The College of Liberal Arts and Communication warmly congratulates Christopher D. Gabriel for earning 3rd Place in the Short Story – English category of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature 2025, a distinction made even more impressive as this is his first time entering the Philippines’ most prestigious literary competition.
The Palanca Awards—established in 1950—are widely regarded as the gold standard of Philippine letters, a rigorous and highly selective institution whose winners are judged by some of the country’s most respected literary figures. In recognizing his work, the Palanca committee affirms not only Gabriel’s extraordinary talent, but also the intellectual depth and creative discipline that characterize his writing. For De La Salle University–Dasmariñas, his achievement highlights the university’s commitment to fostering serious literary craftsmanship and academic excellence. We mark this milestone with deep respect, recognizing it as both a personal achievement and a contribution to the university’s growing presence in the national literary landscape.
Synopsis
Milked for Milk is a queer-inflected realist short story that reimagines fatherhood, masculinity, and survival within the intersecting violences of hunger, silence, and bodily economy. Set in a cramped urban tenement governed by a form of quiet capitalism, the story centers on a father whose infant daughter wails from hunger-breastfeeding has failed, formula has run out, and state assistance remains absent.
Told with poetic restraint and layered with economic and symbolic tension, the narrative stages three acts of "milking": the systemic extraction of labor through rent and debt; the infant's literal need for milk; and a transactional encounter where the father's body becomes both a commodity and an offering. The milking becomes an embodied metaphor for exploitation, care, and survival.
Rather than romanticizing or vilifying the queer-coded act, the story frames it within a continuum of moral crisis, where heteromasculinity is fractured not by identity but by need. The sex act, stripped of desire, becomes a ritual of transacted agency where silence, flesh, and guilt intersect in ways that destabilize binaries of gender, power, and worth. The story reflects a social order where laboring bodies-particularly male, impoverished, and fathering-are refigured under crisis as both vulnerable and necessary.
The final act closes in stark minimalism: "He leaves the room-the one that had held them all in silence." This silence is not emptiness but aftermath. Milked for Milk is a meditation on what happens when love and labor are not enough to keep life from starving-and on what it costs to feed someone who cannot feed herself.
Animo La Salle!
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