CONTEXT: BENEVOLENT AUTHORITARIAN

On September 23, 1971, using the pretext created by the combination of a communist insurgency, a Muslim insurrection on the southern island of Mindanao, and mounting political unrest on university campuses to declare martial law, President Ferdinand Marcos, at the end of his second and final term, declared martial law. This began what he termed “constitutional authoritarianism” that lasted until being deposed in 1986.

CONTEXT: GAY POPCORN WORKHORSE

The year prior to Marcos “benevolent authoritarianism” sees the debut of the openly gay director Lino Brocka with four feature films: Wanted: Perfect Mother, based on The Sound of Music and komik (local serial comic); The Arizona Kid, a western following a Filipino immigrant in the American West looking for his family; Santiago!, an action film about World War II guerilla fights who withdraw from the battlefield; and Dipped in Gold, another komiks adaptation about the blackmailing of two older men who are having an affair. 

CONTEXT: SURVIVAL IN POLITICAL ALLEGORY

In 1976, Insiang, Brocka’s social realist tragedy of a young woman seeking revenge for her rape by her mother’s boyfriend as she tries to survive poverty and life in the Tondo slum is released. A barely veiled political allegory on the horrors and grotesqueries under Marcos and colonialism, Insiang is partially funded by Imee Marcos, daughter of President Marcos and Brocka’s friend; is heavily and publicly criticized by Imelda Marcos, wife of President Marcos; and is the first Filipino film to premiere at Cannes. Like with Manila in the Claws of Light, political unrest and authoritarian power are said to be merely “background”—the surround—that can disappear if one is so inclined. An allegory set amidst its reality. 

CONTEXT: CONCERNED ARTISTS OF THE PHILIPPINES

Using his global and national status, Brocka took to the streets in 1983 following the assassination of opposition politician Benigno Aguino, Jr. That year Brocka co-founded Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP) that called on artists to use their work and bodies to organize and challenge state censorship and repression of art. At a bus drivers' protest in 1985, Brocka was arrested and held for 16 days until public pressure forced his release. His aesthetic antagonism with power—its cinematic individuality—giving way to material confrontation and bodily sacrifice.

CONTEXT: GAYS IN THE POST-REVOLUTION

Two years after Marcos’s fall, Brocka releases Macho Dancer (1988). Following a young male sex worker as he works to support his family after his American military trick moves back to the States, Macho Dancer is at once a pulpy crime melodrama filled with sex, drugs, and violence, and a social realist drama about the plight of homosexuality, colonialism, police corruption, and poverty. One of Brocka’s final films before a car accident killed him in 1991, Macho Dancerbecame one of his most controversial and censored. Deemed too explicit, too gay, too anti-cop, too anti-government in a still recovering post-Marcos Phillipenes, Brocka had to smuggle the original cut of the film out of the country (a rote practice by this point in his career). Its sexual explicitness an attempt by Brocka to court the growing gay Western market and its political intensity his anger at what little change he saw following Marcos’s ouster. 

CONTEXT: SOFTCORE ART HOUSE / ART HOUSE SOFTCORE

How many times can you hard cut from macho dancers soaping each other up on stage to police violence to melodramatic grabs at heterosexual normalcy to comically flouncy bar managers to warehouses of sex slavery before the tonal foundation cracks and collapses? How long can you circle a stage of masturbating male sex workers and their audience of leering, white tourists before your melodramatic art pedigree collapses into softcore pornography? How long can you ignore the supposed narrative drive of your film to revel in the gyrating bodies of young men? How much funk—what L.H. Stallings theorizes as those sweaty, grimy, living feelings that engage the body as a site of pleasure, liberation, and relationality—can a movie accumulate before the mold sets in?

CONTEXT: ANTAGONISM

Lino Brocka and Macho Dancer should not hold together, their fluidity of forms should slip through our fingers, their contradictions should not allow coherence. And yet, they continue to remain intimately together through their purposeful, willful, antagonistic accumulative density of frictions, of discomforts, of failed presumptions, of erotic reachings, of generic excesses, of political honesty.