Holy Week a drag festival? ‘Divinizing’ drag is such a drag

A Facebook post by a certain Rev. Joseph San Jose of the “progressive” Metropolitan Community Church has been making the rounds on social media. San Jose argues that Holy Week is nothing more but a drag festival. He likens Christian liturgical expressions and the tradition of adorning “santos,” with their often elaborate vestments, as drag. In his post, San Jose also appropriates religious terminology such as “incarnate” and “sacred” to contextualize drag within Christianity.

However, the roots of Christian sacred art predate drag by millennia, with some of the oldest Christian sculptures dating back to the second century. On the other hand, the santero culture, to which San Jose also refers, traces its origins to the colonial era in the Philippines, with the earliest recorded instance being the Santo Niño brought by Magellan in 1521. Holy Week processions and dramas also have roots in the 15th century.

The origins of drag are less clear. While some historians point to instances in ancient Greek and Roman theater where men portrayed female characters due to restrictions on women onstage, these instances seem incidental to the essence of drag itself. The term “drag” has been used since the 12th century, but its contemporary meaning, referring to dressing up and performing as another gender, is more recent, emerging in the 1860s, with the first drag competition recorded in 1867.

Rafael Japón, in his article “Holy Week and the Theater of Art: Sculpture, Retables, and the Spanish Baroque Aesthetic,” explores how social and political changes in the 16th century influenced visual culture, particularly among Catholics. The realism depicted in Spanish art during Holy Week processions served not only as a tool during the counter-reformation but also aimed to instruct the faithful about the transcendental mysteries of the Christian faith. While a case can be made against the flamboyance of some of the images, the artworks are meant to convey the sacred—to make visible what cannot be seen. The processions, on the other hand, persist in contemporary Filipino religiosity because they are seen, not as mere performances or sources of entertainment, but as a contemplation of the history of salvation that has managed and continues to overcome scandals, heresies, and blasphemies.

San Jose also seems to imply that custodians of the santos could be anything other than gay, given it requires “dressing up” the images. For a so-called “progressive church,” he seems more intent on perpetuating gender stereotypes.

Moreover, San Jose’s reductive reading relegates Christianity to one, big costume party. While Christianity has always been countercultural, that is, it has always gone against the grain of social norms, to conflate this nonconformist characteristic of Christianity with drag, which belongs to a disparate historical period and persuasion, is to ignore entire histories of martyrdom and sanctity that have marked the lives of great men and women that have contributed to, among other things, civilization from East to West.

The problem of a reductive point of view is that it cherrypicks and fails to account for contradictions. It’s like looking at the world after Sigmund Freud where everything is sex and the fault of the father, or after various feminisms where everything is a woman’s issue or the failure of men, or after Jacques Derrida where everything is a text and therefore, open-ended and unstable. To arrive at a conclusion such as “drag is sacred” is a great leap of logic, as it simplistically explains and glosses over what are, in fact, oppositional in origins and futures.

Francis Harvey de Leon