(Ba)Ding, Ang Bato!: Queering Duterte's Drug War in Jun Lana's Big Night! (2021)

Though there are studies around Duterte’s war on drugs and human rights violations, scholarship focusing on the relationship between Duterte’s politics and gender, particularly queerness and kabaklaan, is limited despite his frequent derogatory use of bakla, gay, or homosexual to demean rivals and critics. This article analyzes Jun Lana’s Big Night! (2021) through the Filipino concept of batak—intoxication, being forcibly dragged, and musculature—to examine the intersections of queerness, state violence, and survival in Rodrigo Duterte’s “War on Drugs.” Through close readings of key scenes, the article maps how batak operates as a framework for understanding the bakla’s shifting position: policed yet performing resistance, dragged into complicity yet not without critique, intoxicated not with drugs but with survival in a world addicted to power, spectacle, and control. The paper reveals how the bakla is not rehabilitated or redeemed according to state logics, but rendered legible as a complex political actor, crafting modes of endurance and critique within the very structures that aim to erase them. Pagbabakla ay pagbatak: Big Night! reminds us that to live queerly under state-sanctioned violence is not only possible but profoundly political. This paper is a section of a larger study on the re-presentation and transformation of the bakla in Jun Lana's films.