fullman*

Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

slow Sunday. it would have been nice to waste it on a good conversation – on what’s happening in Thailand and Hungary, which proves that a parliamentary form of government does not guarantee political stability or economic wealth; or why this flurry of naked Filipino men online may mean that it’s easier to get laid these days, but it should not be interpreted as synonymous to gay liberation; or why the cabinet and the bed my room have to go.

i’ve decided to spend most of the weekend online, and i stumbled upon Jeanette Winterson’s website, where I got introduced to Carol Ann Duffy. That’s where my weekend went: with poems so scorchingly true. it’ll be Monday again in a few hours, but i don’t regret being with Duffy most of the time. 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.

from e. white’s the farewell symphony:

But it was all much simpler than that: ever since I was a kid I’d wanted someone beautiful to belong to me, a man who had beautiful hair, teeth, hands, skin, loins, bones, a beautiful way of walking pigeon-toed, of lifting a spoon seriously, simply to his lips, of scratching his neck, of pissing a full, hard stream, of plunging off a diving board forthright, without fear, of sleeping, one hand cast back, someone with full, plush lips, who had a fine dusting of gold hairs on his stomach and longer, darker, silkier hairs around his scrotum, whose leg muscles are flat and suggested even in repose the power to hold, to clasp, whose skin was warm to the touch as a clay pot left out in the sun, someone so beautiful he’d never had anything but romantic sex, someone who’d never made the first move, whose palms were callused and neck burned from manual labor, someone whose breath was sweet and so warm it fogged up the window on his side of the car, while the other passengers sat beside shamefully clear glass, someone who knew instinctively how to turn up the collar of his blue cashmere coat or to leave his white cotton pajamas unbuttoned to show his scabbard-flat chest, someone blessed with a driving intellectual curiosity so that he’d never had much interest in his own beauty, whose hair was as heavy, thick and straight as a cord that separates a masterpiece from the public.