A gay Valentine

One boy alone in all the world for me,” wrote the poet Meleager in ancient Greece. How acutely he captured the longing beating in the heart of gays everywhere, especially made more piercing by the madness of Valentine’s Day.

How do Filipino gays celebrate Valentine’s Day?

It’s high time we smashed stereotypes about gay relationships. Like straight pairings, some of them last as long as a night, while others have gone beyond a decade, even more.

Jason, who works for the theater, has been on with his lover for the past four months. With his deep voice and quick movements, he is not your “stereotypical” gay. He is straight-acting because, well, he is straight-acting. None of the macho bluster for him.

“I see my lover here every night,” he says, referring to a café in Quezon City. “I’ll go up to Baguio with him this Valentine’s weekend. We need a change of atmosphere.” Then, a Cheshire Cat smile forming on his face, he adds, “And I heard it’s really cold there now. Mas romantic.”

Before this, he had a string of affairs, and years ago, a boyfriend with whom he lived in for a year. “My past lover and I celebrated Valentine’s our way. We wanted to break away from the usual things, like dinner by candlelight. We’d stay at home, simulate this dinner by candlelight, so we could have a seemingly romantic air about us. We’d talk and hug and reminisce over the good times and the bad.”

Louie works with a multinational company in Makati. He always looks as if he has just stepped out of a baby powder ad: he is young, fresh-faced, and gorgeous. More important, he is a nice person with whom you can chat about almost anything.

“Right now I don’t have a lover,” he tells me. “I’m still looking for one, but I always end up spending Valentine’s with friends.”

Him? My left eyebrow rises half an inch. “Of course. You know me. I end up with friends, but not friends with benefits.” He sighs. “But I don’t know if I’ll have the guts to go out with my future lover on Valentine’s night. I’m still wary. Manila’s so gossip-mad, and it can sometimes be so narrow-minded.”

Ralph works for an NGO. He does have a lover, but they don’t see each other on V-day. “My boyfriend is straight (or so he thinks) and is married to a girl. So I celebrate my Valentine’s Day alone. But I do have friends who cheer me up, bless them. My fag-hag friends, mga vavaing vakla, we send roses to each other. We laugh our heads off on the phone.”

Then, so painfully swift, a cloud darkens his face. “But as the hours pass, I try to read and listen to songs and then, something comes, like a punch in the gut. Para bang I just ate broken glass. It’s so sudden, this sadness, and it’s so sharp. Again I rationalize: everything passes, suffering steels you. You know, words.”

Mark is 19 and he chirps, “I’m just beginning to bloom.” Tall, gangly, suffused with light, he narrates in his charming breathless manner: “My lover calls me up early in the morning of Valentine’s Day. Everything’s been planned a week before. But my God, we go to this place and all the couples are hetero! It almost makes me freak out. But then, why should I care?”

His lover is 25, and slowly climbing the corporate ladder. “I’d like to believe that the excitement of a gay couple is double that of a straight couple. I think with all the repression this macho, conservative and Catholic culture imposes on you, it’s already an achievement — a rare movement — for gays to fall in love. Thus, you should savor every moment.”

In this age of role models, Jessie may well be considered one. He was 16 when he fell in love with a guy 10 years older. Now they are celebrating their 16th year as lovers.

The years weren’t always kind, like in all relationships. “My lover worked abroad for 10 years, and when we came back, he said he wanted to marry a woman. Alam mo na, society (read: family and friends) dictates that at this age, you should do this and do that na. but I talked to him and told him he must choose: would you rather live the life of a sexual lie, or would you rather have me? Aba siyempre, he chose me.”

Jessie is a talented writer, and he is channeling this gift into writing that asks strong questions about the social construction of gender. “My relationship with my lover has been a haven and a home. How do we celebrate Valentine’s?” he asks, his face beaming.

And then it falls, like a pendulum.

“What Valentine’s Day? No, we don’t really celebrate it. Sixteen years na kami. My Valentine’s man o wala, we celebrate each other’s being. We share everything. He is an accountant, the logical one in the house; I didn’t say husband, ha. He does the laundry, while I cook for him. If it’s Valentine’s and I’m in the mood, I prepare his favorite, bouillabaisse.”

No strolling down the breakwaters while watching the majestic beauty of Manila’s sunset, just two lovers living in, staying in an apartment together, their fingers touching the cocoon of home. “Since I’m rather weird, we try to have dinner by candlelight. We lit our room with many candles, and we just stayed together in that warm glow. It was so beautiful I was tempted to believe at the moment that there must really be a God. You should try it.”

In this age of smashing stereotypes, the gay couples who have been living together — and the single gays scouting around for companions — prove to us that not only straight couples have the right to love. Loneliness hits everybody; its bitterness spares no one. Gays have an equal opportunity to despair over heartbreak and, yes, to exult when love falls on them, like grace.

Anais Nin, that wonderful teller of erotic tales, once said: “The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”