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By Dulce M. Arguelles and Darwin G. Amojelar
Raine, 35, is petite and voluptuous. She wears
make-up, jewelry, mini skirts, and high-heeled shoes. She bats her
lashes with the best of them. She goes out with male friends. She is
single. She is gay.
Her male pals have learned to accept the truth.
But Raine remembers, with a rueful laugh, every first coming out
with friends, male or female.
“You? Gay? You can’t be gay!”
The startled explanation is almost always
followed by questions, some coming in rapid-fire fashion, some
delicately phrased, by friends who do not want to offend.
“Were you raped?”
“Does it run in your family?”
“Were you seduced by a tibo (a ‘butch’ or
mannish lesbian)?”
“Did a man break your heart?”
“Did your father abandon the family?”
To all that, Raine, answers No.
She had boy friends as a teenager. She just
outgrew them and found herself attracted, gradually at the start, to
women. Plural, no particular women, until she fell in love with
Belle, 32, another femme.
Ren-ren, a 20-year-old gay, accepted his sexual
orientation way back in high school. He had started having crushes
on other boys and enjoyed the feeling.
“Although I tried to block these feelings, I
could not. They became stronger and stronger. I knew I liked
boys, but I was aware that being gay could be seen by some as
something to be ashamed of,” says Ren-ren.
“I tried to go out with the girls, but I did
not feel anything. It’s hard to be gay because you can’t express
what you really feel to the person you love, your feelings are
always suppressed,” he adds.
Lea, 28, insists she was “born gay.”
She had to suffer frilly clothes and mary jane
pumps but as soon as social niceties were done with, Lea would
revert to her rough and tumble ways. She even insisted on peeing
standing up, Lea recalls with a laugh.
Her brothers liked having another playmate. At
14, Lea was swaggering like a little man, and mooning over pretty
girl classmates. She was miserable having to wear her high
school’s plaid uniform. She was even more miserable because, “I
began to have breasts!”
No little small apples. Full-blown breasts.
Bombshell breasts, which she still has today, beneath her oversized
polos and undershirts.
Her breasts are all women. After a 10 years of
trying to pretend her breasts and other “female ek-ek” did not
exist, Lea met Gina, long-haired and plump, who insisted on a
two-way relationship. Then Lea discovered her “treasures.”
Diversity
There are many roads to gayhood. As there are as
many gay types. Hard butch, medium butch, soft butch, femmes,
androgynous, leather gays, square gays, cross-dressers,
transsexuals. Transgenders. And, of course, bisexuals.
Manila Out’s newsletter states the group
speaks for the “seven million Filipino gays.” That’s almost 10
percent of the population. There is hardly any independent
verification of this claim. Even the World Health Organization (WHO)
doesn’t have figures — because asking a person about gender
would be a form of discrimination.
It’s an iffy position. Data on gender
preference could be and has been used to discriminate against gays.
Yet for many gays, identity is important, simply
because they have to shed tears and sometimes, blood, to stake their
claim to this important aspect of personhood.
The gay pride movement’s symbol is the
rainbow. Harmony amid diversity. It is thus, ironic, that the gamut
of gay sub-types often strain relations between advocates of gay
rights.
Chris Salvatierra, coordinator for Task Force
Pride, says the movement in the Philippines advances because there
are enough gay — and “straight” — souls who realize the need
to stress some unifying themes.
“Mainly, it’s that we have the same
struggles in terms of discrimination,” says Salvatierra.
“We’re discriminated against, in terms of our looks, our
preference, how we act.”
Transformation
Salvatierra explains that gays and lesbians are
people, and so they develop and mature like other folk, taking some
pratfalls along the way.
“Call it transformation. You can’t insist on
painting everyone the same color. If we demand the right to be
accepted for our ‘gayness,’ we must also learn to accept the
different expressions of self-identities among gays.”
There are lesbians, for example, who see
themselves as “men,” their partners likewise consider themselves
“women, not lesbians,” never mind the long years they have spent
together.
Salvatierra says she had the same outlook in her
late teens and early 20s. “It took me a long time, plenty of
reading and loving to learn to love the fact that I am a woman.”
Nobody, she warns, can impose identity on
another.
And if the identity traps a relationship in the
same stereotypes that have given gays so much grief? These are
formed by a confluence of factors, Salvatierra notes.
The Task Force Pride coordinator is wary of
people, gays included, who insist on poster children. Heterosexuals
go through the same process and similar ways of transcending these
stereotypes. Why should gays be expected to change overnight?
Coming out
Part of Salvatierra’s concern stems from the
fact that gays already undergo a traumatic “coming out” process.
Salvatierra says she even tried to have a
boyfriend, just to meet society’s expectations. It was a very
confusing time, with friends and kin jumping at the slightest sign
that she liked a male friend. She always could appreciate handsome
youth; friends told her this was a sign of a crush, prelude to love,
never mind that she had stronger crushes for girls.
For a time, Salvatierra even prayed for a youth
to “take advantage” of her, when kisses and holding hands left
her totally unmoved. On the other hand, the slightest brush of a
pretty girl’s fingers “would make my hair stand on end.”
The process of coming out to her self was sheer
torture. It was easier telling her parents, mainly because she had
fallen in love by then.
“I wanted to share the wonderful feeling; to
be as giggly as the other girls, except I was talking about another
girl, not a boy,” she recalls.
Darlene, 25, had it harder. At some point, she
started to cut herself with knives and razors, feeling frustrated
and isolated because of her attraction to other girls. She
then told her parents that she was lesbian. While her mother
hugged her and reassured her daughter of her love, Darlene’s
father became emotionally distant.
Trina is 42 and, she says, “my mom hasn’t
lost hope yet of me marrying.”
She is a successful doctor, the family
breadwinner, with a live-in partner. But her mom still thinks
“it’s a phase.”
Gay men and women, pressured by society, have
sometimes taken the drastic step of having sex with someone they do
not love, do not even like, whose sole recommendatory trait is that
he or she belongs to “the opposite sex.”
Finding out
What really is the definition of being gay or
lesbian? Is there a rule of thumb by which a person can be
deemed gay or straight?
“Is to be gay having sexual relations with the
same sex? Many people would normally say yes when in fact, it
is not a simple thing. Sexual relations cannot be the sole
basis for identifying people as gay or lesbian,” according to Dr.
Romeo Lee, a Behavioral Science professor from De La Salle
University.
There are actually several “facets of sexual
orientation,” parameters — and a battery of tests and
examinations — by which a person can be deemed gay or lesbian, one
of which is the cognitive aspect, which involves thoughts and
fantasies.
“When you dream, who is your partner in your
dream? Is it a man, a woman, or both? Your erotic
fantasies — when you fantasize, which sex do you desire?” Lee
asks.
Other facets include sexual behavior, emotions
(romantic feelings), sexual attraction (desire to touch and enjoy
physically), and self-defined identity (a person’s description
of his or her sexual self and its expression to others).
“Oftentimes it is sexual behavior that is
taken as a basis for determining sexual orientation,” Lee notes.
Social scientists also take into account how a
person regards himself or herself.
“That’s the easiest way. If you have
all of these, you have to go through a battery of testing and
examinations, which will make things more complicated. The
easiest way is to go to the person and ask the person, and if the
person negates it, it’s not my problem,” Lee adds.
Stereotypes
One of the misconceptions Lee cites is the
tendency of people to judge a book by its cover. A man whose
fingers are “flying,” or who talks like a woman, is often
thought of as gay.
“It doesn’t follow that a man who has a
masculine voice makes him straight. He may be gay. The
overt presentation of a person does not make a person gay,” Lee
explains.
Being married or having had children is also not
a guarantee that a person is straight.
“People simplify it because they don’t
understand other dimensions. What they see and what they hear
tend to be the basis of their judgment. It (A person’s sexual
orientation) cannot be measured by just looking at a person, by what
a person does,” he adds.
Another myth Lee debunks is the permanence of
sexual identity. On the contrary, he says, it “is very fluid,
it’s not fixed.”
A man can be straight at one point in his life,
but later may like other men. A man who prefers sexual
relations with other men at age 20 may, at age 45, become straight
and have a child.
Raine, for example, doesn’t reject the
possibility of falling for a man. “Though I’ve had them before
and having learned about a woman’s love, I don’t think so,”
she muses.
This fluidity also means that men who are gay
can also be aroused by women under the right circumstances.
“Some gay men say they are not able to cause
pregnancy. That their dicks are not going to stand when they
are with women. That’s not true. It is going to
stand,” Lee insists.
It is also not true that children reared by gays
or lesbians will follow the sexual orientation of their elders.
“If that’s your argument, then why do some
gays or lesbians come from so-called straight parents?
Straight parents should also have straight children, but this (is
not the case),” Lee points out.
Second part
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