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?