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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Wednesday, June 01, 2005

entry arrow10:54 PM | The End of Having No Face

Not knowing the most vital of things -- the face, the name -- can take on a certain romance, the kind we have for what escapes us. There is a tingle in the knowledge of deeply-held mystery, the bloodbound secret, and the anticipation of eventual unmasking. Just like the striptease, where the stripping is the main deal and the revelation of the naked body the hohum foregone conclusion, we take to the fascinating anonymous like a fever.

Like all sane mass communication graduates, I wanted to be Bob Woodward -- or at least the Robert Redford version of the famed journalist. Heck, I watched Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men a total of six times. One of the attraction was the shadowy identity of the world's most famous whistle blower. But suddenly, just like that, we know finally who Deep Throat is. And it is quite a letdown, this finally knowing.



He's an old guy. Far from the strapping Hal Holbrook in Pakula's movie. The journalist Hank Stuever writes about it in -- where else? -- in The Washington Post:

What's gone is the last best secret, wrested from the grip of the select few who'd vowed to keep it. The hiding of Deep Throat's identity took on a larger mythic status than any scoop Deep Throat provided, and much of Washington -- media, officialdom, even tourists who snapped the Watergate complex -- guarded the almost holy belief in Deep Throat. He was the perfect, nameless god. It was the idea that reporters (and their background sources) could save the world, and that trust was still trust, and truth was still true. People now go to parking garages to get their cars.

What could be more of a letdown than finding out who Deep Throat is? Finding it out in Vanity Fair? And not really finding it out in Vanity Fair so much as feeling it crash-land across the Internet and the cable news networks, days before the magazine even hits the stands? Finding out that you don't care anymore? Watching it not resonate among people younger than 30?


An era finally passes. But I admit I've always liked Andrew Fleming's film version of Deep Throat's identity better in the comedy Dick.

And talking about revelations of identity, now we finally know who the incredibly hilarious, fabulously fascinating The Search For Love in Manhattan is. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Joel Derfner -- your modern Oscar Wilde, and everybody's witty guide to the emotional roller coaster we call New York.



And he has a new book of gay haikus.

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