Carlo

(Grabbed from Raphael Perez)

“Eto yung facebook niya, type mo ba?”

This was the first time I saw him, as my friend showed me the Facebook account of Carlo through his Android phone.

“Wow naman, pretty boy yan. Pretty boys like him will never date a geeky chubby guy like me.”

Carlo is exactly a pretty boy – a young man, petite, more beautiful than handsome. In his profile picture, he wore a black polo shirt and a smile that radiates beyond the captured photo.

“Add mo daw siya.” My friend told me as they were exchanging SMS.

 “Ayoko, hiya ako eh. Ano pangalan niya, search ko nga.”  As I discreetly opened his FB page through my iPod, I saw more profile pictures of him.

Shit. Ang guapo. Pero pretty boy talaga. I said to myself, as my heart pounded a little faster. Pretty boys are my type. But I was never lucky with pretty boys.

“In-add ka na raw niya,” my friend reported.

I excitedly opened the friend request tab. “Sure ka? Wala eh,”  I asked, a bit disappointed when I didn’t see his name.

“Oo, sabi niya. Patingin nga ng iPod mo.” My friend grabbed my iPod and quickly added him in my contact list.

“O ayan, I added him na!”

“Waaah, shit, sure ka? Kakahiya,” I reacted.

***************

This was how it all began.

A year has passed, it is only now that I decided to write this story. I am writing this story because I do not want to forget. I am writing this story because stories like these - stories of people like me and our love - need to be written, read, and reread. I am writing this story because...  etong si pretty boy, geeky chubs like me pala ang type!

This time, I was a lucky guy afterall.

The Devotion Project

A friend of mine shared a YouTube link a few days back with the title, The Devotion Project. And it is the most poignant short film I ever saw.

Devotion (noun): 1. profound dedication; 2. earnest attachment to a cause, person etc. (dictionary.com)

According to their website, The Devotion Project is a series of short documentary portraits of LGBT couples, examining and celebrating their commitment and devotion. This first short film in the series, "More than Ever" documents Bill Campbell and John Hilton's 54-year love story. It won the Audience Award for Best Short at Newfest: The New York LGBT Film Festival (and it won my heart). 

It is only less than ten minutes, watch the film here:

Beautiful story.

54 years! That is 4536 gay relationship months or 378 gay relationship years! (Funny, they say that for every month you are in a same-sex relationship, it is multiplied by seven months)

After watching the film -- and also being a counseling psychologist and a gay-relationship-advocate wannabee, I asked myself, what was their secret? I want to know their secret because I know it is not easy. I had two 3-year relationships and currently working on another one (Oh incidentally, we are celebrating our third month today and this film is a sweet reminder that sometimes it hurts but sometimes it also last in love instead!)

But I discovered one secret and John Hilton wrote it last July 2011 in Life Lesson with Bill Campbell.

"How can love be profane if it really is love?," he asked. 

"Every day of our life together, Bill and I valued more and more, the privilege of spending our life with each other. We quickly admonished ourselves about any feelings of guilt about our happiness but instead concentrated to understand it as the very evidence we perpetually sought that we were living in the right way."

 The director and producer Anthony Osso shared the birth of this project. Watch it here:

My prayer tonight: "I want to be like that and I can do that too."