Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (15 page)

My ad would look like this:

Gay Catholic erotica writer seeks spiritually advanced, robust,
homo-friendly, charity-filled warriors for Archbishop-
smooching, light lectoring, and religious furniture shopping.
Nongay voices preferred. Likable wizards welcome.

Getting venture capital for this enterprise proved challenging, so I had to stick to hunting down gay Catholic warriors the old-fashioned way: by cruising.

The GLBT Spirituality Group at Saint Anthony Shrine was my first stop. Having just finished the poet Trebor Healey’s book on the mystical aspects of the raunchy, half-goat gods he imagined us homosexuals to be, I expected a roomful of cheerful satyrs — robust, hairy men who regularly ventured into the wild to beat drums and pat mud on their genitals. I’d whip them into a frenzy, and together we would fart, scratch our balls, and storm the chancery.

Here’s the roster of people who actually attended my first meeting:

• Two closet cases visibly racked by the guilt of gay desire
  

• A tightly wound gay seminarian, whose every word was like a marble flung at my eye
  

• A pale, rail-thin wraith who had swallowed a Baltimore Catechism whole
  

• A pot-bellied Episcopalian retiree
  

• A tight-lipped, out Diocesan priest named Picasso, who had the world-weary manner of a debauched whore
  

• Mama Bear, a six-foot-two, queeny, bald, slump-shouldered man who radiated unctuous concern
  

Their pale, terrified faces gaped at me. My sudden appearance in the doorway symbolized to them the arrival of Opus Dei come to haul them off to hell’s eternal fires.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m just one of the gang.” I joked that we should invite Archbishop O’Malley to join the group. They blanched.

“We can’t do that!” one of the closet cases shrieked, not raising his eyes. He was thickset, perhaps forty, but with a young face and jowls that trembled. He had the soul of an accountant, so let’s call him Abacus.

“Why not?”

“They’ll come down on us,” Abacus whined. “They’ll shut us down.”

Mama Bear and Picasso co-led the meeting. Obviously a veteran of group work, Mama Bear focused on process. Every time someone expressed an idea, Mama Bear repeated it back in the modern-day call-and-response of the feel-good, padded-room group psychotherapy approach. We spent a quarter of an hour just debating whether we would check in with the group’s members to see where they were at and to assess their expectations.

Self-revelations and confessions followed. Apropos of nothing, the seminarian brought up the burden of his celibacy. Picasso mentioned that he painted. Abacus reported that his confessor had told him he was going to burn in hell. Mama Bear explained that he was trying to come to terms with the possibility of monogamy in his gay marriage after twenty years of mutual infidelity. The other closet case brought up how humiliated he felt when his priest preached against gays and gay marriage.

To counteract this heavy pall of shame, I tried to project resolute positivity, determined cheer, and a brash bonhomie completely contrary to my nature. I offered one of those banal, hopelessly chipper Hallmark-card confections that could have formed a lynch mob from a group of Poor Sisters of Saint Clare, let alone a bunch of desperate homos: “You should see these humiliations as graces and grow from them,” I suggested brightly.

Silence descended over the room. Mama Bear pouted. Picasso sighed. Abacus clicked some beads.

“Are you saying we deserve to be humiliated?” the seminarian asked. It was like being quizzed by Travis Bickle.

Then the pale wraith — let’s call him Job — lifted his head from the table and spoke for the first time.

“Let me tell you about humiliation.” Job said. “I shat myself in a cafeteria today. It’s my gastrointestinal. Everyone saw me, but pretended not to. I think it was the chocolates I ate. I just had three. They were Mardi Gras chocolates. That’s humiliation.”

Dumbstruck, the group nodded in agreement.

“Last time I shat myself, I was alone,” Job added. “The time before that was in a shelter, but someone cleaned up the mess while I was off looking for paper towels.”

For all his humiliation, Job was looking on the bright side. The grace of the shelter worker’s efficiency clearly impressed him.

After that first meeting, I prayed:
Beheadings and burnings are one thing, God, but you cant possibly ask me to endure another tale of intestinally misbehaving Mardi Gras chocolates
.

Getting no response from the Almighty but significant affirmation from a flock of pigeons crapping on the crucifix above the Shrine’s front door, I took my quest for gay warriors on the road.

Dignity

Boston gave me a choice among gay Catholic groups: one was called Dignity and the other was called Courage. While the groups’ differences, theological and otherwise, are legion, they may be fairly summed up as follows: Dignity members get to engage in the sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance; Courage members opt for celibacy.

I struggled with this difficult choice for three long milliseconds, then I opted for Dignity. The basement of the Episcopal Church where Dignity met had laminated flooring, half-flaccid balloons pinned to lockers, antismoking posters, a drop ceiling, random playground balls, and an altar that looked like a wooden sawhorse. We took name tags at the door and sat in folding chairs arranged like an encounter group. A keyboard rested on a card table. A pixie lesbian with a brass bell of a voice led the five-person choir and shook her maraca (not a euphemism for booty). Someone had scrawled the hymn numbers on huge sheets of yellow-lined paper taped to the wall.

A retired Marist priest led the liturgy. His homily focused on his formation as a priest. He said he had spent fifteen minutes every morning contemplating the sinfulness of some aspect of his life. Every evening, he examined his conscience rigorously to see where he had failed.

“It was all about identifying yourself as a bad and worthless person,” he said.

But his message to Dignity came straight from Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood: “You are all good people,” he assured them, “ninety-nine percent of the time.”

No one but me seemed to disagree. The Dignitarians were obviously far more spiritually evolved. My goodness percentage topped out in the low teens — at best. Hell, even during the Marist’s homily I was deconstructing my fashion-challenged fellow worshippers, who had adopted wholesale the suburban-dyke-with-kids look — orthopedic sneakers, elastic waistbands, oversize sweatshirt with drool stains, and Red Sox caps.

Dignity’s liturgical procedures mandated such strict gender equality. They hailed the Holy Spirit with all three pronouns, alternating among he, she, and it. Wherever possible, the liturgy used the word
God
instead of masculine pronouns and nouns, but the gender-neutral construction often caused blips in the rhythm of the prayers: “Our Father and Our Mother, who art in Heaven….”

An old dyke took the first reading, and a young gay man did the second. Taking alternate verses, the two collaborated on the Psalms. I half expected them to use an eco-friendly game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to determine who would get the Prayers of the Faithful.

Prayers of the Faithful

This call-and-response segment of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass occurs shortly after the homily, when the congregation fervently gives thanks that Father Longwind’s homily has finally ended. We also pray for clothing of the naked, comforting of the sick, world peace, and similar types of happy nonsense.

But the Dignitarians’ capacity for egalitarianism had outstripped my imagination. The entire assembly participated fully in the Prayers of the Faithful. They shared their “celebrations and concerns,” so we prayed for a few birthdays, some elderly parents, a dying partner, a cancerous mother, peace in Scotland, oppressed minorities everywhere, the immortal soul of Gloria Gaynor, and reasonably good weather during the annual conference of DignityUSA in Austin, Texas. They appealed to the predilections and causes of so many splinter groups that it completely undermined the communal nature of the experience.

After the celebrations and concerns, we remembered our dead aloud. Names of the dearly departed boomed from every throat in a macabre cacophony of remembrance that threatened to wake many of those named from their eternal sleep.

At the exchange of peace, I extended my hand to my immediate neighbor. Dagger glances shot from every corner of the room.

Is my fly down? Did I not wash my hands? Do they know I'm not 99 percent good?

Someone muscled my offending hand aside, and a series of strangers quickly moved in for full-body contact. The dyke sitting next to me gave me a kiss on the mouth. Everyone in the room had to be hugged — some of them twice. An average friar at the Shrine could have crammed two Masses into the span of time it took the Dignitarians to exchange peace.

Aside from the lesbian lip-lock, you might have expected that all the bodily contact wouldn’t have bothered me. After all, in my pre-Scott dating years, I enthusiastically engaged in far more intimate acts with complete strangers without batting an eyelash — or at least I wanted to. But Dignity’s service was
so
over-the-top inclusive that it estranged me.

Three laypeople joined the former Marist at the eucharistic saw-horse. The priest and a gay man handled the host: pita pockets torn into triangles. (Did Christ serve hummus at the Last Supper?) Two women took charge of wine. Before approaching the sacred sawhorse for our consecrated pitas, the Marist reminded us that there was a gluten-free “host alternative” as well as consecrated grape juice for those with “special needs,” apparently a euphemism for alcoholism. By the end of the Mass, Saint Anthony’s old, cold anonymity and male-urinal-style worship — standing as far apart as possible from the next guy — had never seemed so good. The Dignitarians might be just the right people to hug Cardinal Sean to death, but otherwise I would have to find my gay warriors somewhere else.

Caking Heart

During my undergraduate years in upstate New York, near the Canadian border, tales of Jesuit missionaries to the Mohawk drew me in. The Jesuits had a stellar reputation for courage. Priests captured by the Mohawk reportedly prayed unceasingly while the braves scraped off the priests’ skin with sharpened seashells and snacked on severed fingers. Even after the Mohawk cut out their tongues, the priests continued to say rosaries. So much did the Mohawk warriors admire the priests’ bravery that they cut out the Jesuits’ hearts and ate them so as to inherit the Jesuits’ courage.

With these hearty missionaries in mind, I set out to find equally brave clerics to serve as my fellow foot soldiers. Here’s what I found:

• Number of diocesan priests under O’Malley: 525.
  

• Number of religious-order priests in the archdiocese: Approximately 500.
  

• Estimate of the rate of homosexuality among priests: 30 to 50 percent.
  

• Number of priests in the Boston area who came out publicly to their parishes and the world at large: 0.
  

• Number of priests who signed the petition “Roman Catholics for Equal Marriage Rights”:
  

• Number of priests who testified that the social justice teachings of the Church precluded support for constitutional amendments banning gay marriage: 4.
  

Butler’s saints and martyrs had no competition in Boston.

The Rainbow Church

A church that celebrates as its central rite a eucharistic ritual “in which an all-male clergy sacrifices male flesh before images of God as an almost naked man” and in which unmarried men regularly share a residence has got to be the gayest church in the whole wide world. Take, for example, liturgical vestments: they come in more shades than a pride flag and have more meanings than any arrangement of colored hankies you might wear in your back pocket.

• Violet, purple, or blue for Advent and Lent
  

• White from Christmas to Christ’s baptism, from Easter to Pentecost, and for feasts for the Virgin Mary
  

• Red for Good Friday, Pentecost, and feasts of martyrs
  

• Green for non-feast days
  

• Black and white for funerals
  

So, if you are a liturgical top, and it’s June, you wear … Oh, never mind.

In private, many priests told me they disagreed with the Vatican’s teaching on civil recognition of committed gay relationships. Some of them ignored the archbishop’s direction to preach against civil marriage and to collect signatures from the parish for a petition to ban same-sex civil marriage. But not one — not a single one —- actually preached in favor of recognizing civil same-sex marriage.

“If there is this whole network of priests who believe that justice requires being more welcoming of gay Catholics and recognizing gay civil marriage, why are they not speaking out?” I asked.

The answer from one priest: “I like my day job.”

“But you’re not doing your day job,” I argued. “Your day job is justice.”