Nora Aunor

Why is Nora Aunor a gay icon? Because she is queer. She has a subversive identity which unsettles the normative status of the society (read: native brown woman taking over the mestiza - domain Philippine entertainment industry; provincial girl who sells water by the trainstation but beating hundreds in a popular amateur singing contest; uneducated and unclassed film star drawing thousands of proletarian fans like a revolution and disrupting their subservient roles in the social-political setup). She embodies the dreams, aspirations, and eventual triumph of the marginalized in Philippine society - the maids, the brown skin Tagalog-speaking low class probinsyana, the ridiculed and taunted bakla. Nora belongs to this marginalized lot, the api. Her movies have capitalized on this identity which have become emblematic symbols of the api. Her star appeal has also often been contested and challenged in the entertainment industry. The persona of Nora both as an actress and as herself has casted it as the ultimate maltreated and battered woman. The battered woman who also happens to be the most gifted entertainer in the Philippines. Her sheer thespian skills and natural singing voice however luckily always succeed over her detractors and personal tragedies. In the end she becomes, just like in her movies, The Superstar. This is how gay men relate to Nora. The ridiculed and derided gay knows he is, just like Nora, the brightest star in his world. The battered superstar life of Nora is both a parody and a fantasy to the gay who sees in her reel and real characters the performance of the identities of abused/maltreated gay and the social scripts of low-life individuals but whose characters, unlike in real life, succeed in the end and have the last line. "Bullshit". "Walang himala!" Nora's queerness is both an accident and an intended one. It is an accident because Nora herself is unconscious of appropriating class conflicts or suffering in her film characters and subverting these positions by playing these characters as The Superstar. However, Nora is conscious that she is The Actress and performs it by playing prima donna. At the same time she is doing this she puts herself in the position that she knows people in the industry like to think of her: that of a woman with humble origins and provincial values. Thus, the "po" in her language. In all essences, Nora's enigma is queer. And it's her queer character/s that make/s her a gay icon.