“I’m fine.” He squared his shoulders and stepped away from Lui. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if your mother would like a drink.”
PREACHING TO THE CHOIR
A man I recognized as Vic Ramos stepped up to the microphone at the front of the room and cleared his throat. “Hi, my name is Vic, and I’m HIV positive.”
The audience was silent. “I guess we don’t have many veterans of twelve-step programs here,” he continued. “You’re supposed to all say, ‘Hi, Vic.’”
There were scattered calls of “Hi, Vic” from around the room. Gunter’s voice was among them.
“Well, that’s a little better,” Vic said. He unbuttoned the jacket of his tuxedo. “You see, I know about twelve-step programs, because I’m also an alcoholic. I’ve used intravenous drugs. Oh, and I’m also a homosexual, and I’m in love with a guy in the audience named Jerry and I want to marry him.”
He smiled at us. “Guess that gives me a lot to talk about, doesn’t it?” The audience laughed a little. “But I’m not going to get into most of that. Let me just tell you that when I was a teenager, growing up in a little town about an hour outside Manila, I started to realize that I was sexually attracted to other guys.”
He started to walk around. “Can you hear me without the microphone? Good. I’m a salesman, you know, and salesmen love to walk around while they make their pitches. Now, I don’t know about where all of you grew up, and what it was like there, but I can tell you in a small town in the Philippines in the 1960s, we didn’t have gay porn. We didn’t have magazines like The Advocate or TV shows like Will and Grace to tell us that it was all right to feel the way we did.” He stopped under the multicolored arc of balloons. “No rainbow coalition, gay pride, pink triangles or tea dances.”
He put one hand in front of his stomach and the other up in the air and did a little Latin dance step. In his tuxedo and black patent leather loafers, he could have been a contestant on any of those TV dance shows. Somebody in the audience called out, “Ole!”
Vic gave us a quick bow. “There was one guy in our town I was pretty sure was gay. He cut all the ladies’ hair and gossiped with them, and he wore these gauzy shirts and bell-bottom pants. Once a month he went in to Manila and got a permanent in his hair. One day, he saw me hanging around his little shop when he was about to close. I guess I was about fifteen then. He must have recognized the look in my eyes, because he invited me inside.”
I noticed a guy in a tux slip in the front door, sweating heavily, and head for the bathroom. I hoped that he hadn’t gotten sick from the appetizers; I’d eaten a bunch of them myself, and I’d seen most of my family eating, too.
Back at the front of the room, Vic smiled again. “You probably all know what happened next.” There was some laughter in the audience. “What you don’t know is that my father found out almost immediately. He kicked me out of the house, and the hairdresser said he couldn’t take me in, because he’d get thrown out of town, lose his house and his business. He gave me the name of a guy in Manila and he lent me money for the bus fare.
“You know what a fifteen-year-old boy does in Manila, when he doesn’t have a family or any money, not even a high school diploma? He goes to work in a pleasure house. That’s where my hairdresser friend sent me; it’s where he went once a month, before he got his hair done. It was the height of the Vietnam war and Manila was full of GIs, on their way to the war, or on their way home, or taking some R amp;R. There were plenty of them who were happy to have sex with a cute little Filipino boy with a nice ass.”
The sweaty guy seemed vaguely familiar; perhaps I’d met him in a bar somewhere. I watched the restroom, waiting for him to come back out, trying to get a fix on where I’d seen him before. I generally have a good memory for faces, which comes in handy as a homicide detective. That made it particularly frustrating when I met someone I just couldn’t place.
Vic looked rueful. “My ass was pretty nice then,” he said, nodding.
Gunter gave him a wolf whistle, and he smiled.
“You can see me after the party,” he said, and everybody laughed. “Me and Jerry, that is. I don’t want you to forget about Jerry. He’s the most important person in my life, but I’m gonna get to him in a couple of minutes.”
He looked out at the crowd. “Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, I was a sixteen-year-old prostitute, and I was pretty miserable. I missed my mama and my family and my friends, and a lot of the guys were pretty rough with me. They called me ugly names, and sometimes they had to hurt me in order to make themselves feel good. A couple of the other boys and I used to get hold of this terrible cheap beer and drink. The madam who ran the brothel started smelling our breath, though, so we couldn’t drink as much, and we started using heroin.”
He held his arms out to us. “I haven’t shot up in years, so my tracks have faded, but you can still see them. Eventually, this one older gentleman, a Frenchman living in Manila, took a liking to me, and he bought me away from the pleasure house. I lived with him for four years as his houseboy, until he died. Then I made my way, doing this and that, and eventually I landed here in Hawai’i.”
I looked toward the bathroom again. The sweaty guy still hadn’t come out, and I worried that if he was throwing up, there could be a big mess.
“Things are a lot better for me now than they were when I was sixteen, even though the HIV is making a mess of my body,” Vic continued, running a hand over his forehead. “I’ve got a good job, district sales manager for the Pacific Rim for a big farm equipment manufacturer. I’m in love with a great guy, and we own our own little house. You all should come over and see us sometime.”
He pointed at Gunter. “Especially you,” he said, and Gunter blushed. “The point of all this, though, is how easily that can get taken away from me. From us, from me and Jerry.” He started walking again. “I’m the primary breadwinner in our household. Jerry builds some of the most beautiful hand-carved furniture you’ll ever see, but he’s still developing his business. You know how expensive it is to get health insurance as a small businessman? I’ll bet some of you know.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bathroom door open, and the sweaty guy slipped out. I couldn’t get a good look at his face, though, and that irritated me. I’d probably wake up in the middle of the night and remember that I’d met him at a bar.
Vic continued, “My company doesn’t offer domestic partner benefits, and they probably never will. So I can’t put Jerry on my health insurance. I can’t pass on my pension to him, or my social security when I die. If I get sick, the hospital may not even let Jerry in to see me, or let him make decisions for me. I’ve got this goddamned Bible-thumping bitch of a sister who lives here in Honolulu now, and if she gets wind of me being sick she’s going to take that opportunity to come on in and take over my life, no matter what kind of papers Jerry and I fill out.”
I twisted around in my seat to look for the sweaty guy again. I just couldn’t let go of it-I knew I recognized him from somewhere. But I couldn’t find him in the crowd.
Vic was standing at the podium. “You see, without a marriage license the government presumes your blood family knows what’s best for you,” he said. “Until gay men can legally marry each other, until lesbians can legally marry each other, teenaged kids are still going to keep thinking there’s something wrong with them when they find they’re attracted to their same sex. Until the government treats us like every other citizens, with the right to serve in the military, to receive the legal benefits of marriage, to be protected from discrimination in our homes and on our jobs, we are not going to be able to enjoy the benefits of full citizenship in the United States.”
He gripped the edges of the podium and stared out at us. “Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked too damn hard to become a citizen here to give up any of the things I’m entitled to. You all feel the same way?”