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Archive for the ‘Coming Out’ Category

There are many ways to skin a cat. If you have “same-sex attraction”, here are some tips on how to cure that ungodly desire:

1. Cover the naked body of the crucified Jesus. He’s good-looking, compassionate, very much into equality and therefore pro-gay, and sinew. It really gives the wrong impression.

2. Ban products that are known to cause homosexuality. Prohibit the sale and use of fabric softeners; a friend claims that they literally make us soft. Stop the use of fertilizers. It is quite known that Masagana rice led to the spread of homosexuality in rural areas.

3. Target the role models. No more Ate Shawie, Ate Vi, Manilyn Reynes, and Coney Reyes. Scrap animation shows that encourage homosexuality – teletubbies, Flying House, Superbook, Superfriends, Superman and Master Showman. Actually, ban Kuya Germs.
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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. Read the rest of this entry »

Just sharing a coming out article I wrote for the PDI’s Sunday Inquirer Magazine.

First Person: Smashing Closets, Opening Doors

I WAS a little brash when I came out. It happened in 1998, on my last year in UP Diliman, when I was madly in love with another gay man. It was unrequited, but love made it easier to smash the closet: I simply dropped the news to my college friends, then attended my first Pride March, and even managed to blurt out “Oh by the way, I am gay” during my talk for freshman orientation.

Coming out, I was euphoric and had complete disregard for what others would think. That year, I brought my first lover to a family reunion. We were discreet, and thought that nobody noticed. Nobody did, actually, except for one lola who, months later, showed the reunion pictures to my parents and said, “Yan ang boyfriend ng anak n’yo! (That’s your son’s boyfriend!)” Read the rest of this entry »

When I was in high school, I always imagined that I would come out in college. I already had in mind how I’d do it, or where I would study, or what course I would take. It turned out to be more difficult than I imagined, and I was only able to come out during my last year in college.

But I did venture out of the closet once in a while. The first time was in my Humanities I class. Our teacher, the good Ms. Heidi Abad, who is now a friend of my sister, asked us to write a brief reaction to a poem by Maria Aguilar. I went crazy and used as many stereotypes as I could to link the poem to homosexuality, when in hindsight I think a more distant interpretation would revolve around non-conformity. I suppose I was just a little restless then and in need of air.

To breathe – exactly what literature and writing offered. After Aguilar’s poem, I started taking out books about homosexuality from the library – Neil Barlett’s Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall and others – just to breathe, a defiance that was more personal than anything else. It wasn’t quite coming out – I was still scared and had, on several occassions, threw away the borrowers card at the back of the books I loaned to avoid being traced. But I kept venturing out of the closet – i wrote an essay for a newsletter about an lgbt student org that happened to be right across our own tambayan, I also told a dear friend about this “disposition” I am in. I somehow came out eventually.

Remind me to tell you about a rather long, tearful bus ride that happened soon after. Meanwhile, here’s Maria Aguilar‘s Pink Elephant.

I ride the Pink Elephant down
Hollowed corridors with past blasphemies
Scrawled lazily on dim walls.
People accuse me in negatives
Their gawking faces like flashbulbs
Exploding in the sacreligion of the time.
I ride the Pink Elephant
Past the huddling in the dark
Of people who whisper
Of the circus of my going,
Jeering, laughing, crying,
At the pinkness, at the elephant,
At the ridiculous impertinence of the act.
But though they may point,
And try to paint him black,
I ride the Pink Elephant still
Down and away
Convinced of his reality of pinkness
Against the insincerity
Of crowds wallowing in the pseudosanctity
Of black and white.