nonfiction

Gay and Catholic
by J. Neil C. Garcia

The Holy Week served to remind us just how Catholic we are. Perhaps, more than any other place in the world, the Philippines celebrates Lent with remarkable piety and pomp: with rituals, processions, crucifixions, and self-flogging enough to make the foreigner drop his jaw in amazement, or shake his head in disbelief. These mark us off from the rest of the Christian world because they are outward displays of religiosity, at a time when quiet contemplation would seem to be the more desirable mode of devotion to take.

Our seemingly great obsession with images of glorious suffering is something Catholicism found most endearing about us. When the Spanish introduced their religion into our islands four-hundredsomething years ago, they hardly had to placate us. They taught us the story of Christ, the God-Man who came down from the heavens to suffer for our sake. And our ancestors understood. More than that, suffering was something they may have secretly desired on themselves, as such would make them like the white-man's God. The first native, Catholic prayers are in fact the lyric narratives detailing the passion and death of Christ: the pasyon . And the pasyon became so popular among the masses that when finally a few native men and women decided that they had had enough of their Spanish overlords, they borrowed the language of their rebellion from the pasyon . (And many of their rebellions failed-probably because in the end Christianity, being transcendental, can only yield defeatist texts.).

Holy week also got me thinking about just how Catholic I am. And this is not something I can help: my childhood, come to think of it, was filled with so much religious fervor that I can only echo it in my present life. Specifically, in my poetry.

My earliest poems were about the saints, Jesuses and Marys that crammed my waking-and even sleeping-days as a child in a very pious household. My maternal grandparents, who stayed with my family ever since I can remember, taught me to value my faith in palpable ways: to sing it, to recite it, to flaunt it. They collected a menagerie of religious images, with which I became slavishly fascinated. I was like a child stolen by these icons and somber-faced likenesses that peopled my world. When I learned to play with modeling clay, my first and last figurines were precisely miniaturized versions of the crucifix, the Virgin of Lourdes, the Nazareno and the Santo Niño. I was especially fixated on the Holy Child, and only recently did I realize that the reason for this was that I was actually identifying myself with the image of the Santo Niño who, like me, I fancied a sissy: he doesn't look boyish at all, what with those long lashes and golden locks, the pink-rouged cheeks and ruby-red lips! I wanted to be the like him was why I fashioned so many clay versions of him, using my sissy, nimble fingers.

When my grandmother died, three years after my lolo , I turned even more spiritual: youngest of the family's apo , I somehow ended up closest to them, and was their shameless favorite. And when they, three years apart, passed away, death touched me, much more deeply than it did my siblings and cousins: I wanted to die, too, to be with my grandparents who loved me. But early death eluded me, and so instead I became a sacristan , joined the choir, and thought myself bound for the priesthood. In hindsight, I only turned more and more religious because of my desire to avoid getting teased a bakla by the neighborhood's roughish boys, who never really managed to make me one of their own. And because by staying close to God I thought I might ever be close to my lolo and lola whose spirits-I was convinced-hovered over me and kept me happy and safe.

It must have been in high school when I finally decided that I was different from the boys of my childhood, who kicked and punched and roughhoused one another silly: like my new-found friends, I realized I was gay (and that I can never be a priest because I enjoyed my newly discovered sexuality too much!). This epiphany happened to us not because we turned one another gay, but because together we finally were able to put to rest our common doubts, and vowed to face up to the consequences of this realization. We excelled in school, suffice it to say. And this made us impervious to the attacks of our school's intolerant heterosexual majority, who got a kick out of bashing just any old gay they happened to bump into. We weren't that, to be sure: not being just any old gays, we gloried in our collective pride, and even bullied the boys who weren't half as bright or popular as we were.

But since my high school was a Catholic one, I never lost touch with my obligations as a believer either. If anything, our being exemplary meant that we had to lead our classmates to the path of holiness. And the strange thing is, we were doing that rather well: despite being avowedly gay (we had crushes who knew that we liked them-and I must believe that some of them liked us back), we were the perennial conduct awardees, and served as lector during mass, sang in the choir, etc. There was hardly any conflict between our sense of who we were (males who were sexually attracted to other males), and what our theology classes taught us we should be (anything but who we were, basically). I have often wondered just why this was so.

And I wonder, too, just how come other gays I came to know much later in life didn't seem to have enjoyed their adolescence as much as my friends and I did. It must be because they were alone, or felt like they were alone: I must admit our being a relatively big group gave us some measure of (imagined) power over the rest of the high school population. And when I think of it, being gay and alone must be the worst fate anybody can have in this life. To know one's demonic difference is hard enough, but being the only who knows about it makes it all the harder.

I have a feeling that I can be confidently gay and Catholic because the kind of Catholicism I grew up in wasn't dogmatic about anything: like the devout Church-going usurer (or corrupt politician) in our society, I can continue being myself at the same time that I profess my faith in all sincerity. (Of course, this analogy is false because being gay isn't like being a usurer or corrupt politician at all!) I look around me and see basically the same thing: the faith-healers and soothsayers hawking their wares in front of the Quiapo church, the blood-weeping image of the Virgin of Agoo, the dancing sun, the miraculous in almost every little thing. they are proof of our ability to make our faith follow our needs, perhaps because our needs, being always human, can only be of a piece with our spiritual nature. Or perhaps, because Catholicism was never really understood by us, we have been able to make it understand us for a change. And so, the native revolutionaries rose up in arms against the Spanish frailes and governador-generales , quoting passages from the pasyon , with pig-Latin inscriptions on pieces of paper plastered fervidly on their chests.

I end this column with a note on suffering. And how gay suffering can be perfectly heroic, in keeping with the spirit of the "passionate" times. This is a poem I wrote around four years back. It's a prose poem, actually, and in it I try to explain why Lent bears heavily down on its persona, who is out to get the ashen cross rubbed onto his forehead, but ends up getting weighed down by something else instead.

There is a cross yearly staked in the mind and people, remembering their own graves, carry it in earnest. Their heads weighed down are stayed by thoughts of the Passion that is come: planks of wood propped up on a Skull; nails riveting hands and feet; of thorns, a crown; water and blood drawn forth by a spear which stoked septuple a mother's great, inflaming heart, etc. It is, of course the season of passion. The coolth is gone from mornings as people show their warmth by wearing more the body than its cloth. The Pontius Sun is let to pass sentence on skins bared impassioned to its cat-o'-nine rays. And this becomes their mortification.

I repent with them, then, this day: people on whose faces the season casts the cruciform shadow of consecrated ash, that brings to bear on me much more than my own mortal load. As I heft the cross of death upon my forehead I carry not just this body's burden of dust to dust, ashes to ashes; but agonying in the skimpy shorts and hanging shirts of boys crucified in earnest to their summer's passions, I fall the fourth time under the terrific weight of mine.

back to nonfiction | home