One writer reflects on how his all-boys barkada from an all-boys school has matured, revealing how larger cultural norms on masculinity have evolved

Is our support of minority causes tokenistic? Driven by the fear of being canceled?

Do you befriend gay people out of genuine interest in their personality and character or just so you can tick off some boxes on your wokeness checklist?

Morgan Freeman seems suspicious of such motives. In a counterintuitive 2005 interview, the American actor shared how he found Black History Month ridiculous, telling the host that “I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace. You know me as Morgan Freeman. not going to say, ‘I know this white guy named Mike Wallace.’”

While Freeman’s sentiment is profound, apparently the manifestation of true equity, getting there is the perennial question. I don’t have any answers yet on the how, but perhaps I can share an experience of what it feels like to experience a bit of “there.”

In the Philippines, despite cultural and media ubiquity, the LGBT+ community remains marginalized: career opportunities and civil rights remain wanting, all while words identifying them persist as slurs and insults.

Picture this: A high school barkada from an all-boy’s school, loud and boisterous in the way that’s acceptable, even expected, when you’re smack in your teens. It’s a Friday after exam week in the early 2000s and they’re chilling in their friend’s house, poolside. It’s my barkada, but it could be yours, too.

It’s a pastiche of dick jokes, cheap alcohol-laced breath, clumsy guitar strumming accompanied by dinner-table drumming, pizza oil-stained playing cards, the muffled sounds of CGI gunfire and plasma explosions, and air three pointers and shouts of “Santos for thu-reee!” whenever a kill is made.

You can probably smell what you have just read.

One bro is sitting on another’s lap, his arms wrapped around the neck of chair-bro in an exaggeratedly comical, even stereotypical feminine way. Both bros used faux high-pitched voices in their faux couple talk. The scene draws laughter from the other bros gathered around doing other things.

All this underpins a general sexual frustration felt at that time. Sixteen and stupid were we, many still too shy to just freakin’ talk to girls all while stalking their photos in proto-Facebook. We knew no one in our barkada was really gay.

Or so we in our insular, ignorant world thought.

Fast forward to college, the early 2010s, and a lot of awkward lessons were learned, err, unlearned. Rape jokes weren’t cool. Groping wasn’t cool. Misogynist and homophobic jokes weren’t cool, and no, you couldn’t complain about how “feminized” the org flyer designs had become.

I know. It sounds basic. We sound almost barbaric realizing these things so late in life.

But this isn’t an exaggeration. It’s a sum of shared experiences from those of us coming from all-boys schools suddenly thrust into a co-ed environment.

Wind the clock forward a little more and it’s the first year since graduating from college. It’s a boys’ night out with the same barkada, but this time, there’s less alcohol volume, our voices are less loud, and the kind of jokes we tell are different. Still, we cheer with faux-threes and the CGI plasma persists.

Also, our significant others are there with us, not in their own world in a corner but their pizza-oily hands staining cards and console controllers, joining in the friendly-insult humor and comfy banter. Among these newcomers are a few men, the significant others of our bros. Two in our group also happen to be dating.

Is it same story across the batch and even in other batches to come? Laurence, an alumnus who graduated five years after we did, shares that while homophobia is vocally condemned by his peers, there remains an awkwardness between hyper-masculine types and openly gay individuals outside of gender studies classes and student council meetings.

Vince, a batchmate of mine now in law school, admits that while he and his high school friends during reunions consciously avoid language that marginalizes the LGBT+ community, full acceptance of gay peers has yet to truly sink in.

It’s more performative, he opines of our apparent gender-sensitivity, pushed by the fear of being “canceled” in the supreme court of social media, given the ubiquity of feminist and gender discourse today, not just in academic settings, but in casual, everyday conversations, at least among those attending higher education.

For readers yet unfamiliar, “cancellation” is slang for publicly shaming (often followed with ostracizing) someone for saying or doing something deemed problematic or insensitive. This especially thrives in a social media climate defined by instant reactions where nuance is largely left out.

At best, known abusers hiding behind institutional protections are brought to justice. At worst, everyday folk committing faux passes out of ignorance are placed at an irredeemable status.

Vince admits that he’s been privileged to have his deepest prejudices largely exposed and exorcised because of the crowd that’s come to accept him since his high school graduation, all while noting how among law frat boys, the older breed of male lawyers, and even among some high school groups, misogyny and homophobia persist.

Our section in high school was unique in that instead of being divided into a number of small cliques, the small cliques converged into two big groups composed mainly of the hyper-masculine basketball varsity-aspiring it-boy types on one hand and a loose collection of the bookish, geeky, and gay on the other hand, the latter being my barkada.

We’re a big group, around 24 individuals, not counting those who, for one reason or another, lie low on social media, so it took a while for everyone to truly get along. And by a while, we mean seasons of squabbles, rivalry, one-upmanship, which were bitterly serious then, but are today laugh-over-beer material.

As psychologists have established that there is a tendency to conform among teenagers, the pressure to have a clearly defined-if-one-sided identity in high school is such that rarely does the poetic side of a jock come out, just as a geek who does like to party wonders if he can invite his Call of Duty friends to an EDM tent.

Take that logic and apply it to the gays in the batch and it becomes clear why they converged into a large barkada spanning all 14 sections with 40-plus students each. But turn the notches of stigma up, because even the geeks and nerds, already outsiders, further othered the LGBT+ members within their ranks.

Girls and women are encouraged to explore all sides of femininity, to embrace both grace and power, motherhood and independence. But what about boys?

It may not have been overt, but aggression isn’t always goose-stepping storm troopers chanting sig heil! as much as it’s the near-daily hammering of homophobic asides, the use of “bakla!” as an insult, and the groping of actually-gay young men to channel sexual frustration in the then-absence of a female touch.

Eventually, too, the two big groups became comfortable enough to go beyond the one-sided identity-markers of our teens. Still, (ever undying) rumor has it that the gays in our class first came out to our barkada rather than to the “jocks.”

It seems like the stigma against non-hetero sexuality and gender-nonconformity still exists under the veneer of performative acceptance given that masculinity is, in its essence, performative, that is, fulfilling a set of expectations in the way we carry ourselves, relate to others (especially those we’ve othered), all the way to the careers we choose.

In our formative years, we learned how to perform a kind of masculinity built on misdirected strength and insecure exclusivity. Now we have to unlearn that and learn behaviors essentially in contrast to what we believed were standard.

Ideas have reached a point where the masculinity of yesteryears is largely deconstructed, but perhaps now it’s time to shape a new identity young men (and gender-nonconforming women) can aspire to. Girls and women are encouraged to explore all sides of femininity, to embrace both grace and power, motherhood and independence. But what about boys?

Going back to Vince’s insight on male performative gender-sensitivity, he adds that, while “cancel culture” has made heterosexual men more accepting on the outside, its very nature cannot make us go beyond walking on eggshells. In fact, existing prejudices might further get entrenched as male resentment festers.

A number of straight men also participate in cancel culture, and they often come from a good place with good intentions. But do we really want to help the causes we profess to care about, or is it simply enough to go to sleep in our comfortable beds having been told that we’re “fighting the good fight?”

Men need to start having deeper, more uncomfortable conversations with and among themselves, but for that to happen, the noise barrage that has become popular discourse needs to let the waters still.

Only then can the moon’s reflection come to light, undistorted.

Note: Names have been changed to protect privacy.