A gay president
The indefatigable Boy Abunda and Bemz Benedito, the managing director of Make Your Nanay Proud Foundation Inc. (MYNP), are busy putting together a book of speeches delivered by Abunda. It will hit the bookstores soon – and is predicted to follow the footsteps of the first publishing foray of MYNP, which landed on the bestsellers’ list of National Book Store.
Boy and Bemz asked me to write an introduction to Boy’s speech delivered at TedxADMU on March 13, 2016 at the Resorts World Manila. It was a full-house crowd and Boy spoke spontaneously – with no notes and no Powerpoint. He was a Powerpoint presentation unto himself. Bemz asked me to write a short introduction, perhaps in deference to the millennial crowd that was the original audience for this startling speech. My introduction follows.
The speech that you will read was written – and delivered – with rhetorical flourish by Boy Abunda. Or properly now, Dr. Eugenio “Boy” Abunda, who woke up at six a.m. every Saturday for many years so he could attend his graduate classes at Philippine Women’s University.
The speech is a model for any class in rhetoric. It asks a difficult question – Why can’t we have a gay President? – and proceeds to dismantle the apparatus of society that made this question difficult to answer. In one fell swoop, or rather in a series of discharges reminiscent of guns ablaze with bullets, Abunda mentions Alan Turing (gay computer scientist), the Stonewall riots in New York, the brave fight of Ladlad Party-list for accreditation in the homophobic Commission on Elections.
Boy Abunda asks leading questions and gives sharp answers. He lobs them like grenades, and they explode in the mind with the fire and flame of rage. But then, it is elegant rage, contained in prose written with substance and poise. He alludes to the 1960s, when colonized countries became free, when women left the kitchens and bedrooms, when black people marched to Washington in the millions – and when LGBTs finally shrugged off the yokes that made them the wretched of the earth.
And since this is Boy Abunda, at the end he gives a sly and hilarious scenario of what would happen if we have a gay President. But I will not preempt your moments of reading pleasure. Just simply savor this speech – one of the best I have heard in recent memory – filled as it is with history and common sense. Bravo!
Boy Abunda pivoted his speech around the idea of having a gay President in the Philippines. But when he road-tested this idea to a friend, he got comments such as gays being “creative and comedic,” but hardly fit for the serious job of governance, which is the job of a real President.
Boy said: “I told her the story of Alan Turing, the Father of Computer Science. He was the lead scientist who decoded the German enigma that paved the way for the victory of Great Britain over Germany in World War II. Alan Turing was a gay computer scientist. We are computer scientists. We are biologists. We are basketball players. We are pole dancers. We are many things; we can do anything.”
I nearly hooted with laughter when I heard Boy say “pole dancers,” but then I had to behave, since I was surrounded by a whole auditorium of young people, many of whom came from Ateneo de Manila University, where I still teach part-time as a professorial lecturer in the departments of English, Communication, and the Development Studies Program.
To further test the waters, Boy said: “So I called another friend and I asked, ‘Why can’t we have a gay President?’ and my friend said: ‘Because gays are said to be promiscuous. They salivate at the sight of flesh. They’re predators. They prey on young boys.’ I said, ‘Excuse me. Some gays are promiscuous. Some women are promiscuous. Some men are promiscuous. Promiscuity is not a gay monopoly.”
Case in point for these are the very public lives of some of the top politicians in this country: they have wives, are legally married, but maintain – and crow about – their gaggle of mistresses whom they bring on official trips here and abroad.
Another case in point: when the Commission on Elections in 2010 rejected Ladlad Party-list’s petition for accreditation and called our party “a threat to the youth” and accused me of promoting immorality and abnormality, a senior Jesuit priest immediately called me up to voice his support for me, who has been teaching at Ateneo for three long decades.
Another persona, then a mayor from the big city of Davao, also fired off a press release supporting Ladlad Party-list and I. He said he would support our advocacy for equal rights for all, since this is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. That gentleman was Rodrigo Roa Duterte, who has hired LGBTs to run the fulcrum of power and governance in Davao City.
Mayor Duterte supported Ladlad Party-list together with the chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights, a feisty Bicolana and bar topnotcher named Atty. Leila de Lima. Our party was able to bring together these twains who would never have met and fought for a common purpose.
Boy Abunda continues with his glittering words: “I wanted to understand what makes a great President. I researched and I found the most insightful and incisive discourse written by Karl Rove, a policy adviser to George W. Bush. Rove enumerated some traits of a great President and these are clarity of vision, consistency of purpose, emotional intelligence, a healthy respect for public opinion, and a great team. Nowhere in that discourse will you find that you have to be a straight man or a straight woman or an LGBT to be a great President. You simply have to be a human being to be a great President.”
These are pearls cast for the future generation of LGBT leaders. I am now contented with being an Op-Ed columnist who runs a college and teaches a classroom of young people who simply want to write well.
Comments can be sent to danton.lodestar@gmail.com. Remoto Control goes on air from Monday to Friday at Radyo 5, 92.3 News FM, from 7-9 PM. I go on air at 9 PM on PBA nights. Livestream at www.news5.com.ph and Facebook Live at Radyo5 92.3 News FM.