Pride Disguised as Shame - Contents

Pride Disguised as Shame

Queer Stories of the Western World

By Isaac López Aguilera

Contents:

Preface

1. The Waiting Spot: Thoughts run wild in the mind of a teenager who goes to the same place every night trying to cruise for sex. 

2.Extravagant: A man stares at his reflection in the mirror and gets confronted with another face of gender identity.

3.Ne Suis Pas: London becomes the witness of a love story that comes to a halt when one of the lovers has to come out to his parents.

4.Jump!: Before accepting his sexual identity, a muslim boy plans a very romantic way of committing suicide jumping from one of the highest and most famous peaks of the Scottish capital.

5.Ugandan Drums: Sometimes euphonic, sometimes deafing, the instruments play a very specific beat for gay people. 

6.Paved Roads to Panama: A symbolic journey of a young man who decides self acceptance before yielding his true identity to social and family pressure.

7.Letter to my Russian Brothers: Author's message to an imaginary Russian pen pal in support for the recent anti-gay legislation in that country. 

8. The Many Apartheids of a Gay Person: An essay that looks into the many processes of separation that a gay man has to endure over his life, supported with the author's own experience.

9. The Reason Why You Can't Give Your Heart Away: In a bar conversation, a "player" explains to his friend why giving your heart is losing the love game.

10. Fires of London: The character draws a comparison between the dreadful event of 1666 and his recent personal affairs in the city. 

11. Days of Halo: The apparition of a halo around the sun serves as the start of a love season that one young man will never forget. 

12. Cheshire Cat's Room: The life of a teenage street vendor takes an unexpected turn when a charming young stranger introduces him to places, feelings, and passions he never thought possible.

"This is why I am single"

I like twisting things around. I love that. Jesus and the velociraptor? Most brilliant mix ever! It just does not make any sense by normal standards! That's what I am talking about. So I took this night, twisted it around to get something out of it and actually get something I believe is meaningful. I turned what should have been another night of heavily drinking and no relevant outcomes to a night of some importance and equally satisfying binging.

Motivation: Lately, I've been lonely. I participated in a club entry giveaway and I happened to be the winner with open bar until 1 a.m. Pretty neat if it weren't for the fact that that's what I do twice a month anyway, so the prize was more the excuse to roll over the bed and do something on a Friday night I had totally decided to spend in the company of cathartic T.V. shows and smoke. I went to the bar, by myself of course because I AM SINGLE. Generally, I believe I am a keeper. There must be others like me who might not be able to find a partner for injust reasons. Let's find out.

The facts: I was getting bored by 11 p.m. The rum was pretty tasty and the people seemed to be willing to have a good time, but I was still reluctant to have any fun. It is way harder when you are in the club by yourself just drinking at the bar and fishing for the conversation of a stranger. I've been wanting to write about how I feel, so I thought that hey! maybe some other people are here by themselves feeling the same. I waited for them to show up, and as they proved to exist, I started my little game.

The method: Patience was the first ingredient. I waited for the bar to fill out, spotted the few people that were obvioulsy too good loking to be single, and fell on them with questions about ther private life. I would come to them, introduce myself and tell them that I only meant to take away 2 minutes of their time. I managed to talk to 7 people and no one said they were not willing to participate. Alright, after smiling charmingly and making eye contact for proper understanding ( a risk you take when the music is so loud and talking to the ear proves being way more useful) I asked 3 basic questions:

1- Are you single?
2- Why do you think you're single?
3- If you had a complaint about the Costa Rican gay scene, what would it be?

Surprisingly, everybody wanted to talk! I ran into a straight guy by accident, but hey! he directed me to his gay friends so it was all good.

The figures: 6 of the seven good looking guys were single. While only one of the five (and the oldest) declared he was single because it was his intention to be so, the other 5 guys wanted to blame it on circumstances. "Guys over here are too divas/queen/superficial" would be all of them's complaint. 5 of 7 times I asked the third question just to make sure they meant it, but by asking question 2, the reasons to be single were flowing. Most of people would just continue the point they tried to make by answering question 2.

Findings The fact that 5 out of 7 guys suggested that the scene was way too stereotypical worries me. 5 out of 7 guys said most of people were shallow. This is a common complaint I hear in not so attractive guys, but fairly good looking guys saying the same??? I believe there's a predisposition in people who have been in many relationships just to give up on love altogether and accept that the scene is just for sex and temporary fun.

Here's when I get on my soapbox: Parameters. Clichés. Repetition.We all need to come to terms on what's shallow. Most common complaint, yet there's no agreement on what it encompasses. Well, if you are good looking and strictly look for good looking people, does that count as shallow? If you are way too interested about style, fashion, and clothes... Would that be shallow too? If all you seek for is fun without comitment, would that be also considered as a shallow, light way to take things? The question of what's not being shallow confuses me even more. I believe that if you don't like the way something is, you stand up and change it, right? Not in this context, apparently.

Conclusion: Look at that! All of us belong to the funny category of idealists. We believe something must be a certain way, so we tend to reject behaviors that could destroy our ideal of "happiness". There has to be a detailed description of "good" in your head for something not to be "good enough." Single, mostly not by choice but by imposition. I have to say that's exactly how I feel. I love being single, but deep inside I believe society has to be wrong to let someone like me be out there not taken. I started this blog entry adamant of the scene's guilt in all this, but as it turns out, I think now the problem is that I have false expectations of what the environment can provide, then there! We all must be right and we might be defeated on that one right from the start. What a shame!

I want to highlight this: if you don't like the way something is, you stand up and change it, I repeat. It is just not clear to me what I can do to change the tide. What to do, what to do? Well, as so many blog entries, this one has no tangible result and just helped me putting my thoughts in written form.

Special thanks: I'd like to dedicate this entry to a certain French boy. All the inspiration comes from him. I mean, it is thanks to him not acknowledging that we should be together that I have to go through all this.

Flying, this time around. The Perks and the Dark Side.

I just had the most tedious experience in my flying history. You could make the case that this is the furthest away I've flown from Costa Rica and that exhaustion was expected, but not to this level. I wasn't counting on Iberia's flight to depart 6 hours later from Costa Rica and to be seated next to a disgusting fat man who not only invaded my personal space and threatened my sanity by snoring and grunting really loud, but also knocked part of my food out of the tray table (beer included) and didn't even attempt to apologize. Good times, good goddamn ten hours.

Anyway, life made a decent attempt to make up for my peril with Iberia, and the rest of the transit either flowed smoothly or people were extra willing to help me. I always thought Madrid was such a mean place. Now I see that it all comes down to that stupid company (which I still have to use since I have thousands of miles with them.)

Still not the point. I wanted to document the landing/departure from Istanbul as I couldn't take any pictures. I was blown away by the beauty of the trip. I landed during the early morning, and the darkness of the Black Sea slowly yielded to the bleak yellow dawn and the lights of Istanbul. The airport was not far from the shore, and for a moment, I had the impression we were going to land in water. Taking off in the next flight for Izmir was even more magical. Full daylight and a window seat allowed me to turn around and see how we left the Black Sea and a float of ships of all shorts behind. As we were leaving Istanbul behind, counting mosques became impossible. One here, one there, another one there and there. The tall needles of the sites of worship outnumbered any other distictive form of architecture. The silver domes shone with the sunrays. Istambul kept expanding beyond reach, and the pain in my neck as I was almost twisting it against physics did not stop me from watching until the concrete faded away in a succession of hills of dry yellow grass and contrasting strong green trees. The plane kept gaining altitude. All around I could see the cracks on the cloud roof and several halos of light working as spotlights for the islands in the Black Sea, later for a mosque in the middle of the slums; much later, halos hit the wing of the plane, and then we were up there in the white.
I expected no more than a flat white mattress of velvety clouds, but the Turkish sky gave me yet another surprise. It was another spectacle up there. The clouds covered it all, but their arbitrarious shapes created the most unthinkable landscapes. I painted some parts in green in my head, some others in blue, added a few wild horses and my imagination went wild. The landmark I liked the most was a perfectly shaped scorpion tail coming out of the white puffy floor.  Did I mention that good 30 minutes of the flight were turbulences? Fun ride, fun ride (I mean it, rollercoaster like.)
The descent took the plane along the cost of what I guessed was the Aegean Sea. For a while, the breaks in another cloudly sky let the sunlight hit entire faces of mountains, and small, scattered villages along the coast preceded one large aglommeration of buildings. And only then, I was in Izmir.

None of the pictures are my property. I took them from google in an attempt of illustrating what I saw.

Oh, by the way, the food in Turkish Airlines is amazing. Salmon and Chicken on Eggplant for dinner? A cheese and fresh vegetables sandwich with yogurt for a one hour flight? Why don't they fly to Costa Rica???

While on this side of the Atlantic...

Blogging about my experience in London and France would have been easier a week ago, when many things were fresh and not so many about myself were awfully stale. My time in here has answered so many questions and elicit some even more complicated ones... I by no means intend this entry to be about my personal issues, but I think I owed people the right to know I haven't been just traveling mindlessly and getting drunk. I've been thinking and reformulating, which is probably a mistake.

Still,

I found London as an everchanging city. I don't recognize even Brixton , where I used to live. It has changed and developed (it has art galleries on Electric Lane now!) However, that's what I love about London. Life moves on a vertiginous pace that pushes you to move just as fast. I found London invaded by denim and snake print this time around. I found many more manufactured hipsters than the real ones that used to hang out around Hoxton and Shoreditch. In the gay scene, my hearcut repeats constantly and people seem to have a thing for long earrings on only one ear now. I think the earring fad should disappear as soon as possible. As for the London oddities, I wasn't deprived from them. One day I was sitting in a café and then a feather mattress exploded or something. For half an hour, I saw a rain of feather coming down the street. It only gave London that magical feeling.
Most of my friends from when I lived in here are somewhere else, but I'm glad to see some of those who stayed made an effort to meet up with me. I like that it is still extra easy to meet strangers and just have party buddies for a night. I had totally forgotten there's no awkward context for a British person to start small talk until I was washing my hands and the guy doing the same next to me told me the water was extra cold. Right, I had forgotten about chatty people everywhere, but how happy I am those things haven't changed. See, I'm perfectly content with walking around, talking to people and carrying on with my life. You can't do that in Costa Rica. Overall, I felt that if I were to move to London again, the city would give me a chance of starting a brand new life with the benefit of the knowledge I already have of it and the ocassional visit or concurrence of people I like from here and from all around the world. I like that.



I found Paris as a city that rarely changes. I stayed in the Montmartre district, which has been decadent for two centuries and remains so. My stay in Paris this time focused more on the real Paris, far away from the sights (as I was trying to spend as little time as possible near crowds.)I do not think I missed that much. Still, it was really nice to walk around the unknown or otherwise the non touristic streets of the city and see how Paris holds on to its essence, however romantic, bohemian or even grotesque it might be. To my distress, I saw my French ex too and realized the chemistry between the two of us hadn't changed either. That's always the risk (just now I sighed so loud it took me out it distracted me from what I was writing.) Anyway, I found this stability in the city's spirit very comforting too. For one, spring is making the trees on the north side of La Seine river bloom with so many flowers that they fly around like a yellow rain and they make a fine carpet on the steps of the lover's bridge, where people now have to struggle to find a place to put their locks with their name and promise everlasting, nonconditional love (*Sighs again*.) And that's only for Paris. The weekend in Rennes with my friends is a whole new chapter of fun that requires an entry on itself.

I propose a toast for the old and the new, and the balance of those elements in life. As I have taken the time to write this entry, I feel entitled to take the last hours of my trip and get comfortably drunk.

Cheers.

Dear Universe,

Dear Universe,

I know we talk a lot about love, and I know I've asked you pretty demented requests that you have, not without some hesitation, granted. You are probably sick of me asking for finding something real when I am playing with fire all the time, and even sicker of my talks to other people when I tell I'm convinced love is not for me and then secrety wish it is going to hit me any day. I don't think I've wasted my time with the experiences I've had, and I'm convinced I have a better idea of what to ask for, so if you're still listening, please take this few things into consideration for next time:

I want a relationship based on laughter. I want lots of jokes filling the air. Please provide plenty of those moments when his eyes meet mine and we smile because we are having a blast. Please provide plenty of inside jokes that make us burst to laughter in public situations. Please have everyone saying "those two..." and smiling too.

I'm tired of starcrossed affairs. I want the other person to believe that we can work it out even if we met in a distant land. I don't want to fight oceans between us or parents, or closets. I want someone as ready as I am to live to the fullest with someone else. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind my relationships being action packed and intense, but for one, do I get to keep the guy at the end of the movie?

Maybe I'm being a little cheeky in here, but let me excercise fully my right to have basic instincts. I want sexual repression to be a ghost of the past. I want to feel how my flesh burns and melts with his. I want to speak the language of the body and talk to my fingers and my mouth when words fall short. Let me sigh when I wake up next to him every morning and then whisper "damn, he's hot.The hottest."

Spare me the need to be fake or to pretend I'm the strongest when I stumble. Allow me to find a place where I can be truly honest and not to have to pay for that with the sour coin of deceit, manipulation, and backstabbing. Give me someone who is comfortable both with a naked body and a naked soul.

One more thing: let me earn it. Retribute justly to my effort. I don't want to take anything for granted. I want to feel that I have fought for love and that it has paid off. Set me on a quest. Nonetheless, once I've struggled enough to find love, let me find him also gasping because he was on a similar race to get to me.

I trust I've been clear enough. Sorry if I'm being picky. I hope you found this request more down to earth that the model-like, demi-gods, James Dean like, prince charming shit I've asked before.

Ps.English is a must. I consider full management of another foreign language a plus.

This writing business got serious.

This is mostly an update for those of my friends - specially those who live overseas, who still have faith in my writing and may want to know how things are going for me. One of my 2013 resolutions remains finishing my novel, so here we go step by step.

First of all, I'm out of the writer's closet. I mean, I am a writer, and there's no turning back. The first question people will throw to you to is "have you published someting?" No, no, I haven't. That doesn't make me any less of a writer. That only makes me an unpublished author -- which is not terrible for my age. I'll come back to the publishing issue later.

So yeah, by making it public on my first facebook cover of the year, people have become interested. The most unexpected people want to know what I am writing and when I am planning on publishing. Whenever I say the strongest project at the moment is a fantasy novel, half of the people lose interest, but that's ok as the fantasy market has never been for everyone. It is surprising though when people want to hear more about the anthology of queer stories I've been writing -- just today I baptized it "Pride Disguised as Shame: Queer Stories of the Western World". Some people even advised to make it available through Amazon for Kindle in order to reach more effectively an audience interested in these topics. Why not, why not? I'll get the whole world trashing my Mathieu character in "Ne Suis Pas" and maybe the real one will hear about it.
Let's say I finish a work. That's roughly a little more than being half way to get the paperback copy. In Costa Rica, if you want to publish, you need to submit your work to a philologist so that they can check the language, fix coherence and similar. They charge about $1-$2 dollars PER PAGE. That's like a lot of money for a 500 page novel. Then you need to choose a publishing house. I took a workshop on this subject with Evelyn Ugalde, mostly a children's stories author who knows the local publishing business from deep inside, and she practically discouraged all the participants from publishing by subsided state publishing house. When she told us they cover the expenses but keep the 90% of each book sold for a five to six year contract, the whole thing sounded awfully unatractive. My interest in going for a big publishing house fell even lower when she said people had waited for 2 to 3 years just to hear from the editors on whether they are interested in publishing the book or not.
The option left for me is going for a private publising house, where you have to submit your work for approval and on top of that you have to self finance the design and the printing. In average, publishing  500 copies of my 500 page novel would cost me no less than $3000 with 70% to a 100% percent of royalties for each book sold (some bookstores keep up to 40% of the cost of the book) and an estimated overall revenue of $3500-- not that money matters that much to me, but something has to pay the investment and future projects.

As it turns out, writing and having good material is not enough, not in this country. While I find out about other opportunities in Mexico or Argentina for my novel in Spanish, I guess I'll just keep on writing and saving as this whole book project is yet another trip I'm taking. Evelyn said something encouraging though. She said "would you put a price to having your baby, your novel, in your hands and have other people reading it on the bus?" I get goosebumps just to think of the idea, and of course, the pleasure of sharing my world with other people comes very cheaply if I can get it for around $4000.

That's it for today, but I'll definitely elaborate more on the writing process in future posts. Thanks for supporting this dream.

Picture: Map of El Valle Negro or Black Valley. Setting of the first 8 chapters of my fantasy novel.

Clichés I love vs Clichés I hate

Clichés are unavoidable in our lives.  You seem to build your teenage years around them --the fact that people find them so goddamn relatable make them extremely appealing and hard not to use. Then you grow up and start the quest of defining yourself for real -- that assuming you woke up from the Matrix. During this period, clichés become frobidden, satanized. However, life plays tricks on you, give your story spin offs, and just when you thought you were original, you come to accept that some clichés, if not most of them, are real.

I came to terms with a few. I endorse them 100%. Here are my favorite clichés:

Life is a rollercoaster: Ups and downs. Everybody knows that. I have come to discover life seems like a rollercoaster even if you are not ridding it. Ok, some stages of your life are pretty intense: that's you in the ride. In some others, you have to see how other people suffer, enjoy, laugh, love (I particularly hate just witnessing other people being stupidly happy) while there is nothing, but absolutely nothing going on for you!!! Hey, life will be a rollercoaster for you soon. You just happened to be in the line to ride the cart again. While other people are on the highest part of the ride and with crazy levels of excitement, you are just watching. But it does not mean you haven't been there. It does not mean you won't be there soon.

You have to follow your heart: And I don't turn into Pocahontas every time I believe this. I don't know. Whenever I'm cold and calculating, life turns rather easy and after a while, uninteresting. If I follow a certain path driven by fear of losing ground, I gain little. If I base my decisions on money, I end up losing a piece of soul. I follow my heart and what I deep inside feel is true and then all becomes bliss. Since I follow my heart, my life flows smoothly.

Sometimes you are truly alone because nobody stands where you are: Friends will rain on you with positive vibes if you ever say you are alone. Truth is not even your closest friends can always go with you to the emotional place you are heading. Some things in life you have to do because your heart is telling you so (cliché inside a cliché: Cliché inception?) You may have a lot of loving people around, but if no one understands the loneliness you're going trough in your job, in your every day desicion making, in your room when you turn the lights off, in your head when you cannot convey your thoughts without having people staring at you like you're crazy... then you are truly alone, aren't you?

And here's a few I hate:

Nobody's perfect: Most of people shield behind this to avoid compromise. I mean, it is a given, just as the fact that you breathe. So if you fail, you either keep trying, apologize if you have to, change your methods, do something about it until you can do it. Nobody's perfect: everyone breathes. Same darn thing! If something is inherent to the human condition, you don't need to state it over and over. Flying was not a human ability, but someone bright enough created a machine for that. Limitations only exist in your head.

If it is meant to be, it will be: From my point of view, absolutely nothing is meant to be. Life's what you make of it. I've met 35 and 45 year old virgins who are still waiting for whenever it will be for them. I have met people who don't put any effort in a relationship because if it does not work, it wasn't meant to be. Sure,  like things are supposed to work magically (some do, but that's another hippie chapter and does not apply to relationships.) I'm fed up of people waiting for destiny to figure out all for them when they comfortably sit down and just criticize others that actually do something with their lives.

Embrace your clichés and keep discovering life to see if you end up making new ones. Every day that passes, I'm more fond of phrases like "Perseverance is the key to success" and "dream big" because they are somehow becoming real. I wouldn't mind if that happens. We'll see, we'll see. 

Fantasy Saves the Day.

So, after two weeks of holiday, I’m reluctant to go back to work. And it troubles me because I really like my job as much as one can like a job. It took me sometime, but now I figured what is it that I hate so much about going back to a schedule: routine kills the fantasy of life. There’s so little to discover and so little to feel amazed by in a stack of papers to file, in a succession of calls to make, e-mails to write, problems to solve, in a shift that promises to take 8 hours of your day and ends up taking nine, ten…

While on holidays, I felt so certain I could even give tips on how to break the routine, but today the routine wore me off. Isaac 0, Reality 1. Not for that, I’ve given up on trying to incorporate fantasy in my tasks through the day. Generally, just to remain sane, I don’t cross the street but play Frogger real life size instead. I make up a random mission that justifies the need to go the office:

“The office is haunted and no one will be able to work if I don’t go and cast a protective spell.”

“I’m going to be an undercover boss today, and I’ll see if they notice. Whoever does, gets chocolate ”

“I work for an office that keeps the flowing of good energy between realms and dimensions. It is my mission to maintain the balance between worlds and make sure no bad flow of energy reaches the world’s portals” (uh?)

The antidote to monotony I use in my working space is origami figures other people have made (they store the memory of the person’s face making it in front of my desk and I can access that happy moment by looking at the finalized piece.) My note holder is a panda that allows me to play with it a little if the day is becoming too hard to bear.

And then when the night falls, I’m all kind of characters from a DJ in a club to the crafter of the world that only lives inside my head. I think that if I keep going like this, it will be very unlikely that I snap under stress and maybe the weekend, when fantasy reigns, might not be so far away after all.

One moment of fantasy you didn’t lose when you grew up.

The Rise of the Guardians, the last kid movie by Dreamworks, awoke my inner kid so badly that I wasn’t even trying to hide I had a regression. I ran to the cinema again and by myself to watch the movie for a second time. I ran to Mcdonalds  and ask the woman at the desk, so proudly she would have been able to give me the “you’re a gown up adult” look, ”I want a happy meal”. I got Sandman, hands down my favorite because he makes dreams and how cool is that!!! Anyway, I found incredibly profound that each guardian had a core. All of the cores together formed the essence of what being a child is all about: discovery and awe, fun, dreams and hope.  I don’t want to lose any of that, and now that I’m aware of how we lose all that with the years, chances are I remain acting a bit as a child for the rest of my life just to keep the magic going.

That’s because you are crazy, Isaac. Uhum,right, I forgot the rest of the humanity does not use their imagination.

Right, call me crazy for living in an alternative reality, but truth is you haven’t lost those fantastic moments and you have even incorporated them to your routine. Most people sing or at least have sung in the shower. The numbers of bath sponges that have served as imaginary microphones exceeds my counting capacity. I have heard people singing so passionately in the shower I dare to assert they are living a concert in their heads. They are even in the concert or giving the concert, surrounded by jumping people and laser lights if not a super complex stage and a roaring crowd at their feet. It might be an adult dream, but it is fantasizing nonetheless. For a few minutes, you’re in a musical, or you’re covering an artist, collaborating with them in a single, hearing the crowd singing your own song as you extend the mic over them while you listen, recline your back, nod,and smile because the fuckers know the song by heart!!!!

So, I’ve asked a few people if they sing in the shower, even knowing that some of them have zero talent, and most have acknowledged doing it. If I had a penny for every person I’ve heard singing in the shower…“It just comes out and you can’t avoid it!” Ha! Clear evidence of fantasy.

Those who remain silent in the shower might be hiding something worse: in their fantasies, they become water creatures, or ninjas who need to avoid needles, or explorers jumping in a waterfall. “Just a shower” Uh? No way.

Fantasy keeps the inner child alive because it in itself is composed by awe, hopes, dreams, and fun. You try to find any of those in your enviroment, you fantasize. I guess getting rid of good old fantasy ain`t that easy after all.

And just because I feel like it, here is a picture of Sandman having fun.