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When a man loves a man, when a woman loves a woman

Love is a many splendored thing.
- an old love song

My body aches when glaring eyes stare. I don’t have huge scars nor an out-of-place body part. I’m just like any other human, complete with all the body parts needed so people could label you ‘normal’. One thing ‘different’ when I see, smell, hear, talk, walk, is I don’t do them alone. I see, smell, hear, talk, and walk together with my partner, the half of everything I am. And by the way, I am a homosexual, a screaming lesbian.

Screaming, yet I feel like having a leash. I feel like I am that woman they call in a rock band’s name, Alice in Chains. Suffocating, hyperventilating, I (and others like me) feel locked up in a place I (we) never wanted myself (ourselves) in. It’s a place only the macho shits and the spurious old ladies can hang around– the culturally-dictated unjust society that [figuratively and literally] killed homosexuals years, decades, centuries ago.

Just last week, I watched “[Once in a…] Blue Moon”, a film by Joel Lamangan. It is a classic love story about two estranged old lovers, separated by time and space. The movie was almost done; the dramatic cry-all-you-can-till-your-eyes-swell scenes were almost over when a man shouted, “P______ina! Baklang-bakla si Lamangan! ‘T____ina talaga! Puro iyakan! Pambaklang pelikula talaga ‘to!”

During the holidays, my partner and I went to Quiapo. A h(e)aven for pirated CDs. (Yes, I know it’s cruel to illegally copy original works, but that’s not my point this time.) We tested one movie called “Ethan Mao”, a gay gangster film. It won several international awards. As I was asking the vendor how much it was, she sneered, “Bibilin n’yo ‘yan? E dalawang lalake ‘yan. Pambakla!”

Agitated, I said, “Tao din po ang bakla. Anong masama du’n?” My voice drowned in the vendor’s ears when another eager customer approached, looking for some teen flick. We walked off in disgust leaving “Ethan” helpless and defenseless.

Have we ever wondered where the purest concept of love came from? Root it to Philosophy.

Imagine a very erect tree. The whole tree is called philo. The branches are two men- Eromenos and Erastes. Eromenos is the ‘old lover’ whose goal is to teach and share ideas (re: the teacher). Erastes is the ‘young beloved’, to be trained to be a good citizen, thus he is the ‘student’. Finally, of course, are the roots called eros- the lustful love. (The other forms of love are philia for familial love, and agape is that for the love of god, for spirit and intellect.)

Yes, eros is that lustful love for the opposite sex. But you have to meet Zeus, the ruler of the Olympian gods and spiritual father of mortals. In Greek mythology, Zeus created man with two heads, four arms and four legs (what we would actually consider as Siamese twins nowadays). Zeus separated the man into two entities. Feeling empty without the other half, one has to search for the other to make himself complete.

Hence, it is noble for a man to be with the other man. One is the ‘lover’, the other the ‘beloved’. Well nowadays, we simply label such quest as homosexuality.

We are not Greeks nor is everybody gay, I meant neither of those. People have just got to respect both sexes. Respect begets respect. No third sex; otherwise, where did the firsts and seconds come from? We are not to be wronged for the choices we make unless we seriously harm society.

So you see, love is a splendored thing. A many many many splendored thing among roots, branches and leaves. # Pink-Jean Fangon Melegrito for NORDIS

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