The Rainbow Blog Philippines

Boy meets girl. Girl meets Boy. Boy meets Boy. Boy loves Boy. ADAM is a 20 something gay guy who’s fed up with his life. He just broke up with his long time model wannabe boyfriend for 10 years, his small flat was flooded, and his boss just kept on riding on his body of work without properly acknowledging him. He is living in a quarter life crisis dealing with issues such as his sexuality, societal acceptance and his failed aspirations. He decided to finally live his life and somewhat succeeded when he met ANDRE- the guy who changed everything. My name is Adam. My name is the 69th most popular boys name in the United States. I find that nonsense info somewhat funny. If you get what I meant then probably there’s something we have in common. I won't lie and go straight to the point by saying that I'm gay. And by gay I don't mean I'm a happy person. Sure, I'm not gloomy or anything close to that. I'm just, well, gay. There’s nothing really special about me. I’m jus...

Book Review on Literature and Literary Theory Professor Emilio Bejel's book "Gay Cuban Nation". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Emilio Bejel is a Professor of Spanish American literature and literary theory at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He wrote Gay Cuban Nation . Before I get into the substance of this book, I was totally offended that the University of Chicago Press would print a book with so many fucking typographical errors! Shame! Shame! Shame! The first few chapters were very fascinating. I know almost nothing about Cuban literature or gay Cuban literary history so that was interesting in itself. However, what was more fascinating was Bejel's ability to weave Cuban national history into the framework of the "rupture" at the end of the nineteenth century / beginning of the twentieth century regarding sexuality. Nakpil Zialcita's comment about Philippine academic disregard for everything Spanis...

Book Review on American Communication Professor Robert Alan Brookey's book "Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Robert Alan Brookey is an American Professor of Communications at Arizona State University. He wrote Reinventing the Male Homosexual: The Rhetoric and Power of the Gay Gene . I was just beginning to blossom when LeVay came out with his theory of neuroendocrinological basis for heterosexual and homosexual difference and when Hamer came out with his theory of the gay gene. As an adolescent, the gay gene theory seemed to fit so perfectly into the idea that homosexuality is inborn and that I had no choice in the matter. Yet, as I went through college and graduate school, it became clear that the gay gene theory would not work. The consequences of it are highly problematic. Is there a gene that predisposes someone to watching May Bukas Pa or Wowowee ? D...

Book Review on American English Professor Lee Edelman's book "No Future". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Be forewarned, I really didn't like American Professor of English Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (of Tufts University). He reduces the symbol of the "child" to "the linchpin of our universal politics of 'reproductive futurism.'" I found Lauren Berlant's classic Queen of America Goes to Washington City to be spot on in many instances and if you're interested in how popular American culture utilizes the symbol of the child for neocon propaganda, read her book. She predicted through her analysis of Forest Gump, George Bush II's election. If neocons could they would elect a fetus as president and Dick Cheney as vice president. And they got close with George Bush II. I am not into fetishizing children in an intellectual way or otherwise. Children are ch...

Book Review on American English Professor Judith Halberstam's book "In a Queer Time and Place". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Judith Halberstam is an American Professor of English and also has written Female Masculinity and The Drag King Book . In A Queer Time and Place discusses a number of topics involving sexuality and queer subjects. One of the topics of her book that I found interesting related to her discussion of metronormativity. Halberstam takes Michael Warner's heteronormativity ( Fear of A Queer Planet ) and reshapes it to describe the "normalizing" of urban sexual identities while abnormalizing rural sexual practices and identities. She takes the stories of several tragic FTM transgenders, like Brandon Teena to show how urban LGBT identities have allied with urbanism to create the belief that rural = homophobic. Halberstam shows how the movie Boys Don't Cry ended up changing Brandon Teena's...

Book Review on Canadian English Professor Michael Cobb's book "God Hates Fags". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . I want to start off this review by unequivocally stating that I do not recommend buying or reading this book . I hesitated writing this review at first, but I decided I wanted to tell you what was so disappointing and my expectations for research into the discourse of anti-gay right-wing Christian fundamentalism. Michael Cobb is an English Professor at the University of Toronto and is a very angry gay man. I picked this book up with the idea that it would be an update to Didi Herman's The Anti-Gay Agenda with a focus on the upsurge in media attention to Fred Phelps "God Hates Fags" church. The book does provide a little bit of research into the history of Fred Phelps church of hate. However, I'd recommend Ryan Jones' documentary Fall from Grace -- which includes unprecedented access to Fred Ph...

Book Review on Literature and LGBT Studies Professor Julie Abraham's book "Metropolitan Lovers". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Julie Abraham is an American professor of literature and LGBT studies. Abraham's book is an interesting look at the connection between the idea of the "city" and homosexual identity -- lesbian and gay. I must admit up front that I found the book to be very Euro-American centric and failed to address the relation of the city and sexuality to colonialism and imperialism or test her theories of that relationship to the conscious city creating in colonized places. Because of this, I found a lot of the book boring and tedious to read. But, if you're into urban studies or European lesbian nineteenth century history or Oscar Wilde, you'll likely find this book much more interesting. That being said, the book got me thinking of Benedict Anderson's highly controversial Under Three Fla...

Book Review on Anthropologist and Gender Studies Professor Gayatri Reddy's book "With Respect to Sex". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Gayatri Reddy is an Indian-American anthropologist and gender studies professor. Reddy's book is an ethnography of the transgender hijra of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Reddy carefully recounts the tensions in life for the hijra that are specific to the cultural context like the road from rural life to urban hijra identity in Hyderabad and some of the more seemingly universal aspects of transgender collective identity regarding how the hijra form into hierarchical adopted families that enforce norms for the hijra identity with an "old-timer" at the apex of the hierarchical family. Her discussion of the negotiation between Hindu and Muslim identification is fascinating. (Hyderabad was a Muslim sultanate until after independence and if you ever go there, you can see i...

Book Review on American English Professor Michael Warner's book "The Trouble with Normal". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Michael Warner is a professor of English at Rutgers University. He is one of the founding thinkers in "queer theory" starting with his edited book Fear of a Queer Planet . When first published, The Trouble with Normal was seen as a response to Andrew Sullivan's book Virtually Normal and the move in sexual minority and dissident communities towards a stable LGBT identity community and same-sex marriage as the ultimate goal of such a community. Until the 1990s, the U.S. did not have a clear and stable notion of an LGBT community -- there were transgender communities, gay communities, lesbian communities and some overlap. This is still true about a global LGBT community. This unifying of different groups of people into an LGBT community produced a unified political agenda. For Warner, this polit...

Book Review on American Anthropology Professor Tanya Erzen's 2006 book "Straight to Jesus". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Tanya Erzen is an American anthropologist and professor and identified herself as a "straight woman." She interviews and observes an ex-gay community south of San Francisco, California over the course of a year and does a bit of historical research of ex-gay faith communities, the media and political movements. In the late 1990s, the religious right in the U.S. began heavily promoting ex-gays as a political maneuver to deny LGBT claims for anti-discrimination laws or equal protection under the law. The LGBT community responded with an attack on ex-gays -- the 1999 movie But I'm a Cheerleader is a classic example. Yet, Enzer doesn't focus on either of these two opposing movements, the LGBT political movement or the religious right's political movement. Instead, she focuses on the suff...

Book Review on Canadian Sociology Professor Tina Fetner's 2008 book "How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Tina Fetner is a sociology professor in Canada and identified herself as a "straight woman." She reviewed documents from both the religious right and gay and lesbian sources and made a simple claim. The modern American LGBT movement was primarily shaped by the forces of the religious right. The religious right had better organization and way more money to contribute to opposing LGBT claims -- at least, how they saw those claims. This ended up, in LGBT organzing terms, putting significant resources and time into responding to that opposition, even if the area of battle was not a priority for the LGBT movement. As has been discussed at length in other scholarship, until the religious right started organizing against the mild anti-discrimination laws the LGBT movem...