It's Raining Cocks and Dongs

Everyone living in Manila knows that it's been raining cats and dogs in the city for the past weeks. Call it typhoon season, or monsoon season, or rainy season. Everyone is inclined to stay at home or rush home when outside, to avoid getting wet by the heavy rains, which cause heavy flooding, which cause the heavy traffic.

Not for me, though. The rains didn't stop me to explore the streets and gay bars of Manila.

Ang swerte ni 'teh!

Like rain water flowing from one canal to another, I was lead to the narrow alleys and dark streets with gay bar locations I haven't visited yet. I've read a lot about these bars -- small, street-side gay bars littered across Quezon City -- and I guess it was time for me to baptize myself with a visit. I brought with me a gay friend from high school, "Mike", who got curious of the gay bar scene, being a gay bar virgin himself. Fantastic, I thought. A trip to the gay bar with a friend on a rainy night!

So on two separate occasions, we went to two of these small gay bars. Small because of their physical size, unlike the two floors of the bigger bars in Quezon City. Small because of their popularity, as the gay bars along Roxas Blvd and Timog were more top-of-mind when it came to gay bars.

The first, which I will call, "Night-Men", is a bar along Aurora Blvd, near the BGB LRT station. With its real name, one would think that this gay bar is filled with the hunky men or cute boys of your dreams. But no, I got something short of a nightmare, like being in a run-down beer house from an 80s horror movie, with its tattered wall, dim lights, and basag sound system, on a thunderous rainy night. Okay, I might be exaggerating a bit, but it didn't have the more cozy or relaxed atmosphere of the bigger gay bars that I was used to. What a way to introduce the gay bar scene to my preppy-wearing, intellectual gay friend.

Second gay bar that we went to was in a very discreet location in Cubao. It was so discreet one wouldn't find it unless he or she asks the people around. That bar I will christen "Warm Boys", because the men were not so hot as its original name implies. Warm lang. But any warm body was enough for that night's cold, perfect-for-snuggling weather.

I didn't expect anything new about these gay bars. The set-up of the stage was the same. The macho dancing gyrations were the same. The types of songs played were the same. The age and general look of the macho dancers were also the same.  

But what I didn't expect in these gay bars was the seediness of it all. I already knew that "anything goes" inside these smaller bars. Can touch. Can see. Can taste. Can tot, even. But when I experienced it myself, I realized everything inside these bars reeked of cheap sex. All-the-way dancers freely approach customers, as they whisper "libreng hawak" (free touch) in the "Night-Men" bar. Floor managers with a naughty smile, sit beside the patrons and ask who they want to "get to know", while casually mentioning or pointing to the inexpensive private rooms. Heck, even the crass DJ blabbers unendingly about the benefits of tabling a macho dancer, and teases customers without men beside them as "uuwing luhaan" (go home in tears). 

What surprised me more was the amount of privates I saw that night. On stage, right after another. Every dancer there seemed to be all-the-way, and not just the pa-sexy macho dancing where briefs remain intact. Yeah, almost everyone, and I counted about 15 to 20 or so, from the mostly old veteran macho dancers to the junjunin, fresh out of public high school types. Compare that to the 8 to 10 all the way men in a given larger, more established bar.

Given the amount of cocks we saw, the larger gay bars along Timog and in the Pasay-Paranaque areas would already be considered tame and conservative compared to the bars here. Just a show of pubic hair or butt in the bigger gay bars would automatically make their girl customers shriek and scream in shock. Place these same girl customers in these smaller gay bars, and the police might suddenly barge in, thinking that a public girl orgy scream-fest was going on, or every woman in the bar was being raped loudly sabay-sabay.

And unlike the bigger gay bars which have been invaded by the matronas and the bridesmaids and the koreanas, these smaller gay bars are what I can say the true gay bars of Manila. The clientele are mostly gay men, ranging from those that look like one's next door butch-silahis uncle who sends his three teenage kids to school, along with his discreet dirty-old-gay barkada, to those that look like one's effeminate high school classmate who's preparing to be the next Ms. Gay Beautician Philippines 2018. These bars may be remnants of the old 90s macho dancing bars, as typically featured in the 90s gay-themed movies, where macho dancing for gays and paid sex were in their simplest, purest forms. 

Yes, cheap thrills, they are. The tips and sabits on-stage range from P100 to P500, compared to the thousands placed on the bikinis in the bigger bars. And the macho drink of P300 allows the horny dirty old gay man for a touch on his ka-table's privates underneath the tables. Compare that to the P500 macho drink in the bigger gay bars, where the tabled dancer is free to stand up and refuse any malicious advances made by the malikot-ang-kamay customer. 

But cheapness has its downside: you do get what you pay for. Higher price generally means higher quality. Face value, of course. In the bigger gay bars, the question in a customer's mind is "who among these men don't I like to table tonight." But in the smaller ones, the thought reverses as "who among these men are pwede na-looking, and where are they." 

Maybe it's the ambience of the bigger bars, plus the heavily-invested lighting, that makes these ordinary men seem to look good on stage. Or maybe the good looking ones just know where the money is, hence, which gay bar along Timog or Manila to work in. 

But there are a few jewels working in the smaller bars. Yeah, semi-precious ones among heaps of course rocks, pre-historic pebbles, or pumice stone (yung panghilod). I'd still return to these bars, just to get a feel of these jewels, on a non-rainy night.

When you're so used to the rainy weather, you can already expect anything that comes with it -- getting wet, getting stuck in traffic, getting stranded under any roof, getting flooded. But there are things you won't expect to see now and then -- beggar kids dancing in the rain, offices calling off work at 3pm, motels getting fully booked. The same goes for the gay bars in Manila. You thought all bars would be the same, until you get to experience these small seedy gay bars.

My friend Mike might also return with me. Perhaps on a better night, when we won't need to worry about the raining cats and dogs on the streets of Manila, as we can focus more on the raining cocks and dongs inside the gay bar. And when it rains, it really does pour.

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

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Photo credit: http://bestuff.com/stuff/its-raining-men