Homme Fatale: The Gay Emosogynist (Part 1)

The faerie’s conquest is inverted. Sex is easier; emotional connection is the elusive bitch. Promiscuous fae are common, highly insecure good-looking faeries are the species' most profligate, but the gay emosogynist deals the most amount of damage.

What is an emosogynist? Celine Lopez (I am a big non-fan of her btw) once had a one-sided commentary thankfully saved by the topic's novelty. The emosogynist is an advanced womanizer, finding his validation of manhood not just through successful sexual conquests but by getting a girl to fall in love with him. In a nutshell, emosogynists are straight men who have found a new way of seduction: a metrosexual flare with a non-threatening sensitivity that can switch off a woman’s guard very easily, leaving open her heart—the latest plaything. Dude acts faggy, gets girl to fall in love, then dumps her. Tits have become rather antiquated. Women have evolved a keener sense of identifying predators, and predators would naturally need to adapt to the new feminist habitat. Charles Darwin is smiling somewhere in heaven saying “I told you so.”

Emosogynists are a new breed of straight men but gay men are just as capable, if not more, of fitting into the profile. It has now become easier for more faeries to find sexual partners through a plethora of social networking sites, chat rooms and watering holes all around the Metro and this convenience dwarfs the actual chances of finding romantic connections. Because sex is easier, getting someone to fall in love with you has become the real challenge. It ups the ante. Games are more exciting when the stakes are higher.

And some have become experts.

There is a new game in town and it’s not Diablo III. However, just like Diablo III, it has sprung from a wealth of technology and connectivity, and just as devious. Some of us may be in it right now but we don’t know it. Emosogyny is a game that a lot of us have played at some point. I’ve had my ride the last couple of years.

To be continued.

Johnny is Davao Rock God

But not until March. Also, I’m still waiting for promos to get the cheapest ticket rates I can get. Where the fuck are the promos when I need em?

That’s because I’m a non-bisaya speaking half-Davaoeňo with approximately 50 first cousins that I haven’t met yet. Last time I visited I got showered with gifts and fed with the best mead and meat. My aunts and uncles competed with one another with the food they served in their respective houses. Every night was a feast. Relatives competed for the attention. My cousins took me out at night to crowded bars where my crotch area was constantly in contact with something or someone. My cousins speak the most conyo-sounding bisaya I’ve ever heard. The morning half hour travel towards any direction brought me to the beach or the mountains. And there were 90-peso buffets everywhere.

I always wondered what my cousins in Davao would be like, because I always wondered why I never had anything in common with my cousins in Luzon. When I met 2 of my cousins and learned that they pretended to murder each other with a knife for the sake of scaring the poor housemaids, I felt profoundly at home.

What I should never ever forget is the day I shook hands and shared a few drinks with one of the infamous Davao City Hitmen. DDS or Davao Death Squad, they're called. 3 years ago my late father introduced me to the hitman and told me how many he's killed. DDS is no urban myth. Shaking hands with a cold-blooded Davao killer could have been cool in theory but that might have been too dark for my taste. I'm not prejudiced, but I think I'll allow myself make an exception sometimes.

Mandaya Woman from Davao Oriental. Drawn in Manila on a good day last year. Still havent drawn the right foot until now. I still can't. I wonder what that says about me.

Johnny’s Closet has a Backdoor

And he’s thankful for it

I opened a blog last month with the intention to unload and express the old fashioned way, like cursive on a journal and ink on a sketchpad but a lot less messy. I got to read a few other blogs and felt a quiet kinship; it's been a pleasant surprise, this blogosphere thing. It's like finding out that my closet has a backdoor that leads to a free city that is part Secret Garden, part Narnia, and unapologetically gay. I could hop out of this backdoor to stretch my legs from time to time.

I have blogged under my real name at some point. However, I felt like I had so much to write about but couldn’t. I was going through funny or hot or interesting experiences but had no faerie friends to share them with. I wanted to write about that time I slept with this Sprite TVC dude who consistently stole my underwear after every tryst, how I wore my crummy beaten up bacon underwear which he stole anyway, and how that led to my realization of the liberating breeze of occasionally going commando. I couldn’t blog about it then. My friends and classmates and relatives had access to my previous blogs where I wrote as a straight guy. How fucked-up boring those blogs were. I’ve been living mostly as a straight guy and straight people can be absofuckinlutely boring most of the time. I could almost concede to the fact that their sole purpose on this planet is procreation and taxes.

I’ve met several bloggers already, but mostly before I even knew they wrote blogs. Days after being partnered, I found out that my sidekick carried a blog that shows his insightfulness and fascinating wit, giving him 5-digit pogi points that I had to factor into the pogi point matrix (painstaking but worth it). I’ve been good friends for a couple of years now with J, the person who introduced us, and it turned out he blogs too. I’ve hung out with J’s tropa a few times and I enjoyed their company before finding out that the entire group had some sort of blog. I met sidekick’s faerie friends and instantly liked them. They blog, turns out. Jessica Zafra’s Twisted series has been my staple lavatory literature even before I found out about her blog. Jessica Zafra regulates my bowels better than fiber and curdled milk, God bless her.

The pink blogosphere’s gravity is throwing the Earth out of orbit. Or maybe it’s just me that has unconsciously gravitated towards it. Why not? It is a free city that is part Secret Garden, part Narnia, and unapologetically gay.

Johnny Sings "Isang Linggong Pag-Ibig"

My good friend K has just experienced his very own Isang Linggong Pag-Ibig with a person I’ll conveniently call Dude. They got hitched on Christmas Day after a mere 2 days of courtship, met the boy’s friends and relatives, and then promptly snapped out of it just after New Year. I’m not exactly sure what K said during the breakup, but what I do know is that he spilled the dirt via text message (gasp!).

It began when K and Dude met in Malate, hooked up and K brought him home for the requisite fornication.

 K: (Post-coitus) “Are you leaving already? Do you want to stay?”

Dude: “…Forever?”

That’s when K did a back handspring triple twist backward salto right into bottom Dude’s ass. And heart, apparently. A week after, they've split.


I blame it on a few things:

1)      Both parties were drunk before they met eyes in Bed and up until the hook up.

2)      It was the holiday season. Statistically, December  is the month that has the most cases of clinical depression in the Philippines, Ireland, United States and Zaire. Holiday blues are as real as peanut butter and the symptoms are greatest among single faeries. Such symptoms include promiscuity, sleepless nights and false boyfriend hallucinations.

3)      When my sidekick and I met, K was there to make kilatis. K did not even introduce me to Dude before the hitching. My valuable objective pagkilatis was not utilized.

4)      Peer Pressure: I was recently partnered the previous month. Feeling left out, K wanted a sidekick for himself too.

5)      Male competition: I was partnered after 3 days so the biatch got hitched on impulse after 2 days. It’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing, but risky: an extremely short (or virtually non-existent) courtship or dating means you’re up for either a pleasant or pungent surprise.

The relationship was turning sour for K and the coldness of the holidays crept right into them. It was just a dream, a fleeting memory, t a week-long MMFF movie marathon that got tiring. K texted me that he wanted to end it, and I replied with all the support an SMS can carry. I told him to be strong, be firm on his decision and be very clear on why he’s breaking up with Dude; an ambiguous, unsure reason will only give Dude a lot to hold on to.  K really needed to end it soon because he’s already been meeting several boys on the side anyway.

Fellow blogger McVie blogged about the how people getting dumped get all the sympathy even as the dumper could go through the same shit and get just as fucked up; there are other nuances to the dumper experience that can rival the sorrow of the dumpee. Hurting another person is a very unpleasant experience especially when the pain is undeserved. And when the breakup is nobody's fault, the dumper still ends up looking like the jerk.

 ...who needs just as much support.

Johnny keeps Straight People in his Closet

Being out to my best friends who happen to be a straight couple has a completely different set of dynamics on its own. For closeted guys, it’s usually either you’re completely closeted from your straight friends or you’ve come out and then the friendship isn’t the same anymore. Sometimes a faerie will be lucky and he will have straight friends who remain loyal post-outing.

I love Adren. He’s my straight guy friend and he loves me back in a brusque brotherly fashion while his girlfriend Martha is my straight girl best friend who treats me like the sister she never had. Ironically, with his tisoy features, body-consciousness and luxurious lashes he'd look better as the gay guy among us. Even after I’ve come out to Adren, we still share the same interest with girls although his fondness for females is sexual while mine is (very) distant outside-looking-in and clinically objective. He still enjoys sharing his beerhouse anecdotes like he was sharing it to a frat brother, as he always did, but to me it sounds like the Na’vi explaining their mating rituals. On a good day I could make it sound like fax tone.

Nightcrawler snogs Cerise. Drawn on a random day ages ago.

I find it extremely thoughtful that he made the effort to go back to our old Philosophy lessons on Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” with its articles on sexual fluidity to convince me that my gayness is but an anomalous falling from grace.  I could almost blog about his personal discourse on the topic but I refuse to (meaning: I can’t). He is as intelligent as he is stubborn. One fine day when I felt especially annoyed, I brought up the topic of the fluidity of sexuality and declared how he might factually enjoy sucking cock in 2010. That ended his lecture.

Adren is, like friends should be, brutally honest. And I especially value this honesty because in my situation it is not easy to have a very close straight guy friend who will give you his truth. What could be very true, and very sad, is one thing that he told me a couple of weeks ago over a bucket of beer: “…but we’re never going to be 100% O.K. with the idea that you’re gay.” Inside my signature tipsy smirk was my voice getting caught in my throat. It is painfully true. That’s why he always invites me to see dancing naked Na’vi boobies in hopes of converting me. Or why he’d bring up the topic of how great it might be to make tiny baby Johnny Cursives. Or get very academic and appeal to my geekier side with Foucaultian philosophy. But the beer bottle I share with them is half full, not half-empty. Apparently it also never gets empty. They are still my friends, and the dynamics of a closeted gay guy being best friends with a straight couple is their struggle as much as it is mine. I didn’t come out of the closet to them; I’ve invited them over to mine. And it’s a hot, cramped closet with the smell of moth balls. It’s also very pink. Hot pink.