THROUGH the years — married, and unmarried; celibate, or sexually active — writing became an important part of me because of the people who loved and appreciated my early works: my risk-taking first publishers in the early 1990s, the people who bought my first books and have continued to support me in every new title, and the readers who were kind and thoughtful enough to let me know how my books have changed their lives.
In some perverted way, I persevered in writing because I wanted to honor them, to make them proud, and to make them see that their faith in me was not in vain.
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It is my wish and prayer that people would enjoy reading my memoirs without prejudice against what I have become in the more than 20 years after their first publication.
These books are not high literature.
They are also not the Holy Scriptures.
They are only my humble, if beloved, memoirs.
Nowadays, I am happy as a gay man virtuously living his golden years.
But I look back with fondness, and gratefulness, to my writerly youth.
And to the truths that I lived, to the beauties that I loved, to the goodness that I believed in.
My present situation has nothing to do with Heart of My Youth.
But the beautiful “heart of my youth” has everything to do with the happy and gay man that I have now become.
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It’s a little stretch and strain for me to be verbose and elaborate in writing an introduction in an evidently extravagant and ostentatious style after so many years.
But I wanted to match the floridity and flamboyance of my youthful bravado in my memoirs.
So much has changed within me as a writer over the years.
Today, I seem to prefer writing short, simple sentences.
As if responding to, and going along with, the insta-culture of the millennials, a culture created around the always-on-the-go social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat.
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Right around my 50th birthday, Facebook connected me with a “fan” reader from more than 20 years ago.
This beautiful man is from Zamboanga City in southern Philippines.
I have a vague recollection of a letter from Zamboanga.
(But one cannot forget the name Zamboanga with its rare initial letter Z!)
It was one of the first fan mails I received in the 1990s.
Twenty years later, I met my fan reader online.
He told me a story: He was 15 when he first encountered my Book No. 4, Rated R (Giraffe Books: 1997).
He borrowed the signed copy of my book from his friend, and like a real book thief, never returned it.
He even ripped out the page — with my personalized dedication to his friend — just so he could keep the book for himself.
Sheepishly, he admitted that he still has the book to this day.
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More than 20 years after that fan mail, this young man, who has become a poet himself, made me cry with his even more eloquent confessions.
He said that he stole the book when he was 15 because he liked my poetic voice.
That it was like I was saying the things his young self wanted to say then.
And more than just the articulation, he admired how I seemed to have understood what he was going through in his adolescence.
Short of putting me on a pedestal, he also spoke of how he “borrowed my voice” for some time.
How he used my voice to sing his own poetry.
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His words, in bursts of messages on Facebook Messenger:
“When I was in high school, I wrote you a letter, and you replied to me with a handwritten one.
I was so happy considering that I was so young, and said the most naïve stuff, even comparing you to great writers that weren’t even in your comparative field.
Just imagine, a small-town boy from Zamboanga getting a letter from someone like you. Back then, that was like a huge affirmation.
Thank you again.
… I grew up with your poetry.
And every time I read them, somehow I hear my voice, too.
Know that, somehow, you are one of those voices I hear when I write.
I swear, a part of my writing voice is from reading your work.
I’m not even trying to patronize you.
It’s just as it is.
Rated R, … Purple Cat, and Moon River…were my canon growing up in the province.
It was the standard that I heaved myself from in writing.
… To sum it up, I’m just the boy who stole a book, and saw the world differently after reading it.” (To be continued as “The youth who stole PSN)/PN
