Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man

By C.E. Gatchalian

--C.E. (Chris) Gatchalian is a queer Filipino writer; his plays have been shortlisted for 2 Lambda Literary Awards, and he is the 2013 winner of the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBT Writers from the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Chris published an essay on Maria Callas in the Arsenal anthology AlliterAsian in 2015; we were so impressed by it, we asked him to write a nonfiction collection, the result of which is Double Melancholy.
--Double Melancholy is a hybrid of LGBTQ and Asian memoir and cultural commentary, in which Chris writes eloquently and movingly of the impact of art on his formative years as a brown queer young man. The title, a play on the Asian phrase “double happiness,” refers to the role of melancholy in the lives of many LGBTQ people as they come to terms with their outsider status. In Chris’ world, the performing arts had a huge impact on his burgeoning queer and racial identity, from the children’s literary classic Anne of Green Gables to film, opera and popular music. These works of art “saved” him through their beauty and pathos, offering new ways of thinking and dreaming about the world; at the same time, he comes to understand that in many ways, these works were largely heteronormative and white, and suppressed his own self-acceptance as a brown queer.
--In Chris’s own words: “In writing this book, I wanted to work out my complex feelings about Western art that I’ve imbibed and worshipped over the years: how it’s edified me while at the same time colonized and erased me.” The work of Susan Sontag was a big influence on him; not so much in terms of approach (Sontag’s criticism is much more detached and impersonal than that taken by this book), but more in terms of breadth and its general feeling of intellectual striving.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781551527543

C.E. Gatchalian

Born, raised and based in Vancouver, C. E. Gatchalian is a writer of plays, poetry, fiction and essays. An alumnus of the University of British Columbia's Creative Writing program, he is the author of nine plays, including Motifs & Repetitions, Crossing, Broken and People Like Vince. The recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council, and the winner of the 2005 Gordon Armstrong Playwright's Rent Award, he has been Playwright-in-Residence at the Playhouse Theatre Company and the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver, and Writer-in-Residence at the Berton House Writers' Retreat in Dawson City, Yukon. His work has appeared on stages in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto and New Zealand.

Book preview

Chapter

1  |  Rupture: Anne of Green Gables

Even as a young child, I knew I was odd. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I always felt at odds with the world.

In the beginning, before the rupture, was pure consciousness. I was one with the world; my rhythms were its rhythms. Even after the inevitable ego boundaries had formed and I’d realized that my will was not necessarily the will of the universe, I still felt—until the age of ten—enough concord with the world to not feel particularly estranged by it.

On the contrary—I thought the world my oyster. I was an only child; my father left us when I was three. Consequently, there was no one with whom I had to compete for my mother’s attention (at least not early on; later, her boyfriends would wreak havoc on our mystical union). As well, I was reading fluently by age three and by age four had taught myself to play piano by ear. I was identified as gifted and treated duly by the adults around me. I was well behaved and conscientious, according to my grade two report card. Only child, teacher’s pet. As a child, I had some privilege.

June 5, 1983

[my earliest surviving journal entry]

Upon blowing out my birthday candles on this, the night of my ninth birthday, I made the following wishes (I know we’re only supposed to make one, but I made three, because I can):

1. That I get straight As in school this year (yes, even math, and PE doesn’t count—only ignoramuses get As in PE)

2. That I get the highest mark in the province on my grade four piano exam

3. That we win the dream house at this year’s PNE [Pacific National Exhibition, Vancouver’s annual summer trashy, petit bourgeois fun fair]

I visualized all three of these things happening just before I blew my candles out, because everything I set my heart on, I get. Always. I am a good person and I work hard and I deserve it.

I don’t remember there being a birthday party for me that year. In fact, I think I was thrown only two birthday parties my entire childhood—not because my mother was anti-social or stingy, but because of my own, seemingly innate, aversion to anything that smacked of society (except school—I welcomed it as society’s proxy, as the thing to struggle against and transcend). Parties seemed to celebrate society—and why would anyone want to do something as insipid as that?

So as a child, my political leanings were anti-collectivist; I subscribed to a philosophy of meritocratic, heroic individualism. I attribute this early political conservatism to my mother, who remains the fiercest embodiment I know of unadulterated self-reliance. When she separated from my father—with whom she immigrated to Canada from the Philippines three years before I was born—she was ostracized by her Filipinx friends, whose ethics dictated they render my parents immoral. And although the dictum was officially about both of them, it was my mother who bore the brunt of it; in Filipinx culture, as in many others, the wife is expected to endure all of the husband’s transgressions.

Being branded a bad woman turned my mother off community, so she disentangled herself from the mob and focused single-mindedly on motherhood. This worked out well for me, but there were other benefits as well: when my mother severed ties with her community, she also severed ties with that community’s hegemon: the Church. So I was spared the autocratic indignities forced upon most Filipinx children: attending Mass, serving at Mass, Sunday school, Catholic school. I was baptized but never confirmed (which doesn’t make me any less of a Catholic according to official church doctrine, but does in the court of popular opinion); my knowledge of the Bible remains fragmentary. The relics prominently displayed in our home—multiple statues of the Blessed Virgin; the obligatory painting of the Last Supper; the torsioned, slightly glossy, and inevitably erotic hand-carved Jesus on the cross—were simply nods to our Filipinxness, for we had evolved past colonial thrall and become merely cultural Catholics.

Further padding my sense of entitlement was the presence of Lola (Tagalog for grandmother), who lived with my mother and me for most of the first twenty-seven years of my life. Mother and daughter had always had a fractious relationship, but whatever generosity Lola had failed to show her only child (one of my mother’s many and oft-aired complaints) she certainly didn’t fail to show her grandchild (to either compensate or make a point—I’m not sure which). So between my grandmother and mother (who was resolute about being exactly the kind of parent her own ostensibly unaffectionate mother wasn’t), the coddling was ferocious. Under this heaving, sheltering matriarchy, I was safe.

(Is the narrator jettisoning complexity in favour of an overly quaint and therefore palatable narrative?)

April 30, 1984

So last night I scored 90% and second place in the [piano] competition. Afterwards people came up to me and Mom and said I should have won. They said I was much more musical, played with much more feeling than the girl who won. I am furious, apoplectic—I practice so hard, wish so hard. I don’t know what else to do.

---

Speaking mostly Tagalog at home and being brown didn’t strike me as strange, living as we did in Vancouver’s West End, which by the late 1970s had become a dense Babelian hotbed of multiple settler communities. (From preschool to grade twelve, I attended schools where white kids were the minority.) Culturally, however, Tagalog notwithstanding, our household was very white: virtually everything we watched on TV was white, and between the ages of five and ten, the music I most remember hearing was Judy Garland (whom my mother was fixated on) and ABBA (who, for better or worse, were just