I look like who?

Are you fucking kidding me? The closest one I look like is Margaret Cho!

I wouldn't say Pride...

I felt very sad reading on the various blogs about the authors’ experiences with Pride this year. I felt like I had missed out on something. It’s really not as deep as that might sound but it was an event that I really wanted to experience. Unfortunately financial concerns kept me from making a trip out to Chicago like I had planned on earlier this year. While I may have missed out on it, I have been thinking over whether I would have been in appropriate state of mind to appreciate it.

I’ve come to a brick wall in my development which is why I haven’t been posting much on this blog anymore. Basically, everyone that I want to come out to already knows that I’m gay. It’s just my family that is that final hurdle and I’m currently up against it.

I think that I’m a pretty well adjusted person. I’ve come to embrace my sexuality in the sense that it gives me a whole new exciting outlook on life. I’ll admit I don’t know a lot but it’s something that I want to explore and see where it takes me. But does that make me a person that Pride is meant for?

I’ve got this idea that Pride is for people who are out there. The fearless sort who aren’t ashamed of who they are and don’t let other people’s opinion of them keep them from living out their life. So I don’t belong to that. I’d think that I’d be a hypocrite to show up at a Pride event while I still hide a large part of who I am from my family.

What I probably want most of all is to meet other gay people. Pride would have been a great opportunity to do that but that’s not the only way to do it. I could always go to Truman’s. It’s an uncomfortable as it requires me to get over a number of my issues such as going to a bar, meeting new people, and doing it all alone. I could use the internet and its social sites such as MySpace but that’s completely weird to me as well. “Hi. I saw your profile on MySpace. I think you’re cool. Wanna hang out?”

How do break into a community? I don’t like the answers that I’ve come up with so far.

He was never yours to lose.

A little while ago I got off the IM with a fellow blogger and it got me thinking of a guy that I “miss.” I know that I’ve written about John before but I had to do it again.

When I was in the Philippines, I was staying at the international dorm. Mostly, it housed graduate students from other nations. It had better accommodations in comparison to the regular dorms available to the undergrads. I hate to sound mean, but the regular dorms are not acceptable to most American university students so most of stay at the international dorm where we can have toilet seats, or if we want to spend a little more on rent, air conditioning. The program that I was in had a partnership with Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin and was geared mainly for agricultural economics students. The year that I applied, study abroad applications for that part of the world dropped, probably due to 9-11. I’d say in years prior, four students together from State and Wisconsin would go there. That year, no one applied at Wisconsin and I was the only applicant at State. (Yay, no competition!) So I went alone.

When I arrived I knew that that there weren’t going to be any American students in my program. Then when I talked to the staff there, I found out that I was the only American there period. Well, actually, there were a few Americans at the University, just not anywhere near me. Nope, it was me with a bunch of Filipinos, Malaysians, Indonesians, and Thais. I was largely fine with that. After all, I had come to reconnect with my heritage. But still, it felt like I was cut off from my people. A week in or so, I saw a white guy walking through the dorm lounge. He headed down to air conditioned wing. (I opted for the dirt cheap single room dorm that cost $80/month.) I thought, maybe there’s an American. Or it might have been one of those French students that I heard was around but never saw. Turns out his name was David and he was an Australian doing research here from the University of London. He was gone most of the time so I never really saw him.

Three weeks in and I began seeing another guy. He was usually in entrance lounge reading a newspaper. Then one night, on the 27th of June, I was watching TV in the lounge with my Korean friend, Lee. The white guy walks by and says hi to Lee. Bang! In those few seconds, I determined that he was from the Mid-west and played football (as evident by the shirt he wore and the accent he used.) Turns out Lee had met him beforehand and talked with him. Now it was my turn and I learned quite a bit about him.

John was there on an internship with one of the institutes. So he had to travel a bit. But when he was here, we managed to hang out quite a bit. Looking back at my journal entries of the time, I’m not surprised at how frequently he appears in my entries. Now, he didn’t strike me as particularly attractive and I fell for him slowly.

After a few conversations with him, I began to suspect that he might be gay. He was like me in so many ways that it was scary. Make me drop a 1/3 of my body weight, make me white with blond hair, and take an interest in rugby and frats and I’d be him. The little things like him being a virgin but claiming chastity yet oddly fascinated with sex. I mean, I’ve never talked about masturbation habits until I met him. I remember him focusing on the penis and him prodding the rest of us guys to reveal how big we were. There were the homoerotic stories of his fraternity such as the “helicockter” guy that had a penis so large that he would swing it in circles. Then there were the conversation topics on how pervasive homosexuality was in the Philippines versus the America (John and I), Japan (Shigeto), and Korea (Lee). There was one occasion as he was going on and on about it that I looked over with a are-you-fucking-for-real look on my face.

Still, I loved seeing him. I couldn’t wait for my classes to get over just so that I had the opportunity to hang with him. I suggested lunch and dinners together, going out shopping, trips to Manila, watching pirated movies—just anything. His hold over me was insidious and could bring out the worst feelings of me such as jealousy and anger when he planned a trip with Lee and then Shigeto. I wouldn’t be able to go because of classes. I felt so much shame when that typhoon came in and wrecked their plans because I was happy.

My time with him was brief. I was there for the semester. He was only there for the summer. Before I knew it he was gone. The night before he left, I gave him something. I’ve only done this with two other people in my life and it’s sort of like a tradition. Whenever I leave someone that I know that I probably will never see again, I give them something of mine that I treasure. I didn’t bring much with me to the Philippines, so I was kind of limited. But I did bring two Air Force coins with me. Those in the military know what I’m talking about. So I gave him my “Fighting Terrorism” coin. I had gotten it as a response of 9-11 and was my most valued coin.

I saw him leave in the morning. I shook his hand and said good-bye. Then I watched him disappear down the street. I just stood there for a while before going back upstairs. There, I lost it. I cried. As much as I denied it before, at that moment, I allowed myself to feel. I was gay. I fell for a guy that made me feel more alive that I had felt in a long time. Now I was miserable because he was gone. I had lost him and probably would never see him again. The rest of my time in the Philippines never came close to the time he was there with me.

I tried to keep in touch with him but it was hard. It always consisted of me contacting him and then him giving me a short reply back. I don’t respond well to that. If I have to keep making the first move in contact, pretty soon I stop bothering. Anyways, with him, I kept trying every now and again. We became friends on facebook, then he quit, then he came back, then he quit again. I knew that I was going to loose him for good.

The last time I wrote him, he had quit facebook once again. I didn’t think he was going to come back so I used his gmail address and asked him a question. It was a question that I had always wanted to ask him. Even if it meant me intruding on his business, I had to know and so I asked him, “are you gay?” He wrote back and said that he wasn’t. And that was it.

I had never felt for someone what I felt for John. And though my feelings weren’t reciprocated, I wouldn’t have changed what happened. Despite the ending, it gave me something the hold on to and cherish. Eventually, someone is going to come along and I will know something deeper and better than what I felt. For now, I’d rather hurt than still wonder.