EILEEN TABIOS Engages
Boys’ Love by Danton Remoto
(Penguin Random House SEA, 2025)
Danton Remoto’s Boys’ Love surprised me—it’s the most tender novel-writing I’ve read in years, which is also notable in today’s times when novels are praised specifically for their edgy writing (whether in tone, subject or approach). It’s refreshing to experience its lightness that’s admirable because I don’t think it’s easy to sustain, particularly because its story is about love in its many forms, including the traumatic and anguished. There are scenes that in the hands of other writers would be developed in a more fraught—and louder—manner, versus Remoto’s approach that is elegantly understated without diminishing emotion or passion. Indeed, at the beginning of my read, I wondered whether the point of the novel was its nuanced stylishness, that is, its stylishness through language; at one point while reading it, I even felt the sensibility, while less melancholic, of Wong Kar-Wai’s poignant film, “In the Mood for Love.” (I almost feel silly hearkening Wong Kar-Wai but there ya go…)
At first, I thought its story was to present the life of a gay man, Jon, through his romantic crushes, encounters, and relationships. It's all that but but it wasn’t until I reached the end of Chapter 21 that I realized what, it seems to me, is the very raison d'être of the book:
But I was also sad. My shoulders were always wet during the workshop sessions, when younger gays would cry their eyes out as we talked about coming out, about our different loves, and the indifference of a God fashioned by the conservative Catholic Church. For this Church, God was outside the gays’ lives, so far away, paring his fingernails.
But we were coming out together, and in that warm circle we knew that we would never be alone again. (P. 87)
In the above excerpt, we can see the novel’s merit in normalizing gay life, including the periods of coming of age as well as aging (I found Chapter 37’s presentations of “old boys” particularly moving). I imagine that a gay reader might, indeed, feel less alone with the persuasive—and comforting—thought from the novel that there are others like him, that his life and lifestyle need not be closeted but is deserving of the same sunlight that kisses other types of lives. The book’s protagonist not only bears the pronoun “I” but also the “we” of the gay community, something also exemplified by the beginnings of Chapter 26 on “Gay Men In Their Thirties”:
The same keenly aware writing also generates empathy from non-gay readers, through its tenderness combined with the help of humor, wit, and a literary education that drops the names of Carson McCullers, T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Carolyn Forche, William Faulkner, Edmund White (the protagonist’s favorite author), W.H. Auden, Anton Chekhov, Ben Santos, Wilfrido D. Nolledo, Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, among others. If one imbibed from this round-up of writers’ works, one can only become a better writer, as illustrated by Remoto.
To the reader’s advantage, the book features an appendix that interviews Remoto about his writing and, having read the novel before the appendix, that’s how I learned that what I’ve been calling “lightness” was a goal:
I always try to avoid heavy-handed writing. In my mind, a feather touch could also be deadly, like the small green snake coiled at the bottom of the toilet bowl in the penthouse of an expensive condo in Singapore. (P. 177)
At that, I can only congratulate the novelist for having attained his goal. Relatedly, it’s fitting that Chapter 36 is comprised solely of a poem, “Room.” For what is a story like Boy’s Love without depicting sex? Biologically-infused prose, though, might have been too heavy-handed, but not a—or this—poem. In “Room,” roaming tongues, growing nipples, humming pores, and awakening thighs—to paraphrase from the poem’s lines—avoid becoming prosaic if not pornographic through prose’s specific narration.
Further, Remoto’s writing technique is noticeably stellar in at least three other ways:
1.) —his writing contains a rhythm that smoothens the words' passage in the readers' minds, e.g. the excerpt below in No. 2;
2.) —the use of slyly inserted political references, such as in the excerpt below that describes the protagonist meeting a princess, though writ in such a light-handed manner that one who’d never heard of Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. might still appreciate it; this excerpt is also quite clever because Marcos’ daughter Imee—who works hard at her gorgeous façade—actually does bear a chin that resembles a horse’s muzzle from a certain angle:
I did not curtsy; I did not even bow before her. I just looked through her, the way she did to me. She should first ask someone to trim her long chin. It looked like the half-moon chin of the daughter of a controversial politician, the one who said, “he refused to die” but he ultimately did die, the poor sod, another dictator bloated beyond belief by lupus erythematosus, a disease in his kidney that ate away at his insides and later drained the colour from his face, making him look like a mask made of ash. Like a whole archipelago taking revenge on the body politic. (P. 4)
3.) —the insertion of what could be actual newspaper columns and literary events speeches. It wouldn’t surprise me if the newspaper column, presented as written for The Manila Chronicle, might be a real (i.e. non-fiction) column written by Remoto since he also is a real-life columnist for The Manila Times. Same thoughts with regards to the speeches the protagonist delivers during a book launch and a university forum since Remoto has participated in such real-life activities. But this insertion technique—which, when I heard of it prior to reading the novel was something I cynically thought could be a good way to increase page count (the novel runs a mere 173 pages, including the column and speeches)—proves itself effective. Remoto is not cheating because they are organically woven into the novel’s narrative. They indeed could have been written for the purpose of the novel rather than being recycled (if they are)—even if they are recycled, they don’t stand out as elements that were arbitrarily collaged into the novel’s narrative.
Finally, for something I won’t discuss much so as to encourage readers to check out the novel for themselves, the novel’s ending is a nice surprise; it presents a character—a non-boy—seemingly out of nowhere but which can only remind of the generous, indeed, near-infinite expanse of love, if we allow such love to blossom.
For many reasons, therefore, Boys’ Love is now my favorite novel by Danton Remoto. I’m so glad to meet you!
*****
Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent releases include the poetry collections Engkanto in the Diaspora and Because I Love You, I Become War; a novel The Balikbayan Artist; an art monograph Drawing Six Directions; an autobiography, The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography; and a flash fiction collection Getting To One. Other books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times which was translated by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon and two French poetry books, PRISES (Double Take) (trans. Fanny Garin) and La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery). Forthcoming in 2026 is a selected art stories collection, The Erotic Space Around Objects. Her literary inventions include the "Kapwa novel"; the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form; the MDR Poetry Generator that create poems totaling theoretical infinity; the “Flooid” poetry form that’s rooted in a good deed; and the monobon poetry form based on the monostich. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
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