In the claws of desire: Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer, a trip into Manila’s gay underworld

Lino Brocka was once taking me to dinner in Manila when he explained that we needed to make a detour first. He was chair of the Directors’ Guild of the Philippines, and needed to be at a hastily convened meeting of the guild to establish its position on some new political crisis; Ferdinand Marcos was the dictatorial president at the time, although it was generally his wife Imelda who muscled in on ‘cultural’ matters. Lino kept the meeting short, but made sure that all factions in the hall had a chance to speak. The discussion was in Tagalog, of course, and I didn’t understand what was being said. But I was more struck by the way the directors arranged themselves: all the macho directors of thrillers and action films sat at one end, the country’s few women directors sat in the middle, and a surprisingly large contingent of gay directors sat at the other end.  I remember thinking that this must be the only such guild in the world where gay men had such a voluminous role.

Lino himself was gay and far from celibate, but tackled gay characters and themes in his films quite rarely. His third feature Gold-plated (Tubog sa Ginto, 1971; never shown outside the Philippines but there are lengthy clips in Christian Blackwood’s 1987 documentary Signed: Lino Brocka) centres on a wealthy married businessman blackmailed by his male lover. And in his famous 1975 feature Manila: In the Claws of Light (Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag) there’s an episode in which the country-boy protagonist Julio is briefly and disastrously cajoled into male prostitution. But Macho Dancer (1988) is the only Brocka film set largely in Manila’s gay underworld. The film was a modest success in the home market, despite local censorship, and sold well enough abroad to prompt a mini-genre of imitations, three directed by Mel Chionglo. 

‘Macho dancing’ is a type of nightclub performance in which young, non-effeminate men in small slips or jock-straps undulate their bodies to music, interspersed with ‘shower’ acts (in which two soap each other’s naked bodies before feigning sexual intimacy) and masturbation line-ups, which must be self-explanatory. Some establishments also include faked displays of sadomasochism, but not those shown in Lino’s film. The dancing itself seems to be culturally specific to the Philippines (it’s not performed in similar clubs in Thailand’s big cities), and functions primarily to allow the performers to advertise their charms to the customers in the audience. It’s widely assumed that most performers are gay-for-pay and straight in real life – and that the club proprietors have ‘understandings’ with the local police.

The film’s script (co-written by Lino’s frequent collaborator Ricky Lee, a specialist in both noirish melodrama and the gay subculture) takes male and female prostitution as given aspects of Manila’s nightlife and avoids moralising. There’s no sense that the film is an exposé. The underlying assumption is that impoverished young men enter this world willingly while young women are often forced into prostitution, sometimes at gunpoint, and rarely achieve any real agency in the profession. One birthday party scene shows that some of the men have internalised self-hatred while trying to ‘escape’ through drink, drugs and self-harming. 

Watching the restored, uncut print of Macho Dancer, it’s clear that Lino is using the gay milieu more as a colourful backdrop than as a theme. His tendency when supervising his writers was always to push his plots in the direction of working-class film noir (John Garfield movies of the late 1940s were his lifelong touchstone) and he gives this film that thrust by focusing on two protagonists in trouble. First and for much of the film foremost is Pol (Lino’s ‘discovery’ Allan Paule) who decides to leave his village home to support his fatherless family by working in the big-city fleshpots when his GI lover/benefactor is transferred out of the Philippines. (The American kindly lines up a replacement father-figure, but Pol clearly believes he could do better on a bigger stage.) Second is Noel (Daniel Fernando, best actor in the Urian Awards), another country-boy and an established macho dancer who is preoccupied with finding his missing sister Pining, believed to have been hijacked into prostitution. 

Thanks to the duplicity of Noel’s on-stage partner Dennis (William Lorenzo, another newcomer), who deals drugs for the corrupt and ruthless local chief of police, Pol and Noel find themselves both dodging and committing violence as they search for and try to free Pining. Along the way, Pol develops a crush on the sassy hooker Bambi (top-billed Jaclyn Jose), who reciprocates his feelings but is too smart to see any future for them as a couple.

There are obvious echoes of characters and situations from earlier Brocka films like Manila and Jaguar (1979), but Lino’s insistence on credible characters and realistic plotting gives Macho Dancer an urgency, resonance and staying power that transcend the genre it launched.

Macho Dancer screens at BFI Southbank on 21 May as part of this year’s Queer East Film Festival.