So here is another example of dick lit to make your summer days blaze and burn some more.
After taking off his crisp barong tagalog and his tailored pair of pants, Raul has dinner at his condominium unit in Loyola Heights. He has a housemaid who comes to his house at 6 a.m., cooks and cleans for him, does his laundry and irons his clothes, and promptly vanishes at 6 p.m. It is a good schedule, right to the point, because after dinner, Raul begins to chat.
He goes to the MIRC, the yahoo chat groups, and to gay.com. In the world of cyberspace, he becomes a different person. Or persons, more like it. He wears different masks – from red-hot top to sinuous versatile to ever-ready bottom. The lurkers in the chat rooms do not favor men who are fat or effeminate, thus the tagline: No fats, no femmes. Which is okay, because Raul works out and is straight-acting. With his skin the color of honey, deep-set eyes and nose of pico de loro, he is a catch, indeed. Add to that a mind sheathed in polished irony and wit! With these gifts, Raul demolishes them all. He plays games with the men – verbal games mostly, cybersex sometimes, and rarely, SOP (sex on the phone).
Only once did he have an SEB (sex eyeball), or an actual, physical meeting with a chatmate. The guy happened to be Rob, one of his schoolmates in college. Rob is a self-supporting student in college and an orphan. Sad and good-looking, he is the kind of man Raul would fall for. A perfect fit. The first time they met they had dinner, they talked, and Rob came home with Raul. They made love that night – long and slow and pleasurable – and slept with arms around each other.
But Rob said it is better if they do not live together. So Raul lives in his condo in Quezon City, while Rob stays with his aunts in Pasig. Not a far commute, and they could always meet at The Podium, to have coffee and share a piece of cheesecake, or walk a block away to catch a movie at SM Megamall. When the first month of their anniversary fell on a long weekend, they went to Baguio and Sagada, their skin soaking up the chill air of the woodlands.
However, Rob finds Raul too intense and too aggressive. Having been used to a life all alone, he cannot cope with the vividness of Raul. Too present, too real, so very here and now, like tendrils around the vine of one’s throat. They drift away from each other.
Raul goes back to his life before Rob. Workhorse by day, Internet hottie by night. He edits the words of congressmen ("barking at the wrong train, Your Honor") and trawls for friends in the Internet ("Coffee, conversation, companion, anybody home?"). Who knows, one fine day, those bodiless, anonymous men in the Net at night would materialize into bright, young men, with faces golden in the sun? Who knows?
All of these books are published by Anvil, with Karina Bolasco and Gwen Galvez as two mother hens. Buhay Bading is written in Taglish, even in gayspeak – a painless way to learn Tagalog, the way it is spoken in the malls, on the streets, and in the, uh, bars.
I am also doing work on three anthologies. I am compiling ghost stories, as well as poems about mothers and poems of a spiritual or religious nature. The deadline for all of these is June 30. So from the landmark Ladlad series of Philippine gay writing, we are now moving to the realm of the spirit.