I remember Angel well. I was walking along a backstreet in Cubao on my way to the Baliwag Transport depot. As I approach it I hear the familiar call: ‘Hey Joe!’
Usually I just wave my hand and smile but this time it’s a girl standing in a doorway across the street. She’s pretty, fake blonde, so I cross over. The reaction of teenage Filipinas to an approaching foreigner — even one they have just saluted — is too delicious to miss and, as predicted, the girl collapses into hysterical giggles.
There is nothing remarkable about meeting ladyboys here. Sex is on the agenda and ladyboys live for sex.
The area we live, in Balibago, is not a red-light zone; it’s a quiet – well except for the videoke ‘occasions’ – middle-class residential neighbourhood. Most people work outside the sex business, either locally or uptown in Angeles City. There are a few bar-girls who rent houses in the area but they don’t bring it home; that’s not the Filipino way. Here, they’re just ordinary girls with jobs, no matter what the demands of their professional lives might be. On their days off, they sit out in their yards, drink beers and chat with friends, just like women all over the Philippines.
Remember, the Phils is a modern matriarchy; inside the home space, women are in charge, no matter whether they be mothers or whores – and sometimes they are both. You could have a half-dozen bar girls living next door and think your neighbours were bank clerks – which might cause you some surprise, were you to encounter one dancing naked on a bar-top, delicately plucking thousand-peso notes out of beer-bottles with her moistened labia.
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