bosco has left the building

i.
my friend bosco passed away last wednesday and on saturday he was cremated. i went to hong kong with my partner to pay respect to our common friend for the last time. i desperately tried to get drunk on the plane, not to drown my sorrows, but to remain calm throughout the rough flight. and when it didn't work well, i played reels of bosco home movies in my head.

bosco and i met yonks ago when we boarded the same flight to hong kong from manila. it was fate that brought us together on that flight, seated next to each other. he had spent a week in puerto galera with his pinoy boyfriend and i was leaving manila to run away from mine. we became friends on that flight and had been so since.

on a trip to hong kong with my partner, i discovered that we both knew bosco.

"would that be bosco tam?"

"yes. you know him?"

"yes. we worked on a project together. nice fellow."

it turned out that my partner and i have very similar bosco stories. apparently, he had only one set of manners for everyone: evenly considerate, generous, involved. bosco of the age-defying body. bosco of the tiny speedos. bosco of the constant enthusiasm. bosco of the thoughtful gestures. lost keys, missed lights, break-ups, fast cash - all of us seemed to have benefited from bosco's boundless generosity.

and yet none of us seemed to have been particularly close to him. we were all friends of bosco, a loose, malleable group that included people he had worked with, slept with, helped, saved, inspired. as much as some of us wanted him to ourselves in selfish, proprietary ways, he had managed to keep us all equal and at a distance.

we had speculated that he was somehow attached - what with a body that was the draw in a huge men's cologne campaign - the model bailed apparently and bosco, who was on hand at the shoot, was asked to strip naked to take the talent's place - but none of us had met his partner whom we all assumed existed. and it didn't really matter. it was all about us where bosco was concerned.

ii.
just outside the wake hung photos of bosco, in the buff, in mildly erotic poses, a most bizarre display put together by his friends. there were two registers, one conventional and another online - yes, the tributes and eulogies were on podcast and the wake on video stream. another desk where pledges for an AIDS charity were being accepted was placed in another corner.  

i refused to look at bosco's remains. i sat at the back of the pews with my partner who calmly handed me cups of tea and pointed out people he knows. i looked around and saw familiar faces: bosco's family, his cute older brother, his band of friends - a sea of homosexual men in expensive clothes and expensive haircuts, manufactured tan and manicured facial hairs, and bodies painstakingly shaped in gyms according the season's template. previously it was abs; this time it's all big guns.

i'm seeing more and more unusual if not downright bizarre gay rites. our weddings are different, our parties are different. there is just so much emphasis on being different, that deliberate attempt to deviate from the norm. do we need yet another way of showing how different we are? i thought the agenda was to integrate ourselves with the rest without losing our identity? is our identity then foisted on a few gimmicks the inevitably require plumes, sequins and eyeliner?

i do not begrudge fellow gay men who engage in this behaviour. hey, i have my quirks, too! between a loaf of bread and a bunch of flowers, i'll always choose the latter. but for us to show how different we are by crossing good taste and decorum is not something that i understand.

on the flight back to singapore, i enumerated to my partner what i wouldn't have in my wake. he ignored me and pretended to be asleep.

iii.
we ended the weekend with a concert at the esplanade on sunday night - the singapore youth chorale in a programme of liturgical hymns and japanese folk songs. somewhere in a sad rendition of panis angelicus i found myself crying.

my partner held my hand and gave it a squeeze. "missing bosco?" he whispered to me.