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MAY has
always been a flamboyant season in this country.
Flowers—which are there always, all through the year—are
celebrated as if they have just bloomed. It is a kind of
spring for us. Which must be the reason for our
colonizers to see it as our own Spring. Never mind if
there is no Autumn to provide its counterpoint. The
flores are therefore located in May, even if in some
hot provinces the flores are wilted and browned
by the heat of the sun. This is not a problem because
rituals have always this capacity to ignore the real and
the empirical and create its own layer of audio-visual
splendor, more convincing and even more compelling than
the everyday facts.
In this
Republic, May is an open season. Rituals are conflated
with other rituals, and the search for the Cross is
stretched to the offering of flowers that is rooted in
what have oftentimes been described as pre-Spanish
animistic traditions. In Bicol the Santacruzan is linked
to a form called Dotoc. With the passing of years,
ceremonials are dusted off and transformed into
postmodern commentaries. Even the offerings for the
encantos have changed: they are no longer content
with rolled tobacco but with Hope and Marlboro. For
drink offerings, rice wine has been replaced by beer.
You see, even the world of enchantment goes through
development, too.
 New
rituals are even created. In that phantom space of
rituals, there are no owners, only dominant authorities
who manage to cloak their positions with the power of
landlords and owners.
This
summer ownership of May rituals has come to the fore.
Certain sectors, most of them associated with the
institutional Catholic Church, are bristling against the
misuse of the Santacruzan. Gay males who can put to
shame the flowers of May in gowns resplendent and
precious enough to be offerings to the gods, are accused
of misrepresenting the elements of the rituals. Come on!
Santacruzan and Flores de Mayo have always been gay! Its
design and its air have always been about the display of
beauty and competition and fun. In every small town,
there is always this gentle mannered man or, in some
cases, a person with florid manners and well-developed
aesthetics in the face of a community whose main
concerns are palay and coconut production. He can always
create the grandest of arcos and coordinate the building
of floats on the tiniest budgets. They are miracle
workers because they make our fiestas and, well, our
Santacruzan possible. For all their colorful presence,
they manage to stay in the background while people
admire the True Female parade. We thank these planners,
these quintessential “eventologists” way before the term
became an invention of the big cities. In small towns,
these artists disappear behind their creations and the
societies that admire their works are happier.
Now,
this is not the time to question the function of fiestas
and the Santacruzan or the Flores de Mayo. The issue is
really one of judgment, of what other people think of
other people. In some gay Santacruzan—now, that’s being
redundant—gay males believe they have the right to their
faith. In fairness (doesn’t this phrase sound poetically
justified with our topic?) to other gay groups, some
have differentiated the Flores de Mayo as secular from
the relatively sacred undertaking like Santacruzan. A
news report on TV carried Ricky Reyes explaining that,
in his opinion, gay males should respect the sacrality
of the Santacruzan, meaning that all those
personalities—Reina Elena, Reina Emperatriz, Rosa
Mistica, etc.—were all created to be acted out by
females. But, I tell you, the debate will certainly not
end there.
Years
back, in a forum, I was approached by a person who
introduced himself as from a local tourism bureau. He
saw me, an anthropologist, as the person who would know
about traditions and their maintenance. I told him we
anthropologists do not work on preserving of traditions.
We record traditions, including the shifts they go
through. The guy was particularly interested in the
preservation of the Santacruzan practices in his place.
I asked him these questions: What elements would you
want preserved? Santacruzan as beauty pageant? With
little girls sexualized into looking like grown-up women
with big hair and big makeup? With senior citizens
encouraged to making parodies of themselves? What about
the gay Santacruzan? The guy was relentless: We want the
authentic one! Which one is authentic? Or more
authentic?
The
director John Milius once said: “There is a certain kind
of respect for authenticity today that there wasn’t back
in the days when they did Cleopatra, where everything
looked like a giant motel. People want to have it be
authentic in the look, and authentic in the way people
behave.”
The
issue at hand goes beyond authenticity and into the
highly contentious domain of morality? Are some sectors
by being themselves not imbued with morality to approach
the sacred sphere? In certain towns again where the
Church authorities cannot stop men from whipping
themselves in public (as flagellants atoning for their
sins), a kind of compromise has been reached: they
cannot enter the church and conduct the rituals there.
It follows also that they do not receive any formal
blessing from the priest.
The gay
males who persist to be personalities in this pageant
depicting Constantine’s Search for the Cross will never
be allowed to enter the Church. Not that they want to
conduct their pageant inside. As far as I know, only the
True Females who are part of this pageant are allowed in
the Church, if the pageant is sanctioned by the local
church. As far as they tell us, these gay males who are
appropriating a ritual are quite happy to be outside the
church of their faith, even if some of them claim the
pageant to be part of their panata, or vow. As
with any other Catholics.
Back to
that news report on TV about Ricky Reyes and what looked
like his group. One participant clarified that they were
not in a Santacruzan but in a Flores de Mayo. And what
is the difference: the sagala said, in so many
words, that Flores de Mayo is when you can be yourself.
The news reporter then commented that it is indeed
difficult to differentiate the two events.
What I
see is the lack of dialogue between, and the ready
judgment and conviction on the marginalized and the
already disenfranchised. This debate and rancor will go
on and on but my memory of that news report will be of
people who are avid about what they are doing. I cannot
comment on their being Catholics but they remind me of
the hermit in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra
and how this hermit would create sacred songs, laugh,
weep, sing and even mumble for his God. The philosopher
would judge that this old man does not know that God is
dead. For the gay sagala, their God is alive and
they laugh, weep and put on costumes. For those with
higher theology, that faith is crude. But you do not
dismiss it, you talk about it. What I do remember in
this event, in the Santacruzan/Flores de Mayo, are men
who are peacocks outside but humble souls within.
Humility, if my catechism is correct, goes a long, long
way with an understanding God. |
