An Introduction:

Prelude to a Kissing Workshop
Watkins Glen State Park, New York
August 1998
By Melisa J. San Luis Casumbal

 

The Toronto Pinays arrive under a high moon having completed yet another border crossing. The Toronto Pinays join the New York Pinays join the Bay Area Pinays join the LA Pinays join the Chicago Pinays join the Boston Pinays join the DC Pinay and we make 52. Fifty-two. We are 52 queer Pilipinas all on one mountain in upstate New York. We are 52 queer Pilipinas in North America. We are 52 queer Pilipinas in North America who have found each other. I learn first that your preference for Canadian beer — beer na beer — produces proud and cacophonous belching.    Your sated grin dizzys me as the dust and giggling around you settle. The next day, in the magic hour gaffing dripping through Seneca Nation oaks I become familiar with how comfortably all your limbs belong to you. You lean forward, shifting your picnic bench vantage, lithe loving lithe forearms against knees Hilfiger sweatshirt grazing your khakis, to explain to your barkada who I labor for "She works with families families of people like us..." Alam ko wala but that, in all your tomboy fierceness, you know you are par too sexy por da rest ob us, hah... smoother, cooler than yelo melting on the ridges of a stomach which you ask me to display. All I know of you is a hungry, drunken pout, a just undereager-enough friendliness, your loudness as ringleader, your name. Wanting to steal your lover's girlfriend, I turn the volume up. "Mamiya," I whisper, fingers against your pocket, many tequila shots after you've kissed my neck. "Wait til later..." Before the tequila, your barkada — voyeurs of my barkada, playing falling-down in Finger Lake — sit in sultry repose on a rocky jetty. Your "I'm alllll that" smile turns away at the last moment deflecting most of my moist, slippery gaze. It lingers on your kayumanggi. I flex in my bikini as the flashbulb pops. Eye contact would be obvious. We defy. I am resentful to see my well-honed tactics engaged against me. Disarmed, I thrash about in the lake water, wanting unwant for the pare in the "Aguila" jersey. Take this desire away, to someone else's homeland. I enfold it in a box, a pasalubong for you. Balikbayan with me to a place where gender doesn't regulate. Balikbayan with me to a new familiar where babae don't abandon wet cupping of breasts tongue in viscous skin folds or moments of kaibigan quietude to have a family with "a real man." My family is now ikaw sia ako kayo nila breasts tongue kaibigan kayumanggi eto na. I work... I work for families like us. Take my want back over the northern border to your babae lover. Tell her I am here wanting unwant for you. Tell her you are a real man, a trans man. Tell her we are working... We are building our families. May our families grow because of people like us. © Melisa J. San Luis Casumbal

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