Back from Outer Space

It was Coming Out Day last October 11. In outer space, sound doesn't exist

It was Coming Out Day last October 11. I keep thinking I never had a coming out, so to speak – in the sense that it wasn’t a big, singular event. The conversation around my sexual orientation was slowly introduced, tested among different social circles, refined, and messaged appropriately. I think it was during a shoot for Bench's blog for Pride Month in 2014 that I "officially" came out. That is to say, it has been publicized to an audience whose opinions I could no longer foresee or manage. (The blog is dead now, but I'm still gay.)

I didn't come out to my family, but they knew I had dated guys. I had brought home some of them, mostly introduced as a "friend." I cried and almost killed myself for one, and my mom had to take me to the hospital to have the doctors stitch the scars on my arms. I had to be committed to a psychiatric facility — for one week at Sunrise Hill in Quezon City. Despite everything, my parents walked around the topic of my queerness, and the only moments we ever talked about it were to discuss how it's a sin.

I've mostly tried to evade the topic of coming out and unpack it on a personal level because it feels, well, cheap. I've always held on to the belief that my personal experiences are irrelevant unless they serve a greater purpose. What's so special about hearing another gay guy with a religious family being forced to suppress who they were? (They did that with "Boy Erased" – move on, Evan.)

There’s also a mix of shame, self-hatred, and a desire to be respectable. Stay invisible, keep your head down, don’t be loud. The rule is: Don’t be gay, but if you’re going to be gay, don’t be that kind of gay.

But then I realized I was falling into the same trap as my parents, grandparents, and their grandparents and so on – the trap of keeping silent and never airing one's dirty laundry in public. This unspoken oath to omit the nasty parts and maintain a semblance of normality, which then props up the problematic status quo and sends children to psychiatric facilities for a week. (I mean, it’s either that or a drinking problem. Or being a child molester, like my uncle.)

Not that being gay is dirty or nasty, but it’s always what other people are thinking in my family. I remember my parents used to have fights, and whenever my dad would raise his voice, my mom would always say, “Itigil mo yan, ano lang iisipin ng mga kapitbahay!” As if the only deterrent to their bad behavior was not because it was horrible, but because someone else would catch you and gossip about you.

(Which I guess is the reason they’re so into religion: they need a big policeman in the sky to watch over them all the time.)

These days, I question whether the idea of coming out is, in a way, the queer community’s acquiescence to cisheteronormative standards. Why is it that the default is cisgender and straight, and everyone else has to be forced to declare their queerness? When I was in university, I wrote a play for our final project about a world where straight people were witch-hunted for having sex like nonhuman animals, which the people in this world found gross and savage. (Yes, I know gay animals exist too, but the characters ignored that, just like how religious zealots do in our world, anyway.) I can’t find the play now because the hard drive where I stored all my old files is now corrupted.