Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (16 page)

“I can do more from within than without.”

“So what do you do?”

“I put all that anti-gay-marriage literature from O’Malley on the table way in the back of the church. That’s like relegating it to the netherworld,” he said, proud of being such a rebel.

One of the priests I spoke to, a generous and generously proportioned prelate named Father Butterballino, proposed, “Maybe if I lived in a society where coming out as gay was like mentioning that you are left-handed, then I’d come out.”

“But you won’t live in such a society
until
people like you come out.

“True,” Father Butterballino acknowledged. “But I’m not going to be the first.”

Over and over, it was the same refrain: fear of job loss, fear of opprobrium, fear of being tainted by perverts and pedophiles, fear of loss of ministry. But where were those priests who decided social justice, personal integrity, and the possibility of saving a youth considering suicide was worth the risk? Where were my Berrigans, liberation priests, and prelates who stood up to Nicaraguan death squads? Where were my Jesuits?

Clerical Comings-Out

In the early 1970s, Tom Brokaw interviewed Father John J. McNeill, a Jesuit, on NBC. “Are you gay?” Brokaw asked. McNeill acknowledged that he was. This admission kick-started a tradition of clerical coming-out:

• 1987: Robert L. Arpin announced from the pulpit that he was gay and had AIDS. He died in 1995.
  

• 1997: Martín Kurylowicz carne out to- his parish in a newsletter and at Holy Thursday services. His boss, the bishop of the Grand Rapids diocese, supported him,
  

• 2002: William Hart McNichols of Taos, New Mexico, came out in a
  Time
  magazine article about closeted priests.
  

• 2004:-Fred Daley, a priest in the Diocese of Syracuse, announced publicly that he was gay after becoming fed up with the Vatican’s attempt to scapegoat gay priests for the scandal. His parish gave him a standing ovation.
  

• 2005; Rich Danyluk came out to his parish. He later explained, “There’s a passage in Scripture that God said to Jesus, You’re my beloved son in whom Pm well pleased.* I believe God says that to every male, and he says, “You’re my beloved daughter/- to every woman. Finally, that-sunk into me, that 1 don’t need a priest or a bishop or a pope to tell me who I am.”
  

• 2005: A Jesuit retreat director from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Thomas O’Brien, came out in the
  Detroit Free Press
  in response to the ban on gay priests in the seminary, writing, “I am coming out. as a gay, chaste Jesuit priest because it hurts too much not to”.
  

• 2006; Jim Morrison came out to his Louisiana- parish and bishop as a celibate gay man. He said he was not looking for approval, but only trying to be more true to himself, his parish, and his God,
  

For many, coming out costs them dearly. In’ 1974, McNeill (a co-founder of the New York, chapter of Dignity) argued in his book
The Church and the Homosexual
that the Bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality. After studying its contents for three years, the Vatican initially approved the book’s publication. Two years later, however, Rome rescinded its permission, and the Rat ordered McNeill not to speak to or write in the media. When O’Neill refused to discontinue his ministry to gays, the Rat caused McNeill's expulsion from the Jesuits.

When I expressed dismay to a diocesan priest that only about 8 of America’s 45,000 priests had come out of the closet, he said, “I think that more have than you know. It just hasn’t been public. I know priests who have come out to people who they think are trustworthy.” Quoting Matthew Shepard’s mother, he said that people ought to come out wisely, safely, and not to people who might hurt you. He sighed, then added, “I think if we get the word sex’ out of homosexual, it might be a lot easier.”

Shortly after, I had lunch with Father McSlutty, a sexually active gay priest. While we perused the menu, Father McSlutty waxed rhapsodic about the pleasures of coming out to himself and becoming comfortable with his own body. A byproduct of this new comfort, he said, was the ability to urinate without stage fright for the first time in his life.

But Father McSlutty also had a confession to make. Not only had he failed to come out or speak out in support of gay people, he had preached Archbishop O’Malley’s party line, delivering a homily that lumped homosexuality in with adultery, masturbation, and fornication. He seemed genuinely surprised that two gay men in the parish had confronted him afterward. When Father McSlutty saw the couple again the following week, the men rightly snubbed him, and their cold shoulder hurt.

“There is a language we have to speak,” Father McSlutty pleaded, “a language of gay, tentative at first —”

“That’s the language of the closet,” I pointed out.

“You’ve got to understand that a priest can’t wear a sign that says, Tm gay-friendly.’ If a priest says he is gay-friendly, it means ‘I accept the homosexual lifestyle of cruising and acting out and supporting others who do these things.’“^

“Assuming you accept the idea that there is a ‘homosexual lifestyle,’ and that your description aptly characterizes it,” I said.

“You need to find ways to gently reveal your gayness, so that your pastor can pursue the subject if he wishes. The priest may be trying to say something to you that he can’t say in public. You have to listen.”

“Gays don’t want to play games anymore.”

“I understand that. They spent a lot of effort to come out of the closet. I know. But they should play the games for the sake of the rest of us, out of charity if nothing else, so that the priest can become part of their lives. Priests can’t afford to get stuck on positions and stands.” Father McSlutty shrugged. “I’ve love to have gay couples in my parish. But gays have to compromise. They can’t be flamboyant. Hugging is OK. But being demonstrative … no.” Then Father McSlutty looked up at the cute waiter in the tight black pants and made eyes at him.

Womenpriests: Invasion of the Compound Nouns

One
group of priests with hearts that no self-respecting Mohawk would turn down were the Roman Catholic Womenpriests, an international organization of ordained women whose members traced an unbroken apostolic succession through a European (male) bishop ordained by Rome, who had ordained one of their number in a secret ceremony.

My local womanpriest, Jean Marchant, told me that gay men played a key role in her decision to become ordained. For years, Jean had directed spiritual care at a hospice for patients suffering from complications of HIV/AIDS. The birth families of many patients had disowned them for being gay.

“It was very powerful work,” Jean said. “I saw the sacredness of these relationships up against the lack of family support, the lack of societal support, sometimes even in the face of lack of support from the gay community, which at that time was not very accepting of those who wanted to live in relationships. The level of commitment and care was extraordinary. They were doing the dirty work. They were showing up every day.”

Fast forward to 2004. By then, Jean had taken a job with the Archdiocese of Boston, coordinating the work of chaplains and others who visit the sick at the archdiocese’s seventy hospitals.

Two incidents drove Jean to break with the Church. First was how the archdiocese set about closing parishes for fiscal reasons, Jean warned that parishioners needed a grieving process to ease the transition, O’Malley’s then—vicar general — archdiocesan chief operating officer — Richard Lennon, assured her that no such process was necessary. As Jean predicted, the closings turned into a major fiasco. Renegades continue to occupy some of the closed parishes to this day.

Second was the archdiocese’s campaign against gay couples. The Massachusetts Catholic Conference, a lobbying organization funded by the archdiocese and chaired by Archbishop O’Malley, made available a video designed to be shown during Mass in place of the homily.

According to Jean, the video “was a piece of propaganda. What shocked me, what I most remember, was a scene that showed an elderly woman in a hospital bed with oxygen tubes and everything. This was shown next to a picture of a gay couple. And the movie said,
^s
If gay marriage is approved, it will take resources from those who need it most.’

“I am still speechless. It showed no respect for the dying woman and no respect for the reality of same-sex couples. If you have to revert to fear tactics …” She trailed off, clearly upset. “It had the opposite effect on my marriage. I was working with people [at the HIV hospice] who had had spiritual commitment ceremonies. The impact was: Wow! If these people can make it work without the support we straight people have! Whenever I see a gay couple in love, it makes me look at my own marriage and say, I know I could do better.”

Jean had wrestled with a call to priesthood all her life. The afternoon that she watched the video, she e-mailed a womanbishop, “I’m on board.” In March 2005, Jean was ordained to the deaconate. In July 2005, on a boat on the Saint Lawrence Seaway, she was ordained to the priesthood. Jean worked for the archdiocese for another year, at which point she disclosed her ordination and resigned.

Orthodox Catholic bloggers viciously attacked her in print, calling her a liberal Protestant mole, a kangaroo, a tool of Satan, and a worn-out 1960s-reject poncho lady. Nearly all the womenpriests were forbidden to accept communion. Certain bishops targeted fellow womenpriests for special condemnation in the bulletins of their home parish. By way of contrast, no church bulletin I found accorded space to single out a pedophile priest or his pandering bishop in the same way.

Despite the bad press, when I spoke to them a year later, the wornenpriests, more enthusiastic than ever, were training a new group of female candidates for priesthood.

“We are not all gay or lesbian, but we are in solidarity,” one womanpriest told me. “We know the value of people, the value of diversity, the injustice. Whatever we do, we will be part of the solution and not part of the problem.”

Forget the GLBT Spirituality Group
, I thought.
Forget Dignity. Forget the fainthearted clergy. Give me womenpriests!

Unfortunately, the womenpriests were already booked. They had their own cause: getting the Church to recognize vocations among women. Still, it was good to know that although my spiritual Craigslist ad went unfulfilled, I wasn’t the only heretic in the archdiocese.

ManHunt.net is a matchmaking Web site for gay men seeking romantic encounters of limited duration.

“Acting out” is the priestly euphemism for cruising for anonymous sex, as Father McSlutty knew from personal experience.

VII

God Bless Ireland

The language of faith is prayer. Prayer is a language that allows us to communicate with our heavenly Father
. …
Some people have forgotten that language. Without prayer we become spiritually disoriented, our relationships suffer, we begin to be isolated, alone, confused, and often overwhelmed
.

—
Archbishop Sean O’Malley, July 30, 2003

Wookie Prayers

ANY PRIESTS
, including Jean Marchant, report an early childhood obsession with playing priest. While the rest of us were outside playing Kick the Can, they built home altars, murmured blessings, and pressed younger siblings into roles as altar servers. My early prayer life consisted mainly of beseeching. I prayed for new Legos, more snow days, and the return of my “gabum” — my filthy security blanket, which some well-meaning stewardess on an Aer Lingus flight mistook for a potential cholera menace. (Don’t think I've forgiven you, wench.) I prayed that no one make fun of my penis in the locker room at the YMCA, that I pass the Hail Mary-Our Father test, and that my brother inflict only temporary damage on my limbs during the vicious dodgeball games at Catholic summer camp.

By my teen years, my prayers consisted almost entirely of a single plea:
God, please don’t let me be gay. Let it all just be brotherly affection, an artist’s eye for the male form, a passing curiosity as to what it might be like to wear my sister’s tutu. Find for me, God, the perfect chick, who will
really understand my needs
. (“A chick with a dick, in other words,” Scott said years later.)

As the years passed, even without benefit of a proper parochial education, theological sophistication took over. I regularly tried to game the prayer system. If the Almighty cottoned on to the fact that I liked something and gave thanks for it, He — in His Old Testament wisdom — would snatch it away. With this in mind, I gave thanks for increasing premature baldness. My prayers were pro-chromedome, in favor of dead follicles. Grateful for every strand on my pillowcase, I assured the Almighty baldness was the best thing that had ever happened to me: