Gay men in their 40s

Since I have just turned 40 years old (charot), let me share with you some random thoughts about gay men in their 30s.

Gay men in their 30s have learnt that the law of gravity is beginning to take its toll. Everything begins to sag. The hair begins to thin out and fall. The chin begins to form a twin. The belly begins to form a triplet, such that the layers of the midsection begin to look like the Banaue Rice Terraces.

So when this begins to happen, we should stop taking soft drinks, stop having longganisa in the morning and lechon Cebu in the afternoon, say goodbye to sisig with cerveza negra for dinner.

Gay men in their 40s begin to breathe heavily when they climb the second floor. Their eyes begin to blur. And wrinkles, ahhh, they begin to stretch like many worry lines on their foreheads and under the eyes. They cluster around the letter T, from your forehead down to your nose.

So they begin working out in the gym, surrounded by all those sweaty men groaning and grunting. Just don’t stay too long in the sauna because the heat will, umm, burn you. They also begin to apply anti-wrinkle creams and put on all kinds of lotions and potions on their faces, necks, and bodies. They take to aromatherapy and massage – and I mean the real one, guys, ha.

Gay men in their 40s are a little bit better in terms of love and relationships. They begin to appreciate the many permutations of love and sex.  They also begin to appreciate the gradations of attraction. Some gay men have buddies with whom they toss and turn in bed, on the sofa, in the other places of the house.

But the lines, like the lines drawn on the sand, are clear: They are just friends, and would not talk about love because they are not (yet) ready for that. Maybe they will, maybe we won’t. But as the Zen masters would put it, let us enjoy the moment. But I guess the Zen Buddhists are the last people I should paraphrase when I am talking about desire.

A few of them are like rabbits merrily jumping from gay bar to bath house to gay sauna to movie house to park to street to alley to God-knows-where. What is exchanged is the delicious thrill of the moment. It’s a thrill so electric you would wish it would last forever, but it doesn’t. You’re lucky to even have 15 minutes of it. Or 15 seconds.

Many of them are into relationships, or want to have one, the real one that might last for a long time. The parameters of commitment are clarified through constant communication: Is it an open or closed relationship? Are you in a, as they say it in the West, 1:1 relationship, or is the carinderia open for everyone, as the Tagalog movie jauntily put it?

Call me old-fashioned, conservative, so 20th century, your granny, but  I favor a closed relationship. This is when you do not allow another person into the relationship, whether for sex or to fill an emotional need the partner cannot meet. You talk to each other, touch base with each other’s past and present, perhaps probe into the future.

You let the relationship take roots first, deep roots. The horizon of the future is drawn: This year we will save money so we can go to Bangkok on a trip together.

Or maybe Hanoi, with its beautiful State Opera House and its slow, languorous rhythm of life. And in a few years, you plan to leave this condo unit and move together into a house where both of you will live together, whether nestled on a hill or sitting beside the sea. It doesn’t matter where; it can even be in the noisiest central business district, as long as you’re together.

But I tell my friends who are into relationships to savor the moment and truly, I send you all the good vibes in the world. Please stop the jealousy and the mind games and the overweening desire to control the other. Do not feel bad if he cannot text you within a second after you have sent your text message. Remember to be kind to each other after a full day’s work.

Walk with him outside the mall; go to a park, beside the sea, or near the ridge with that tiny volcano like an eye in the distance. And savor the happiness of that moment.

But remember, too, that one day, in God’s own good time, this might end. The man you love might find somebody else to love. Or you begin to fall in love with another man. Or the man you love falls ill with something terminal, and just suddenly vanishes from your life.

My friend, Prof. Randy David, said that, perhaps, this is what all of religion and philosophy wish to tell us: To accept the very briefness of life and of happiness, and therefore, to enjoy its full flowering. My friend, the poet Rayvi Sunico, also wrote about this in his poem, that the beautiful is also sad. This is way the sakura blooms, only for a few days, and this is also the length of a haiku, telling us everything that we have to know about life in all of three lines.

I guess that as long as we can steel ourselves when the storm and the stress come knocking, then we will be all right. And as someone who has written for a living these past many years, as long as I can put all of these things – all these slippery things – into words, then I tell myself I will be all right. As the poet Carolyn Forche wrote: “The heart is the toughest part of the body. / Tenderness is in the hands.”

And so we move on, with eyes fully open, into what the Greek poet Sappho called “life’s beautiful pain.”

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