First met Gil/Gilda/Marimar (GGM) in 2002, it was a day to remember…my friends T & B took me to meet this pinoy/pinay who lived along Hun Sen Park, in a small apartment that also served as her beauty salon, where with a wink, and a sly drawing of a curtain, and you got more than a shampoo, and she a facial. GGM had been in Cambodia several years by then, and was in an intersting stage of inter-sexuality, taking hormones regularly to be more voluptuous. GGM had a vicious cackle for a laugh that was indescribable and eerily characteristic, which s/he could turn up at will, like the canned laughter on a TV show. Or maybe GGM souned like that to stave off a nervous fit, or to attract attention, i really didnt know. But s/he was a character !
We had side-splitting laughter that day, it was like listening to a stand-up comic who hit you where it mattered…i dont remember the jokes, the double entendres, the slavishly sexual slants, and all the camping about, but all that mattered was that after an hour my sides were aching and i was literally begging her not to go on….GGM was so good at branding people with nicknames that fitted them to a T and which were wittily outlandish. Those names though, stuck for years, and eventually became “mainstream’ in a sense.
I had a haircut once done by her, but it didnt turn out as expected, so I didnt go very often, but whenever I was in town, we continued to meet up, whether for walks along the riverside, duly rating the smiling boys, or at the Heart of Darkness, where GGM memorably disappeared into a bathroom cubicle with a french tourist, and emerged with makeup smeared but with a beatific smil, while all the other gay men looked on enviously.
GGM was once a “japayuki”, her fotos from a stint there showed a rather svelte diva. with lovely legs, a fetching smile, and hispanic features…how she ended up in PP running a series of beauty salons and getting in and out of relationships I didnt find out, but with friends Cacai and Ruffa Mae, the tales of cruising were legendary, and the retributions and petty jealousies (generally over willing young men) were grand opera, albeit of the soapy type. “Marimar” was a term she applied to herself, this was the lead character in a popular Mexican telenovela with a wide following in Manila.
GGM, it was said, had a major influence on the emergent drag scene in Phnom Penh…she brought in a bit of style, a touch of make-up, bravado, and “mentored” a number of Phnom Penh’s future drag artistes, many of them did not have someone up close who could show them the way to dress up, bind the birdie, fluff the boobsies, or lip sync like there was no tomorrow. She brought some attitude in, beyond the screeching katoey images beamed in from Thai TV. Some of those protegees from 1999-2002 now are household names in Cambodia.
One time, i think it may have been 2004, I saw GGM on a motorbike, but with shorter hair and a bit of a stubble, looking unexpectedly “macho”. I learned that s/he was currently in a realtionship with a girl, and had stopped taking her hormones for a while. Somehow i couldnt imagine her back as Gil, the original birth certificate name. We didnt see each other very often after that.
Sometime in 2006-7, GGM developed a swelling of the right knee, that turned out to be a form of cancer. Finally s/he opted to return to Bulacan to have it treated, and the leg was amputated, but it was too late to do anything much more….she passed on in May 2009.
If there is drag heaven, Gil/Gilda/Marimar would be right up there, with a curling iron serving as her microphone…Au revoir, Gilda. Life is much more fascinating because of you…
