Homespun Tiara

Enzo Escober sits down with Filipina-American trans model and activist Geena Rocero, in a profile from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 43, “Fixation.”

By Enzo EscoberDecember 30, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Biography & Autobiography

This profile is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 43: Fixation. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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The woman in the fantasy image has come out of the water. Her hair crisps into salty flicks; her skin is already dry. As she bakes in the sun like a finely formed clay figurine, it never seems to occur to her that she has left her swimsuit on the clothesline. Instead she plays, sweetly, with a pair of bunny ears on her head. She is in Playboy, and this variation on the magazine’s signature accessory is made of palm leaves. It glints in the light, a homespun tiara vested with the fraught provenance of American fetish.

On the surface, there is nothing new about the erotics of these pictures, their oblique exoticism and splendor. The woman is animating familiar configurations, a series of sex dreams about the East: concealing herself behind a banana leaf, beached on the glistening shore, posing in a bikini assembled from thin string and quartered pineapple shells. Only, she refuses to be a type. In a few frames shot on a Super 8 camera, she pierces through the stagecraft, imbuing the images with a particular storyline. She is determined to make us look as intently as possible.

Desire is among the United States’ most enduring global exports, an industry as profitable as war. As a 10-year-old child in the Philippines, Geena Rocero, the woman in the centerfold, snuck into her father’s bedroom to flip through his collection of Playboy magazines. Poring over the glossy pages, she grew enamored with the bodies on display. Smooth, bosomy emissaries of the American libido, they gave a young trans girl an education in comportment funneled through an imperial pipeline. In 1898, the US purchased the Philippines from its former colonizer, Spain, for $20 million and, after killing about 20,000 revolutionaries, held dominion over the islands for close to 50 years. To this day, it is the United States’ most secure sphere of influence in the Far East, a society where stateside cultural products emit a mystic gleam.

For many Filipinos, the US itself is a place of imports—a country one loses parents to. When Rocero was a teenager, her mother left Manila to take a job as a factory worker in San Francisco, sustaining her family on the power of the American dollar. The care packages she sent back were as redolent of excess as Playboy spreads. “I smelled the United States before I ever set foot in it,” Rocero writes in her memoir Horse Barbie, describing an aroma familiar to countless Filipinos. “I cared almost as much about getting a whiff of the box itself as I did about what was inside. […] It smelled like possibility.”

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On the Monday morning I met Rocero in July, it was 90 degrees in Manhattan—sweltering for anyone raised on the East Coast but standard for two immigrants from Manila. She had made a reservation for us at the Smith, an easy, light-filled brasserie in NoMad. I was there 30 minutes early, eager to ensure we got the quietest booth. She arrived like an undercover Miss Congeniality, her all-black outfit contrasting with my all-white one. When she took off her shades, her face appeared just as it did in the photographs I’d studied: small, lambent eyes; a strict, triangular nose; and lips like those of a conch shell.

Shortly before our meeting, I had opened Rocero’s Instagram story to find the words “Vagina BDay” typed out in big Partiful letters, so I surmised that the day was a special one. She told me that it was the 21st anniversary of her bottom surgery, a procedure she underwent in Thailand. Rocero had two engagements planned today: our interview and a gathering with friends.

A waitress came to the table, clearly enthralled by her new customer. Leaning in, Rocero ordered herself a shrimp cocktail and a glass of champagne—she would be cooking a Filipino feast for the party later and wanted to save her appetite. Unwilling to let her toast alone, I requested champagne with my cheeseburger. When the waitress asked what we were celebrating, Rocero smiled giddily: “It’s my vagina birthday! She’s 21, so she can drink!”

This winsome candor is part of Rocero’s baseline disposition, though she can just as easily slip into a serious, more evidently controlled register. It’s the performative range of a seasoned beauty queen: a capaciousness fostered by her expansive, pluralist upbringing in Manila. In the Philippines, pockets of the surreal flourish—though omnipresent, Western legacies begin to warp and atrophy at their point of saturation. When she was 15, Rocero started competing in the transgender beauty pageants that formed a fixture of Catholic fiesta culture. Often, these were held in front of the town church; there, for a brief moment onstage, Rocero and her peers appeared alchemized into the saintly icons they were celebrating. One of her favorite costumes, she remembered, was a billowy dress paired with a blue veil, just like Our Lady of Guadalupe.

In a few short years, Rocero became one of the most accomplished queens in the national trans pageant circuit. She had never truly known the closet—both of her parents accepted her identity, and she was doted on by the Garcias, a house of trans women who became her chosen family. When her mother secured her a green card in 2001, Rocero was hesitant to leave it all behind—that is, until she was told she could formally live as a woman in the States. The prospect spurred her to move across the Pacific, overriding every competing interest. Trans people in the Philippines cannot change their legal names or gender markers. They also have poor access to gender-affirming care—very few medical facilities are equipped to offer such treatments, leaving many people with no choice but to create their own hormone cocktails via unregulated markets. Rocero herself first gained access to estrogen through over-the-counter birth control pills. Throughout her press tour for Horse Barbie, which was released in paperback earlier this year, her most recurrent refrain about trans people in the Philippines is that they are “culturally visible” but not “politically recognized.”

Migration is a gamble, and those who cast the dice are often consigned to lives in which relief and disappointment are bedfellows. To her surprise—and despite the promise of legalized womanhood—Rocero landed in a US that seemed to invert the status quo of its former colony. Though trans people were afforded certain political freedoms, on-paper approval didn’t extend into broader social sensibilities. Soon after she corrected her identifying data in San Francisco, Rocero realized that she was now prone to bodily violence, to the peculiar sexual dynamics of the West and the supremacy of its binaries.

She also discovered she could pass in a way she couldn’t at home. “Back in the Philippines, I had grown accustomed to shouts of Bakla! anytime I walked down the street,” she wrote, using the Tagalog word for gay. “Transness was hypervisible there in a way that it wasn’t in the United States of 2003.” And so, after being scouted by a model at the Macy’s makeup counter where she worked in San Francisco, Rocero entered the New York fashion world with a secret. None of the brands she worked with were aware she was assigned male at birth—nor was her agent. Horse Barbie details the paranoia of those years—the pressures, familiar in different ways to trans people and immigrants, to assimilate.

Rocero stayed closeted until 2014. She came out in a TED Talk, cold-pitched to the organization under the name “Why I must come out.” It was a moment that fit conveniently into the narrative structure of the Obama era, a period that purported to vanquish old demons domestically even as it continued to spirit them abroad. Rocero went viral, and soon she took on the mantle of advocate, speaking at conferences, the United Nations, and the White House. When she met Barack Obama, she joked about the speed with which he was approving new trans policies. Online, there’s a picture of her making him laugh at the DNC LGBT Gala. Hers, it seemed, was shaping up to be a good life: a life of prestige, of performance.

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From our corner of the Smith, I contemplated Rocero’s inborn poise. Even as she relaxed, speaking to me as though we had known one another back home, she appeared held up, always, by invisible strings. Drawing her flute to her lips in one, velvety motion, she explained that her roots in pageantry continue to inform her way of life. Her memoir’s title is a reference to the dark skin and equine features her rivals once mocked her for. It was her trans mother, Tigerlily, who reclaimed the insult on her behalf, birthing the Horse Barbie persona. Today, Rocero thinks of it as a spirit, an elemental force that allows her to capture the sublime in her work. But while she enjoyed selling those kinds of loftier fantasies back home, where she strutted on stages for collective morale, she was often frustrated with the work she got in the States. For Rocero, modeling was about art, theater. In New York, she was a mere mannequin, in service of profit: “My image was only going to end up getting flattened anyway, consumed on a page instead of a stage,” she writes. “The viewer would be so many more steps removed from what I was doing; their gaze would be distant enough to keep my secret safe but too far to really see me.”

The need to be seen is a running theme in Horse Barbie. There is a humility to Rocero’s prose; you feel as though you are wandering through a foreign land alongside her, attempting to pass in adopted spaces, and figuring out how things work—realizing that, often, they don’t. “My favorite thing to hear from people who read it is, ‘I never for one moment felt like I was being preached to,’” she told me in July. “That’s what is expected of this trans narrative. And I was subverting that, even subverting this whole ‘America promising freedom’ concept.”

I’d been drawn to Rocero from the moment her TED Talk started trending on Filipino social media. But what distinguished her in my eyes, especially after I moved to the United States in 2021, was her insistence on critiquing empire. Most trans advocates who walk red carpets and appear on magazine covers aren’t first-generation immigrants. “The precolonial grounds me,” Rocero said. “It’s what guides my point of view.” For a long time, she wanted nothing more than to blend into the American abstract. Her world was upended when she read a history of the babaylans, ancient Filipino shamans and healers who were either female or gender-fluid, but who always adopted feminine dress. Classed alongside nobility, they were often consulted by tribal leaders for spiritual matters and could freely marry men. Their reign began to decline with the arrival of the Spanish, who enforced Catholicism and relegated women to secondary social status. By the time the Americans arrived 300 years later, the babaylans had been erased from the collective memory. But their ethos persisted, an unmoored shard of native identity hidden in plain sight.

The discovery vindicated Rocero. Here, at last, was an explanation for the trans pageants that were such an organic feature of religious life back home. “I’m really proud of that kind of unapologetic queerness, that unapologetic expression that does not need to be defined,” she said. “Gender fluidity is so ingrained in our culture … So whether I was conscious of it or not, history says it. History is the teacher. In a way, it led us to the future.”

This revenant energy is captured, quite remarkably, in Rocero’s favorite image of herself. It’s a photo from her very first pageant, where she won Best in Swimsuit. Standing in a black-and-white striped bikini similar to the one worn by the first-ever Barbie, she somehow looks both lush and stately. On the stage behind her is the name of the fiesta, conveying to the viewer that this event is religious. Below it is the name of the government sponsor, an indisputable stamp of establishment approval. “I understand the tendency of people to compare trans pageants in the Philippines to the ballroom scene in America,” Rocero told me. “And I tell them, this is in the mainstream. We were not underground. It’s literally on the street where the whole family is watching, with babies.”

I sometimes find myself on the receiving end of such observations about the home I left behind. Invariably, I am unable to offer anything by way of affirmation. I pointed out to Rocero that while queerness in the Philippines might be more normalized within the Catholic majority, there are spaces where it is unthinkable to express such identity even in sublimated forms. In the small, evangelical milieu I was raised in, panic was the defining mood, gender its favored object. Constituting just 11 percent of the population—as opposed to the Catholic 80 percent—evangelical Christians tend to hold fast to notions of scriptural purity, regarding any kind of religious syncretism with scorn. The faith is a distinctly American import, brought by colonial missionaries. To this day, most evangelical institutions in the Philippines take their stances and protocols—even their sermon styles—directly from megachurches in the United States. The theology I’d received was the gospel of Billy Graham, of Joel Osteen, of Rick Warren. I lived in a province of red-state conservatism, a stronghold of its ideals. We did not go to fiestas; never in my life had I seen a trans beauty pageant. When a bill protecting queer people from discrimination was proposed in government, my church pastor decried it as a measure that would incur the wrath of God.

In 2014, Rocero flew back to the Philippines to campaign for that very bill, which was first filed in 2000 and continues to get rejected every time it is presented in Congress. When I asked her how she dealt with religious critics, she said she would usually give them a history lesson, pointing out that Filipino languages are constructed around gender-neutral pronouns. He and she are nonexistent words; there is only the catchall, siya, which is used to denote not anatomy but essence. “You cannot be more mainstream than that,” she said. “It’s in our very language. It’s just there’s this other colonial structure that’s more dominant, that’s tied to power, that’s tied to capital.”

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By this point in our conversation, the champagne was gone; one last shrimp hung, limp, from Rocero’s platter. She prodded it with her fork. “I am sure you experienced this—I don’t want to make this assumption,” she said, eyeing me. “I certainly experienced it when I moved here. I would confuse all my he/she/hers. And I used to get shamed for that. But now I know that the ancestors were speaking through me.”

Rocero was aware that I was still somewhat fresh off the boat, a newcomer to the country she had migrated to more than 20 years ago. I had moved in pursuit of a place where my gayness didn’t need to be so suppressed. Now, in this room of white tile and dark wood, frothy with the chatter of weekends being recounted, I reflected on how uncanny it felt to be seated across from Rocero 10 years after I’d first encountered her speech, a vision of what migration could offer. But she was wrong in assuming I’d had difficulty with English pronouns—my mother was particular about grammar, and gently corrected my errors when I was growing up.

The person Rocero shared more lingual kinship with was my father. A man for whom gray areas were not worth examination, he harbored a special aversion toward queer people, conjuring them up unprompted as the foulest contortionists of order, attackers of the Christian family. He was also a native Tagalog speaker, one who had mastered English only in his teens and thus was always in the habit of switching his hes and shes. It was a tic that frustrated my mother but amused me. Those small moments of slippage were islands of solace in the otherwise unyielding sea of his rhetoric. I never once corrected him, dazzled as I was by the irony of a man who constantly flubbed the basic terms of his belief system.

Rocero’s own father, who died in 2001, affirmed her transness at an early age, and her mother, who remains a practicing Catholic, accompanied her daughter to her bottom surgery in Thailand. But Rocero’s anthropological convictions remain a source of tension in her family. “I was not afraid, obviously, to talk about transness and pageants and all that,” she said when I asked what most intimidated her about writing Horse Barbie. “I was really afraid to share my decolonial process. Because if I share my decolonial journey, I feel like I’m more directly challenging my mom and my grandma.” The admission alludes to a thorniness underlying the serene familial relationship portrayed in her book. “To this day, my mom hangs up the phone when I talk about precolonial stuff, when I challenge her Bible.”

Rocero was naturalized in 2006. She could have kept dual citizenship but was too distressed by the male gender marker on her Philippine passport to maintain it. “There was guilt and shame in that complicated choice,” she wrote in her memoir. “At first, I felt like I was letting go of my heritage. But then I realized it was my home country that was trying to erase its own heritage, suppressing knowledge of my gender-fluid ancestors.” It is perhaps the most stunning idea in the book, a line that made me pause to reach for my highlighter. The suggestion—that Rocero was in fact more Filipino than conservative lawmakers loyal to church dogma—reversed the narrative that transness was somehow a corrupting influence of the West.

And yet something about her words gnawed at me. After paying our respective bills, I walked Rocero a couple of blocks down Broadway toward her friend’s apartment, where she would make pancit and barbecue for the party. We said our goodbyes, and for the next hour I ambled through the rigorous streets of NoMad, where high-rises and prewar buildings regarded one another uncertainly. The interview was over; the requisite tedium of life came traipsing back in. I remembered deadlines, documents, the fees due to my immigration lawyer. For the past few months, I’d been in the process of applying for an artist visa, the next step to gaining the US citizenship I so ardently craved. This city had become my own; I felt New York’s pulse in my marrow. But just as I reflected on what I was escaping, I thought about where I had chosen to flee. The United States was as much the root of my church’s malignance as it was the North Star that had led me to grace. There was a time when I walked through Manila imagining it was Manhattan. Now, as I sank down the subway stairs on 28th Street, I thought about the strange determinism of my newfound freedom, the extent to which we buy the dreams we are sold.

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To mark the 10th anniversary of Philippine conquest in 1908, Americans in Manila decided to host a carnival. Bread and circuses were crucial in those fragile first days, preventing any further uprisings. The initial plan was to abduct Indigenous Filipinos from the mountains and put them on display in the city. Instead, a more benign kind of exhibition prevailed. Filipinas across the country submitted their pictures to a board of judges, and the most pleasing was named that year’s Carnival Queen. The messaging was clear: if Spain had raped its former subjects, the US would exalt them. Filipinos embraced the custom, parading each favorite daughter like a bride bejeweled for her new master. It was in this climate of coercion that women of the Philippines learned to make a sport of beauty.

In 2015, five days before Christmas, my family turned on the TV to watch 80 glamazons compete for the title of Miss Universe. The annual pageant is the object of intense frenzy in the Philippines, a global spectacle that recasts diva worship as a patriotic duty. All of the country’s major news outlets cover the broadcast, and our delegates often place in the top five. Many Filipinos take pride in the allure of our women, their crossover appeal, their ability to field questions without an English translator. But we hadn’t taken the crown since 1973, and I had never seen a Miss Philippines win in my lifetime.

On that day, I first saw Pia Wurtzbach walk. She was ethereal, a saint stepped out from her alcove. And she triumphed in the most dramatic fashion—Steve Harvey, the host for the evening, had mistakenly announced Miss Colombia as the winner. When he reemerged onstage to bashfully correct himself, it became the Moonlight moment of international pageantry, immortalizing the instant a Filipina was crowned the most beautiful girl in the world.

I revisited Wurtzbach’s performance while writing this piece. I had forgotten many of its particulars. Like the Olympics, Miss Universe changes host countries every edition, and on this night the pageant was broadcast from a casino in Las Vegas. During her question-and-answer segment, Wurtzbach approached Harvey at center stage, wearing a dress whose blue was a nod to the color in the Philippine flag that signifies peacetime. He read from the card that had been handed to him by the judges. “Do you think the United States should have a military presence in your country?”

It was a topical question. The previous year, the United States and the Philippines had entered into an agreement allowing American soldiers access to local bases. Many Filipino politicians and pundits decried the decision, worried about the consequences of such thinly veiled powermongering. Around the same time, a US marine stationed in the Philippines had been convicted for the murder of a young Filipina. He had taken her home that night and was shocked to discover she was trans.

Wurtzbach had a split second to consider the stakes. Only five women remained in the running: Miss USA, Miss Colombia, Miss Australia, Miss France, and Wurtzbach. All the judges were American, and she was on their home turf. To win Miss Universe in the Philippines is to be guaranteed a lifetime of lucrative brand endorsements and show business opportunities, not to mention sociopolitical clout. Wurtzbach had been working toward this stage her entire life. She had been her family’s breadwinner since she was 11 years old, through her work as a child model.

Wurtzbach gave an answer she would later regret: “We were colonized by the Americans and we have their culture in our traditions even up to this day. And I think that we’re very welcoming with the Americans, and I don’t see any problem with that at all.” The best beauty queens prevaricate better than politicians. Instantly, the auditorium erupted into deafening applause. “That’s pretty good,” Harvey muttered. Later, it was reported that the judges had voted for Wurtzbach unanimously.

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Two years into her role as spokeswoman for a movement, Geena Rocero began to get the odd feeling that she was playing somebody else’s game. She had been doing everything from working with Obama’s State Department to appearing at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “In the majority of these spaces, I was the only trans person speaking,” she told me over Zoom, three weeks after our brunch. She wore a loose black T-shirt; the room in which she sat was all white wood. Yet though she was calling from home, I got the sense that she was more comfortable at the restaurant, where there were no screens between us.

“I had to speak about what I had gone through while at the same time retraumatizing myself,” Rocero continued. “And I felt like two years ago I’d left the closet of being trans, and now I’d entered the closet of respectability politics.” Alone in high-ceilinged rooms, Rocero shook hands and smiled. She had become a muse of the liberal establishment, asked to wear her identity like a sash.

“It was obviously tokenizing,” Rocero said. “I felt like there should be other people speaking about this, people who have more experience on the ground.” She continues to abide by the Filipino concept of “kapwa,” where one encounters the other as an extension of the self. But in the individualist US, efforts to liberate entire groups of people often end up becoming—occasionally reductive—showcases for just a few voices within. These few are expected to be grateful, unthreatening, charismatic.

I asked her if she regretted compromising herself in this way. “I think I was just a product of my time. We’re the product of the context in which we live,” she cackled, referencing Kamala Harris’s oft-memed koan. Rocero, after all, had just come out after years in hiding, and overnight she had been catapulted into real, potentially change-making halls of power. As exhausting as the work was, she was determined to gauge what her community could gain from it. But being on her best behavior took its toll, and soon enough, she disqualified herself from the race.

When Playboy came to her with an offer, she seized the opportunity. The shoot, the one in which she frolics, seaside, in the nude, took place in Costa Rica, though the beach is clearly intended to evoke the Philippines. Rocero is quick to clarify just how granular her involvement in the creative decision-making was. She wanted to be in nature, a newborn goddess. She wanted to climb a tree—it reminded her of her childhood back home. The pineapple bikini was inspired by her Instagram feed; Rocero had created swimsuits out of fruit in the Philippines before. In many of the photos, she is occupied, undeniably, by the necessary project of seduction. But in others, she is merely a girl at play, awed by the earthly paradise around her. “I wanted to combine joy and sensuality,” she told me. “That was an expression of my truest form.”

Though it might seem irreconcilable with her advocacy work, Rocero’s Playboy shoot is, in fact, one of the most concise distillations of her message. In an era that will be remembered as a boom both for the personal narrative and the discourse of the body, she has worked out that her body is her story, and that the tale is best presented unabridged, unadorned, denuded. “I am many things,” she told me. “And I can be the things that I choose to be, not what the media expects me to be.” It’s a philosophy she sees as a rebuttal to the United States, a nation of binaries.

Rocero makes such statements with humility, having long since learned that a single perspective is not enough. To that end, Rocero’s current focus is on expanding her platform. In 2021, her production company, Street Pageant Productions, released the documentary series Caretakers, which followed Filipino health workers and community figures as they navigated the pandemic. More cinematic projects are forthcoming. (One of them, a 20-minute sci-fi film that Rocero is writing, directing, and acting in, imagines a world of trans women as Stepford wives.)

The elephant in the room had become impossible to ignore. I asked Rocero how she felt about the upcoming election. Needless to say, the Trump era was a period of regression for trans rights, upending what little progress had been made when Rocero was a newly minted ambassador of her community. But she believes that Trump is only a symptom of a larger problem—the United States’ deep-seated commitment to normativity, sameness, and one-man myths. “They know that they can home in on that fear, because it’s rooted in ignorance,” she said. “They don’t see us as full human beings.”

Our Zoom call ended. I clicked through images of Rocero on the internet. After a few minutes, I looked down at my phone to find a text from her, a screenshot of a James Baldwin quote from Notes of a Native Son (1955): “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” I kept it in mind as I perused photos that spanned hundreds of miles, several lifetimes. Rocero’s freshly powdered face on a runway of women moving swanlike through the Manila heat. Her glassy and distracted smile at a New York gallery opening in 2006. Her focused expression on the TED main stage. Together, they formed an American coming-of-age story, a journey from outside to inside, to someplace fertile in between. Here was a body that sought to elude capture, a woman who’d discovered how to answer for herself.

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Featured image: Photo courtesy of Geena Rocero.