Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (10 page)

At the Shrine, he also had his skeptics. A few weeks after the Brown Bag became archbishop, a stranger waited after Friday mass. She had a broad Irish face, a fire-hydrant body, and an aluminum walker. I had never seen her before. Flooded with guilt, I racked my brains for the sin with which she was preparing to confront me.

I dodged around the holy water font, feinted for the shrine of the Holy Virgin, and made a beeline for the side door. But she had good foot speed for a lady with a walker and cut me off at the statue of Saint Anthony.

“I want to let you know,” she said sweetly, “you read beautifully. I really enjoy coming to this Mass.”

“Th-thank you,” I stuttered.

I discreetly knocked on the wooden platform supporting Saint Anthony. If there’s anything a Catholic boy likes less than being confronted with his sins, it’s being confronted with praise. Praise makes you proud, and pride goeth before a fall, and no doubt this woman’s good wishes would boomerang back and knock down my immortal soul.

To reduce the karmic backlash, I put on my best aw-shucks voice. “It’s not me. I just read what’s in the Book. God’s word and all that.”

“Well”
she said, raising her voice. This was not a woman who tolerated contradiction.
“I
appreciate it. It takes my mind
off of all this!”

“All this” was the phrase parishioners at Saint Anthony Shrine used to denote the pedophile priest scandal, and it gave me the opportunity to change the topic from the pitfalls of pride and praise.

“But O’Malley’s coming,” I reminded her.

“So’s the Lord,” she snapped, “but I’m not holding my breath
all this
is going to change soon.”

But it did change — or seemed to change. O’Malley’s first acts gave reason for hope. He insisted on being called by his first name. He hired my former law firm with the goal of reaching settlements with the victims. He rejected the luxurious trappings of Bernard Law, his pandering predecessor. Gone was the mansion, gone the orgiastic installation ceremony. Sean took up residence in the rectory of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, auspiciously located in my gayborhood, the South End, and used proceeds from the sale of the mansion to compensate victims.

O’Malley’s first homily as archbishop of Boston described how lepers converted the heart of Saint Francis. All his life, the sight of lepers had disgusted Francis, until one day, by the grace of God, Francis embraced a leper and kissed him instead of fleeing and holding his nose. This homily made my heart leap.

Brother Sean
, I thought,
aren't gay men America’s lepers?

Seeking a big wet smooch of reconciliation, I sent Archbishop Sean a welcome letter. I wrote that I looked forward to his coming and restoring pride. Basically, I pinned my hopes on Bishop O’Malley’s arrival as if it marked the return of Christ himself.

I never got any sort of reply. The Brown Bag was too busy, no doubt, fixing all that was wrong with the Church.

Calculating the Odds

Shortly after the installation of Sean O’Malley as archbishop, Scott Whittier and I launched Romentics, the first-ever line of romance novels featuring gay men. We modeled them explicitly after the Harlequin line.

The venture was Scott’s idea. For years, he had watched Gram and his mother devour truckloads of cheap Harlequin novels. After reading, they coded the novels with their own shorthand ratings scale on the first page: “good story,” “nice,” and, very occasionally, “sexy.” This latter rating was no compliment. For Scott’s mother and Gram, sex got in the way of the story.

Scott and I had a different perspective. We wanted
every
reader to write “sexy” on the flyleaf of our Romentics novels. Sex was integral to our characters’ relationships and necessary to driving plot. Ours were romances, yes, but romances with testosterone. Blushes and saving your maidenhead for marriage simply wouldn’t do.

Our first romances appeared on November 1, 2003. They had intentionally sassy titles:
Razor Burn
and
Hot Sauce
. Warner Books agreed to publish the latter, and this stamp of approval attracted media, beginning in Canada —- natch — with a profile in the
Globe & Mail
.

But it wasn’t until the
Boston Globe
profiled us that news of my venture got back to the Shrine. The Friday after the
Globe
came out, I showed up in the sacristy a few minutes before Mass. The three Hale Marys had already arrived. We went about our usual business, which consisted mostly of watching the sacristan pour out a bag of unconsecrated hosts —
Oops! Dropped one! Five-second rule!
— and set out the chalice and ciboria.

It didn’t surprise me that no one mentioned the
Globe
. My conversations with Mary Flanagan in particular were always lopsided. She never asked a single question about my personal life, not even where I lived. It was “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” That is how old ladies get along in a changing world: they converse at a level of generality that allows everyone to pretend nothing has changed. Then they die. At eighty-seven, Mary seemed no different.

An elevator led from the friars’ quarters directly to the sacristy, much like the pole in a firehouse. When the alarm rings, the friars dash to the lift, go down it, and go to work. About ninety seconds before Mass was scheduled to began, the elevator doors opened, and Father Myron McCormick stepped into the sacristy, blinking a moment in brilliant benevolence. He was ancient, completely bald, and had long, wizardlike fingers that accentuated his medieval brown robe.

“Hello, Scottie,” he said. Father Myron is the only person besides my mother and my godson who calls me Scottie. “Hello, Mary. And Mary. And Mary.”

I have always been a spiritual size queen,* and Father Myron was a man of enormous spiritual endowment. His eyes exuded kindness. He never failed to greet me enthusiastically, taking my hand in both of his. His manner was what you might expect from someone named Myron: he wore big, nerdy glasses and had an endearing spastic awkwardness. To be in his presence was like taking Valium; immediately the restless spirit calmed and anger diminished. I couldn’t imagine him harming a housefly. Archbishop Sean himself had stopped by the Shrine for the express purpose of making his confession to Father Myron.

Recovering from his stunned benevolence, Myron drifted around the room, laying hands on each and every person in the room. He opened the wardrobe that contained a rainbow of vestments for the various masses of the liturgical year and hooked his cane over the top of one of the doors. Myron was addicted to this cane that he never actually used, carrying it everywhere and forever hanging it on altars, chair rails, counters, doorknobs, and forearms.

Myron slipped vestments over his robe. The Hale Marys paraded out to the first pew. I took a last look at the day’s reading. Mass was supposed to begin, but Myron paged through the lectionary (known as “the Book”) as if he had all the time in the world. All of a sudden, as if the Book reminded him of books in general, he turned and asked, “How’s your book coming, Scottie?”

“My
book ?” I thought he was referring to the lectionary.

“I read about it in the
Globe”
he said.

My eyes widened, my knees weakened. I wanted to explain that I was not Scottie at all. Rather I was a National Security Administration operative living under a false identity while engaged in a top-secret undercover operation, which regrettably required me to leap immediately through the nearest stained glass window and make my escape.

“Um, my book’s good, Father Myron. Which, uh, reading do you want me to do? The feast-day reading? Or the regular one?”
Or the one with the shower scene that involves whipped cream?

“Where can I get a copy?” Father Myron asked brightly.

An image — a very unwelcome image — flashed through my head: Myron reading my smut:

The first kiss tickled the spot behind his ear. The hard cock was a firebrand against his backside. Slicked with soap, Troy’s hands moved one circle on Brad’s chest, one on his right hip. Gradually the circles grew closer and closer to Brad’s crotch. He tried to turn, but Troy would not let him. Like a man arrested, Brad placed both his palms on the glass, spread his legs, and lowered his butt slightly. First there was a finger, then two …

It wasn’t that I was ashamed of the poetry of this passage. Sexuality is a gift from God, and can be sacramental in the right circumstances. And the sexual congress in our novels always took place in the grossly conventional context of sacred and enduring unions between men who were destined to live happily and monogamously ever after.

No, what made me uncomfortable was the fact that Myron was a priest and a saint. He belonged up on that altar (read: pedestal). I wanted him to be glassed in and safe, like the dolls in the lobby of the Shrine:
NOT FOR SALE
. Putting aside Myron’s saintliness, the last thing I wanted was for this to get back to Archbishop Sean. I didn’t want him to get a bad first impression or become distracted from restoring pride in the Church.

A store carried my books a hundred yards from the Shrine, but I suggested, “Why don’t I try to get you a copy sometime, Father?” I had absolutely no intention of doing so.

Myron grasped my hand in both of his. “Would you?” he said. He wrung my hands warmly. “Thank you, Scottie. Thank you.”

It wasn’t that I wouldn’t, I told myself. Rather, I would delay it. For years.

The Cardinal Spellman School

“The last thing I need,” Mary Flanagan declared one day in the sacristy, “is yet another edict from Rome about how I’m supposed to approach the tabernacle or where I’m supposed to put the used ciboria after Mass.’

A Eucharistic Place Setting

The altar is the table at our cloth-napkin restaurant We don’t wrap the utensils into a paper napkin, twist and put out crayons for the place mats. Here’s what you’ll find on a properly set eucharistic table:

• Ciborium: Soup bowl used to carry wafers for consecration and distribution.
  

• Paten: Dinner plate- that carries the presider’s portion. ‘Since bread is all there is for dinner, there’s no separate bread plate.
  

• Chalice: Wine (and water) glass. There’s typically just one, so the presider never has to worry about poaching from his dining partner.
  

• Cruets: Just like those used for salad dressing, but these hold water and wine, respectively,
  

• Purificator: A napkin used to wipe holy schmutz off the edge of the chalice between recipients.
  

In stark contrast to the tenacity with which Rome clung to tradition, edicts concerning the eucharistic ministry changed weekly. According to the latest instruction, the leftover consecrated hosts were not to be returned to the tabernacle after communion was distributed. They were to be left instead on the windowsill in the ambulatory between the altar and the sacristy, so that the sacristan could judge whether sufficient host remained for the next mass.

“It feels like I’m leaving crumbs for birds,” Mary Fleming complained.

Mary Flanagan announced she was going to ignore the edict, “Sooner or later,” she said defiantly, “they’ll go changing the rules on us again.”

For most Catholics, particularly lapsed Catholics, Catholicism is a religion of screwy, random rules paired with fantastically grave consequences. We think of the Thou Shalt Nots, the Ten Commandments, nuns with wooden rulers, confession before communion, holy days of obligation, altar boy rubrics, when to sit, stand, and kneel, how long to fast before Mass, don’t touch the host with your hands, orgasm-free sex tips, and, of course, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, goddamnit. Throw in a few Thou Shalts, for good measure, and don’t ever get caught alone in the rectory with Father Feel-Me-Up. The Church created the specter of a moral minefield of a world and then pointed the way to safety: strict obedience.

While Vatican II loosened things up a little, Pope John Paul II (known affectionately as J2P2 because his aging, hunched physique increasingly resembled the wheeled droid from
Star Wars)
inspired a rules-based backlash. He hired bishops and priests who made a fetish of obedience and congratulated themselves on their denial. They made a golden calf of rubrics and rules and encouraged a diminishing number of followers to gird their loins and lash their own backs, and they thought less of those who did not lash in time.

Mary Flanagan and many of the eucharistic ministers had a looser approach to Catholicism. They put the “cat” in Catholic. Getting them to follow a common set of prescribed rules was like the proverbial herding of felines — without the benefit of the Brown Bag’s squirt gun.

“Is anyone not getting their communion because of me?” Mary asked belligerently. When she heard nothing but God’s own silence in response, she said with great satisfaction, “I didn’t think so!”

Father Bear-Daddy was Mary Flanagan’s nemesis. Bitchy, impatient, passionate, and demanding, he suffered no fools. Father Bear-Daddy — unlike Father Abraham — was, at heart, a “drama teacher.” The clues were legion:

• Father Bear-Daddy owned a miniature greyhound, eight inches high at the shoulder and all of twelve pounds.
  

• He subscribed to
  Bay Windows
  ’, the local gay paper.
  

• He also received other harder-core mailings — “Stuff I don’t touch!” according to one parish employee.
  

• He had a finely developed sense of gay vanity. When I referred to the friars at Saint Anthony’s as “old,” he became indignant.
  

• At the party celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his ordination, a pastoral associate joked that she meant to buy him pearls to wear, but thought it would look too Mardi Gras.
  

• Father Bear-Daddy was the Shrine’s decorator-in-chief— his taste inspired by a Victorian bordello. Imagine extravagant purple and scarlet swashes of silk streaming down from the rafters under which one had to duck to reach the ambo, collections of lilies that spread out from the altar like a rash, and lighting so low that anyone on the altar could pass for twenty years younger.
  

• Father Bear-Daddy had read
  Hot Sauce
  .