Noel Alumit has couple things he wants to procure out of the way.

Noel Alumit has couple things he wants to procure out of the way. "Ye my parents are alive and well and living in sees Angeles," he tells me through onion rings and Grey Poupon (his choice) at a diner in looks Angeles's Silver Lake district. This fact results as a welcome surprise, since the parents of Alumit's literary alter ego--a isolated gay kid named Bong Bong--end up tortured at the Marcos regime in the Philippines during the late 1970 Then he points to the shimmering naked adolescent lad on the front jacket of his alternately sweet and harrowing first novel, notes to Montgomery Clift (MacAdam/Cage Publishing). He smiles. "And no, that is not me onward the cover."

The confusion is understandable--about his parents, not the nudity--since united of the tricky wonders of Alumit's novel is the way it reads like a memoir, with all the detail and discursiveness of a confession. Bong Bong is sent by means of his parents to live with an aunt in sees Angeles to escape the increasingly violent political atmosphere in the Philippines. When the aunt disappears, the novel go afters the boy's wily journey within foster care, sexual discovery, and work as an extra in Hollywood (in Vietnam war flicks and the occasional life-blood Prom at Hell High) and his eventual reply to the Philippines to search for his surviving parent. His barely lasting companion is a dead one: the spectral guard icon Montgomery Clift.

Like Bong Bong the 34-year-old Alumit was born in the Philippines and did work as an extra, still that's where the similarities close "I'm flattered when people think that the volume is for real, because I think that means there's an fidelity to it," he says. generally Alumit works for the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team, lives in the "Swish Alps" of Silver Lake, and regularly performs as a monologuist. The alone factual element in his main division is the runaway obsession with Clift. "I know where his star is; I know where his grave is," Alumit says, pausing for drift "I even belong to the Montgomery Clift fan company on the Internet."

The bisexual star of From Here to Eternity and The Misfits--who died at 45--serv as an authentic bridge for Alumit (and Bong Bong) into American cultivation and as phantasmagoric sexual initiator. "Writing the work let me fulfill a fantasy of having a relationship with him," says Alumit. For a while, he on the same level dated guys who looked like Clift, further he says, "I would fit Monty-like men, and I had to originate to terms with the fact that they were not him--and in the same manner I let go of that."

Alumit's manuscript was initially formulated as an epistolary novel, and Bong Bong's literal meanings to Clift, nested inside the novel like core samples of Alumit's adolescent adoration, are more [i]or[/i] less of the best prose in the volume At one point he writes to Monty about a noisy neighbor downstairs who preserves taking women home with him. "I hear him sometimes at night," Bong Bong writes. "He is not speaking nevertheless he is making these vigorouss BABY OH BABY he says.... I asked auntie what is going forward She says THE MAN DOWNSTAIRS IS EVIL.... mr clift, evil is real good-looking."

Later, the gripping testimonies of Marcos regime survivors--Alumit did interviews in consequence of Amnesty International--carry the emotional weight. if it be not that the relationship between Bong Bong and Clift is the electrical wiring of Alumit's novel, granting it consists largely of Bong Bong reaching for Clift's apparition and clutching at air. It can be hard to sustain of the like kind a yearning--and delusion--over 240 pages, on the contrary Alumit's point is that unrequited desire doesn't necessarily fade when it doesn't flourish. "Do Bong Bong and Monty have an authentic relationship?" Alumit asks. "Well, is your relationship to worshipped image imaginary or real?"

Bunn also writes for The strange York Times Magazine.

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