363

Philippine Senate’s rejection of the RP-­U.S. Bases Agreement, and the departure of U.S.
forces from the Philippines after ninety-­four years.
13. This gesture is repeated by Harry (Rodel Velayo) in Burlesk King, this time focusing on the
serial emergence and undressing performance of machos at the Erotica Bar where James
(Leonard Litton) also works.
14. Both Pol and Greg inform Pol’s parents that he would be working in Manila as “a bar-
tender,” thus occluding Pol’s real nature as a sex worker.
15. This mythical theme overdetermines the decisions of millions of employable Filipinos to
“deploy” abroad as contract workers; the social and psychological effects of this often-
­extended separation have not yet, however, been taken into account.
16. Theodore W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bern-
stein (London: Routledge, 1991).
17. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992).
18. The closure of Freudian metaphors in Lee’s narrative are also enacted at this last phase of
Harry’s urban life: the son meets his mother in the street who, initially unaware that he is
her son, offers him her sexual services (at discounted rates); the son, recognizing the mother,
breaks down in tears and informs his shocked mother of his identity; and the son’s wife
“replaces” his mother both semantically (as putang asawa vis-­à-­vis the putang ina) as well as
unconsciously (the son symbolically marrying the mother through the daughter-­in-­law).
19. Sparrow is the code name of the assassination squads based in the metropolitan Manila area
formed by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)-­New People’s Army (NPA) in
1981, and commanded by the late Filemon “Ka Popoy” Lagman. Their targets were police-
men, soldiers, and members of the bureaucracy who have been tried and found guilty by
secret courts of the CPP-­NPA for “crimes against the people,” and whose executions were
carried out by a team of spotters and shooters armed with .45–caliber automatic pistols (the
signature weapon of the Sparrow). Sparrow units were officially disbanded following the
arrest of Lagman and the opening of hostilities between the Reaffirmist and Rejectionist
wings of the CPP-­NPA in 1992. Lagman’s assassination in 2001, reportedly at the hands of
the Reaffirmists, has further exacerbated reported divisions within the NPA between urban
and rural warfare strategies.
20. Shabu is the Filipino street slang for speed, or methamphetamine hydrochloride.
21. Macho dancer’s incomes are often determined by the scale of performative desirability that
results from the “degree of difficulty” it entails (dancers who go “all out” in their solo rou-
tine get paid higher rates than those who simply undress to their briefs; those who per-
form in “live shows” get even higher pay scales), hence, a “hierarchy of performances” also
distinguishes a hierarchy of salaries paid per night. Here, the choice as to who gets what
“rank” is again determined mostly by the bar managers, who pick dancers according to
body typology (the more handsome, the more muscular, the larger the erect penis, etc.)
and the level of skill (or “veterancy”) in a performance. These choices are sometimes based
positions 19:2  Fall 2011 364

on the willingness of the macho to play his part of the role. Rejection of an upper-­ranked
performance usually entails “punishment” in terms of downgrading one’s role (and income)
as a dancer outright, and thus few (except the foolhardy, and those with power connections
to management) turn down this arrangement.
22. The price difference of the drink is split between bar and macho — hence, the more a macho
drinks, the more commissions he receives.
23. This system of financial exploitation seemed to have originated in the heterosexist — and far
more prevalent — “girlie bar,” where this time the subject clientele are straight men desiring
women’s bodies and/or companionship.
24. Reuben Ramas Cañete, “Dancing with Death: Homoeroticism and the Social Realist Nar-
rative in Philippine Cinema” (paper presented at 1st Philippine Art Studies Conference,
Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila, October 21–23, 2002).
25. Daniel Fernando has since parlayed his success as a sexy actor into politics, and now serves
as vice-­governor of the province of Bulacan north of Manila; hetero sexy actors like Leandro
Baldemor have entered the lucrative hosto market in Japan; Leonard Litton has left for New
York City; while Rodel Velayo and Danny Ramos have improved their chances of survival
in show business as dramatic actors. Many others, however, have since dropped out of the
monitoring system.
26. This applies especially to badings/babae who work in menial jobs locally and abroad.