Hinko Livernoix, Hong Kong Up front: I am the token Filipino transexual transgendered bi-racial gay man of the Magellan's Log staff, a position which, let me tell you, makes quite a few demands on a person. Think about it: My position in any given pecking order is determined by (among ofther legal, social, moral, and religious factors) Title IX, the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and the Fourteenth Amendment. I won't bore you with all the details behind my fascinating DNA. For a quick sampler, let's do my parents. My mother is easy: she was Chinese, through and through. The clarity of her genes speaks powerfully through my own lissome frame and almond-eyed visage. Papa is a little more difficult. His mother (whose name he adopted when he reached adulthood) was French. Her family, coming the long way round via South America, somehow was stranded in Manila and never made it as far as French Indochina a.k.a. Vietnam. Anyway, Papa after graduating from sixth grade, hired on as assistant houseboy with the Livernoix's, the paterfamilias of which had a rather sizeable factory supplying ball bearings to much of southeast Asia. Papa was, how to say this, always oversexed, and, I might add, proud of it. He would fuck anything that moved if the mood struck him. And it did. Strike him. Often. Mama, née Marie, soon fell under his spell (oh those almond eyes, oh that ready cock) and they, I understand, carried on undetected for several years. Lately I've begun to wonder if their little ruse succeeded so easily because Papa was perhaps providing extra-curricular services to other members of the Livernoix household, not excluding the paterfamilias himself. Then I came along, forcing marriage, and Papa's surprisingly easy and quick acceptance into a family many steps above his own near-peasant background (more evidence of his wide-ranging dilly-dallying?). One thing's for sure: I grew up in a tropical hotbed (so to speak) of polymorphousness the likes of which turgid old Sigmund never dreamed: the Livernoix's and their lower-upper-class ilk, Papa and his lower-lower-class relatives, the ebb and flow of an international set of business acquaintances filled the large house and kept a covey of servants busy-busy-busy. How much of a go-getter was mein Papa? You know that famous World War II photo of MacArthur wading through the surf as my country was liberated from the Japanese? If you'll notice, the good general is slightly eyes left, looking just off-camera. Truth is, he was looking at Papa, who'd not only come down to the beach to greet the American liberator but had worn identical aviator glasses and was smoking an identical corncob pipe. Forgive me. I'm going on much too long about this. It for some reason seems important to give a flavor-- if not a reason-- to my highly gender-mixed self. As soon as I finished George Washington High School for Boys (and what a fine bunch of boys it was, let me tell you) in Manila, I saw to it that Papa shipped me out to happier climes. Manila may have been broad-minded in those days, but it wasn't ready for one such as I. (Come to think of it, Hong Kong today isn't either--but that's another story.) Off I went to Paris, where the Sorbonne held my interest and Papa's money for about three weeks. I discovered it was very difficult to take a culture seriously which reveres gravy (even in its most varied forms, and even if they refer to it in its many forms as "sauces") and whose primary cultural event is a month-long bicycle race and believe those two interests place it at the top of the human heap. There followed a fast odyssey of Europe. A semester in Florence, a spring break in Amsterdam, an Oktoberfest in Munich. But my downfall came in Barcelona. I was sitting on the steps of Gaudi's unfinished masterpiece, his dream in stone of what a cathedral should really look like, the "Sagrada Familia," when I noticed one of the young guards patrolling the area was staring at me from beneath a head full of the curliest blondest hair imagineable. To be continued... |
