Seb as latest icon of LGBT community

There are talent discoveries upon discoveries, many of them through YouTube due to the Filipinos’ penchant for posting online their singing performances. Many of these have led to fame and fortune, the biggest of them Charice and Arnel Pineda of Journey.

Others are still waiting in the sidelines like kid discovery Aldrich Talonding who with cousin James Bucong performed Dance with My Father on Ellen DeGeneres’ show and came home with a brand-new piano, guitar and $10,000.

The case of Sebastian Castro, Seb for short, however, is completely different. The 21-year-old Peruvian-Japanese found himself in the Philippines after leaving home since his parents and their religion didn’t exactly approve of his gay, freewheeling ways. Sebastian got into the modeling arena which led to being selected as one of the Cosmo Bachelors in 2011. This gave him a small fan base where he would constantly post things about himself on the social media. It was through Facebook that our gemologist friend Marlon Pedregosa discovered Seb in a sexually-charged video he had posted on YouTube.   

Recently, we met up with Seb and his manager Dennis. Marlon thought it might be interesting to set an interview with them, and another friend Jose Cabaltera from FEU joined us. Sebastian has in his side of the ring over 70,000 followers on Facebook, over 20,000 on Instagram and 36,000 on Twitter. This is more people than most barangay captains have constituents.

We asked how this all started. Sebastian is best known for his video Bubble which mustered over a million views in a few short months thus earning him the unofficial title as a YouTube sensation. Before that, Sebastian admitted, he had only 10,000 Facebook followers and “maybe about 5,000 to 7,000 on Twitter.”

Bubble and the subsequent coming-out video for Sebastian were game-changers in his social media career. He saw opportunity in the attention he drew. He began to focus on increasing followers. “I was making something that I wanted to make more than anything in my life,” he confessed.

Through Seb’s coming-out video, we found a doe-eyed young man commiserating with his gay followers, telling them: “I know what it’s like to be very lonely. I know what it’s like to have those suicidal thoughts. I don’t want you there. You’re worth more than that.”

On Nov. 12, Seb is set to release his first album and it would be available on iTunes, Google, Amazon and a myriad of other online music retail outlets. Simultaneously, he will release on YouTube the first video of his first album: Theban, a reference to the ancient Greek city of Thebes, and also a metaphor for being gay. Seb explained that Thebes had an army composed of gay men. “It was believed that if you fought next to the person you loved, you would fight much harder to keep them alive. This led the generals to have the lovers fight alongside one another in battle. I can’t think of anything more beautiful — beautiful and sexy… I love the idea of dragging my followers, or any LGBT for that matter, into this world where you are fighting with, fighting for and possibly dying for that one guy you love.”

What a romantic idea from this attractive icon of the gay community, we thought to ourselves. What a difference from other icons we had met whose sole attraction to screaming fans were their pa-charming ways. Just how many kids would use Thebes as an inspiration for his reaching out to fans? Our sole interest in ancient Thebes while in high school started by watching the Hollywood film The Egyptian where we discovered Edmund Purdon and became his fan forever.

The search for Seb’s leading man began with a few posts on Facebook and Twitter, confiding that it would be directed at “that young insecure gay boy who’ll relate to all this.” Theban was shot in the Ninoy Aquino Wildlife Center. It had a full production with a volunteer cast and staff of 30 people. After the shoot, he confessed, “Theban is everything — everything I wanted it to be. Everything it was meant to be.”

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