The doctors are sick

Last New Year’s Eve, Jan-Jan (not his real name), a 39-year-old gay man in Cebu City, was going home after a drunken revelry. On the streets he met a male sex worker, whom he brought home. The next day, when he woke up, there was pain inside his rectum, and the sex worker was gone.

He asked his sister to bring him to the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center, a government-run hospital. The doctor examined him, sneered, and told him he needed surgery for a perfume canister embedded in his rectum. He was made to quickly sign papers he was not given the chance to read. He was sedated before the operation, and he did not know that while the perfume canister was being extracted from him, the doctors and the nurses and a whole menagerie of medical practitioners were recording everything with their cell phone cameras.

Anti-gay jokes – which the educated set in the operating room thought were witty – were exchanged. It was a scene enough for Hippocrates to turn in his ancient grave.

Some malignant soul uploaded the two-minute-plus long video on YouTube, and thus began the public humiliation of Jan Jan – not once, not twice, but many times over, as the images were downloaded, passed from cell phone to cell phone, the images replicated to the nth degree via technology.

Said Jan Jan: “I trusted them. And yet they ridiculed me. . . Was that something that professionals should do? Now I can’t even walk the streets without being laughed at by my neighbors. I want my ordeal to end. And I hope it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”  Read full story