My straight best friend calls me ‘jowa’

We were on a bus heading to an LRT station when he told me, “Yesterday, when I picked up my second girlfriend from work…” I was shocked. I didn’t know that my closest straight buddy has another girl.

“Wait, what ‘second girlfriend’?” I asked.

“Aren’t you the first one?” he replied. Of course, how could I forget our running joke that we’re so close people mistake us for a gay couple sometimes? That setup has been normalized that even his (one and only) girlfriend joins in on the fun, too.

In one of our conversations, we noticed how girls could hold hands in public without suffering from prejudice, unlike if guys did it.

So, whenever we feel silly, we do it as a social experiment — to check if people would notice or, worse, stare. We think it’s a good exercise that gives us confidence and helps us promote tolerance.

Sometimes we also call each other “babe” or “jowa” in public to see who minds — and someone always does.

Girls can poke each other’s boobs and it looks funny, even cute and silly. But if boys touch each other’s crotch or behind, the reaction is different. Suddenly, people forcibly unthink what they just saw.

In the new world language, girls being touchy and clingy get all the cute emojis, while guys receive a punctuation mark. Make that plural if one of them is straight and the other isn’t.

I’m lucky enough to have a bond brother who puts up with the complexities of having a gay friend. We don’t treat “I love you” as a World War code that cannot be disclosed lest countries fall apart. We can say such a vulnerable phrase as a joke, a postscript to a birthday greeting, or an alternative to “I got your back.”

“I miss you” is not a rarity for us, either. The same is true with “Ingat ka” and “Kumusta?”

We play board games with friends and, like boys (who will always be boys) secretly outwit and outplay each other. When someone loses, he can easily joke, “Lagi naman akong pangalawa lang sa’yo.” And when someone wins, he is free to guarantee, “Hindi ka naman galit sa ‘kin, ’di ba?”

“Oo nga, seryoso.” More than a decade has passed since we became friends, and I can share that the secret to our bond is honesty without a hint of malice. I repeat, without a hint of malice, so that every time I intentionally hit or touch his crotch and he does the same to me, it means we’re playing as brothers, not as daydreaming confused adults. We don’t do it to make each other feel uncomfortable; we do it because we are comfortable.

“It’s a guy thing,” and our female friends understand.

Thankfully, I have a nonhomophobic team that reassures us that what may be different in others’ eyes is not wrong but just that—different.

Hopefully soon, what is considered uncommon can be more visible. But, fine, perhaps less of the playful crotch-touching now, because we’re both in our late 20s.

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Ross Manicad, 27, paints, writes and talks a lot. He has a neglected blog, whenpencilwrites.blogspot.com.