Yes, there's strength and beauty in diversity

I don’t bank with Standard Chartered. I bank with BDO, Metrobank and BPI. Spread whatever little you have. It’s safer, I have been told by my concerned cousin who worked for 10 different banks in the past 10 years. “I needed to find a place that could keep up with my pace,” he explained.

But I will always treasure the opportunity that Standard Chartered gave me when I was invited as speaker in its Diversity and Inclusion Advocacy series of talks exactly two years ago (May 2007). “There is strength and beauty in diversity,” Maya Angelou wrote in one of her essays. Here I was in front of a diverse audience composed of employees of the bank. People who I would imagine were encouraged to attain their fullest potentials based on merits and not on color of skin or sexual preference. Here was a bank that celebrated excellence in diversity, a financial institution that respected people’s uniqueness. I figured there was a financial institution that nurtured the spiritual, mental and material well-being of its workforce and by doing so transforming them into evangelists of the bank. Each one has a natural beauty and strength about him so different from his neighbors yet bound together by the same love and respect for the institution they work for and for the people they work with making this place a better world.

I spoke to my Standard Chartered Bank audience about 10 little things about me and I would like to share them with you here on Direct Line.

1. I am able to do a job that I love with passion.

(Oh yes, showbiz does not enjoy the esteem accorded to the legal, medical profession or to the financial industry. Even if there’s recession in some parts of the world or to rocket science but all these industries don’t have the magic, the panache, the seductive charisma that only showbiz has).

2. I am able to laugh and live my little successes and failures knowing that they are fleeting. (I am in a world of ephemera where success and failure are so temporary that it is wise to treat every show your last).

3. With every (good and not so good) moment inside and out of television, with every commentary, stand upper, opening and closing spiels, with every decent and despicable performance, I continue to learn. (Now I’m back in school after realizing that it is powerful to combine learnings from the school of hard knocks and heartaches and from the formal, disciplined structures of the academe).

4. I have not lost my way back home despite the blinding razzmatazz.

5. I love Nanay and Bong. (You can only be naked, warts, bulges, scars and all in front of people you love!).

6. That I see my own beauty without bias, and my scars without bitterness. (I learned along time ago that I cannot apply for Ms. Pralala but also that no Ms. Pralala can ever define my beauty).

7. That I am so brittle and so flawed that I am willing to be extraordinary.

8. That I am so grateful to the deserving and I try to be both a worthy friend and adversary.

9. That I’m gay and it has been a wonderful life of catfights and tender caresses.

10. That I pray to God so hard as if I don’t work hard at all.