Category: journal

personal drabbles, what would be my journal ?

Gay Cowboy Movies

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I’m twenty-one and gay and watched Brokeback Mountain for the first time. (This alone is cause for writing.) There’s a scene where Ellis (Heath Ledger) takes a moment to stare at the night sky, reunited for a weekend four years after a passionate summer with Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal). Both men are married and further bound with kids, but the commitment here is an afterthought. When they meet for the first time, they kiss tighter than the first hundred times, pushing each other against the wall where one raised a home and wed a wife and lived an entirely separate life: in an instant, their life was theirs to reclaim. Ellis receives no answers from the moon. Shadows are falling from the trees. The world guts men and does not sing for them. “Is there anything interesting up in heaven?”

Scholars are so convinced that David and Jonathan were never gay. The Wikipedia page discerns “a number of groups made up of gay Roman Catholics trying to reconcile their faith with their sexuality…” for those who’ve taken the names of two myths, homosociality as if any different from homosexuality. The Hebrew Bible is an ancient text used to kill men and free them. Listen, “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul,” is love in its truest, and “then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he had loved him as his own soul.” Jonathan also gave everything to David. He stripped himself from his robe, his armor, his sword, his bow, and his belt –– because noting that the belt was given is just as important as the embodiment of your being. Modern day Christians go out and scorn Scorsese’s Last Temptation because of Jesus and Magdalene, but existing right in the canon is a disciple whom Jesus loved. So desperate do we desecrate the holy texts, relegating it to the author and the author far from a valid lover, as if Jesus and John were comparable to the love I had felt so closely with anyone I’ve slept with.

I’m thinking about covenants and what it must take to break them. How queer love is constantly portrayed as fleeting, passionate things as if to frame them as temptations and urges. Everything but love is allowed to be fueled by passion: constantly reignited, stronger than ever, an immense devotion. The moment queerness exists in a form, it exists distinct from suburbia and consistency. Ellis and Jack kiss with bloody noses. Grating, skin-on-skin, rolling on the hill under the beating sun kind of love. Everything else is cathedral and familial. The wives are routine, even if whole histories lie beneath them. Another summer, internalized homophobia rendezvous where Alex Lawther pushes French male lead down on the hills, hate in each other’s veins, one calls the other faggot before kissing. And each instance of love is built on a history of fear and self-hatred. And the Bible scholars still insist that there was nothing more between, even if their souls were bonded and given to one another. Must every act of my love today be an act of reconciliation? When I take a lover, is it an act of forgiveness? Everything I do is mirrored unto this foundation of internalized homophobia and fear that I keep trying to pinpoint: for Ellis, a beaten, tortured body shown by his father of a man suspected of homosexuality; for the Catholic, a history of scorning and flinching when holding your friends’ hand and the bruising and the thought of eternal damnation for the act of love. Wherein: God will kill you and take all that is good if you kiss who you want to kiss. And then at that moment, I knew I had trouble believing.

In canon, people take concubines. Sexual relations are separate from “love”. That is, the heterosexual is allowed a body, a human body and spirit that he puts his own flesh in and abandons forever, an object of possession but not quite of love. In queer cinema, promiscuity is often mistakenly equated with liberation, as if sexual agency is the stripping of freedom and the body as a whole: if not for one other, it is the world.

Take the other gay cowboy movie. (Wikipedia acknowledges ‘gay cowboy movie’ means Brokeback Mountain, but I had to dig through Letterboxd to jog my memory of the first gay cowboy movie I watched––which is mostly farmers and not explicitly gay cowboy but it’s nearly the same anyway, the same as how homosexuality means men means questioning god means cheating means the soul is a tender, tethered thing that means nothing if not unto the opposite sex.) Everything is relational. Everything we consume points to this. Everything I love comes at the risk of breaking. This is all that can come from someone so ruined too, participating in an act that even the gods look away from…

God’s Own Country. Johnny loves migrant Georghe, the former a wreck who drinks and fucks men in port-a-potties, a fact less important than the fact that a calf in the movie died from a breech birth (or maybe it functions as an analogy for how homosexuality is an opposite, bottom-first, Freudian Phallic stage and all––actually, this is likely the case). The moment things turn, Johnny drinks more and more and more and engages in another sexual encounter until Georghe leaves the farm. Johnny must love Georghe slowly, making up to him with softness and tenderness, and the two turn from roughness and passion and instantaneousness and blind flee-and-pursue to stability and a home. Homosexuality is only valid if placed within the idyllic white picket fences. Johnny and Georghe want to be nuclear. Nuclear means the decay is irreversible.

Sappho writes to wish that someone will remember all this in the future. She does not know that an act of love will ever be named after her. Say, all these queer writers must only be able to draw from centuries of fear since it is all we had. When love is normal and domestic like the American dreams of Ellis and Jack, will it be worth writing about? If a soul bonded to a soul between man and man weren’t special, would we be debating here in the millennia after?

First, I beg to be spared from the hellfall and the thought of my parents and teachers and the misshapen cross condemning me to the abyss because of who I love. (This cannot be helped.) Next, my love is painted as an act of forgiveness. Each act I do explained by the unnamed authors and writers, taking my love and pursing the words as if their own, penance for my childhood and all the stones unturned. There must be rational explanation to the irrational act of selling my body for the other. For the deviation from my parents’ wills and the natural order itself, where my kiss must only be returned because this is a vicious act of contrition––where sinfulness is a delight, where all the bad things in the world are rooted in pleasure. Then, my love will is to become domiciliary and docile. One takes the traditional role, one gay takes the top and the other the bottom, one queer is the man and the other the woman in this relationship, or a mishmash depending on whether the gay people are in a polycule or not––because gay people fuck anything over, especially themselves.

Nothing is interesting in heaven. I have no intention in providing defaults to the modes of compassion I learn of, the ones to be condemned, the ones that I too––must figure out how to endure. I wonder why the love my kind of people live is immediately electric and fleeting. I want to prove that as an exception, I must endure––but I also owe this act to no one. I can’t live with the family and kids. My love is an infinite thing. I am busy trying to not be forgotten. (Cinema says we smell shirts and are haunted by ghost stories.) We sing bad and fish for praise and call each other slurs.

Whenever I want to kill myself, I remember that the love I have left to give on the dirtside is more gritty, borne of integrity, and humanly fleeting than the choir of heavens above. I must be on my way to bury the forgiveness I’m told I bear, but I can’t find it at all.


Related: Sitting in Theaters with Girls

21

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Elaboration to come soon, maybe.

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About five years ago, at sixteen (fuck), I wrote a looong letter to myself about how I thought 21 was going to be the end. It still might be. I am still so far from the person I imagined myself to be, even if it feels like I’ve had centuries to work at this.

I am learning how to see myself in the worst of things. To enjoy sulking in my misery and excessive gluttony. To speak and be silenced during days that were never mine. To feel nothing when everything is happening and vice-versa. I control my own life. I end it when I can. No gods exist in this world that could possibly take this level of control from me. For that reason, this existence and consciousness that is an extension of the world can be forever destroyed––my misery that connects me to everything, my nothingness that intertwines me with everyone else’s fate––the sixteen year old in me knows that the only form of power I will ever have is the choice to end it all. I destroy everything inside of me and around me. It is my duty to be incredibly aware of this.

Kind 21 thoughts

  1. If I can’t be authentic, I may as well be nothing.
  2. Physical proximity with those you love matters.
  3. To measure for myself in time is meaningless, but everything for others.
  4. I am not obligated to bear the weight of everyone who had come before me––but die trying, anyway.
  5. I am no savior.
  6. And I must lean into love, gentleness, kindness, and softness more––resisting a world that has long refused to equate this with strength or progress.
  7. I carry a piece of everyone I’ve encountered with me, and because of that I too, am loved and holy.
  8. I must write because I forget. I must write to document, and then to reimagine.
  9. My (and everyone else’s) effect on both systems & individuals is far greater than I can possibly fathom.
  10. Signs are merely signs. Things must be spoken.
  11. Things that bring joy and truth are rarities, and are as meaningful to pursue as anything else.
  12. After giving, living for myself can also be living for others.
  13. Gratitude over fear, anger, disgust. Affirmation in an age of silence.
  14. Repetition rarely diminishes.
  15. My life does not need to be story. Every act I do is novel and grand, but also mine.
  16. Every distance consequence is still a consequence.
  17. It is a time to be prolific. It is time to consume & love & crate, without fear. I leave behind only what I am able to show and let others feel.
  18. Resistance, every single day. Radical acts & beliefs, any time. I act against a world & what others have built that threaten it all over again. This is urgent.
  19. Technology can be a human thing. “Only the human invents tools to make tools, and has always used its own artifacts to reinvent itself.”
  20. Nothing I lose compares to the everything I have to gain.
  21. The love I have to give and have yet to give is far from a finite thing.

Less kind 21 thoughts (to myself)

  1. You already know that nobody cares after you die, or when you want to die. What are you going to do with your life knowing that now?
  2. Live the rest of your life as dangerously open and online as you have the past. Be an experiment for its effects.
  3. Am I going to be one of those people that exist better as an idea –– with no tangible representation or thought?
  4. Everything you wish for will never come true. Your mind will never be able to grasp anything real. Every desire you have is destructive.
  5. How utterly selfish of you to not spend every possible waking moment for betterment that will change other people’s lives drastically, instead of meager things that barely mean anything to you incrementally.
  6. Fall Out Boy lyrics are still so true even if people think they’re stupid just put them in your fucking bio since you want to do it so badly anyway
  7. It is always too late and too early.
  8. Likability matters a lot, so start sucking up a bit more.
  9. Warning sign after warning sign, nobody has cared. It is pointless to ask for help. Do everything else you can to live.
  10. Anger and rage are valid fuels.
  11. Most of the time, it will be the only fuel you ever have.
  12. You will regret everything at the end, anyway.
  13. Everyone just wants the best for themselves. Nobody cares about you.
  14. Only your own consistency can salvage you from a chaotic world.
  15. Love is infinite. Love is also very easily tested.
  16. Everything is only as unkind as you make it seem.
  17. You are running out of time. Especially at this state.
  18. Nothing matters, and as such everything does.
  19. I am only what I leave behind. Every thought unsaid, every quiet non-response… it’s like I have been existing to erase myself and my being. Do you want to be nothing?
  20. I do not deserve a single thing that has ever happened to me.
  21. It will never get better. You destroy yourself and then it becomes nothing. What will you do about it?

Past Weeks

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I’ve been thinking of writing a post explaining my plans for the next year. They’re on the brink of certainty and it feels like I must speak them into existence – but I just can’t. Everything I have willed in the past months has crumbled and everything unexpected has descended.

A year has taught me how to be everything and nothing. I feel uncomfortably close to Manila, talking far more of it than the people who seem the be there – and the next moment a newsflash reminds me that I now am an expatriate visitor who has sold out my years to another world. The whiplash of feeling irredeemably close to somebody and having them disappear; of years spent burning myself up and the tangible pain of my back breaking when I lay down to rest for more than a moment; knowing that I have done something and these repetitions will never end. I draw arbitrary lines around decisions that will irreversibly change the course of my life in ways my meager eyes can never follow. Somehow I am failing every single person who has ever loved me and becoming more and more visible to strangers all at once. I manage to stay in conversation and send tens of thousands of messages to people who have never known me, then am physically incapable of just talking to a single person one-on-one. Mortality is a dooming thing when I am reminded that all I work and do is as erasable as the memory of me; the latter, despite being ever-irreplaceable doesn’t save it from its worthlessness. For months I listened to a new album a day, then all of a sudden I decide to write about it and can only keep the same thing on repeat for days.

On the television I watch someone die. I read the newspaper and a hundred thousand more do, their names fallen with pages bared to the slightest crumb of their story. One day I will be reduced to a sentence, then a memory, then nothing at all.

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I speak this as I turn twenty-one in a few weeks, an age ceremonious that I have never really thought about. (When I find excuses to celebrate, they’re tied to feelings rather than dates and holidays. Whenever I feel good, it feels like it will be the last time.)

This is all to say that I am everything and nothing – that I feel so, so loved one moment and then agonizingly alone then next. I can’t count the hours of sleep I get and feel myself a perpetual machine. Often, I wonder how I survived the decades past and remember each morning that I didn’t allow myself to stay in bed with such acute recall – and go to sleep the next. I’ve never felt so achingly sick and burdened while ungrateful and a waste. One moment I am my biggest barrier, and next it is the world; the world is both the dominion of everyone around me until it is only itself for the fatal end.

I’ve never felt such confounding, complex burnout. It’s shit. I’m reading so much more, sleep so much more, yet am exhausted and desperate and talking to no one yet everyone at the same moment. I was supposed to feel this way at eighteen, not now. How do you reconcile your own being when the world is ending? Today, I feel like I exist in that last moment of serene absolution. Everything is just preparations for the end.

In time, I’ll learn how to think in the longer-term. For myself, and everyone else. Right now is just some chaotic era.