Re: Pinay Lesbian Sex Stories
Jahed Stetter
It revealed, instead, a cornucopia of experiences of Filipina lesbians: of how they tried to survive the backlash and the vile anger of their families who disowned them after learning that they were not heterosexual; of Filipina lesbian activists who found love and solidarity; of unrequited affection for a straight woman.
Ricco Villanueva Siasoco has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, Lambda Literary, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in San Francisco where he is a Grade Dean at the Urban School of San Francisco. The Foley Artist is his first book of stories; it was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2021 Asian American Studies Book Award.
To say that this anthology is much-belated and much-awaited is an understatement and a reprimand-of-a- kind. It is so belated that Ladlad Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing, edited by J. Neil Garcia and Danton Remoto, which first came out, nagladlad, in 1994, has since come out with two more volumes, plus a Best of in 2014. Tingle is so belated that some of our lesbian writers have either stopped writing or stopped being lesbian; I myself had gone into semi-retirement for six years, and then staged a comeback with my collection of lesbian-themed stories, Women Loving (2010). In fact, the daughter I had during that period has now turned lesbian without a diverse literary anthology to help usher her and her generation into the experience.
So here we finally are. I first conceptualized Tingle in November 2015 over dinner in the company of younger writers shane carreon, Early Sol Gadong, Diandra Macarambon, and Roger Garcia, who all agreed it was time to gather the lesbians together in one book. shane and I agreed to co-edit and we issued the open call for submissions in 2016. Unfortunately, the submissions we received were too few and uneven in quality, so we had to shelve it in favor of our individual projects. From that open call, only four writers are included in this book: Villar, Dandeljane Maraat, Camille Rivera, and Germaine Leonin.
But the lesbian tingle is more explicitly dealt with in most of the pieces, which I have arranged in seven thematic sections, although like many efforts to categorize, something remains arbitrary about my selections. Surely, the pieces can be arranged differently, and many of the themes do overlap within the pieces, for instance in all of the poems, and in the non-linear story of Nerisa Guevara, which melds issues of butch-femme identities, passion, the end and beginning of love, family.
We have writers from across the country and across different age groups, with the youngest in their 20s. And because Anvil requested only writing in English, I translated the work of Neri and Melinda Babaran, to somehow also represent our lesbian writers in Filipino. Andyleen Feje, who usually writes in Filipino, offers a sample of her writing in English in a delightful meta-essay about how to write a pseudo-lesbian story. I tried to get all the lesbian writers I know together here (including my daughter), but some constraints proved too difficult to breach.