Blurb: I think about him now, wondering how he would have prospered in today’s more open environment.
I went to the UP Diliman campus on the afternoon of Saturday, June 28, for my usual walk-around-the-oval weekend. I had completely forgotten that the campus was to be the site of this year’s Pride March in the city. As I got closer I noticed many people holding rainbow flags or dressed in rainbow-inspired clothing. Traffic on E. Jacinto was heavy, and, far ahead, the oval was filled with people and tents.
The scene looked festive, so I decided to push through even though the walking path was congested. I was an ally, anyway.
There was an overhead banner that announced the theme – LoveLaban — every few hundred meters. Dusk cast a magical shadow on the people milling around, being with their friends or significant others, posing for pictures. Many were holding hands or kissing. We’ve come a long way, I thought, even as I conceded there’s still a long way to go. On the sidelines, blue-shirted cops stood and watched, some of them having their early dinner from the food stalls nearby.
I pushed my way to the crowd but it soon started to drizzle. I looked into my tote for my umbrella, thankful I had brought one. And then, when the drizzling turned into a downpour, there reverberated a collective shriek from the many members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
The shrieking was as funny as it was endearing. It reminded me of someone I had lost.
My uncle, Papa Edwin, used to shriek that way when a downpour started and we had shirts and pants and blankets on the clothesline, hanging out to dry. My mother’s younger brother, he was gay, and he stood as my father figure in the home I shared with him and my grandmother (Mom lived elsewhere). The memory flooded back: the three of us running outside, piling as many clothes as we could on our arms, running indoors, dumping them on the couch and dashing back outside again. We were breathless and exhausted by the time all the clothes had been saved, but we normally collapsed laughing on whatever space there was left on the couch. He hated it when the downpour ended at once, because it meant we would have to hang the clothes outside again — or risk their turning smelly.
At a workshop I attended earlier this month, two of my personal essays were discussed – one was about my rushed wedding and the other was about my misguided foray into show business when I was a kid. I wrote those creative nonfiction pieces at different times and did not realize until the sessions that Papa Edwin was present in both of them. In fact, the readers loved him – he was funny, he was caring, he was the voice of reason. Indeed, he was a big part of my life.
Papa Edwin died in ‘97 at age 38, just after I had graduated from university and even before I fulfilled my promise of taking him to a buffet meal at Cabalen. From my meager paycheck, I was only able to bring him siopao from 7-11. And then, a few months later, he was gone. At his wake, there were not enough chairs in the community chapel — too many people wanted to pay their last respects. He was friends with many from the “eskinita,” offering counsel or handing out a kilo or two of rice, or his old shirts, when he could.
I think about Papa Edwin now, many years later, wondering how he would have prospered in today’s more open environment. He was neither flamboyant nor loud, but in hindsight, he never made any efforts to hide who he was. I remember him getting into a fight with his brothers who called him “bakla” in a derisive tone behind his back, or him having that one close “friend” who came by our house after his funeral, weeping for long minutes as he clung to my Lola. I wonder too what kind of support we would have offered each other in my adult life. I am sure he would have had some choice words for my relationship choices over the years, but that he would have always, always been on my side.
The rain had stopped by the time I started walking back home, and the shrieking multitude had gone back to the streets, just happy to be there and soaking up the freedom, the bliss, of being comfortable in one’s own skin. Would I have brought Papa Edwin here? I pictured us eating squid balls and pancit canton in one of the stalls. We would have found many reasons to laugh. It would have been a lovely time.
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