Was Rizal Gay?

There is something malicious about this question. Sometime during the Centennial of Rizal’s martyrdom, Isagani R. Cruz, local pop-culture provocateur and professor of literature and Philippine studies at the De La Salle University, wrote a column for the now-defunct Filmag: Filipino Magazin, shockingly titled "Bakla ba si Rizal?"

The answer to this question, if Cruz is to be believed, is a resounding and categorical “Yes!” And he offers what he calls “biographical evidence” in order to arrive at this question’s confidently affirmative answer.

First, Rizal was a bakla because he was afraid of committing himself to the revolutionary cause. Second, Rizal’s kabaklaan made itself apparent in his periodic “failings” in his relationships with the women to whom he was supposed to have been  romantically linked. Third, Rizal, unlike his compatriots, didn’t go “wenching” in the brothels of Barcelona and Madrid (at least, not very often). Fourth, Rizal might not have even been the father of Josephine’s benighted baby boy, since—paraphrasing noted Rizalist historian Ambeth Ocampo’s feelings on the matter of Rizal’s “disputable paternity”—Josephine would seem to have been routinely sexually abused and consequently impregnated by her stepfather.

Of course, these four “conjectures” hardly qualify as proof. They are more likely the end-results of what I can only describe as a largely catty evidential procedure that begs now to be challenged, if only for its underlying assumptions concerning what being a bakla means: one, a bakla cannot ever be a revolutionary because he is essentially spineless and a coward; two, failing in your relationships with women makes you a bakla; three, a bakla cannot possibly have sex with women, not even when they are wenches; and four, to be a bakla is to be impotent or at least incapable of getting a woman pregnant.

 By: Patricia Orbe