Bubblegum Boy

written by Aries

REASONS TO GO TO UNIVERSITY:

[] New city / queer city and a new world / meeting people with the same flair / be able to finally have a tattoo of rainbow on my forearm / new friends, maybe try bootycall / reinvention or what Mama Ru call drag / not having to pinch myself anymore for the flick of my wrists / dorm houses / the campus life / en suite bathroom (but really who am I fooling?) / and glitter, more glitter, against the gray /

Other reasons to go:

[] BREAK THE OLD SHELL

Before the era of the noughties — the 2000s Y2K, Miu Miu skirts, tie-dye shirts, Paris Hilton pink — I am born / The year is 1999 and Momma says the world is burning, / churning Cheetos red, lemon-boil yellow, angry orange, seismic blues, aquamarine scales / The millennium hatches its revolution and televisions hiss static of convicts, collapsing headlines, the slow theater of disaster / Momma holds me like pills she was warned against mixing with wine / Her body is a warm nest / and outside, the gravel is thick like foundation / planes fold into ocean like metal prayers / and clocks melt soft as candy against walls / The reporter calls it / the world catching Dali /

Meanwhile / my father watches the emancipation of culture through a sports-colored haze / He says he is not ready for a son / At year’s end, tobacco blunts an obsidian scar on the carpet / A duffel bag waits / Leather straps pulled tight like his swagger for young life enamored / My Momma screams and the world splinters / Her rage burns my father’s skin, claws at his face with desperation /

I was just born / my back carries a home / I am a snail tucked into its own spiral / learning to weigh my weather / weather my weight / and my backbone thickens under my mother’s careful hands / a slow mineral kindness turning into structure / and a snail cannot outpace its house / it drags its shelter through every surface it survives / it folds inward, always penitent / a body made into enclosure /

ANOTHER REASON:

[] Dance for my life

Growth is a ruse / that the body takes for granted / My man-heels spanned into wings / and what do a normal boy want if not for normalcy? / Not ballet? / Does the world teach early on that there is a certain blindness that man has to achieve to walk straight? / What if a body is congruent / Has a dereliction that mothers can only write through rhyme scheme / AABB / ABBA / ABAB / Every wrist flicker / Hips zip / She saw a boy in tutu / toes pointed Polaris at every angle / and I was just the only boy in a ballet class / a blue bubblegum / with the four walls of the rehearsal room ready to stomp /

NOW:

[] ACTUALLY, LIVING THE LIFE

The campus is greener than pastures / the lessons / the libraries / coffee shops with their eccentric charms / clubs and their electric, sexy songs / vintage classrooms and book-sage scents / students primed with ambitious strides and stars pined for that spotlight / punks, rebels, grueling achievers / queen bees, social media stars, It girls in pastel clothes / mini shops of cutesy trinkets / thrift stores holding all the magic for repersonalization / the sparkle and charm of grubby canals / everything shimmering in stardust before it gradually chips like paint flakes off a mural / beautiful, fleeting, already becoming something else in my hands /

The Freshmen’s Fair at the covered court, its great awning like a whale’s mouth, smells of BO and wanting / The rugby boys in sportswear wave their flyers, urging Spartans toward the coming sports combat / I roll my eyes at the heat, listen to the intellectuals dissect poetry at the Literature Club / Indie boys, all pretenses and philosophies, smile at me, and offers a nouveau nicheness flirt / I am looking and looking for a place / but all I see are Econ majors, numbers flying with precision; Bio people in their megafantastic green; Psychology beaus with their piercing gaze / I buy an Audrey Hepburn poster from the Art Club and stick it to my bedroom wall that night / The stars turn into Marilyn’s diamonds, and I dance to Madonna’s Vogue /

My clothes are neatly lined / rolled socks and folded Calvin Klein underwear my Momma bought from her favorite online shop / my wide-leg pants stacked like the Eiffel Tower on my cabinet / and floating on the metal rack like Aphrodite’s soul / are shimmering tops, rainbow coats, fur-trimmed dresses, extravagant ensembles / Below, platform boots lifted from my Aunt’s house, red heels bought from cashier’s tips, a pair of thigh-highs for my awakening / Beyoncé’s vocals fracture me into chandelier glow and I arabesque to the floor /

Pink / I go to the LGBTQ+ Society / I wear my skin / Everyone introduces their names and they roll off my tongue like cinnamon and peppermint / some sweet, some sharp / The circle gives their pronouns / He / Him / She / Her / They / Them / and I know / I understand these people / just them / people like me / I say my name / and one boy with a pierced nose says he is a trans man / his name is Jacob / and he says he would prefer a life where he was born a boy / maybe it would be different / less spectacle / less people congratulating him / because what is brave in being your true self / it only gets brave when there’s a certain axis of privilege to becoming one / and all butterflies have cocoons they can call home / does that mean we don’t have our own? / and something in all of us is honest below the fluorescent lights / a rustle of the gold foil sheets through awkwardly and recognition blinks off from its sheen / outside the room, posters of queer youth assemblies and campus pride strikes flicker on the bulletin board / inked fists, lipstick slogans, calls to march through Manila heat / we talk about drag / some call it a hyperinflatable costume / some say it is weather / something you step into / something to make the survival visible / some afternoons, we rehearse walks in borrowed heels / laughing when the floor goes on acid / someone says the city is also learning to us / some men have vaginas /some women have penises / some queers don’t / some fiddle with a cross on their neck despite Him turning his back more than one time and again / some paint themselves green / and some are just here to exist / and it’s not big of a deal /

When I see the poster in Drama Class / I know I have to be inside / Drag It Up Society / the Vogue-esque blocky font snags my sequined heart / There is a room number I copy onto my wrist / destiny etched into the pillars of heaven / and I dash in with my worn-out shoes / The door is cluttered with design posters and fashion paraphernalia / I knock and a dozen pairs of eyes merge into this humongous supernova presence / They smile with overlined lips / honey-thick, hive-warm wigs towering / and their queen says / Welcome home /

I had seen musicals as a child / watched them with such fervor beside my mother / called her once Broadway / in adolescence, it belted into Mama Ru on screen / and in Social Science, our teacher tells us that DRAG is never just one word / Dress Resembling A Girl / something more, always more / like CUNT when RuPaul says it / Charisma Uniqueness Nerve Talent / In the Shakespearean era, DRAG existed differently / male performers in feminine costume playing women on stage / and the audience applauded without hesitation / Queerness, then, was spectacle and celebration /

Everyone sits on the floor like glamorous felines / Everyone is made of yarned warmth / Across the circle, a boy with curly hair lifts a hand toward me / Someone begins her speech /

I am Venus Galactica in drag, but you can call me Aria out of drag / Pronouns they/them, and make sure to spell Venus with a capital V / First of all, drag is not just for queer people / it’s for everyone / they continue / And we’re all here not only because we are queer but because we are here to be a berserk reminder that we really do exist /

They smile red lips stretched like Hollywood / Their eyes sizzle with fire, thorned by spiky eyeliner; monochrome blue lids like a resurrected 90s / Under the mahogany foundation and sunset blush, a faint stubble surfaces, a trace of something outside the makeshift world / They/Them. / Their outfit reads Mugler corset in leather / Bad-ass. / Their wig an explosion of blond, dripping sun around their shoulders /

They ask everyone’s drag name / I answer, honestly: I don’t know yet. / Names feel temporary / Fluidly tailored, like identity itself. / How do you strip your name and become you? / RuPaul, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga /names edited, sharpened, placed onto stage / The spotlight does not burn them; it shines back their sheen. / Perhaps a name is just a name /

The president asks again why we are here / Everyone already seems to know / Born to perform / I cave inward, rummaging through the ache in my chest, until something gasps / I am here to belong, isn’t everyone else? / And everyone smiles / No one judges /

I am queer / I am a boy who does ballet / I love men / What else?

College is a beginning, a shedding / Old skin peeled into new / I come from the poems I write, the boy-crush doodles tucked inside spring notebooks / I am still the blush of a thirteen-year-old when someone asks why I dance ballet / Shame blooming hot beneath skin / I am still that boy and still the flower wreaths I made to become that boy / I am nineteen and still made of my mother’s folktales, my grandmother’s recipes, the mythologies from class / I am queer, the riots, the rebellion, the hip-hop playing too loud in my chest. / I am still the rap bars, still the body that is wrapped in tutu / I am me / He/Him / Now, I just have to figure out the name.