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A FRIEND
of mine passed away recently. I was able to see him only
once before his passing, a day after I, along with a
smattering of mutual friends, found out that he was very
sick and in the hospital—had been, in fact, for some two
weeks already. I was told—warned almost—that my friend
was suffering from multiple organ failure, and that I
might be shocked by the sight of him. I was, there is no
other way to put it, although on the way to hospital I
had resolved to channel all that I have learned from
watching Meryl Streep movies into putting on a mask of
quiet fortitude for my friend. In a hospital ward in
Manila, on that creaky old bed with metal frame and
springs, and linens of a white that had faded into a
ghastly gray from too many washings, lay my long-time
friend barely recognizable from his body’s state of
emaciation, his skin ashen and revealing the ugly
protrusions of bones virtually stripped of body mass. A
tube ran down from his nose, his breathing was much
belabored, and my friend could barely squeeze the hand
that I had put in his to show his appreciation for this
visitation of friends. He whispered/mouthed, “Thank
you,” and I simply stood there, his hand in mine, my
face the mask of a quiet smile, while my insides
shattered into a million pieces.
Later,
in the privacy of the hallway outside the ward, I asked
our mutual friend who had informed me of this
unfortunate development, “What happened? How could he
have come to this state without any of us knowing?” I
was told that my very sick friend didn’t want any of us,
his friends, to know. For what reason, a few later
surmised that perhaps our friend didn’t want us to be
bothered, while others conjectured that maybe he was
embarrassed or ashamed.
By 7 pm,
the hospital staff informed us that visiting hours were
up and we had to leave. We made our goodbyes, first to
his family and then to him, our long-time friend, whom I
gently admonished to get well soon because there will be
that launching at Club Government in Makati of Madonna’s
new album, Hard Candy, which we all simply must
go to. Before we left, I told my friend that he might
have a problem with the hospital personnel on our next
visit, as we would turn up in drag and put on a show for
everyone. He smiled a weak smile of incredulity, which
was understandable given that in all the years he had
known me, he never once saw me come close to donning a
wig and putting on some lipstick even for the annual Gay
Pride.
I and my
friend will never know if a future awaits me as a
drag-queen showgirl. He passed on to better days a few
days later. Fittingly enough, it happened on the evening
of the Hard Candy album launch party. He simply
had to be there to pay homage to the Queen, and the only
way he could do so at that point was in spirit.
His
death, according to what his doctor had told us, was due
to complications related to AIDS.
Not long
after his passing, us his friends gathered at a bar in
Quezon City, to reminisce about him, to share our
thoughts and feelings about his passing, and to put
together a bit of a sum to help the blood family he had
left behind. I would have preferred to have skipped the
going up onstage and talking about our dearly departed
friend, as I have never considered the microphone—or the
camera, for that matter—to be a friend, nor has public
speaking ever been my metier. But after a stream of
wistful friends have had their turn onstage, I was
called nonetheless, and so I went up to the mic with a
bottle of San Mig Light in hand as my security blanket.
I won’t
go on and on here about the little speech I gave that
night in front of a few friends, some acquaintances and
other strangers, but I will recall how I ended it. “On
the night I visited him, I chided [my friend] for not
reaching out to us, his friends. I’m mad even now. You
see, if we’re not going to reach out to one another in
the gay community, who do we turn to for help?
Certainly, the straight community is not going to help
us,” I told the small assembly.
Of
course, some will argue to the contrary but the evidence
out there is far more compelling. Or haven’t you heard
about the recent sensation on the video-sharing site
YouTube? The latest online video scandal shows the
entire ER staff of the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical
Center in Cebu having a riot of a time while doctors
took a body-spray canister out of the rectum of a gay
patient, who lay there prostrate, helpless and totally
out of it, and who woke up later on to find that his
privacy had been unforgivably breached and he had been
made into a mockery. Guess who was quickly taken to task
and dressed down over the scandal? The gay patient, of
course.
“According to [Msgr. Achilles Dakay], who is based in
Cebu, the patient’s trouble started when he contacted an
alleged call boy who then stuck a body-spray canister up
the man’s rectum at the height of their sexual act.
‘They seem to forget the whole thing. They are blaming
the doctors for what they [did] but I think they should
blame the guy for what they did,’ Monsignor Dakay,
spokesman for Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal,
said.” (GMANews.TV)
Or
didn’t you see the recent episode of GMA’s
Imbestigador, in which a segment was devoted to the
police raid of a private members-only club in Cubao,
Quezon City,
that caters exclusively to gays? Sure, the owner(s) of
the club may have been asking for trouble by not
acquiring the necessary local government permits to
collect money for membership, and to sell forms of
libation, and by hosting a sex show for its members, all
of which were mouthed by so-called and self-appointed
representatives of the gay community who nonetheless
failed to express outrage over the language used by
Imbestigador’s writers and gleefully mouthed by the
show’s host, Mike Enriquez, which dripped with the kind
of wink-wink homophobia that gays have suffered within
their families and in society at large; or the
over-the-top handling of raiding team which not only
forced the club’s members to lie down on the floor
face-down but also wielded their guns at everybody, as
if the club they were raiding was some crystal meth
factory. Contrast this to a segment of the same show a
week or so earlier showing the raid of a girlie bar in
Manila, where the parokyano merely remained
seated in the comfort of their chairs with booze in
hand.
Or
haven’t you been reading the news lately and all those
reports about how the local Catholic Church expressed
its “disgust” over drag queens participating in the
annual Flores de Mayo parade? This, despite the fact
that these gays, who one may surmise have found it in
themselves to remain spiritual even as they are
routinely excoriated by institutionalized religion, have
committed no crime—unless a man dressing up as a woman
has been criminalized—while the Church and its leaders
continue to consort with and embrace prominent
individuals whose concept of morality is atrocious at
best.
All
these issues, I have already written about back when
that most excellent newspaper, Today, was still around.
But the beat of homophobia goes on, and one can only
wonder how such institutionalized homophobia contributed
to the unfortunate situations my friend must have found
himself in before and after he got very, very sick. I
can only take comfort in the thought that he is in much
better days now, no doubt entertaining the heavens with
his spot-on rendition of Cher’s “Believe.” |
