Free Mahu Fire by Neil Plakcy

all of you grew up, and what it was like there, but I can tell you in a small town in the Philippines in the 1960s, we didn’t have gay porn. We didn’t have magazines like The Advocate or TV shows like Will and Grace to tell us that it was all right to feel the way we did.” He stopped under the multicolored arc of balloons. “No rainbow coalition, gay pride, pink triangles or tea dances.”
    He put one hand in front of his stomach and the other up in the air and did a little Latin dance step. In his tuxedo and black patent leather loafers, he could have been a contestant on any of those TV dance shows. Somebody in the audience called out, “Olé!”
    Vic gave us a quick bow. “There was one guy in our town I was pretty sure was gay. He cut all the ladies’ hair and gossiped with them, and he wore these gauzy shirts and bell-bottom pants. Once a month he went in to Manila and got a permanent in his hair. One day, he saw me hanging around his little shop when he was about to close. I guess I was about fifteen then. He must have recognized the look in my eyes, because he invited me inside.”
    I noticed a guy in a tux slip in the front door, sweating heavily, and head for the bathroom. I hoped that he hadn’t gotten sick from the appetizers; I’d eaten a bunch of them myself, and I’d seen most of my family eating, too.
    Back at the front of the room, Vic smiled again. “You probably all know what happened next.” There was some laughter in the audience. “What you don’t know is that my father found out almost immediately. He kicked me out of the house, and the hairdresser said he couldn’t take me in, because he’d get thrown out of town, lose his house and his business. He gave me the name of a guy in Manila and he lent me money for the bus fare.
    “You know what a fifteen-year-old boy does in Manila, when he doesn’t have a family or any money, not even a high school diploma? He goes to work in a pleasure house. That’s where my hairdresser friend sent me; it’s where he went once a month, before he got his hair done. It was the height of the Vietnam war and Manila was full of GIs, on their way to the war, or on their way home, or taking some R&R. There were plenty of them who were happy to have sex with a cute little Filipino boy with a nice ass.”
    The sweaty guy seemed vaguely familiar; perhaps I’d met him in a bar somewhere. I watched the restroom, waiting for him to come back out, trying to get a fix on where I’d seen him before. I generally have a good memory for faces, which comes in handy as a homicide detective. That made it particularly frustrating when I met someone I just couldn’t place.
    Vic looked rueful. “My ass was pretty nice then,” he said, nodding.
    Gunter gave him a wolf whistle, and he smiled.
    “You can see me after the party,” he said, and everybody laughed. “Me and Jerry, that is. I don’t want you to forget about Jerry. He’s the most important person in my life, but I’m gonna get to him in a couple of minutes.”
    He looked out at the crowd. “Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, I was a sixteen-year-old prostitute, and I was pretty miserable. I missed my mama and my family and my friends, and a lot of the guys were pretty rough with me. They called me ugly names, and sometimes they had to hurt me in order to make themselves feel good. A couple of the other boys and I used to get hold of this terrible cheap beer and drink. The madam who ran the brothel started smelling our breath, though, so we couldn’t drink as much, and we started using heroin.”
    He held his arms out to us. “I haven’t shot up in years, so my tracks have faded, but you can still see them. Eventually, this one older gentleman, a Frenchman living in Manila, took a liking to me, and he bought me away from the pleasure house. I lived with him for four years as his houseboy, until he died. Then I made my way, doing this and that, and eventually I landed here in Hawai’i.”
    I looked toward the