The Makeup She Left behind

The Makeup She Left Behind

I was on my knees when I first saw my mother transform.

I must have been around eleven. I was sitting on the floor to her left, close to her knees, wearing a maroon shirt with a gray collar. My mother was seated in front of a mirror, putting on makeup.

I watched everything.

The green eyeshadow had a slight shimmer to it, almost sheer when the light hit it. She applied blush. Then came the red lipstick. I remember how the lipstick seemed to change her face immediately, as if somebody had turned on a light inside it. Her hair had just been permed, the curls falling in these circular shapes from her head toward her shoulders.

I stared with my mouth open.

There was something about watching her inspect every detail in the mirror that mesmerized me. Every stroke mattered. Every adjustment mattered. I didn’t have the language for what I was seeing. I only knew that my mother had changed in front of me, and I wanted whatever power had just entered the room.

At that age, I thought I was simply witnessing glamour.

I did not understand that my mother was also trying to survive.

She was a political activist during the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. At different points, she had to hide. She had to change how she presented herself because people in the military were looking for her. Years later, she would tell me that a colleague from her organization had been shot in the head only days before she left, and that she had learned she might be next.

But she didn’t tell me any of that when I was eleven.

Children aren’t always given the explanation. Sometimes we are simply left with the image.

And the image I was left with was my mother putting on makeup.

Now, as an adult and as a drag queen, I understand that moment differently. I can see makeup as camouflage. Transformation as protection. Glamour as a survival strategy.

But I don’t want to give my eleven-year-old self knowledge he didn’t have.

That child wasn’t thinking about political resistance or the military or colonial histories of gender.

He was staring at green eyeshadow.

He was staring at red lipstick.

He was thinking: I want that.

That morning, I understood that my mother was leaving. I didn’t know when I would see her again.

The morning she went away, I woke because I heard the noises she was making while she packed.

I’m a side sleeper. When I opened my eyes, I could only see her through my left eye; my right eye was covered by the pillow. I didn’t move. I felt somehow frozen, almost as if I were a camera closely observing what was happening. The image has stayed incredibly vivid in my mind. I don’t think she knew I was awake.

Then she started kissing each of my siblings goodbye, one by one. Eventually she got to me. There wasn’t some big movie speech. She simply kissed me, believing, I think, that I was still asleep. Even now, I start tearing up every time I remember that moment.

Looking back, I could somehow sense that she was distancing herself emotionally from how painful that moment was. I don’t know exactly what was happening inside her. Imagine leaving six children behind. How did she do it? Maybe she had to hold something back just to be able to leave. Maybe if she had allowed herself to feel the full weight of it, she would not have been able to walk out the door. My mother is made of something else.

Then my father helped her drag the two suitcases downstairs. He would take her to the airport.

I wanted to drag them back up.

I wanted to stop the entire thing by reversing the physical action. If the suitcases came back upstairs, maybe she would stay.

But even as a child, I knew I couldn’t stop my mother.

She left.

After she was gone, the image of her at the mirror stayed with me. So did the makeup she had left behind.

I understand now that reaching for that makeup became one way I stayed close to her. I wasn’t thinking that consciously as a child. I only knew that it still held something of the transformation I had witnessed. So I started picking it up.

My little sister was probably four or five then, and at some point she became one of my first subjects. I would put makeup on her. I remember a photograph I think I still have somewhere: my sister lying on the floor with full makeup, very red blush, her hair arranged around her face, flowers placed around her head.

Looking back now, I recognize so much of myself in that image.

Makeup.

Styling.

Composition.

Photography.

The desire to transform another person and then preserve the transformation as an image.

I didn’t know I was practicing the things that would eventually become my life as an artist. I certainly wasn’t thinking about interdisciplinary art.

I was a child missing his mother and playing with the things she left behind.

Our household helper was less fortunate.

Poor girl.

I would make her sit down so I could practice on her too. Green eyeshadow. Blue eyeshadow. Eyeliner. Red lipstick. Very red blush. I wanted the whole face.

Sometimes after I finished, she still had errands to run.

So there she would be, needing to go outside to buy vinegar or soy sauce from the neighborhood sari-sari store, wearing the face I had just created for her.

She was not always thrilled.

I think sometimes she was embarrassed. Sometimes she was probably mad at me. Honestly, I may have been a little bit cruel.

And yet I was also fascinated by what would happen when she went outside.

I would tell her not to tell anyone that I had done her makeup.

But when she came back, I wanted to know what everybody said.

That contradiction feels familiar to me now.

I wanted the work to be seen before I was ready to be seen.

I wanted people to react to what I had made, but I didn’t want them to know it came from me.

I wanted to be visible and hidden at the same time.

That was not an unfamiliar way for me to live as a queer child.

My mother’s absence sat underneath all of this, although I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that then.

I just knew I kept returning to makeup.

It connected me to her.

Maybe every time I picked up one of her brushes, every time I opened one of her compacts, every time I put color on somebody else’s face, I was trying to hold onto something I had watched disappear.

The person was gone.

The tools of transformation remained.

Years later, I would make a documentary called My Revolutionary Mother.

The film became one of the ways I tried to understand what had happened between us. I confronted my mother about my feelings of abandonment. By then, I was old enough to understand the political circumstances surrounding her departure. I understood that she had been afraid of being killed. I understood that she could not bear the possibility of being gunned down in front of her children.

Understanding did not erase the child who watched her leave.

Both things could be true.

My mother could have left because she loved us.

And I could still have felt abandoned.

That tension has followed me into adulthood: the ability to understand something intellectually while still carrying a completely different truth in the body.

It is one reason I resist simple stories about people now.

My mother wasn’t simply the woman who left me.

She was also the woman who taught me about equal rights, community, sacrifice, and fighting for something larger than yourself. She was the first political activist I ever knew. Long before I understood activism as something I might practice publicly, I had watched it shape the life of my own family.

And before I understood drag as an art form, I had watched my mother use transformation to protect herself.

That connection became clearer only much later, after I had already become Virginia Please.

My mother’s name is Virginia.

I chose Virginia Please because I wanted to carry something of her with me.

Her courage.

Her refusal.

Her political conviction.

Her ability to walk into danger and still put on lipstick.

There is something almost absurdly perfect to me about the fact that the person who first showed me the power of drag was not a drag queen at all.

She was my mother.

And she wasn’t doing it for applause.

She wasn’t walking a runway.