Abstract
This chapter looks at the gay history of Malate, how urban gay spaces emerged among the district’s sex strip, and what gay urban history contributes to contemporary manifestations of urban magic. The chapter continues the story of the Malate Renaissance as it shifts to Nakpil Street, focusing on how place-making changes under the direction of a key gay café owner, David, and a community development activist, Angie. They create notions of urban magic through their facilitation of a spontaneous street culture that encouraged the mixing of pedestrians, street space, gay life, and creative performances with the local businesses on Nakpil. This was the “golden age” of the Malate revival and one that many viewed as Bohemian and gay-performative.
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Notes
- 1.
Sidecars are food stalls placed on the side of trucks or Jeepneys. They sell cheap food—snacks, drinks, lunches, dinners—to pedestrians and car operators on the street. Sidecars can be quickly moved depending on the heaviest human and auto traffic, or if there is a threat of police harassment.
- 2.
Enclave and Down Under were two prominent gay bars in 2000.
- 3.
Larry Cruz was the founder-owner of Adriatico Café as well as three additional restaurants that were located around Remedios Circle. He is often credited for developing the circle into a café culture area and for sustaining his restaurant businesses through the cyclical rise and fall in Malate’s popularity. Larry Cruz passed away in 2012 but his restaurant franchise spread to other regions of Metropolitan Manila. In 2013, Adriatico Café and Remedios Bistro were the only remaining LJC restaurants around the circle.
- 4.
The ABC Gallery was an art gallery.
- 5.
Monaco was a gay sex club where patrons watched live sex acts, nude dancing, and met male sex workers.
- 6.
Again, the Ayalas are an elite land-owning and real estate development family in the Philippines who have been credited for Makati’s commercial development.
- 7.
The restaurants, cafés, and bars could sell liquor, wine, and food but no other name brand beer could be sold at the street festival.
- 8.
André Bonafacio is popularly understood as the common person’s national figure of the Philippines and many claim him as “father” of the nation alongside the more educated and reformist José Rizal. Bonafacio founded the Katipunan—a nationalist and revolutionary association that sought Philippine independence through armed struggle and which played a powerful role in the first phase of the Philippine revolution against Spanish colonization. Bonafacio was later executed for treason by the revolutionary government preceding a split in its leadership (Francia 2010).
- 9.
Angie indicated that she did this work for free; she never accepted a salary for any of the organizing work she carried out in Malate.
- 10.
To give a point of comparison, Baccus, the gay bar that opened with the second wave of gay-led gentrification on Nakpil, charged a 100 pesos door charge and 80 pesos per beer in 2000.
- 11.
“Parlor girls” is a derogatory and classed term used to describe working-class, gay Filipino men or transgender women who dress and act as effeminate gays and who work in beauty parlors. The term comes from the work effeminate working-class gays typically secure in the feminized sector of hairdressing or clothes making, and because they cannot secure jobs in masculinized fields.
Bibliography
Francia, Luis H. 2010. A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos. New York, NY: The Overlook Press.
Massey, Doreen, John Allen, and Steve Pile, eds. 1999. City Worlds. London and New York: Routledge.
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Collins, D. (2016). The Magic of Place: Players in the Nakpil Revival. In: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Sexual Community. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57961-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57961-4_3
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