Apologize, Wowowee

Nagpapakasaya, Willie? The word is not nagpapakasaya. I can think of numerous words and terms to describe what you are doing, or who you are. Opportunistic. Calloused. Vile. Deceptive. Un-Filipino.

Nagpapakasaya? You feel irritated because the live stream showing Cory Aquino’s wake is spoiling the fun. How can you provide entertainment to the public when death is being rammed down on everyone’s throat? Lunch time is for cheap entertainment – rice tastes better with Wowowee.

I will not even try to compare you with Cory Aquino, whose death – and its commemoration – you find ill-timed and inconvenient. Doing so would insult Cory. You callousness deserves a more apt comparison. The first is to a French Queen who, when when told that the people had no bread, responded, “let them eat cake”.  Incidentally, her head was chopped off when the revolution won.

But there is an even better comparison. There is another woman, one who, like you, sees giving false hopes and acts of opportunism as public service. You share the same character – you treat the people as a joke, and rake millions in the process.

The nation is not just mourning, Willie. We haven’t seen anything move the public for a long time, not after Garci or GMA. Despite grief, the nation has at least found an anchor to look for its soul. You may call it nostalgia, a melodrama, a wet blanket. For others, though, for most of us, this is called hope, and a deep yearning for it. Your show – and may I say you’re not even witty, because wit presupposes intelligence – can never encompass this emotion: your sense of humor is neither a replacement nor an equivalent of the mood of the people today.

So go ahead, have your fun. Your hubris is that one day,  you’ll find yourself sharing the same spot in history with the most unpopular, most unloved woman in the country today.

Coming Out: smashing closets, opening doors

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!)”

Paalam, at Maraming Salamat

Photo from http://www.gmanews.tv

The first time I sided with Cory Aquino was when I was in grade school. It was, I suppose, at the height of the snap elections. Maricon, the granddaughter of our school’s principal and my Grade 2 classmate, came to me one day in our school playground and tried to bully us to do the Marcos’ V sign.

I didn’t like her. Wiry hair, frail, pale, and an unforgivable name. A brat, too. So I defied her, told her “na Laban ako”, flashing the L sign, all of which – the labels, the gestures – actually meant nothing. I merely picked them up from grown ups. Already a Marcos loyalist, Maricon said she’s not inviting me to her birthday party.

Heartbreak

The people walking on the street suddenly stopped, their faces darkening – here a tear or a whimper, there a sigh – and then the act itself. At the sight of a familiar nape, or at the prodding of a distant scent or the notes of a song once shared, the heart is wrenched out of the one’s soul, gravity becoming its long-lost lover, shattering on busy pavements, in the middle of the city, inside an empty church, in front of a portrait, or even when one is high.

The act repeats itself, a testimony to the truth that we have more than one heart, and the best argument why we can’t spare that many.

Bagasbas

In Bagasbas, one does not denounce the crowd. One just ogles.

With plans to return to Caramoan cancelled, I got invited by Iona, my officemate, to a surfing trip to Bagasbas. The town is about 15 minutes away from the chaos of Daet, the capital of Camarines Norte. Since I was already in Legaspi City, I decided to go.

Incidentally, the trip to Daet could be described by the building blocks of Pinoy erotic stories – masikip, mainit, minsan may amoy. From one point in the region to another, one has to take GTExpress vans, a proof that sardine cans can indeed be used as instruments of transportation. These vans also uphold Al Gore’s principles on ecological interconnectedness: a case of flatulence inside these vans is a good reminder that indeed we share what we breathe.

Caramoan

Because Jae omitted certain details, I feel compelled to make this confession: somebody farted in the van. Not once but twice. It was so strong and life-threatening, but the driver adamantly refused to open the windows, as if he wanted his passengers to have a bonding moment. It was only after the second assault that he finally relented. By then Clang/Christine was already spraying her perfume all over the place to mask the coma-inducing odor.

We were on our way to Sabang, which is two hours away from Naga City. The boat ride from Sabang to Guijalo Port, the gateway to the islands of Caramoan, would take another two hours. We junked the tour package that would have costed each of us around P7,000 for a Do-It-Yourself trip, and in return we had a weekend of adventure, scented road trips, hours of chismisan and Jae’s constant shrieking.  

Mutiny or gluttony?

And so yesterday, after pigging out in Binondo and while we were walking to Cartimar, we discovered the Magdalo bar and restaurant (and carwash). Now that the political grapevine is again full of rumors of another coup attempt, I wonder if the Oakwood Mutiny and the Manila Peninsula Siege were nothing but an exercise of culinary espionage? After all, why launch coups d’etat in hotels? Rumor has it that one of the mutineers escaped through the kitchen – was he stealing a recipe, or doing a quick taste test?

Dear Bishop X

When you announced the other day that Bishops do not need sex education and that you actually have your sex education program, I instantly got a hard on. There’s nothing like listening to a man of cloth explaining the birds and the bees and the miraculous babies to arouse me instantaneously.

In high school, I got bored with flip charts showing the fallopian tube, the vans deferens (duh!), and all these organs. But with bees and birds – dude, my dear Bishop, I get the point. It’s so raw that it gets me off – no need to commit premarital sex, or in my case the dreaded immoral, infernal homosexual sex – and I do get the message instantaneously: the birds shouldn’t get the bees, they should get married first and promise to each other that the bird won’t eat the bee and bee won’t sting the bird. Commitment before the stomach. See?

Significant other

From Section 10 it became Section 2.7. And so finally that morning, after a long delay, we found ourselves right in the middle of the Bureaucracy, going over a Memorandum of Agreement (“henceforth referred to as MOA”), some preambulatory clauses, pertinent provisions, and a litany of technical terms.

I was with E. and N., leaders of an organization of Filipinos with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs) that has been providing support to positive Pinoys. They were about to lose their office this year due to lack of funding, and since 2006 they’ve been trying to get the Department of Health to provide a little office space in one of its facilities for free. Their appeal went through a complete bureaucratic life cycle – it was approved in principle, was referred to several public health agencies and facilities, was suddenly denied, and was being re-considered. When Akbayan heard of the case, we brought it up in a congressional hearing, finally compelling the Department of Health to see if there’s a spare room that the organization could use. It was decided that a hospital in Manila would host the organization for the meantime.

O-ba-ma!

This changes nothing, not here for sure.  Obama will be in White House, indeed a proof of the audacity of hope; meanwhile, in this archipelago, generals will still be carrying millions of pesos in their pockets for their junkets. Bishops will still be dictating how policies should be decided. Scams would not cease.

I have never been fond of American politics, not until this election. This has been a very moving election, and for all the gaffes and its divisiveness, it has shown what politics should be about about: it is eminently about the people exercising their sovereign will – in this case, a clear rejection of the politics that Bush represents and yes, a movement to make American politics truly color-blind. No illusions should obscure how we look at Obama – we still have to see how he is as President. But the symbolism should not be missed: to borrow a feminist metaphor, a glass ceiling had been broken today, and that alone is a cause of celebration, of exuberance.

It is tragic that Filipinos viewed this election with indifference. Are we racist enough to miss the fact that the election of the first black American President is what the American Dream is all about, a dream that is deeply ingrained in our colonial mentality? Equally tragic is that this apathy also displays how hopelessness has paralyzed us in such a way that we cannot even relate to a very moving political phenomenon. Has desperation gnawed that deep into our collective soul that we can no longer feel any sense of solidarity?

The moment CNN announced that Obama won in Florida and has enough votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency, I felt so moved. The first thing that came to my mind was a poem by Langston Hughes:

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow
of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went
down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn
all golden in the sunset.

A very moving election, indeed. Congrats, Obama!