In the Philippines, where same-sex intimate partnerships are not recognized legally and even considered taboo, there are ecumenical religious groups like the Metropolitan Community Church that officiate weddings for gay and lesbian couples. These weddings, or Holy Unions, are meant to celebrate the pledge of lifelong fidelity between the members of the couple but do not lead them to legal recognition. However, the performance of these weddings is consistently criticized as the country’s religious and conservative population view it as a bastardization of marriage, an institution which has always been assumed as a heterosexual privilege. The primary text of this study is “J & P: Love is love Regardless†(Magbanua, 2012) an online video featuring the wedding of a Filipino gay couple. Guided by Kathleen Hull’s concept of wedding ritual as cultural practice and Ann Swidler’s romantic love mythology, the wedding video is analyzed to understand how the image of the newlywed gay couple in J & P contributes to the idealization of wedding as the pinnacle event for Filipino gay couples. The same concepts are also used as interpretive lens to analyze the video’s reception (via comments posted online) to show the public’s view on gay relationships and how the cultural practice, the wedding, has become synonymous with marriage. Finally, a queer reading of the text and reception is employed to reveal how the wedding video serves as a cultural artifact that not only preserves the wedding event and the fantasy of romance it exhibits but also the validation of marriage as ideal aspiration for any intimate relationship. Following Michael Warner’s arguments in The Trouble With Normal (2000) that marriage is a flawed, patriarchal institution laid by straight culture, this study contends that the views of Filipino same-sex couples on marriage are simplistic and heteronormative, as marriage is viewed as a universal, unquestioned, and always present “right,†as the debates are usually directed to the genders of who are allowed to marry and not to what marriage is about.
ISSN 2094-4187 (Print)
Philippine E-Journals
