Coming out with ‘Letters from the Closet’

This Week’s Winner

Terence Eyre Belangoy, 28, holds a law degree from FEU-Institute of Law and a business economics degree from UP Diliman. He is from Dipolog City, Zamboanga del Norte. He is currently reviewing for the bar exams.

Hackneyed as this may sound, no other book I have read turned up at the very moment I needed it most. This book, my favorite book, is the extraordinary and enlightening Letters from the Closet, written in a postcard-correspondence style between the two main characters of the book, Tony Ferrante and Paulette Jacobson.

As the title goes, it is about people of a different gender orientation and about the two main characters’ (Adam and Katie) coming-out process.

The book, which would interest anybody of any gender, was given to me by my high school friend (and subsequently college schoolmate) Sharon at that point in my life when everything about me and around me was bleak, ambiguous, distressing, and painful. On the first page, my friend wrote a message: "Enjoy life! …Gather yourself while you may . . .."

How thoughtful and how very appropriate that message was! I was then so confused, trying to find my true self, and the book immeasurably helped me.

Truth be told, I had been honest with myself and the people around me – family, relatives, friends, etc. – about who I was, gender-wise. Luckily for me, they all had been accepting. Even in my bucolic home province, I did not feel discriminated against or different. It was also to my immense benefit, of course, that, I excelled academically and in extra-curricular activities back then, so people who knew me were willing to ignore my "different orientation." ("Even if he is like that, he is good and brainy," they would say.)

But my approach towards life vis-à-vis my true identity changed when I started college in Manila. Far from my comfort zone, it dawned on me (more like a very rude awakening) that there could in fact be a more competitive, more difficult environment than what I had been accustomed to. Life became worse, vicious.

I actually did not experience more than the usual discrimination. But finding it hard to stand out academically or otherwise (I had classmates and schoolmates who were in the running for Latin honors and drove BMWs), I decided that by putting on a veneer of conformity and normalcy I would sail smoothly through college life than if I were to be true to myself. So I crawled back into my shell; I hid in my closet.

I was so wrong! Hiding my true identity and in the process depriving myself of freedom was much harder and more suffocating than fending off gender slurs and discrimination, which were real, sometimes direct and sometimes oblique.

My friend probably sensed my predicament and gave me Letters from the Closet at the most opportune time. She said she found the book at a sale in one of those unassuming shops at the University Shopping Center.

When my friend handed me the book, I was at first hesitant to accept it. Although she knew me almost as much as I knew myself since we were in high school, a part of me tried to sever anything that would remind me of who I truly was. Since I was trying to put on a "new and different" me, accepting my friend’s gift meant coming to terms once again with my true self, the self that I had tried to reject.

Thank God I accepted the book. It gave me insight into the life of one with a different gender orientation (until now I am still averse to saying the word "homosexual"). It provided me that most-needed paradigm shift and helped keep my sanity.

This is one of my favorite passages from the book: The Choice we have is not whether to be gay or straight. For the majority of gay people, we are who God made us to be. The real choice is between denial and embracing who we are. The real choice is between living life in the shadows or walking proudly in the light. The real choice is between a slow death and an honest life.

I have chosen an honest life since then. I have no regrets.