From closet to center of the room

The month of June is traditionally celebrated as Pride Month for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders.

It began when the New York Police Department hauled the gays of New York who were in the bars at Stonewall in Greenwich Village into the police precincts. But lo and behold, the NYPD was stunned by the response of the gays, who used to meekly obey orders for them to leave the premises.

But this time, the gays of New York, who were mourning the recent death of their icon, the great Judy Garland, fought back – with their handbags and their stilettos, with their words and their fists. Thus began the Stonewall riots that ushered in the start of the LGBT movement in the world.

Fittingly enough, the last four weeks were busy days for Filipino LGBTs, since we were front and center of the news. Geraldine Roman became the first transgender politician in the Philippines, leaving her opponent biting the dust in a landslide victory to become the congresswoman of Bataan’s second district.

Bright, well-educated, and a good political strategist, Congresswoman Roman will work hard on two parallel tracks. The first is to modernize the hospitals and build roads for the people of Bataan, as well as provide for their medical and educational needs.

The second is to work for the passage of the Anti-Discrimination Bill that criminalizes the oppression of LGBTs in the workplace, schools, getting of licenses to operate a business or work in a profession. She will also file a Gender Recognition Bill that will give recognition to transgenders who have undergone sexual reassignment surgery to have their new gender placed in their birth certificates and official documents.

Moreover, she will also work for the passage of a law that will allow same-sex partners in loving relationships to have a civil union sanctioned by state. I have gone on record before that we need to focus first on the passage of an AntiDiscrimination Bill, but times have changed.

Times, they are a’changing, and temperate winds are beginning to blow. Both the elected President Rodrigo Duterte and the elected Vice President Leni Robredo are for civil unions of LGBT couples. Both are lawyers, and agree with the gist of our argument for same-sex partnerships: denying us civil unions would be tantamount to discrimination, since it singles us out as a class that should not have the same rights enjoyed by the rest of the (straight) population.

So let me state for the record: yes, I am for civil unions, because I want my partner to be my next-of-kin who will decide on my medical treatment if I get ill; because I want my partner to share in the fruits of the hard work we are both doing to make our lives more comfortable; because I want to be on equal footing with the person beside me, my fellow citizen and taxpayer and Filipino, equal in all our rights – including the right to get married.

So how, somebody tweeted me from out of the blue, did you come out? We’re talking ancient history, but let me summarize.

I had been two years in the country in 1992, having finished my graduate studies in Publishing in the United Kingdom, when I met Zach. Now Zach was not only a brilliant writer, but he was also tall and good-looking. He was taking some subjects at UP and lived at the International House. He was out in Hawaii, where he lived, but was closeted in Manila.

Aha, a partner in crime, we thought of each other, and promptly went to Malate the next Saturday.

First we went to The Library on Adriatico. When we entered the comedy bar whose shelves were lined with books, all eyes turned on Zach. I was completely ignored. Right there and then, I knew how the stepsisters of Cinderella felt.

After that, we went to a party at the Syquia Apartments organized by The Library Foundation and Katlo, gay groups I would later join. The guests ran the whole spectrum – from straight-acting gays with voices that seemed to have come from the deepest bowels of the earth, to flaming queens with invisible gumamelas in their hair.

After the party, we walked four blocks down Adriatico to go to Subway. The waiters’ black uniforms showed off their sculpted bodies. The laser lights glowed, so many colors piercing the bodies dancing on the floor. It’s the same here, I thought, as in The Laughing Duck and The Blue Oyster in Edinburgh in Scotland, as in everywhere else in the world.

The heart, as the novelist Carson McCullers said, is a lonely hunter.

The next week, Zach and I returned to Malate, where we visited John Glenn Sunga’s Blue, a stylish bar that played reggae. The upholstery of the seats was impressed with the faces of celebrities. Zach always sat on the face of James Dean. There was a lot of intelligent conversation, and that I liked.

Cine Café was on the other side of town, on Timog Avenue in QC. There, we watched plays by Nick Pichay and films like My Own Private Idaho. We wanted to bring home the gorgeous Keaunu Reeves even if he could not act, or wishing we could have somebody dark and melancholy like River Phoenix for our partners.

By that time, I met J. Neil Garcia, who was already teaching the machos of UP Diliman a thing or two about equality. When his fellow male teachers invited him to a girlie bar, he would agree but only if the machos would join him the next week in a gay bar.

For the next two years, Neil and I collected manuscripts and edited Ladlad: an Anthology of Philippine Gay Writing. One old fogey even warned me that coming out would destroy my literary career. Really? Then he went around town telling the young people not to submit to Ladlad, for it would destroy their careers.

He was wrong. Not only did Ladlad become a bestseller, it also boosted the sales of my other books.

In the 1960s, Director Ishmael Bernal wrote a sensuous short story called “Ulysses,” where he compared a young man to a “stallion with a black and shiny coat. . .” But when I called up Ishma and asked if I could reprint his story in Ladlad, the great director purred on the phone: “But Danton, we cannot do that. . . . [ Pause] I am no longer gay. . . [ Pause] I have become a woman.”

One of Ladlad’s contributors was Ted Nierras, who invited me to join batch four of the Healthy Interaction and Values (HIV) Workshop being run by The Library Foundation in Los Baños, Laguna. I went, and never looked back ever since.

I had a roaring great time, laughing madly at the beauty contest, where even the most butch gays wore serpentina gowns they made from curtains and tablecloth. But I was also bothered. My shoulders were always wet during the workshop sessions, when the younger gays would cry their eyes out as we talked about coming out, about the love that dares to speak its name, about the cruel and judgmental God fashioned by the Catholic Church.

We were coming out together. And in that circle, we knew we would never be alone, again.

The Pride March will be held on June 25 in Malate, Manila. Comments can be sent to danton.lodestar@gmail.com