Awesome! Charice Pempengco’s mom is a lesbian too!

So now it turns out, Charice Pempengco’s mom is also a lesbian. Oh, sorry, was a lesbian. According to Raquel Pempengco “she, too, was once a lesbian but chose family over her own sexual desires after meeting the young star’s father.” And there’s more…

“I’m the lesbian,” she told Bandila, according to a Huffington Post translation. “I’m the lesbian — until my mom sent me off to my husband and [Charice’s] father. I told Charice this before, I told her that I experienced what it’s like, too. But then I changed.”

Raquel apparently decided to speak out because of the backlash she has faced since her daughter’s coming out.

“I spoke out because I couldn’t take the accusations that I couldn’t accept my daughter,” she said. “If there’s one person who knows what it’s like, it’s me. But as you can see, I kept it hidden for so many years, because I didn’t want to destroy her.”

Whew! Too much information there. You wonder why these people use the media like it was some kind of confessional box. No wonder the Catholic faith is in decline. Its most effective scare tactic — its serving as a monopoly channel for confession — is under direct competition from the Philippine Media!

Trouble with celebrity is that those afflicted by it lose the plot. The irony that seems to be missed here is that by making such a big deal about being a lesbian (or having experimented with other gals in one’s youth) is that the topic becomes an even bigger source of scoopy topics for the Philippines’ eyeball-starved media.

I mean, hey, so what?

Apparently the religious powers-that-be have got lots of people by the nuts — including the management of the Inquirer.net who recently banned Pol Medina from its pages after his popular Pugad Baboy strip cracked a few jokes about lesbianism in St. Scho.

No surprise then why people still get the giggles and suddenly start speaking in hushed tones when the subject of homosexuality comes up at a dinner party. Rather than face the matter head on, we drive the issue underground where misinformation thrives. Yet we all pay top peso to educate our kids in Catholic schools. Go figure. The country’s men-in-robes hold our parents’ wallets by the balls too!

As really astute businesspeople, maybe our priests and nuns should re-think this whole business strategy of demonising lesbianism. Today’s parents are no longer of the generation that defined Atenistas as dashing boys who carried rosaries in their pockets. Though, on second thought, referring to the motherly insight of blogger Angela Stuart-Santiago, maybe not…

[…] if parents of st. scho students were all as sophisticated as this in their thinking and perception, i’d say, and they’d say, indeed, so what if st. scho or any other exclusive school has lesbians among its students and faculty. but the reality is that most parents, who have just invested in their kids education in st. scho for a new schoolyear, are far from sophisticated in their thinking on sexual matters, and that comic strip could only be causing them undue anxieties about their daughters’ sexualities-in-the-making, and the really conservative ones would be wondering where to transfer their daughters next year, thinking that st. scho must be the worst since it was singled out in that comic strip.

If Raquel Pempengco had a bit of sophistication, she would have spared us the awful cringe that crawled up our spines when she made that sensational press release about her “true” sexual orientation. Funny thing, though, is that I’ve always known St. Scho to be a bastion of progressive thinking — a breeding ground for Leftists, in fact. One would’ve thought an inclination to breed commies rather than being a legendary nest for girl-on-girl action would have been the bigger outrage here.

[Photo courtesy The Guardian.]

benign0

benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.com.