not all community members are immediately allies. ika nga ni Weber eh not all social groups are immediately communities. https://twitter.com/TheRainBro/status/1325691774594023425

Yes may pa RRL na naman po to wait lang kayo.

OKAY. I just got home from the supermarket and the specific work by Weber I'm referring to above is this one

The distribution of power within the community: Classes, Stände, Parties by Max Weber. (2010). Journal of Classical Sociology, 10(2), 137–152. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X10361546

If there's ever a TLDR on how we can use this to understand Vice, it is that here, Weber asserts that social groups are not coherent because there's always the factor of social stratification not just in economic terms but also in terms of individual interests.

For Weber, to argue that "false consciousness" is the sole answer to why some members of a community do actions that are inimical to collective interest, may fall a bit short.

Individuals have differential access, gains and losses relative to the market (wealth) and/or power

so it may be more useful for advocates to remain hopeful in the fact that sincerity in educating others MAY just work and bear good fruits for a cause even as it is also important to see and accept that sometimes those who claim and should be allies are just not and will never be

I cannot enumerate the countless times Vice has been called out whether kindly or not but if they were ever sincere in helping out the Filipino queer, then shouldn't change have happened long ago?

This also underscores the fact that it may be in their interest to remain

proactively representing themselves as queer even as they remain heteronormative. Their representation of Gay, after all, reminds us of a different means to agency which is harmful to other LGBT+. Looking at Vice, it is possible that for them, to be able to

preserve existence as queer in a homophobic society means to translate queerness in heteronormative terms—to ask Ian and Pao who among them was more straight or not.

This negotiational means to agency is of course challenged by the liberating discourse of Out and Proud which

argues that if there's ever gonna be acceptance, it is to accept queerness as queerness rather than queerness as a "weird" formulation of the gender and sexuality of being straight/heterosexual. This breaks the unfair structure of a patriarchal/homophobic society because

agency is asserted from human dignity rather than in the subordinate terms and position that the homophobic society prescribes to the LGBT+.

Let's go back a bit to my thread last weekend and play (and undo) a devil's advocate position. There are perhaps three answers why Vice

continues what they do.

1. They're using what Karl does as some sort of "weapon of the weak" against a homophobic society although this we know to be untenable given the stature and social class they've achieved in showbiz.

2. It's possible that the self-preserving heteronor

mative behavior is a holdover of a previous experience as an underclass is just hard to undo or;

3. That maybe "heteronormative queerness" is what is profitable given that it is still the dominant lens that's popular for a homophobic society to try and understand "them," us.

My take: Yes Vice is not the end-all of Filipino queer liberation but I am still deeply disturbed at what happened given that it was scandalous precisely because what was supposed to be "revolutionary" was silenced and watered down just before our very eyes. And through "jokes."

E//dd//ie Vil//la//n//ueva does not only exist in the legislation chambers. He is in the everyday and the benign. In these everyday microagressions that shut the queer youth up to loneliness in countless conservative family dinners. Aren't we all tired :)

If to the own Community and our own selves SOGIE education and equality is scandalous, then we musn't be blind to the fact that we're really fighting a war in two fronts: internalized and explicit homophobia.

#End