The Wily Filipino

Sex and the Manong.

The cover of last month's issue of Filipinas Magazine had the caption "Sex and the Single Manong, ca. 1940." I was, perhaps irrationally, hoping for some hot man-on-man action, but I knew what to expect: the men-to-women ratio, the taxi dance halls, the riots, prostitutes following the migrants from camp to camp and harvest to harvest, that California businessman calling Filipinos "hot little rabbits,"* the fascination with white women, reading between the lines of America Is In The Heart about Bulosan's blondes and wondering what the deal was with all these white women wandering in and out of the narrative.

It's quite obvious and understandable how historiography regarding the manong generation proceeded this way: in a community full of fairly devout Catholics, and a nascent second/third-generation (het-male) Filipino American identity that was effectively emasculated in current American popular culture, it was no wonder that this -- I'm thinking of a good word -- rampant male heterosexuality became regnant in Filipino American Studies. There's nothing like a threat to masculinity to get one's, um, dander up -- if "one" were a predominantly male and perhaps proudly heterosexual group of Filipino American scholars in the '60s and '70s. The party line, if one could call it that, was that the manongs were playas -- the suits! the white women! the slicked-back hair! -- supported very clearly by the very real white perception of Filipinos as sexual threats, with its violent consequences. It is perhaps easier to imagine them, amidst their lives of desperate I-Hotel loneliness, as eternally swinging, forever single, and straight bachelors.

Such heteronormativity (and a healthy dose of Catholic prudishness) would perhaps prevent any further inquiry into whether or not scenes of the love that dare not speak its name were ever enacted in those lonely and cramped migrant shacks.**

*The whole quote actually goes, "The Filipinos are hot little rabbits, and many of these white women like them for this reason." At which point, I imagine, my straight male Filipino students say under their breath, "Cool."

**I'm also thinking about this because of a discussion in class last week of Joel Tan's story "Night Sweats," in which the classroom -- and at some point one student was fanning herself just talking about it -- was treated to phrases like "ring muscle" and "purple knob."

Posted by the wily filipino at November 16, 2004 10:32 PM