Ugh, ugh, no NO why?! I know the webisodes haven’t even started yet, but I am pre-judging this project anyway. I don’t care how cute/uplifting/queer-friendly/fun you want to make the scenario, the reality of Filipino men and women (bakla, straight, tibo, whatever) being forced to dance in a prison that many of them have languished in for years while waiting for trial and sentencing is not okay.
The CPDRC began this program— the one that produced the infamous “prison Thriller video”— as part of a larger Christian-based “rehabilitation project.” Though marketed as fun for prisoners, in reality it was used, in part, as a front to siphon money from the state (the warden is siblings with Cebu’s governor); additionally, it has completely covered for the massive corruption of the Philippine penal system and government itself. In a country where non-violent activists are “disappeared” and gunned down in broad daylight; where more money is spent on building up sex tourism for former GIs to enjoy Filipina women and children than on proper education and sustainable domestic industry; and when the president himself is co-owner of one of the largest haciendas in the country where peasants have been murdered for daring to struggle for land rights and living wages, the “dancing prisoners” of the CPDRC are mere bread and circuses, a way for us abroad to laugh about, and wash our hands clean of, the human rights abuses rampant in the Philippines and other such former(?) colonies.
I’ve been sitting on my MA thesis for a few years— a chapter of which is devoted to a critique of the original prison YouTube videos— having been burned out and exhausted by viewing over and over again these sites of pain. But as the years have gone on, and as people (even queer/activist/sympathetic Filipino Americans and Filipino Canadians) have continued to make light of these videos, I remember why I need to continue this work. It isn’t cute when Glee makes the presence of queer youth in the show a cop-out for its otherwise racist, sexist, and ableist politics; it’s even less cute when FIlipino Americans/Canadians aspiring to their “own” version of Glee try to make friendship between bakla men somehow liberationist and radical when they are in a prison that they shouldn’t be in the first place! Can we at least consider that fact, please?!
