Our Double Lives: Part 2

(continued from Part 1)

It is the same world that allows a macho dancer to be known only for his face, his body, his skill, and not the details of his true identity -- the hometown where he grew up in, the graduation of his younger sister, the place where his estranged father lives, the birth date of his kids. It is the only world that deejays, managers and customers call for his alias or stage name, while his real name is reserved at home for his nanay or ka-tropa who can merely turn their blind eye. It is a world that introduces him as single and un-attached, even if the mother of his one or two kids is waiting for him to arrive at 6AM everyday. It is this second world that forces them to shift their personalities from charming to seductive, from obliging to playful, at the customer's demands. It is the world where everyone in his private life knows he is working only as a waiter or bartender or deejay, but never as someone who markets his face and uncovered body to sex-deprived gays and matrons.

It is this second life of theirs that allows them to earn and support their first lives.

And this is shared also by the bar owner who had a taste of steady income back in the day, but whose expenses for salaries, rent, electricity, and payola to the government or police are now greater than the combined revenues from his bar's once-a-week regular clients. It is shared by the gay floor manager who seems to extort cash from their customers, but also acts as an adoptive parent to their sister's third kid. This is the same for the transvestite impersonator who was not accepted by his father as a kid, but is now dressed up in false eyelashes and fake boa feathers to buy the medicine for his ailing mother in his first life.  

But, with the exception of a few, no one in a macho dancer's, a gay manager's, or a transvestite impersonator's first life knows of what exactly happens in their second lives. Especially so for the customer, whose first life friends and family are not aware of their whereabouts on those nights spent in the second life.

The second life is a secret that can not be revealed to the first life. It is a secret that the first life can not understand, and would refuse to comprehend and accept, especially with its preconceived notions of dark, seedy macho-dancing gay bar. It is a secret that can't be merged with the first life -- like inviting your boyfriend macho dancer to your cousin's wedding, or introducing your matrona lover to your childhood sweetheart, the mother of your kids.

The first with the second can never work. Thus, the second is always kept hidden, in the darkness of the midnight, inside the gay bar.  

And even this second life of mine is only a secret, which I keep in this blog. A blog which writes about our secret lives -- 

A mother in her 50s by day who becomes a matrona who feels 30 by night.

A manly serious desk manager by day, lusty screaming fag by night.

A doting over-protective uncle by day, a so-called pimp mamasan by night.

A husband by day, a macho dancer by night.

We, in the gay bars, all live double lives.

GB Goer
Learn more: Lessons from Gay Bars in Manila
http://machosandhostos.blogspot.com/
email: char.affairs@gmail.com

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Photocredit: http://www.123rf.com/photo_8655635_closeup-portrait-of-a-handsome-young-man-looking-himself-in-the-mirror.html