“It was very difficult to leave, but the church tried to control too much of our lives,” Camilla continued. We went on to sit at different tables for dinner, but we found each other several times over the next three hours, drawn together by what I came to recognize as the incongruous, shared experience of having to clarify who we were now to people we knew but hadn’t seen in a long time. My equivalent of her “I’m not with the church anymore” was “I’m a woman now,” a request to interact with us on different terms than our past selves. I also wondered how much she regretted her college life, how she had been so drawn to that church that she wasn’t able to focus on much else. Thinking of her made me think about what it would have been like if I had been a woman in college, to have skipped my days as a gay man. But while I wished I’d been more open about being Filipino at Harvard, that I’d had the self-assurance then to tell anyone who judged me to go fuck themselves, I couldn’t bring myself to wish I had never been a man, because my life as a man was part of the complexity of my being, this unusual person I had become, someone whose insights I cherished. In the superficial climate of a reunion reception, where we mainly talked about facts and only grazed over feelings, I wished the same for Camilla, an acknowledgment of what her past provided her, even when she found herself turning away from it.

I also couldn’t help but feel that Camilla and I were alike in another way, because the experience of being gay felt in some ways like belonging to a strict church. Feminine men in the gay community were relegated to such inferiority that I eventually couldn’t stay, even though I belonged there in principle. It wasn’t that I didn’t resonate with being a gay man—in similar ways to Camilla joining BCC because she was a Christian—but it was the specific, masculinity-obsessed form gay male culture took in America that I eventually couldn’t tolerate. Gender transition provided me with much greater freedom of expression, the ability to determine the forms of femininity I wanted to embody, instead of feeling like I had to negotiate every feminine accessory or mannerism with a strict gay church that constantly threatened to reject me. I would have probably been bakla had I stayed in the Philippines, remained in that more indeterminate space in a culture where that was possible.