Yuan Villanueva - Part One: May He Have Your Attention, Please?
By Mikael Jay Borres
Quotes and dialogue have been edited, shortened and/or translated from Cebuano (Bisaya) to English for clarity and length.
Trigger Warning: Sexual Violence
Prologue: Andre The Liar
Yuan Nhyl Andre Villanueva and I sat on cement benches under the trees of Talisay City’s Liberation Park, on a sweltering February afternoon that punished those who wore thick-clothed sweaters. For donning a blue, horizontal-striped sweater, the weather punished me.
Before moving from the park to somewhere more hospitable to sweater wearers, Yuan dissected the consequences of his parents not giving him the attention he so richly desired. The lack of affection carved out the life he would lead, a life that is not exactly genuine. Yuan told me, “I’ll just say this bluntly: I think my life is built on a foundation of lies that I’ve fabricated myself just so I can get that attention.”
“And when I say my life is built on lies, I can say that my life is built on lies. Even having this interview, how would you know that I’m speaking the truth?”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t know,” I replied.
Although I endeavour to ensure Fascinating Features is rooted in truth, transparency, and clarity – double-checking with interviewees about unclear details and timelines, as well as utilizing reporting from credible news sources – the bulk of my storytelling harps on the accounts of the featured person. Perhaps because of naivety, I assume the interviewees provide me with what I believe to be their honest recollection of their lives.
“You could be lying to me right now, and I wouldn’t know,” I continued. “I just trust as well that you would tell me the truth.”
“Exactly,” Yuan replied.
“Any lies so far?” I asked. We were sixteen minutes into the interview.
“None so far.”
“Then again, how would I know that you lied to me?”
“Yeah, exactly,” Yuan repeated.
“OK, so how about this: how would someone know that you’re lying? You can lie about this answer, but that’s up to you.”
“No, I’ll be truthful to you. They don’t know,” Yuan responded.
“Isn’t that scary?” I asked. “Like as a person, as a friend… I mean, we don’t know each other, but let’s say your friend and you say something, isn’t it kind of sucky for them? ‘Oh, I’m not sure if you’re telling me the truth or not.’”
Yuan doubled down on his self-proclamation of being a liar, telling me how he puts on a “facade” of being someone trustworthy. The “facade” is the base of others’ preconceived notions of him. In the face of confrontation and questioning of whether he told them the truth or not, he keeps in handy the tool called gaslighting (in the form of responses like ‘Wait I did say that? Didn’t you know that wasn’t true?’), evading the accountability that would bring Yuan down to his knees in the name of integrity.
“I don’t know… there’s just so many things I’ve done, so many things in my life that I’m ashamed of and not ashamed of,” said Yuan, “and it’s gotten to the point where I lie about a lot of things.”
Does Yuan’s friends have a clue that he’s lying? “No, they don’t,” Yuan answered.
“So if they read this and they know you might have lied about something…”
“Yes, but the thing is, it’s still something I want.”
“Which is?”
“The attention they’re gonna give me.”
The transcriber who took notes on this two-and-a-half-long interview left a comment on her working Google Doc when she listened to this exchange. She writes: Kael, this man is a psychopath.
Attention Seeker
Younger Yuan’s mood soured when he didn’t win a game of bato lata, a popular Filipino street game. He cried about losing. The other kids' mood soured too, all because of a sore loser throwing a tantrum. He denied his bratty behaviour to his playmates, self-canonizing and dismissing them as haters. Younger Yuan was, as he would think of it now, “delulu.” His parents scoffed at his unruliness, advising others to ignore their son’s antics.
Yuan’s grandparents took care of him during his childhood. His father worked overseas as a seaman, being with the family for only three months of the year. His mother, a call center agent by night, comes home in the morning, tired and ready for sleep. Present-day Yuan, now a college student, only sees his mother, who arrives from her graveyard shift, for only a few hours before he drives his motorcycle to his 7:30 a.m. classes.
“You know when you’re a child and you’re always wanting your mother’s attention? I would always wake up the moment she left and I would chase her from my house to the road because I would beg her to come home, and like, ‘Please! Don’t leave me! I need you!’” Yuan recalled.
“And I would cry, and then she would threaten me, being like, ‘If you don’t go back to sleep, I’ll take all your CDs! You’re such a hard-headed kid!” Yuan continued, imitating his mother’s fast cadence when quoting her. “‘I’ll throw them away, I don’t care! Go to sleep!’”
She came back inside their home to go to Yuan’s room and tucked her son into his bed. He woke up again, called for her mom, and then realized she wasn’t there. She left for work yet again.
The drive to attain attention swelled since Yuan’s childhood. He never turns down opportunities to shine. He took up modelling workshops in 2019 and competed in his first pageant, Mister Eco Tourism 2022. He won the contest. He bagged the first runner-up spot in Mister Sagay 2023. He also joined his schools’ debate clubs for the “serotonin” of speaking out through what he believes is an eloquent form of idea exchange.
In his senior high school, he starred in a school-wide play as the leading man. “Back then, all eyes were on me,” said Yuan, bubbling with jubilation as he reminisced with animation. “I don’t know how to express it in feelings, but the very moment where everyone was looking at me, where everyone was hearing my own voice, where everyone was paying attention to me, it felt like I just didn't want to get off that stage. I wanted to keep doing that, and I think that’s the reason why I do all these stupid things so that people give me attention.
“I think that's the reason why I even agreed to this interview,” Yuan admitted, “because I want people to know about me, and I want people to talk about me. I don't know if this is some sort of coping mechanism because of some trauma I had when I was during my childhood.”
He ended his reflection with, “Yeah, just attention, man. That’s literally the lifeline of me, my behaviour, my personality.”
Alter Icarus
On June 16, 2022, a few months after winning Mister Eco-Tourism, he posted yet another shirtless picture of himself on his then-public account on X (formerly Twitter); his account is now private. He had put out other similar suggestive pictures, to limited social media traction when counting the views and likes. But a picture he posted in June — a body progress photo of him in a gym wearing neon green shorts — gripped a nanoscopic-sized space of the gay Alter Twitter-sphere. “Yeah I’m like, 5’11,” Yuan wrote as the caption.
He said he “woke Alter Twitter” up within hours of posting the thirst trap, amassing 23 thousand likes, over 150 comments, and nearly a thousand retweets as of August 9, 2024. Aaron Piercer, actor and Alter personality, followed Yuan on X. Some online passersby scrolling through their feeds swooned over Yuan's height. “I'm like 5’7, but I can go down like I'm 4’7,” a random X user said in their retweet. Others fawned over his body; another person opined, “You have no right being this hot.”
Some in the comments section promoted their sex work, such as their OnlyFans pages, while others responded by sharing photos even lewder than Yuan’s (I saw at least four penises; yes, I counted), or made direct solicitations for sex with Yuan.
“When it was still in its early stages of peaking, a lot of people were like, ‘Hey Yuan, what’s happening? You’re famous. Why are you going viral over a shirtless pic?’”
There was one comment, however, that halted any of Yuan’s giddiness. The comment, word-for-word, was: “You’re so sexy bro, I’d let you rape me.”
The comment was still posted at the time of the interview, February 16, 2024. As of August 10, 2024, the comment has been taken down.
Yuan was devastated. He cried. He did not want to leave his house for a week after reading that comment. Yuan said, “It's something that affected me so deeply that it changed my entire perspective on what exactly I am as a person online.”
- - -
A photographer invited Yuan to his private studio in Consolacion for a photoshoot. Yuan went, posed for him, and got a few pictures. The photographer then wanted to put tissue into Yuan’s underwear to enlarge his crotch area.
“I was fine with it because I thought it was all being professional,” said Yuan, “until he started touching me, and then one thing led to another, and I couldn't really move because I was just frozen.”
Yuan was raped.
Yuan did not share more details of the assault during that photoshoot. The last detail he shared was that it happened long before our interview.
“So whenever I see that picture [the thirst trap] – I pinned it because it's what gets me traction – but whenever I see that picture, and then I go into the hidden comments, it's a constant reminder of the price I have to pay when I want attention.”
He tried confiding in his then-closest friend about what happened to him. “I showed him, and he was like, ‘Why are you crying? Like, you asked for that!’
“I was stuttering and whatnot,” Yuan said when describing his reaction. “Like I didn't know what to do and what to say because why would you say that?”
His friend’s words were on repeat in Yuan’s mind. They reminded him of what his father used to say to him. His father made Yuan cry with his cussing and insults; he spanked his son for not playing basketball. If Yuan did cry, his father would beat him up for not acting like the man he was supposed to become. That was code for not being allowed to show emotion. Yuan recalled being told by his father that the pain inflicted on him was “tough love.”
“It was conflicting to know, to understand at first, but you know, me, as an adult now, or like a young adult ‘cause I’m 21, I actually do realize that, ‘Hey he did actually do those things not because he wanted to hurt me. It was his own way of loving.”
Yuan sees a thread connecting how his father treated him and what his close friend said. “I realized he [his friend] was right,” he said. “He was right to question me why I would cry even though I wanted it [the attention], and most of the people who are going to read this later would think that, ‘Huh? That’s not normal! He’s your friend, you’re supposed to support him,’ But when you think about it, like [from] a different angle or like in a different situation, he's right, he’s very right. and when I found out that he was right, I accepted it.”
Still sweltering while sitting on a park bench, I asked Yuan if he had the right to cry after he read the rape comment. The answer is obviously a yes, but I posed the question because I did not think Yuan would feel the same way.
Yuan replied, “I agree, I definitely have the right to cry, but of course, it’s different for people. Circumstances vary between individuals. But for me, personally — of course, I’m not saying that people should follow me — it's just how I now perceive it as a whole and how I perceive myself as an individual.
“I just think that, Why am I crying about this? It's just some comment from some anonymous person, it's not like it's actually going to happen or I’m going to do it. Like, toughen up, Yuan. It's not the end of the world, you’re not gonna lose your career over this. Just keep on smiling. Just keep on thirst-trapping or whatever. Do what you want to do because, at the end of the day, this is actually normal no matter how fucked up it actually sounds.”
Yuan is bought into the idea that he has to learn to accept certain things as normal even if the things in question reject his notion of what is normal. Why? In what he sees as a grimy world of entertainment and media, Yuan feels that those who have set their heart on stamping their names in people’s minds should anticipate the horrors that seem to him as inseparable from their goal.
“This is the world of attention,” Yuan declared. “There are pros, there are cons, and if you want that sort of attention, especially in the global context, you're going to have to experience those things. And I realized that I really did need to toughen myself up because how am I going to achieve my dream of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster artist if I'm not going to handle all that thirst trapping or whatnot?’”
“I've learned to accept it as normal because it's the world that I dream to live in, and if that's what I want to live in, then, you know, might as well just subscribe to what's normal. Although I don't have to change who I am, I don't have to change my morals just for these kinds of people, but at the end of the day I'll have to face them, and when I face them I don't want to be a crybaby. I want to face them head-on.”
Yuan and Mikael conducted an in-person interview on Friday, February 16th, 2024.
Recommended Song: Fame - Irene Cara
