What your soul sings
Like most things in my life, my coming out to my parents about 13 years ago did not happen in one spectacular event that shook the world. Being an only child, friends expected only the highest of dramas. However, there was no heart-rending drama: no tears, hysterics, or some other violent reaction to my disclosure. Life went on in its usual pace in my little family. The dramatic moments happened later but they would pale when compared to the dramas that have been chronicled in literature and films, even in the lives of some of my friends. If you ask my mother, she would say that my coming out happened the way things in life happen: it just happened. However, on my side, it took months of planning, preparation, and execution.
As I said, my coming out was not one big event. It happened gradually. Since I didn’t have the gumption to come up to either of my parents to boldly declare that I am homosexual, my plan was to leave them little clues here and there until it got to the point where they would have no choice but to ask me outright. Unlike me, my mother has lots of gumption. Things also sort of fell into place a year before it happened, which further facilitated the process.
I have known that I’m not like other boys since I was 7 years old. In the year of my first communion, I would spend most of the recess looking at older boys as they played basketball. I was particularly attracted to the sight of calves, where the sock ended, dimpling the flesh. Of course I had no way of explaining my feelings then. When I was 10 years old, an older boy–the son of my mother’s friend, seduced me while we were playing in our backyard one early evening. This boy, R, would teach me the first things I learned about sex. As a good (I thought) Catholic school boy my guilt was surprisingly minuscule. I’m not sure now what I was thinking then. How I coped with that secret. But then again, when you’re an only child, you quickly learn to keep things to yourself. In college, separated from the company of that older boy, I completely abstained from male-to-male sex. I got so busy with my own life as a college student–the new kinds of freedom I’d been given, new friends, new pursuits (like my crushes on girls), that I didn’t pay attention to that part of my life. I didn’t have sex with another guy until 1993, months after graduating from university. Before that year ended, I was in my first relationship with a guy. This lasted about 6 months. Three months after V and I broke up I met my second boyfriend. This second relationship was more intense but lasted barely 4 months. A week after T and I broke up, I met my third. N was my boyfriend when I came out to my mother.
At work, I never had to come out because I had the good fortune of working for an NGO that was staffed by mostly gay men. We liked to joke that ReachOut was really a gay men’s organization disguised as an NGO. In fact, before ReachOut, I didn’t have any gay friends. Most of the friends I made at ReachOut remain my friends to this day. I volunteered at ReachOut as a telephone counselor in the AIDS HelpLine while awaiting the results of my board exams. When I got my professional license, they hired me as staff. My sexuality was never an issue there. Same with my second job in 1996, as a reporter for Balitang K. I mean, our head writer was gay, most of the production assistants were gay, including 2 other reporters so it was also a non-issue. Inside Korina Sanchez’s tough exterior, I think, lies a giggling fag hag. And because I was the new guy that time, I just worked on stories that were mostly assigned to me. Of course, they considered my health background (a nurse who worked in the AIDS field) and my (perceived) sexuality.
My relationship and my work contributed to my coming out.
N, my boyfriend, was a medical representative who was based in Nueva Ecija, a province north of Manila. We would spend Saturdays together, usually in a mall, watching movies, going to museums and shows and around midnight I would sneak him in our house where we’d have sex in my room and then between 3-4AM, he’d sneak out and make the 3-hour drive back to Nueva Ecija. During weekdays we would burn the telephone lines by alternately calling each other everyday. This was 1996. Mobile phones were a luxury and our landline phone didn’t have NDD. So whenever I called N, I had to go through the operator and this was reflected in our monthly phone bill. I paid for my long-distance calls, which at that time amounted to about USD25.00 a month. This was one of my clues. She wanted to know who I was calling in Cabanatuan and I told her I was calling a friend. When she demanded to know which among my friends (because I didn’t have many friends, my mother knew all few of them) was it, I just told her a friend I met at work.
