Did I say something wrong?

Imagine there’s no heaven, as John Lennon once did while dreaming up peace on earth. There’ll be no hell. There’ll be no morality. No good, no bad, either. Imagine how free we would be.
Or how lost. Or how doomed.

I remember the first time I witnessed sex in public. It was at the good, old Giraffe, the riot of a club in the mid-‘90s on street level at 6750 in Makati. The first few years, it wasthe club, but I mean THE club! It was new, new, new, not new as in newly opened, but new as in it changed the whole night scene. Before Giraffe, you walked into a club and you looked for a table, but at Giraffe, you didn’t want a table. You had to be on your toes, ready to dance, ready to mingle. And you stood right next to the likes of Aga Muhlach or Gretchen Barretto or Eric
Quizon or Tweetie de Leon.
 

In those first few years of Giraffe, it was sort of like a mixed gender club. No one cared if you were straight or bi or gay, unless they were sizing you up for a hookup. Otherwise, you just danced, danced, danced, Coronain hand, lime swirling through the amber liquid in its clear-glass bottle.
 

There was no dance floor, so you danced where you stood or you danced on the table top, yes, you did—What the table top was at Giraffe was the ledge at Faces of the previous decade. Madonna’s “Secret” was all the rage and I remember it playing mostly just before 2 a.m. Fridays or Saturdays, just when the music was revving up, alcohol was kicking in, and the party was nearing its peak. “Mmm mmm, somethin’s comin’ over,” whispered Madonna in her sex kitten voice and the party would somehow compress, the bodies squeezing into one another. I stood there, on a high, higher than the Rufino Pacific Tower, “the new altitude,” as I wrote in an ad I made for the building before it opened a new space in the Makati skyline just a year or two before.
 

I was watching two girls—two girls!—both beautiful and dressed as girls in ‘90s club wear and they were doing it. They were doing it. First, all this body-to-body movement, hips swaying together, hands going every which way, around the back of the neck, around the waist, at the swell of the backside, the small of the back, down the upper arms.
 

The lips then took their turn, tracing the jawline and the earlobes, the skin peeking through the neckline, before coming together, two pairs of lips, in a kiss that went from tentative pecks, to gentle caresses, to a torrid communion replete with mouths wide open and some tongue. It was sex, all right, in a shiny, vinyl mini skirt and fishnet stockings!
 

What is dance anyway, but, as Robert Frost put it, “the vertical expression of a horizontal desire?” But that wasn’t enough. A boy soon joined them, a young actor. Threesome, though the boy stayed in the peripheries, like a moth to a flame, like a ring around burning Saturn. Occasionally, he would be right in the center, but I could see the girls played the key roles in this ménage-a-trois. The boy was an accessory and he was content playing third fiddle. 

“Mmm mmm, somethin’s comin’ over me...” oohed Madonna, the material girl before she turned maternal girl before she turned into pop matriarch with a three decade-long reign, who, in collaboration with Steven Meisel in 1992, launched her Sex book to public shock, where she explored the very limits of this taboo subject with an old man, with a young boy, with Isabella Rosellini, with groups of two to infinity, and, well, there was a dog. She was a provocateur and she got the world at her fingertips. They did pay attention. They were, indeed, provoked.
 

Back in Giraffe, morality was left at the door, not by the most, but by the few and a few was all it took to make the club the talk of the town. The talk was not limited to the clubgoers. The talk was not limited to the night owls. The talk was not limited to the party animals. It was all over, even among the intellectual circles, in the columns of serious thinkers, the scholarly writers. It was such a phenomenon that the PR plan prepared for its reopening as a club (from a fine dining establishment) never had to be launched. 

There was so much bad publicity that it was soon known by so many other names—Gayraffe, Plastic City, Did I say something wrong? the New Hellhole of Makati... But then we all know it: Publicity, good or bad, is still publicity and back then it packed the place, especially after midnight, with the DJs playing music from all eras, from The Beatles and The Village People (Y.M.C.A!) to Hotdogs, to Sheryl Crow and Gabrielle and the party people going wild and wilder and wildest ‘til night turned to day.
 

One day, having partied into the New Year at Giraffe shortly after Media Noche with my family, my friends emerged into the 9 a.m. sun, not only drunk but already hung over. The plan was to cross Ayala Avenue for breakfast at the Peninsula, but as we stepped out into the sunlit pavement, I was momentarily blinded, daylight in my drunken eyes, sunshine on my intoxicated skin.
 

In that split second, I thought: Has the world ended? Is this hell? How strange that it’s true, everything good is illegal, immoral, or fattening (even deadly, with HIV, A.I.D.S., diabetes, emphysema, or alcoholic cirrhosis). Judging from the way we associate the worst things to sex, we could say sex must be the best thing, next maybe to chocolate and a fatty slice of pork belly or tequila with our rowdy, do-anything friends.
 

Shielding my eyes from the early morning sun, I turned back into the semi-darkness of after-party Giraffe. It was 9 a.m. on New Year’s Day, the wait staff had begun cleaning up the place, and there were only a few men and women left standing and dancing.
 

But the party was still going on. I asked myself what it would be like to be damned to eternal partying. In hindsight, I think at best it would be so damn’ tiring. And I’d die a million deaths of thirst. (The title and subtitle of this essay are borrowed from Madonna’s “Human Nature” off her 1994 studio album Bedtime Stories, where “Secret,” her other song discussed in this piece, was also among the tracks.)