Why Dads Take Their Queer Sons To The Drunken Table

a personal essay on fatherhood, transness, and a table

There’s a religious practice not well-known in the corner of manhood—of men ritualistically gathering around a monobloc table, fermented with the stink of vinegar-soaked chips and roasted meat. These men neck cheap shots of gin fervently, mythologizing themselves as gods with every swallow of bitterness. They call this an act of fraternal bonding. Brotherhood running in their veins with the sweet belief of faith.

This is a rite to them, a litmus test of ¹pagkalalake. The table is a stone-hedged place for the brusque, for the Man, and for the macho.

But to me, that table was always a four-limbed Frankenstein, moving on its own monstrosity. It is a fence of jury witnessing the violence it took for every queer son to undergo yet another baptism. It is a passage into manhood, wrapped in the amniotic fluid of dominance and disillusionment, soaked in soy sauce and oily ²pulutans.

I remember being thirteen, my body stuck in the purgatory of puberty, when Papa handed me the invitation to join the table. The invitation came in the form of his sweaty, calloused hand, pushing back the monobloc chair and offering it to me like a sword unsheathed. “³Anak, dito ka.” The phallic bottle of Emperador stood gleaming gold, and the night was already thick with spilled beer and slurred speeches. His kumpadres, manspreading, eyed me with scrutiny; some of them grinning amusingly, as if they'd already sniffed the neon flamboyance in me, while the others squinted at my changeling form.

When I sat in the monobloc chair, you could almost hear the angel trumpets fading away. His friends patted me on the back, unaware of the snipped wings, as they chugged down their beers. “You’re a man now!” Papa howled drunkenly, as though I had just claimed some great trophy of success. He shoved a crystal glass into my hand, and everyone thumped their fists to their chests. Every syncopated chant urging me to drink felt like a gallop toward the truth: that the glass was heavier than the pink shadow in my changeling body.

As every pair of red-rimmed eyes urged me to drink it like a man, all I could think of was running my bare feet into the sand, dancing under the sun, with my mother’s scarf wrapped around my head. I saw myself twirling in the floral-printed kumot of my grandmother, perfuming myself like the pretty girls on TV. I pictured the Vaseline glimmering on my lips like a siren’s scales. But all these daydreams were yanked away as I was wedged once again into the drunken table of Papa and his friends. Their machismo, vinegar-spiked pulutan, dirty jokes, and stories about women spilled onto the table like smithereens. And always, cue the boisterous laughter at the end, with someone punching a shoulder too hard, someone singing a random ⁴Kundiman off-beat, and someone already dozing off.

The curriculum of this test is rooted in the belief that alcohol is the armor of a man. It is the elixir of masculinity, the catalyst of power—a serum consumed by warriors, iron-clad men, and hardworking husbands to summon their manly traits. Alcohol is the harbinger of testosterone, bravery, lionheartedness, and the essence of the Johnny Bravo ideal. This is the lesson the drunken table has ingrained in me, but it has also taught me something else about my identity. It hollowed out what I thought was my lived boyhood and filled it with the realization that I could never live as a man. Alcohol handed me a shovel to bury the dozen versions of a ‘boy’ my father wanted from me, and when that liquid sloshed in my mouth, it tasted exactly like fear of not getting his acceptance.

Papa was teaching me the language of his love in his own way; he wasn’t trying to hurt me—not directly. The drunken table was the only nest Papa had known when it came to breaking his shell. It was the only space where he could chip away at his vulnerability. The men at that table didn’t say “I love you,” but they drank enough to let you know that you belonged.

Maybe, at thirteen, I was already showing early signs of a queer apocalypse. And Papa, knowing only that table as a medium of love, perhaps thought he could baptize the glitter out of me, excise the femininity by exposing me to the table of wolves. Drown the gay with gin. But after sitting at that table long enough to pickle my throat with alcohol, I realized that I was queerer than ever. I would always flinch at slasher films, always scream at cockroaches, always make Barbie out of sticks and yarn.

I could have laughed like they did, could have roared with my chest squared, and could have found my voice in every clink of glass and crush of ice. But I didn’t. Because it wasn’t the table I belonged to. So, I retreated.

When the alcohol sat heavy on my chest, it burned. I slumped into my seat, sinking back into the comfort of my pink shadow, already knowing at that ripe age that I was nothing more than a castration of the man he thought I could be. I carried my queerness like a bruise behind my ribs, and I learned then that the drunken table wasn’t for girls like me. Girls who happened to be assigned male at birth, who wore their softness with pride in private, who would grow into the bones of trans womanhood like a flower pushing through concrete.

The drunken table was never a place of love for queer sons; it was a test of masculinity. A searing gaze that demanded you be a man. It was an exam every father imposed on his rainbow son to map out the shadows of his queerness. It was an exorcism of femininity. One that I gladly endured, only for it to backfire beautifully.

And that, in itself, was the rebirth.

To realize that the drunken table would never be a place I would revisit again. A table I would never truly belong to.

No matter how many times I was called "anak," the table would never understand the ache and grit it took for my body to be loved. The table would never see my changeling anatomy, the wrongness of it. It would always be coated in sticky beer, but it would never be warm enough to peer beneath my father’s image, to truly recognize that I could never be his machoismo, his muscly confidence, or his brusque demeanor.

It’s a strange thing to grieve over a table, to mourn for something plastic that you were never welcome at. That table gave me the eyes to see that I was excluded even before I could take a seat, and it also handed me my freedom.

For years, I haven’t let alcohol touch my tongue. Alcohol is not a truth-teller; it is a havoc-wreaker. I’ve witnessed its tsunami violence in the coiled bodies of men bigger than me, seen what it does to them as they tremble in fear and anger before you. I’ve seen how a golden liquid loosens the lips and tightens the fists. I’ve seen alcohol ferment the minds of mortal men, making them believe they are the divine likeness of mythological gods. I remember alcohol being a voicebox for deepened frustration, how words could shift from soft cotton to sharp knives without warning. I remember this Dionysian liquid becoming a detonating poison in the tongues of men, spitting warnings and turning the air of fatherhood into danger.

I have grown to fear the acrid taste because of what it evokes: the drunken table, the noise, the proving ground. I refuse to marinate in that legacy of pain, to macerate into my father’s image. Maybe I am a failed son, but I am my own daughter, born from his drunken table, and that is truer of a becoming.

Maybe Papa will understand one day that I did sit at the drunken table. I watched his friends smirk when I said the wrong thing. I watched how they giggled as they teased me for being ⁵binabai. I watched him sulk in his anger over not getting the militant boy he wanted. And maybe, after seeing what the drunken table offered to his queer son, he would understand that I chose to walk away from it all, not out of shame, but out of clarity.

Because I knew then, within that drunken table, that love does not need to be shouted drunkenly or battered into someone. The only glass I want to raise is a toast to the life I’ve built away from their table. I toast it in silence, in pride, in softness, and in glitter. But most importantly, I toast it away from the smoke, the vinegar, the shadows, and entirely to my own light.

1. A Filipino term referring to manhood or masculinity, often tied to rigid and traditional expectations on what it means to be a ‘real man’

2. Filipino term for food eaten as a companion to alcoholic drinks, usually savory and greasy

3. A Filipino word meaning "child" or "son/daughter, used as a term of endearment by parents.

4. A genre of traditional Filipino love songs, characterized by gentle melodies and romantic, often melancholic lyrics

5. A colloquial Filipino term meaning effeminate, often used to refer disparagingly to boys or men perceived as feminine