Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (51 page)

“
I’m not saying you should rule anything out. I’m not saying you should isolate yourself from the community. I just think your role in it might be something different.”

I gave him a resistant, quizzical look.

He stood there expressionless, Buddha-like. And then he spoke his final words: “I think you might be happier on your own.”

In journalism school, I began to find my own way professionally, emboldened by a $6,000 fellowship in religious journalism from United Methodist Communications. I wrote and published articles describing how the struggles of people with AIDS in the San Francisco area were changing the hearts and minds of local religious leaders, prompting them to rethink their theological precepts with respect to gay and lesbian people.

Father Giles Valcovich was a Franciscan chaplain at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco. “It startled me to see how many of my AIDS patients were hurting
inside
,” he told me during an interview in his office, “how much they hated being ostracized, being categorized, as if they were all atheists. It was a revelation to me that God was very, very important in their lives, and it only intensified their hurt when they were tabbed as nonreligious people.”

“
How did they share their pain with you?” I asked. “Just by talking about it?”

“
It had been so long since some of them had received the sacraments that when I gave them Communion in their hospital beds, they were crying, and I was crying, too.”

“
How do you console them?”

“
Many of them retain a tremendous desire to be recognized as part of the church. I try to assure them that even though the vast majority of them have not been churchgoers for a long time, they’ve not been ostracized by God, that he has always been there.”

A priest for 38 years, Valcovich said that working with AIDS patients had been a “great awakening” for him. “To consider that God is perhaps a lot more real for them than for people who are thought to be God-fearing, it’s changed my whole outlook. I just don’t generalize anymore. The last thing you want to be is judgmental or condemnatory. You’ve got to just take an individual from where he is at and go from there.”

I finished journalism school in May 1986 at the age of 24. Four months later, I accepted a job offer from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco. I would write for its magazine and report to a priest who had smuggled books by Teilhard into the seminary during the 1950s. I wondered if I had, at long last, squared the spiritual triangle and found a place to fit in as an openly gay Catholic American—an oddly shaped puzzle piece if there ever was one.

I knew only one thing for certain. I would no longer conceal or compromise my identity as an individual in any way. For anyone.

Signs of increasing distress were emanating from home throughout most of 1986. Mom called frequently with disturbing news about Dad. Her mounting anxiety became a yardstick of his steady decline. “It’s like he’s lost his will to live,” her voice cracked.

For reasons that nobody could fathom, Dad fell into a spiral of anxiety and depression that left him preparing to die. Typically fastidious about his hygiene, he stopped bathing and began to smell. His mental decline triggered a physical decline.

Nothing seemed to help Dad. Medication. Counseling. Prayer. Nothing. He scratched both of his wrists with a razor blade just deep enough to draw a couple dribbles of blood from the skin and an outpouring of alarm from Mom. At her wit’s end, she admitted him to Del Amo Hospital, a mental hospital, in October 1986.

A psychiatrist recommended that Dad undergo electroconvulsive therapy, or shock treatments. The treatments had become controversial since Geri had received them in 1969, particularly because of concerns about potential memory loss. Some doctors and hospitals refused to administer the treatments for fear of lawsuits. Only when all other options of medication and psychotherapy had been exhausted—and only when a patient was near death—would many doctors resort to shock treatments.

Dad fit the criteria. Nothing else had worked. He was dying. He was 62.

Mom became a nervous wreck herself. She didn’t know how the treatments would be administered or if they would help. But she had no other hope.

Every few days, Dad lay unconscious on his back while the doctors placed two electrode paddles on his forehead. With the push of a button, an electric current coursed through his body. His right toe twitched. That was it. The nurse then awakened Dad, gave him a snack, and escorted him to his room.

Dad was undergoing the treatments as I drove home from Berkeley in the middle of October to gather my stuff before moving to San Francisco. “Should I visit Dad in the hospital?” I asked Mom after walking through the door.

“
I don’t want you to see him in that condition,” she said. “I think the treatments are helping.” Besides, she had something else on her mind.

“
Where are you moving to in San Francisco?” she seemed kind of nervous about it. “How’d you find it? How big is it? Who’re ya gonna live with?”

“
I’m gonna share a two-bedroom flat with a guy who advertised for a roommate.”

“
How old is he?”

“
Oh, he’s pushing 30.”

“
He isn’t married, huh?”

“
No.”

“
Is he gay?”

“
Yes.”

“
Well, you’re not gay, right?” she couldn’t stop now.

“
No,” I bungled the double negative.

“
Oh, thank God,” she heaved a sigh of relief.

“
I mean, yes, I am gay. No, I’m not
not
gay.”

She collapsed into her chair and started to cry.

“
It’s okay, Mom,” I tried to be comforting.

“
I was afraid about Mary Jo, but not you, too,” she blubbered.

“
Mom, what’s the source of your tears?” I tried to be therapeutic.

She put on a brave face: “I’m just so sorry for anything I ever said or couldn’t do to make it easier for you.”

We hugged and said we loved each other.

“
Please don’t tell Dad,” I pleaded, “especially not in his current condition.”

But she couldn’t keep the news to herself. She broke it to him between shock treatments. “Your youngest son is gay, Joe. Let’s just be grateful he’s in a place like San Francisco.”

Dad was in an elevated, electrically-induced state of hazy, halcyon contentment. He responded with remarkable equanimity: “Oh . . . well . . . most priests are gay.”

Under the least expected of circumstances, the man who had been suffering from severe anxiety and depression found a most unlikely ray of hope. The shock treatments were the closest thing to a miracle our family had experienced in years.

Over the course of the month, Dad received nine treatments and became stronger with each one. Mom became calmer with each one.

“
Oh, those shock treatments were BYOO-tiful!” a supremely relieved Mom exulted over the phone.

On Friday, October 31, 1986, the Vatican released its most strongly worded statement ever against homosexuality. Known as the “Halloween encyclical,” the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” not only reiterated previous doctrine stating that homosexual acts were sinful but also condemned the mere inclination toward homosexuality as an “objective disorder” and as a “tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.” The letter even warned that society should not be surprised if, as a result of civil rights legislation designed to protect homosexuals, “irrational and violent reactions increase.”

As I rode the BART train to work that morning, I was reading the front-page
San Francisco Chronicle
story about the Vatican letter, and I was having a crisis of conscience. I was supposed to move to San Francisco the next day to live four blocks from my new job at church headquarters on Church Street. But no sooner had I started believing that I could fit into the institution than it deemed me objectively and intrinsically a reject. My blood boiled hotter and hotter with each passing BART station. Beads of sweat collected on my brow. As far as I could tell, the church was clinging to its antiquated prejudices and refusing to accept the findings of modern psychiatry, which had held that being gay was
not
like being a homicidal maniac. Rather, being gay was like being left-handed. It was not some kind of deviant disorder but just a standard deviation from the norm. It galled me that a bunch of celibate clerics had deemed it unacceptably abnormal to be gay, yet they never seemed perturbed by the abnormality of celibacy, which was a chosen lifestyle, after all, not a natural orientation. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became.

I stormed into the archdiocesan headquarters, hyperventilated to a colleague, and shoved the newspaper article into her face: “I cannot support this!”

“
That’s okay, John,” she said in a soothing voice. “Stay here. We need you.”

“
Oh,” I recalled the higher calling of changing things from within. So I stayed.

I moved to San Francisco the next day.

A few months later, Mom called with a warning: “Dad’s getting back to his old self again, darnit. The shock treatments are wearing off. He’s reading your articles.”

The articles I was writing for the Catholic press quoted people in the church who openly questioned church teachings on homosexuality, premarital sex, birth control, divorce, remarriage, celibacy, women’s ordination, and papal authority. “Dad’s not happy with the articles,” Mom said. “I wish I could give him another shock treatment.”

Dad began making impassioned phone calls to San Francisco, consigning me to perdition until the clunky answering machine clicked off after two minutes. He disparaged my work and my beliefs. He refused to stop calling me until I changed them.

I engaged him in a couple of heated debates, but it soon became apparent to me that there was little point in arguing. I was just as stubborn in my convictions as he was in his. I saw no winner in this battle, only bitter stalemate.

“
Just let me lead my own life!” I tried to end the dispute over the phone.

“
What kind of father would I be,” he persisted, his voice trembling, “if I did nothing?” He sent me a 20-page letter, by certified mail, outlining my moral deficiencies and underlining the admonition: “You are gradually destroying yourself spiritually.”

This ordeal taught me only one sad lesson: There are few things more destructive to the psyche than knowing that someone who genuinely loves you genuinely believes that you are going to hell. I started screening my calls and skimming through the mail.

Dad could no longer reach me, but he still could not let me go to hell. He enlisted the virtuous son and soldier, Stan, and his dutiful wife, Cathie, as reinforcements.

Stan and Cathie lived in suburban Fremont, just southeast across San Francisco Bay. Stan had recently ended his active-duty career in the army and started working in a private dental practice. Cathie continued her work as an occupational therapist. The two of them, plus a diminutive dog—a Lhasa Shitzuh crossbreed—lived in a monster of a home atop a newly developed knoll overlooking the Weibel vineyards. Their expansive back yard featured a waterfall cascading into a lagoon swimming pool, a hot tub with an ornamental torch built into the contiguous coals, a footbridge over a koi pond, a fruit orchard, and an orchid grotto. Stan was king of the subdivision.

His political leanings had swayed in the completely opposite direction of mine. I was a pacifist who had submitted every necessary supporting document to the National Interreligious Service Board for Conscientious Objectors so that I could lawfully refuse to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Stan was an army officer who had just spent a year keeping the dominoes from falling in Korea. I believed that there should be a greater redistribution of income from the rich to the poor and that government should build a more humane society. Stan believed that there should be fewer taxes, less welfare, and smaller government—except for the exceptional exception of the military. I believed in giving each person a chance. Stan believed in giving each person his due. People like me were known as gay pinko commies. People like Stan were known as straight white male fascists. People like Stan liked to shoot people like me.

Stan and Cathie invited me down for dinner one evening. I took the BART train from my flat in the working-class Mission district of San Francisco to the end of the line in Fremont. Stan picked me up and drove me to the house at the summit of the knoll in a pristine neighborhood called Warm Springs. Once our stomachs had been sated and our bodies submerged in the hot tub, Stan and Cathie let fire a gentle fusillade.

“
Dad asked us to talk to you,” Stan began, “because he seems to think that you’re gay or something. And if so, he asked us to see if you’d be willing to go see a therapist.” It sounded as if they wanted a therapist to “cure” me, setting me straight once and for all.

“
No way!” I was gunning for a battle I could win. “I’ve seen a therapist already. Way back in high school when a friend took me. So where was my family then? And where does my family get off thinking it can tell me to go see a therapist now?”

They were about to answer. I didn’t let them.

“
I’ve dealt with the problem,” I snarled. “It’s not my problem anymore. It’s your problem!” So much for Gandhian nonviolence of the spirit. I was way too angry for that.