Film Review

From the outset—indeed, from its very title—Markova: Comfort Gay announces itself as an ambitious and uncompromising offering by Filipino director Gil Portes. The film is based on the life of Walter Dempster, Jr., a gay transvestite performer with the stage name Walterina Markova. Ródolfo Quizon, "Dolphy," a beloved comic actor who has made something of a career out of gay roles, portrays the older, narrating Markova/Walter. The young Markova is played by Dolphy's son Jeffrey Quizon, and Dolphy's elder son Eric Quizon plays Markova as a young adult.

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During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, Walterina and his fellow performers were at first mistaken for women and then, as punishment for their "deception," quartered in a barn and sexually brutalized by a group of soldiers over an unknown period of time. Consequently, the film invites comparison between Walter's experiences and those of the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women who were forcibly "enlisted" to service Japanese troops at "comfort stations" throughout the Pacific. The intentional nature of the comparison drawn between institutionalized rape and an act of revenge directed against a particular group is made explicit as, years later, a televised documentary about former comfort women provokes Markova to reveal his own story. He lures television news reporter Loren Legarda to the Golden Gays Rest Home with the promise of an interview with a former comfort woman. Although Legarda is at first angered and dismayed to discover that Markova is the "woman" in question, she nonetheless consents to record his story. The unexpected nature of Markova's tale occasions a series of questions—about, for instance, the history of his cross-dressing habits—that allows the film to trace, albeit episodically, much of Markova's life, from his youthful fascination with movie starlets to his current position as a Golden Gays den mother and trainer of aspiring showgirls.

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