The unreality of landscapes as the saying goes. For a brief moment they unmask themselves as CLANDESTINE. And basically, you never see them again. Try as you may. It is always the unknown room in the palace. The corridor in If It Die…, or in the burrow.
-Jean-François Lyotard
“Scapeland” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time
Juvenile Scapeland
poetics of a queer childhood
for Carmelita Tagudar-Corkhum, on her 51st birthday
*
I was a reluctant butch. I never told my friends. I was never at ease with it. It is something I could never be proud of – nor be ashamed of.
*
“Denying a loss, I call myself careless,” so begins DM Reyes as he lays out a barren nocturnal shadowland of unrequited longing in his poem “Blue grapes.” Tonight, too, I write about loss. And I begin with childhood – the boy I lost somewhere between birth and late adolescence.
Sigmund Freud is a boy I could have loved, but there is a new place well within the place where I spent most of my childhood that was craving for a new set of characters. (Maybe the set is not new after all. It just happens that this was a recent and continuing discovery.)
The first generation: as a child and boy in the place.
Breaks have been numerous: childhood is multiple, it is not dual like a boy or girl; not a girl becoming a boy; nor a boy becoming a girl; not the claustrophobic history of Sigmund. I lost my first childhood when I entered school. Lost another when a girl courted me – a boy getting cruised at seven. Juvenile creativity attacked by another child – of another patriarch. The other child happened to be a girl – who will someday grow up into a woman? And I will be the future man for the little woman? Lost another when the school ended. After fourth grade, I moved on to another school. Another childhood lost.
*
Remembrance: recycling used memories of scenes. An early morning jog is a tour: old routes; new routes; old trails; new trails – undiscovered paths around the bush jungle I’ve come to live and love.
Mornings were times for mourning. Frigid times for mourning.
It will be a long walk along the untouched dust trail where blades of carabao grass will deliver last nights mist unto my socks, sometimes unto my bare feet when Mommy allows me to wear my blue slippers to the wood-house. Mommy’s friend, and my brothers’ favorite teacher when they were my age, now awaits at the bamboo gate – beside the pomelo grove. Time to go. Time to hide in silence. What is going to be at the end of that long trail? I greet Mommy’s friend. Mourning moves on to another dimension.
*
This eerie morning, younger brother is back in his child’s embrace of the void. He is past asleep as I scribble this suite. Such an innocent dream of solitude as I look over him from my cot where I fuse the pieces of this morose prose. I remember the picture which I took of him during that summer after his first year at the university – a non-sensual view of a young male subject taking a catnap under the searing tropical heat.
Going back ten or more years ago, we had it so young at an affirmatively gay-paranoid and nuclearly colonial patriarchal home (That was years and years ago! So distant now!) – I was a solitary pubescent boy while he’s just a little kiddo brother: Sometimes the object of my personal rage because he’s the youngest while I got stuck up in fourth – such petty and foolish things now I see clearly with silent laughter. The only sad part part of which is that the silent laughter should not have been that silent ideally. (When one laughs in silence, one ends up crying…)
It should not have been that opaque. Thumbing my blues is the only thing that I can do sometimes – because he’s so “far away” now. Our brotherly ties now getting more and more like mere triangulations by the academic demagogues that we are. When I was breezing through the dusty trail of adolescence I never had time to ask him. Was everything forgiven and forgotten, considering the phobia? Too ashamed that I pinned the craving boy at the bottom (I was playing an early apprenticeship at being a tricks-rich dominator.) Yes, I’m too sorry, we were never once given the window or warm and silent blue room where things could have been straightened out. Little kiddo brother is more robust than me now – contemplating girls he likes most – while I ended up just being his intellectual elder brother… …who is also a homosexual. It stops at that. At distance.
*
Enough of that. This is just to set the blue themes up. Care if you want but it really stopped at that. Punctuate the first chord variation with a shrieking HE’S NOT MY TYPE! He’ll probably turn up black and blue if ever he gay baits me in all my contemplative self-centeredness.
*
I will not be blinded. I tasted the scent and saw it all in the peripheral outpost after the tanks rolled in and the vigilant weary crowd cleared after February, on the radio tuned to my Daddy’s only station during that frightening – that tearfully dizzying crossing of a decade. They’re jubilant, while the days raced towards the parchness of summer. Brother was ecstatic, he defied the city-matriarchs orders that he (the other boy) stay out of Makati. The chidings. The echoes: to the chicks, to the chicks – Mah- kah- tih – to the chicks, to the chicks – Ah- yah- lah! Not knowing what to do with thousands of shoes on that field trip to San Miguel, the restlessness showed on the faces of my classmates in my freshman class at the country’s elite science high school.
Today, that’s just… That’s just kitsch on the telee. Some fetishized spool of aging film.
*
The main question has been slapped on my centuries battered face. Without doing, I shall address it now. The urgency. Why Marxism? The little boy awed will quip, “I only believe in science.” Daddy, Mommy, and elder brothers who filled me in. With what? Observe. Think. Try. Observe. Try. Think. Observe. Try. To a child aching to know, that is perfect delight. To man, to woman, that adult thing, that’s hash. There’s no such thing, you idiot! You’re gonna bring the corporate ladder down. They also taught me God. I know what you’re thinking: Hey, that’s silly! Marx and God?
Don’t believe the absoluteness of things spoken. There’s only this mass of people. This mass. I often cried during holy mass when I was a boy. Loved the recessional songs so much that I sometimes hum them when I am alone contemplating a long procession along the aisle of a grand cathedral. Somewhere in the slow swirl of gold-colored clothes and ghostly smoke is me – a priest, an altar boy, one of those apostles, one of those beautiful boys who have their roles pegged for them – I wanted to be pegged for a role.
An atlas dead ringer at a young age? The messages of the geomancers belong to the storyland of their fantasized future that always shuts it past.
Enough. The awed little boy is getting xenophobic. And the other, the little boy who was not awed? He loved(!) Marx, because Marx was also once a boy. A curious Jewish lad growing up in a turn of age German home.
*
Boyhood could have been fun. If only… If only I pricked my eyes with my Daddy’s Parker pen that has always been my ideal. If only I blew my ear-drums deaf during those intermittent summertime skin-dives at my Mommy’s clan-owned plantation island a quarter hours drive from the provincial capital. If only I shut my mouth. And stopped breathing. And stopped giving manual service to a wretched self, tacking tears in, longing for some sweet thing obscured somewhere. Yes. Boyhood could have been fun. If only I stayed inside the merry little yard.
And stay in the merry little yard, I did.
Physically.
*
By January, the other boy was gone. My Aunt was trying hard to rationalize while I cried outside the councourse – watching the widebodied jetliner waiting to take one of my boyhood gods to his land of dreams. Daddy was silent: maybe you’ll see each other again. Mommy was explaining things out: he was his closest and most loved brother.
Was that love? I don’t know. But some things were certain. I wrote a college reading paper with a textual structure that made a parallel narrative between Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and a brother’s act of moving away. I wrote E. explicit love letters during the time that I was finally coming out to myself.
*
I must say I really loved E. more than any other boy in our squad of five.
He scared a lot out of me sometimes, though – his self-centered independence tempered to slickness by years of checking things out alone. This has often been complicated by the reality that we were both narcissistic, be it in thematically and abstractly different ways.
We were both self-taught piano players. In the classical cannon, E. was partial to Robert Schumann and Frederic Chopin. Recently, I found that I loved drowning myself in the works of Richard Strauss and Sergei Prokofiev – the latter I liked not because of his first name which is a Russian version of my name, but due to the atonality of his music, something that mirrored painstaking transgression of conventional form; the former, I liked, simply because of the epical scale of his symphonic works, and the sonority of his lieders. E. learned how to draw and paint, I did not. I was too fussy about getting my lines straight and perfecting my curves. Daddy could have remedied my predicament by teaching me the proper use of a French-curve. However, I decided I will hate using the French-curve in the long run. I did not want to enter an artistic life with a glaring disability. I was scared by a vision: a mischievous kid in crutches trying hard to run along with his friends in a game of tag. It could be funny at times. Sometimes it is not.
Among my friends in childhood, I can not recall anyone who made any comment about the way I looked. (Looking back at rare pictures after I entered school, I noticed I really have that slight faggoty limp to the side!) The first person who made me conscious about my external and physical appearance is the other gay boy in our squad of five – E.
*
I can still recall how growing up in a countryside settlement academic environment embued me to think carefree about my young being-ness. Though I am not a very active child, physically speaking, I can always get in and out of the local gang in a matter-of-fact manner. I was not aware that I will be growing up in an entirely different way from my boyhood friends, notwithstanding my everyday excellence in academics. But even in the read-and-write field I never thought that I was that unusual a person. I would often have the usual difficulties: memorizing phyla and order in the biological sciences; contemplating the trajectories of freely-falling bodies; coming up with the proper configuration of a benzene derivative in organic chemistry. I guess, I was only a bit more introspective than my friends who never cared about anything in life except rushing to the soccer field or gymnasium right after a laboratory experiment, and having the friendly girl from the other grade level for a date or a short sweet talk in the library or the school cafeteria..
That’s what I thought then. We didn’t talk about those things like “Hey dude, why is it that you always want to play soccer?”.
Our interactions as adolescents were always filled with the extraordinary ordinariness of beings who always are in the process of dialogic clearing out for existence.
*
Let me not allow things to hang anymore. I was conscious of it at about eleven years of age. The last two years in grade school. The years when a boy starts breaking his voice. The years when you sneak at the back of a school building and start talk about getting jit. The years when you buddy it up in an imaginary manly place during a weekend pass. Ahhh, innocent grade school. Innocence that is aching to flower into the rites. Those innocent and boyish feelings and longings for companionship. That was the time I entered a new school, the first time that I saw my first same-gender pair image in a young man with whom I will be spending my last two years in grade school.
In the inner lowland of my province, the fog leaves its trace in the early mornings of June.
Coming in from my vacation in the metropolis, I found K. in my adviser’s classroom first thing that cool and foggy Monday morning. He was from another school, too. I had no idea where to place this new face in my intellectual scale, although I was not much interested in academic competition with anybody in my forthcoming class. The top slot in the 25-person class at the laboratory school was reserved for me.
*
It was so easy for a boy in the family to ride the carnivalesque aura that moves around with us. An elder brother was already a trophy at fourteen – a scholar at the best science high school in the country where I will be two years later.
The entrance examination, coming in from my fourth grade in a primary school just up outside campus, was mere bureaucratic formality. It was a given during that temporal and spatial moment that I was the best eleven-year old kid within 100 kilometers of the regional college where I literally grew up.
In my “cruel-against-lesser-people” moments, I tend to muse that the radius was in fact even greater than that! The girl from the same island province with whom I will be entering the halls of Pisay in June 1986 got significantly lower marks in the two-tiered screening examination administered by the country’s science and technology authority. She got accepted due to a state policy regarding cultural minorities. I was a normal entrant, something I was so proud of, clearing the second screening with a confident margin above the cut-off for the Southern Tagalog Region, one of the highest cut-offs around the country – second to Metro Manila.
*
K. became a group member of my reporting group in our civics class. He was often my companion on the way to school. We always came in late for our first period class. We were not doing anything along the way of course. I just enjoyed each others company, silently whiling time away walking towards a half discussed lesson.
K. didn’t have the benefit of having a father while growing up. The patriarch died while he was still a suckling. So what? He was the envy of every boy in the class because he had all the girls in school swooning over his charisma.
And his manners? No. Nothing. Nothing betrayed anything that can be betrayed by his Philippinesian features. If ever there was.
And there never was any. To the dismay of my adolescent mind – and I don’t know who else’s, nobody has come out yet, perhaps they never will.
He only courted a number of girls too many.
And beat out a number of boys in basketball and soccer shoot-outs too many.
*
What about now? Well he’s still courting a lot of women. I never asked him why. I guess it’s too an un-manly thing to ask my friend that question. Besides, whenever we have a time to talk to each other, an asymmetry always engenders into our relationship as two old acquaintances.
He never stopped looking up at me as the class valedictorian. As the wizard boy. As the son of two university-educated college professors. As the only lad in class who entered the halls of Pisay, a school he never even dreamt of getting into in the first place – because he always thought he was too ordinary, that I knew more about life than what I thought then were his bare desires.
Almost to the point of mockery. My mockery.
What I was not sure of was whether the asymmetry was still based on his parodic devaluation of his ego or whether he was looking at me as a fuckee in a fucker-fuckee relationship between two guys.
We never slept together.
*
We grew up, me and my brother, (No sisters?!? So what?!? We enjoyed each others company anyway – inspite of age gaps that ranged between one year to six years. I’m just laying out information for you – the reader. You may assemble these things up for your own version of the story. YOUR OWN VERSION, NOT MINE! – I refuse to imply anything.) inside the closed space of an academic institution in a frontier province. My Mom and Dad taught at the college, so they were able to avail of free housing facilities given to couples. The colonial style houses where quite roomy and airy. Our family of seven was never able to completely fill up the rooms. A child can lock himself up in the end room at the back of the house and my parents who occupied the front room will never hear his bodily sounds. We were quite free by ourselves.
Sometime, while I was about six, three college-age boys came to lodge at the vacant rooms at the back. That’s how it happened. Technically speaking, I was the more aggressive one in this pedophiliac homosexual bonding that took place.
*
High school was terrible for me. I was living in numerous fractured worlds at the same time. To my family and friends back in the province I was doing a good job studying at the best science high school in the country. For me, living with the “multiculti” product of the country it was no good at all. I don’t know where I got or how I developed swishiness, but the only thing I’m sure about was that some things were showing at the façade of my personage. Mix this with the fact that I was a small boy for my age. A gay cultural scientist who is well steeped with the dynamics of the country’s misogynist and humanistically homoparanoid cultures will easily understand how a young male subject who does not have the patriarchal inclination in joining the heterosexual subject formation at the early stages of personality development is left with nothing but the parodic devalution of his existence. I played volleyball with a swish – a total parodic abandon – and was often the butt of jokes of some sons of urban bourgeoisie. Later, going back to my province after two years at the nation’s capital, I learned and perfected the skill of playing the real hard-court stuff of volleyball, getting assigned the strategic job of setting-up offensive attacks during numerous matches. I learned to play the sport in a new real hard-hitting dimension. Now, why the heck was that sport not gendered outside the city?
Answers, anyone?
At present, I am no longer interested in inquiring about the number of the “clean and good” “real” boys who turned out gay. In Tagalog, masyadong masakit na para sa akin (it was too painful for me to think about it now). Everybody had their place while I was solitary right at the beginning – a lower-class gay pariah.
I always tried to be complex in my historico-material politics, devicing ever new ways of grasping and feeling through my socio-politics. (On a different note and level, this may be considered an ever contingent development of an ideological parachute in this hegemonic situation. And consequently the ideological practitioner – me – is always the loser.) In this ocassion I can’t do anything but apply classical class dynamics: My family belonged to the proto-intellectual class (which Filipino writer N.V.M. Gonzales calls a class that aspires to be middle class but in reality belongs to the working class – only, their job is highly specialized due to the strong indivuation produced by the division of labor, thus the ideological illusion of being above the laboring class) back in the province, but in the urban jungle I was a nobody among the rich and the bourgeoisie. I had no voice. A screaming soundless native gritty faggot.
*
There are two gays among us in the family. Or, that’s how far I can go regarding the adolescent sexualities manifest at home. Children are great experimenters, you know. They do stuff without testing them against priori hypotheses. The driving force they trust: that great welcoming unknown – the world.
The older homo boy was a junior natural scientist who was finishing his PhD in a university outside the country, a recipient of a prestigious fellowship grant from Sigma Xi, among others. He “practiced” his homo-ness half a year before I finally gave myself room, a wider room where my thoughts were freer.
I was the younger homo boy in this middle class family where both parents were both university-educated and ended up, both, holding college teaching positions.
Our playful brood grew up together inside the green and wide campus of a state college in the countryside, far from the bustlings of the metropolis which became our summer place (in an ironic reversion of a city dwellers notion of a vacation.)
We have been Mom and Dad’s whiz kid back home: academic trophies for my Mom and Dad – who have often been considered as non-conventional entities inside the green and wide campus. Perhaps, that was the only consolation they were able to get out of being looked upon as an odd couple who brought up a squad of academic boys in a far flung place. Year after year, were were reaping awards from our respective mentors.
We were not about to be brought up as physical bodies. The college track coach, a friend of Mom’s, was coaxing me to try middle distance running since I was eleven. Nobody gave it a thought. Nobody showed any enthusiasm about my going out of the academic way. Of course that would not have been a problem had I decide to run. My mother who had a minor in sports education from Diliman, was the college swimming instructor back then. Whenever me and my brothers had free time, we trekked with Mom’s weekend class to the beach where she conducts class.
But we were really training to be the whiz kids or/for our community that has continually polished our pedestals for us. My close friend K. was the captain ball of the basketball team in sixth grade. Another friend was doing well in football. I stayed within the confines of the library. Too proud of not being able to catch a baseball from the outer field. Afraid of not shooting the ball high enough to reach the basket. Even electing to read the revised little league rules for the school coach – in an apparent self-saving-cum-saving act. My physical education teacher regrets. He could have given me the home-plate position since I knew the rules more than anybody else in sixth grade. But I could not catch a ball. Or, say, I could not look a ball straight in the eye as much as I would want to. I didn’t know what would happen if I got hit by a spherical lump of leather, rubber, and wood. Worst, I couldn’t even tell my predicament to my friends. My friends who thought it’s really just not my cup of tea to sweat it out and have fun with them in the dusty baseball field. Otherwise, inspite of this “self-centered” fear of the physical games that my friends were playing, nobody could mistake me for a sissy in grade school. Simply, I was not one. Or, I can’t be one, not out of choice. I could not even talk to anybody what makes my limbs tremble. Tremors only I could feel.
*
Sexuality may have been the base of gender along with other possible complex permutations of the two categories together. But gender was never the exact base of sexuality.
*
And so, for all these, we never performed nor subjected ourselves to that fetishized concept called coming out. Even if we became silently-frozen, unsuspected spectators of our childhood friends who are at the throes of their battles for their most cherished identities – be it that they are parlor queens or gym rats. Battles which would never have been The problematique in the first place.
*
This was my compendium.
…my well of answers to questions of loneliness and of being second-best or being second-boy …for myself … for my loved ones, my few ones – after living for about a quarter of a century…
In a preface to a re-issue of his A Boy’s Own Story, novelist Edmund White said, ‘If I’d hated myself as a boy and adolescent, I now felt an affection for the miserable kid I’d once been, a retrospective kindliness one might call “the pederasty of autobiography.”’ Autobiography? This is not yet my autobiography. Narrative lines are still soaked in a great entangled mass. Interpretations have not yet landed in their final resting ground. Tentative like poetry.
