A Pugad Baboy strip that contained allusions to the purported lesbian scene in St Scholastica’s College, an exclusive all-girls-school in Manila, was pulled out of the Inquirer.net website. The “offending” strip which was published on an Inquirer.net page time-stamped the 4th June 2013 now displays a 404 Error message indicating that the page itself has been deleted from its server. The characters in that strip are shown discussing the hypocrisy of Christians in the way they regard homosexuality citing how all-female schools run by nuns allegedly condone lesbianism within their campuses.
In the third panel of the strip, one of the characters quips that in St Scho (presumably short for St Scholastica’s College), pretty students there are likely to be in a lesbian relationship with another student…
The Philippine Star reports today that;
The Philippine Daily Inquirer announced on Wednesday its decision to pull out a famous comic strip from its Comic Relief section after its June 4 issue about students from an exclusive girls’ school drew flak from online citizens.
Furthermore, management of the Inquirer revealed that “the comic strip will not appear in the section starting Friday while its reader’s advocate investigates the issue.”
Pugad Baboy (literally, “swine’s nest” in Tagalog) is a comic strip created by Filipino cartoonist Apolonio “Pol” Medina, Jr. The strip is about a Manila community of mostly obese people – “fat as pigs”, so to speak (baboy is Tagalog for pig).
It started appearing in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on May 18, 1988. It currently appears exclusively in the Inquirer line of newspapers (Broadsheet Inquirer and its free concise sister tabloid called Inquirer Libre and tabloids Bandera and Tumbok.) Its popularity has spawned numerous compilations, a live-action television series, and merchandise such as T-shirts and figurines.
The strip does not only showcase domestic life; occasionally, it features adventure, drama, and pure spoof sequences. More often, the strip mirrors the general sentiment of the Filipino people on relevant topics such as corruption in the government as well as Filipino pop culture. In this respect, the strip has been likened to Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Sometimes, political satire is woven into some ordinary strips and adventure stories.
But lesbianism and its widely-observed prevalence in Catholic schools in the Philippines is a reality in Philippine society. Interestingly, this incident follows Filipino singer Charice Pempengco’s recent coming out to the public as an avowed “tomboy” and, at the same time, revealing an on-going relationship with female X-Factor finalist Alyssa Quijano. On that occasion,Get Real Post contributor Kate Natividad, wrote about her own personal experience with on-campus lesbianism in a previous article…
recalling my days as a high-school student in an all-girls’ school, I do recall some of my friends hooking up with self-proclaimed “tomboys”. Back then tomboys didn’t really come across as all that too convincing. For one thing, not too many of them had the resources or wherewithal to take on the full lifestyle and look. For another, many of them were just plain and simple confused. That’s easy for me to say as hindsight comes in handy in those cases. I know now that many of these high school tomboys now pretty much lead straight ladies’ lives. Those friends of mine who were the “girls” in these “relationships” remain the girls in their relationships with their husbands and boyfriends today.
…observations that seem to point to what should be a more sensible regard for lesbianism amongst the nation’s kolehyalas — one of just giving this issue a clueless shrug and just letting kids sort themselves out on their own and amongst themselves. Sexuality, after all, is really a joyful journey of exploration and perhaps lesbian experimentation in school is quite simply just a part of all that. There’s no harm in a bit of humour spun around this most basic of human conditions. And the best humour derives its efficacy from clear realities that it draws from.
[NB: Parts of this article were lifted from the Wikipedia.org article “Pugad Baboy” in a manner compliant to the terms stipulated in the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License that governs usage of content made available in this site. Image courtesty Inquirer.net.]
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