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.
