fullman*

Thank you for the letters. The response to the article made me realize that a 3,000-character piece on coming out could never encompass the space and stories inside the closet – the agony/ecstasy of desire, unrequited love (and how, as a friend once told me, we latch on it as if that’s the only meaningful and acceptable love), and the occasional sneaking out, slip ups, that make us nervous, that make us laugh.

Some of you have confessed of the hardship of coming out. One reader told me that he never succumbed to the temptations of gay sex, and now that he’s 66 years old, he has decided to just let things be, and focus on taking care of his 96-year old mother. Some closets are made for forever, and we cannot pass judgement on why others can come out while some can’t. Some letters expressed hopefulness, a solidarity of sort, a wish that one day others could also make the leap.

I didn’t mean for the story to be sad, and truth be told, despite that episode, my coming out was in general a positive and affirming moment. I have to confess that I actually enjoyed shocking people , a habit that was easily acquired by my former boss (Itago natin siya sa pangalang Melay), who must have thought, as I did, that outing me to our colleagues or during conferences was a good ice-breaker.

One coming out cannot sum it all. And sometimes, one coming out is not enough. There are those who have so-called glass closets: after coming out, they discover that they have to contend with larger, more formidable closets – ones made of prejudices, of stereotypes, of notions that homosexuality means effeminacy and effeminacy means weakness, that the ideal gay image is bisexual and hypermasculine. Break down a closet, and expect to do it again and again.

And sometimes we creep back inside. I remember having a meeting with the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines on the issue of agrarian reform a day after criticizing the Church for its decision to ban gay men and transgenders in the annual Flores de Mayo. The reaction landed in the frontpage of a major daily, and during the meeting, I, a self-avowed gay activist, after daring to enter the sacred grounds of everything not gay (oy, did i just hear a bishop scream in protest?), decided to skip the attendance sheet to avoid being linked to that gay activist who questioned the lord’s order.

There are times when we return to the closet in batches. A few years ago, we were invited to a friend’s house in Laguna for lunch. Our friend, someone who’s been into gay activism for quite sometime already, is not yet out to his family, and so we were told to be discreet. During lunch, the proverbial cup fell, and four “straight” guys shrieked: it was as if someone unfurled a rainbow flag.

Then there was this one time when we had to go to the wake of a friend’s mother. When we were already on our way we realized that we don’t even know our friend’s real name. He, with his boyishness and boy-next-door smile, is not out to his family and relatives, and has unfortunately been named by our barkada as “Kyla”. We eventually discovered his real name, and the entire night we all crawled back into the closet, donning our real names, even our own “Mamu”, with some slipping out once in a while.

So does it ever end? I guess it doesn’t. We will all find the need to come out, again and again, until the end, if only to say that we exist, if only to prove that we do mean it: hindi ninyo kami mabubura.