When Pura Luka Vega was arrested and detained in late September, one of the dominant reactions was surprise: how can this happen in the Philippines? What happened to creative freedom? How could they get jailed for a case they had no idea had been filed, when they had been going from one city to the next facing persona non grata charges, in full drag, with Instagram documentation, and stories about the openness of these spaces to seeing them and their artistry?

But the curse of the Philippine present is that we are reaping the outcomes of our refusal to have the more difficult, because complex conversations about arts and culture, much of which is not simply about data and history, but about fleshing these out, tearing these apart, so that we know better the state of discourse, freedom, and creative work in the present. At the very least, we need these conversations so that we might be reminded that our freedoms — including all those enshrined in the Constitution — are never guaranteed.

Especially not when we are talking about artistic freedom. A sense of (recent) history in fact reveals how in the post-Marcos leaderships from Cory to Duterte, censorship was a constant. Sure, not in the Martial Law era kind of way, but in ways that were equally dangerous because insidious and consistent. And yes, there’s the MTRCB and its mere existence as a regulatory board; but there are also the acts of censure, the bannings, the cancellations that are borne of an ever-growing conservatism, one that is bound to the ways in which Catholicism is practiced in these shores, and in the age of online platforms, a predisposition towards simply swinging between black-and-white, right-and-wrong, acceptable-and-unacceptable for the loudest voice, the bigger mob. There is also a constant mistrust of creative work, as there is an insistence that it must serve the purpose of espousing a certain kind of morality, that is about a fixed set of rules, a list of lessons to be learned.

It is for this reason that Pura Luka Vega—their artistic practice and their performance—would never be understood. It is also why they have been victimized by these acts of censure. Because there is nothing simple about drag, and certainly nothing simplistic about the art practice of Pura Luka Vega. But censorship lives off simplicity, the black and white, and in the case of the Philippines, it lives off feelings of offense.

Which is why the better question is not: when did this start happening in this democracy? It is: how has our democracy come to this? How did we come to this point when being offended by something, disagreeing about a specific portrayal, a kind of artistic work, has to mean actions that curtail artistic freedom, from the cancellation of individuals, to campaigns to boycott their work, from online bullying to legal cases filed?

Because this is where we’re at, and the impulse to engage in acts of censure are rarely ever seen for what they are: a disagreement with the artistic product, a dismissal of its value, an insistence that art should be a certain way. 

This is at the heart of all the cases against Pura Luka Vega, from the personas non grata filed against them across so many cities, to the case that brought him to jail, to the one that was filed recently by the suspiciously conservative Social Media Broadcasters of the Philippines. These are cases that do not speak of their performance as an artistic product, and instead simply sees it as nothing more but an offensive act, removed from the context of its making, the culture that surrounds its creation, the transgression and power that it holds. It also denies the performance its audience, and instead presumes that its only audience are the ones who have taken offense, the ones that these cities and groups and individuals are purportedly speaking for when they target Pura for the performance. The ones who are Catholic, and conservative, which these cases presume is all of us.

And here’s the thing: it won’t matter that this is untrue. The premise of a “Catholic country” is one that’s not so much in our laws, as it is in our legal system, our governance, our civil society institutions. There is little in this country that is not run on some version of Catholicism, and while we would like to say that there is a separation between Church and State, this couldn’t be farthest from the truth in practice—after all, our government officials espouse Catholicism every chance they get and govern with a conservatism wrought by Catholic practice. In the case of Pura, even the most, uh, liberal of them thought they had crossed a line. Even transgender Congress representative Geraldine Roman told Pura not to use the gender card, which is strange coming from … a … transgender Congress representative.

Yet, this is not just about governance and Catholicism. It is also the arts and culture sector in general, unable to grapple with a performance such as Pura’s, which can only be a measure of the sector’s own conservatism, as it might be a by-product of an internalized homophobia. Either way, there is a resistance to—if not an impulse to dismiss—performances and artmaking that is beyond the purvey of one’s consciousness and practice, that is beyond what is deemed “acceptable.”

Which is a crisis in itself for the cultural sector: when we ourselves fail to see the artistic practices of others to be valuable and worthy enough of our solidarity, why do we expect the bigger society to understand and accept it? If falls on us, for sure, the ones doing mainstream work, to provide the bridge between audiences and the transgressive, the new, the different. Part of the work that we do is about opening up our audience to diverse expressions and ways of thinking that they might otherwise not be exposed to.

Because this is what censorship also reminds us. It tells us that we are failing at educating a bigger public about the value of creative expression and cultural work. It reminds us of our own creative work and artistic practices, and how these might already be in the clutches of the comfortable and easy, the ones that are expected and acceptable, across the political spectrum, and believing that this is all of artmaking and creativity that is valuable. Watching drag artists performing for free for the Pura Luka Vega fundraiser, it was easy to see how and why much of the drag scene’s artistry and creativity would be difficult for an arts and culture scene that—one realizes—is pre-dominantly heterosexual, patriarchal, if not macho, despite the “diversity” it claims to cradle.

And herein lies the reasons why Pura Luka Vega’s performance and creativity are powerful: it is beyond what we are taught to allow into our lives, what we are taught to engage in. It is a practice of faith, the kind that is different from the ways we know our Catholicism to be practiced through song, ritual, pomp, and pageantry. But also it is premised on faith: a faith in an audience that would know, would understand, the complexity with which entertainment and enjoyment could be so interwoven with critique on the one hand, and religion on the other. That these can all co-exist in an art form, in performance, and in the artist that builds from and through it, is what we are being challenged to understand and accept.

The question really is whether or not we can rise to the occasion of this challenge, not just from the case of Pura, but from the rise of drag artistry and creativity, and its influence on and takeover of mainstream spaces. Because if the answer is no, then the repercussions on all our freedoms will be massive, especially given the rise of conservatism across the political spectrum given the predisposition towards cancellations and censures and dismissals. Sometimes we are the monsters that we first need to slay. ***