Don’t Tell Anyone

Introduction

introduction

IN 2011, IAN ROSALES Casocot invited me to submit four stories for an erotica anthology featuring ‘no-holds-barred sex.’ It was to include a couple of his stories no local publication was brave enough to publish. It was originally the idea of author Lakambini Sitoy to compile an anthology of four writers—one straight male, one straight female, one gay man, and one lesbian—on the condition that the stories, in Ian’s words, ‘go beyond the careful framing of erotica and must jump into the unashamed clarity of the pornographic,’ but could not be dismissed as being artless.

I obliged. I breathlessly wrote and submitted my four stories with anxiousness and anticipation. Years passed and in 2015, Ian said that the heterosexual submissions he received were simply ‘not bastos enough’ and it would just be the two of us braving our souls for this book. A little embarrassed that I made the cut, I laughed and sheepishly agreed to an additional two stories from each of us to make up the dirty dozen that is currently in your clammy hands.

So, here you have it—a collection to hide from your mothers or to clutch stealthily in the MRT. In it, one lesbian makes a request: “f**k me hard,” and the other proceeds to “moisten her fingers with the mix of spit and c*m on her chin, then slowly seek entry.” A boyfriend describes his affair by saying, “I licked him, his back towards me, from his balls—to his asshole,” and another describes his “p***s inside him (feeling) warm and welcomed, and (he’d) thrust slowly, in rhythm with this breathing.”

Bastos!

Don’t these lines instinctively make you want to bury this book under your bed and wrap its cover with plain paper? In fact, I am pretty sure that when you tell a friend about this, it will be in the form of a whisper. The straightforward mention of s*x outside the bedroom still makes most of us cringe, as if it must remain a secret that humans use their genitals for other things besides excretion and birthing.

Why do we fear the bastos?

The fact that Tagalog has the same word for obscenity and rudeness shows that in our culture we are hardly able to separate s****l acts from the discomfort and shame which accompany them. In fact, the word bastos isn’t just used to denote s*x, but all things that imply any kind of impropriety—an exposed shoulder, a suggestive pose, the springy member of a Baguio barrel man, or the authoritative imposition of a wooden p***s ashtray.

Even in male-female relationships there is already so much shame and guilt attached to any act of s*x. It is nearly two decades into the new millennium and girls still pretend to be virgins way into adulthood, and single mothers are still considered lacking in virtue. Men still scoff at women with experience as “nagalaw na,” and anything beyond p***s-v****a penetration is still considered the work of whores. Teens still ask each other whether they are for or against pre-marital s*x, as if s*x outside marriage were a sports team threatening marital copulation.

And what about s*x between two men or two women? Our physical attachments are treated only as one of two extremes—immoral acts deserving of disgust and ridicule, or romances between friends which rarely go past love notes and hugs. If s*x is still taboo in the heterosexual world, it remains even more hidden if it occurs within the LGBT spectrum. s*x occurring outside cisgender opposite-s*x partners remains to have implications on a person’s femininity, masculinity, character, and moral standing.

Despite the more frequent representation of same-s*x relationships in TV and in movies, lesbians are still asked how they have s*x, and the s****l encounters between gay men are still regarded as kababuyan, unnatural, and against the laws of God. Two men still can’t hold hands in a public place without risking physical or verbal assault. A Philippine senator has recently called gays “masahol pa sa hayop.” It is still a largely held conviction that opposing same-s*x marriage for religious reasons is a valid and logical argument.

Enter Don’t Tell Anyone, which makes no apologies for the nature of f*****g between gay couples. In this collection dubbed ‘literary smut,’ neither Ian nor I sugarcoat acts between same-s*x partners as anything requiring love, commitment, affection, or even subtlety. Ian describes in detail, ‘the rhythm of our suddenly rocking bodies as I pounded upon him, his insides warm against my penis.’ I talk about running a ‘tongue softly from the bottom going up, running circles around her c**t and back down to stick it inside.’ There is no calling a v****a a mysterious fragrant flower, or a p***s a purple-headed warrior. In these stories, neither of us pretend that love and commitment are prerequisites to the s****l act, but this doesn’t mean our characters never actually make love.

In fact, many of these are stories of heartbreak. In compiling this book, Ian and I had to reach deep into our past romances, flings, and casual encounters. In revisiting and replaying from our own experiences what we believe occurs between two people of the same gender, we also had to remember the inevitability in all forms of intimacy—the risk of attachment, of one-sided affection, and the outright rejection that accompany two people when they cross the line and dare to touch. It is a reminder that stories about s*x cannot be completely separated from stories of love, no matter how much we insist on drawing that line.

The world has changed for the LGBT community since this book was first imagined by Bing and Ian in 2008. For one, same-s*x marriage has been legalized in the United States, New Zealand, France, and Taiwan—countries the Philippines emulates and admires. Suddenly, the possibility of marriage between same-s*x couples forced Filipinos to recognize the validity of these relationships, as well as the equal treatment LGBT citizens also deserved. I got married myself, and because I discuss my marriage to my wife openly on social media, LGBT youth regularly drop me a line to say they hope to get married one day too. This wasn’t in the realm of possibilities when I was growing up in Manila. Same-s*x relationships then seemed open-ended and devoid of conclusion, leading many to believe that they were pointless, and that true adult companionship and family building could only exist between a man and a woman.

This is no longer the case, especially with numerous out celebrities posting their happy lives on our news feeds. The words gay, lesbian, bisexual, bakla, tibo are losing their stigma, and the younger generation are becoming versed in other variations of human sexuality and gender identity such as pansexual, transgender, and queer. Same-s*x couples discuss parenthood candidly and redefine conventional family models. Transgender men and women are documenting their transition online for all curious and impressionable minds to see.

Children are hitting puberty with all this information on the variations of human sexuality and gender online. The Grindr app is a staple in queer men’s phones. Boys and girls swipe left and right faster than they can even type the word ‘love.’

Don’t Tell Anyone is the fully formed fetus of Philippine gay and lesbian sexuality in literary form. Born of its predecessors Ladlad by Danton Remoto and J. Neil C. Garcia in 1994, and Forbidden Fruit: Women Write the Erotic edited by Tina Cuyugan in 1992, Don’t Tell Anyone has come to labor and is crowning at a time when the gay and lesbian s****l experience demands its own occupation of the center stage where it cannot be dismissed as simply filthy, immoral, or inconsequential. These stories’ characters are never conflicted about their sexuality. The women never demand p***s, sperm, or children from their partners. The men never insist that they are straight. They don’t flinch about anal s*x. They shove their p*****s in each other’s faces. Men flick tongues into puckering holes. A lesbian wants a woman’s “unwashed, day-old, unkempt p***y” on her face. She wipes herself with her fingers and smears the mucus on her girlfriend’s mouth.

Even while the rest of the world outside this book continues to insist that homosexual s*x is merely a simulation of the heterosexual act, this anthology’s stories feature individuals and couples who never attempt to approximate the male-female interaction. They have their unique ways of courtship, consummation, and conclusion which exist without a conventional model. In writing these stories, Ian and I never tried to approximate or imitate. Instead, we told our truths which you can read in the endless abundance of sucking, licking, fingering, and f*****g—all in a way that not even heterosexual erotic stories in English have ever seen print in Philippine media.

We are fortunate to find a publisher bold enough to print this collection as the flagship title of their LGBT imprint Pride Press, assuaging Ian’s fears of not finding a publication that would be brave enough to handle his stories in their full glory. We are honored as authors to be part of this novel effort, at the same time apprehensive about being seen as speaking for an entire population whose individuals may not approach their own sexuality with the same candor and sense of abandon.

Just like in Ian’s “The Boys from Rizal Street,” I would like this book to be a ‘pummeling largeness’ that ‘punishes’ the reader with the truth of gay and lesbian s*x and love. Whether or not you feel a ‘tantalizing mix of anger and pleasure’ in partaking of our stories, we hope that you allow the book to do to you what it has done for us in writing it, in letting these stories escape from our minds and bodies and into your lives—a combination of pain, release, and satisfaction similar to the acts and memories that inspired them.

Ian and I wrote this book not to shock, but to speak the truth of what has always been ordinary to us as a gay man and a lesbian. If these truths shock you, then maybe that is enough proof that stories like these are long overdue in getting their own moment in the bright, discriminating, and excoriating light.

Shakira Andrea Sison

New York City

2017