Lamyos: New LGBTQ Fiction from the Philippines

by J. Neil C. Garcia (Editor)

While the relatively newfangled category "queer" is now the political "marker" for LGBTQ, it doesn't invalidate these other signifiers of being and becoming including the ideas, practices, and, indeed, lives that these more familiar and hard-won names represent. It merely puts these self-identifications on edge, rendering them more open, more self-aware, and ultimately more critical of the assumptions that it will do all of us—lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, queers, intersexuals, or whatever else—well never to leave unexamined. However else it can be embodied into being, at this point in our history, to be queer is to possess excentric forms of desire and/or to identify outside conventional categories of cisgendered maleness and femaleness.
Written in three Philippine languages by a variety of young Filipino authors from across the archipelago, the twelve stories in Lamyos: New LGBTQ Fiction from the Philippines seek not only to present a variety of sexually dissident, gender-nonconformist, and/or queer subjectivities but also to problematize heteronormative gender and sexuality—and their privileging of het-conjugal and cisgendered sexual bonds—as well as the appropriations of these and all other "global" forms of desire in our country, where they can only exist as syncretisms of local and translocal conceptions.
As exemplary instances of imaginative queer literacy, these stories may be seen to exhibit the idea of "intersectionalities": the intricate and mutually implicating layers of realities and circumstances—the complexity—that necessarily attend the materiality of LGBTQ being... As these stories so memorably demonstrate, because the oppression suffered by queer individuals is manifold and intersecting, so are the resources of queer agency, so is the dignity and the luminous truth of queer lives.
-from the Introduction by J. NEIL C. GARCIA

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

305 pages

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

J. Neil C. Garcia finished his BA Journalism (magna cum laude) in the University of Santo Tomas in 1990. He is currently teaching creative writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines , Diliman, where he also serves as an associate for poetry in the Institute of Creative Writing . He is the author of numerous poetry collections and works in literary and cultural criticism, including Our Lady of the Carnival (1996), The Sorrows of Water (2000), Kaluluwa (2001), Philippine Gay Culture: The Last Thirty Years (1996), Slip/pages: Essays in Philippine Gay Criticism (1998), Performing the Self: Occasional Prose (2003), The Garden of Wordlessness (2005), and Misterios and Other Poems ( 2005) His latest critical work , Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics: Essays and Critiques , is a revised version of his PhD dissertation in English Studies: Creative Writing, which he completed in 2003. He is currently working on a full-length book, a postcolonial survey and analysis of Philippine poetry in English.

Reviews

[Rupert Tamayo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pasalamat ako at natuklasan ko ang librong ito sa Manila International Book Fair 2022. Nakakatuwa sa panahon ngayon na makakabasa ka ng mga LGBTQ na kuwento na tumatalakay sa mga seryosong isyung panlipunan.

Ang librong ito ay para sa lahat, walang pinipiling mambabasa. Sa kabuuan ng libro tatlong kuwento ang aking nagustuhan ng sobra-sobra dahil pasok sa aking panlasa at namangha ako sa paraan ng kanilang pagsulat.

1. Mabitac
2. Dibuhong Martir
3. The Consequences of Crossing Gazes