They’ve been lovers for almost two months now. They spent the entire couple of weeks of the Christmas break from school with only the two of them in the same house together. They hold hands, kiss, and hug.
But they haven’t had sex yet.
“We actually sat down and decided not to have sex until after a year,” Boots Liquigan, a 24-year- old graduating Journalism student from the University of the Philippines – Diliman, says of his romantic relationship. He and his boyfriend Joey Lazarde, a 22-year- old call center agent in a multinational company in Makati, formally became lovers in November 19 last year.
“Hindi kasi siya ganun,” Boots says, referring to Joey. “He’s not the type of person who’s really big on having sex. He’s not promiscuous.”
Keeping their relationship celibate for a period is a personal and political statement on Boots’ part. “Sex is an important element in gay couples’ relationships. They want something passionate to share with each other,” he explains.
He himself has had five previous relationships, and he had sex each time. “I want to prove this time that a gay relationship is not always founded on sex alone.” Maybe he always invoked this statement like a mantra, as there have been times when he and Joey found themselves standing on the brink of breaking their vow, but they have always managed to restrain themselves.
“It was very serendipitous,” Boots says of the way he and Joey got to know each other. One day, Boots was surfing the Internet when someone he didn’t know “buzzed” him – that’s cyberspeak for calling the attention of another person currently logged in an online instant messaging service by making the window shake. He couldn’t remember how that person’s email address had landed on his instant messaging account.
Of course, that person turned out to be Joey. That random buzz stretched to regular chats, as they began to talk about each other’s previous relationships.
“The funny thing is, my ex-boyfriend’s reason why we decided to break up was his [Joey’s] reason why he broke up with his own ex-boyfriend. And my reason was his ex’s reason,” Boots, who had just broken up with his previous boyfriend in July last year, recounts.
They were two broken hearts, shipwrecked in an ocean of electronic signals, liquid crystals, and fiber optics, and found an island in each other.
They decided to have an “eyeball”, or finally meet each other in the flesh. The Powerbooks outlet in Trinoma was their rendezvous, as Boots had to look for a book for his History of the Press class. “I was wondering what was taking him so long to arrive, so I sent him a text message: ‘Asan ka na ba?’
‘Nasa likod mo,’” came the reply.
Boots turned and saw, a couple of bookshelves away, a fair young man in a pink polo shirt, smiling at him. “Siya na ba ‘yun?” he thought. They had seen each other before, but that was only through web camera. His first impression of Joey was that he looked like a “big child, like a grade six pupil.” Their love story began to unfold that moment.
Joey turned out to be childlike in his being thoughtful and affectionate. Boots recalled an instance when the two of them went strolling down a mall and passed by a store selling Garfield merchandise. Joey went in and bought Boots an XL shirt- and-shorts child’s clothes set, knowing the cartoon character was Boots’ favorite.
Another time, they were shopping at a bookstore for rolls of gift wrapper for Christmas when Joey went somewhere for a while. Impatience soon took its toll on Boots, wondering were could his boyfriend have gone. When he went out the store to look for him, he saw Joey there outside, waiting for him, who then held out to him a single long stemmed rose, like a child offering a candy to a wronged playmate.
Joey often surprises him with his spontaneous hugs and kisses, even in public places. It’s not that Boots is being hypocritical. It’s just that excessive public display of affection is just something that “offends [his] sensibilities.” Even seeing heterosexual couples canoodling in broad daylight for every one’s spectacle makes him cringe.
“Holding hands is okay, but for other things, do them in private,” he asserts.
So holding hands is just one of the ways of showing their affection for each other they are settling for right now, until the one-year chastity period is over. Boots is aware that they attract people’s attention whenever they hold hands in public places, such as the mall. “I don’t care,” he says. “[People] have to accept that there are gays. It’s the reality. It [homosexuality] is not a disease.”
Only two weeks after their relationship begun, Joey had to be confined in a hospital due to hemorrhage causing the presence of blood in his stool. “At first, Joey did not want me to come to him at the hospital, but I insisted,” he says. “It was the first time that I skipped classes for a boyfriend.”
It was also the first time that he met Joey’s former boyfriend, Justin. Justin was the tall, dark and chinito guy who walked into the hospital room, accompanied by some friends. A gamut of scenarios was running like MTV’s in Boots’s mind that moment. Fortunately, the Third World War did not ensue.
On the third day of Joey’s confinement in the hospital, the past and the present sat down together at the hospital canteen. Justin laughingly divulged to him what his friends had said on the first time they met: “Dapat ninega mo”, or Justin should have violently confronted Boots. However, Justin admitted that upon seeing Boots, he realized that Joey had indeed gotten over their relationship.
Boots, Joey, and Justin are good friends now. “They seem to get along better now that they are just friends,” Boots says. Joey and Justin are still living in the same house, as they have been before. Boots is conscious of the possibility that the affection between the two could recur and they become lovers again, but he is not allowing it to get in the way of his own relationship with Joey.
They are still in the honeymoon stage of their relationship, when they are still getting to know each other. Even their respective families have yet to know about their relationship. Boots plans of telling his mom and two siblings about their relationship after he graduates. “I’m currently working on my thesis, so I don’t want my mom to blame my getting into a relationship should any unfavorable circumstances happen.”
His dad, on the other hand, who has warned him not to introduce any boyfriend, still cannot stand seeing his son in a relationship with another man.
Likewise, Joey’s father is wallowing in the thought that the family name cannot spread anymore, as Joey is the only son of the family.
If they could keep their vow of celibacy for a year, the relationship is a feat in a couple of ways for Boots: first, he would have proven that a gay relationship could transcend mere lust; second, it would be the longest relationship he has ever been to, his longest one so far lasted for eight months.
So, is he hoping this one will last? “I’m not hoping this relationship will last. I am hoping I could work it out.”
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