Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (19 page)

“Wow, Picasso! Has the archdiocese had anything to say about your exhibition?”

“Why should they? There’s not a penis in the whole
Man Emerging
series,” he snapped indignantly.

It was still unnerving to hear the word
penis
coming from priestly lips. “No reaction at all?” I pressed.

He admitted that there had been some unpleasantness when he first linked his artistic Web site to his parish’s site. Conservative Catholic bloggers circulated the link. Picasso said he received over 200,000 hits in that one month. He also received a personal invitation to the chancery.

“I was ready for them,” Picasso said. “Look at Michelangelo! I had my art history lined up.”

That was a frightening proposition: a gay man armed with art history.

“So what happened?” I asked. “Did they fire you? Send you to a retreat for your exhaustion? Assign you a new parish like they did with the pedophiles?”

“The bishop asked me to delink my site from the church’s.”

“No art history?”

“None.”

“No new parish?”

“Same old place.”

We chatted for a while, and I asked how Picasso had first come to the GLBT Spirituality Group.

“I was flirting with Mama Bear on the subway,” Picasso admitted. “He was wearing a baseball cap with a rainbow bear.”

“You still go?”

“No, but you should go back. They’re still around.”

I promised I would. My sense of superiority had gradually faded. Porn writing tends to keep you honest and humble. It also keeps you from ever holding elective office, but that’s another matter entirely.

GLBT Spirituality Redux: The Bishop’s Blessing

The Group had dropped the B and T. It was now just lettuce and bread: the group’s official name became G-L Spirituality Group.

“No one is unwelcome,” said Mama Bear, but he suggested that B and T spiritual issues were different.

Desperation no longer filled the windowless classroom. Travis Bickle, God help his soul and those of his future parishioners, had gone off to finish seminary work. The closet cases had diminished by half. A pink tablecloth covered the back table, now stacked with pint bottles of water and a few juice boxes. Multigrain snack bars formed tidy blue, red, and green pyramids.

And women had joined! Martina, a boyish lesbian, endlessly fingered a long purple necklace that looked like rock candy. Clearly she had had older brothers; she tried to — but would never fully — make up for all the things she hadn’t been able to say when she was a girl. She spoke in unrestrained bursts about gay spiritual books she had read, a welcoming church she attended, and the need for gender-inclusive language.

A token straight couple, Ward and June, sat next to Martina. They looked like they had been through hell. The gay son they claimed to have must have been a demon: I pictured a nasty Chelsea S&M bare-backing pagan sex worker meth queen antichrist democrat with a voracious taste for my porn.”^

Ward and June nodded vigorously when Mama Bear suggested that their main goal ought to be to find a way both to affirm their love for their child and to remain loyal to Church teaching (and the Republican Party). Looking a little ashamed, Ward acknowledged that he knew it was a Catholic group, but he recommended
The Good Book 
by Peter Gomes, the Protestant chaplain of Harvard University. “It’s worth reading,” he said shyly, as if the book was on the Vatican’s prohibited list.”

To make Ward feel better, I copped to the truth: “I have a Protestant pew and a Protestant boyfriend. I know just what you mean.”

Emboldened, Ward said, “One of the problems is that people don’t go to confession anymore.”

“I’ve got nothing to confess,” Martina snapped.

Mama Bear swooped in to remind the group that this was a meeting about gay spirituality, not a bitch session. He suggested we take two minutes to hold hands to show our unity. We sang a verse of “We Are One.”

“No,” Ward explained, “what I mean is, not going to confession makes our pastors less effective. In the sixties and seventies, when everybody went to confession, priests learned about humanity and it softened their hearts. It helped them see how life is really lived.”

Boy
, I thought, /
could educate some of those pastors about humanity right quick. Burn their ears. Crash confessionals all over the state, all in the name of softening hearts
.

Like a stenographer, Alphaba scribbled down virtually every word spoken, as if she were going to report it back to the archbishop. She had a weathered face and a blunt voice that was like getting slapped in the face with a sapling. She reminded me of a wounded dog under a blanket —- vicious, angry, thrashing, drawing out its own intestines as if it could remove its agony and choke it down. At fifty-five, she acknowledged that she was newly “exploring these feelings” and new to “all this.” Neither the word
gay
nor the word
lesbian
crossed her lips during the entire hour.

Next to Alphaba sat Magoo, a red-faced drinker and self-described sissy-boy run to fat and glasses. His legs trailed away from his upper body like a nasturtium spilling over an iron railing. He came to the meeting because a priest had told him that gays were just defective straight people. He said that when he came out to his mother, she responded, “I still love you.” He had expected a “but” to follow. He had expected her to rattle on reflexively about Church teaching. The “but” never came.

“It was the first time my mother has ever had an original thought,” Magoo said, “the first time she wasn’t a wind-up automaton, where the Church pulls a string and the words come out of her mouth. She finally allowed that the Church might not have all the right answers.”

The last member of the group, the Landscaper, wore a green T-shirt advertising his trade. Much of the time, he sat on his own oil-stained hands with his face down and his shoulders hunched. Explaining that they conjured up gay pride marches and men in leather, he proposed excising the words
gay
and
lesbian
from the group’s name. (Did Mama Bear flinch?) I didn’t have the heart to tell the Landscaper that the average Boston Gay Pride parade consists of big-name advertisers, employee affinity groups sponsored by major corporations like Fidelity and Bank of America, and religious groups like the Jesuit Urban Center, Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry, Integrity (gay Episcopalians), A Common Bond (gay Jehovah’s Witnesses), Affirmation (gay Mormons), Q-Light (gay Quakers), and OrthoGays (gay Orthodox Jews).

And Brazilians, dressed in feathers, boas, very short shorts — and very little else. (As one priestly acquaintance observed, “They’re very talented.”)

The landscaper’s suggestion about the group’s name led to discussion of the group’s legitimacy.

“The bishop blessed the idea of the G-L Group here at Saint Anthony’s,” Mama Bear said.

“What bishop?” demanded the Landscaper.

“He gave his blessing,” Mama Bear repeated firmly, dodging the question.

At that moment, Job wandered in carrying a flyer that he had found in the lobby. “I’m trying to figure out what it says.”

Mama Bear snatched the flyer from his hands. “Where did you get this?” he demanded. Job looked as if he were going to have another unfortunate Mardi Gras chocolate moment.

Mama Bear first tore the flyer in half and then asked mildly, “Do you mind if I tear it up?”

“What is it?” Job asked tremulously.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Mama Bear sniffed, dropping the halves in the trash. Job gazed longingly at the basket. Oblivious, Mama Bear launched into a long-winded diatribe about some crazy nut-job who had been terrorizing the Shrine. That morning, the nutjob had ascended the pulpit during the seven o’clock mass and started raving. Father Bear-Daddy had the lunatic physically removed from the Shrine.

“I’ve been telling Father Bear-Daddy to get a restraining order,” Mama Bear fumed.

Everyone looked both giddy and spooked. Our strangeness to one another suddenly became manifest; each of us was a potential danger.

As the meeting broke up, the Landscaper approached me at the elevator.

“You want to go to dinner?” He flashed me a lascivious look.

“I think you’re looking for Ward and June’s son,” I suggested gently, wanting to explain to him that I was a domesticated satyr, with a three-piece suit, a pocket square, a tumbler of calvados, and vanilla sins.

“Whaddaya say?”

“Urn, no thanks. I’m meeting my boyfriend for dinner tonight. Next time.”

The Landscaper turned from the elevator.

“Not coming down?” I asked.

He shook his head and returned to what was left of the group to see if he could scare up a date. I should have directed him to the doughnut social at the Jesuit Urban Center.

Captain Handsome is flip Copilot

Scott and I were booked to do an erotic reading in Manhattan. Our flight was delayed, and fellow passengers hovered about the jet way like mosquitoes around standing water. My prayer life got an instant boost.

Please don’t let us get stranded here, God
, I beseeched.
And please do not let this family with seven toddlers sit in the same zip code as us
.

As if in answer to my prayers, a deep baritone voice spoke from behind. “Excuse me.”

The voice emanated not from God or James Earl Jones, but from the pilot — six-foot-two, blindingly white teeth, Mitt Romney hair, a titanium jaw, manly handshake, and piercing blue eyes.

The toddlers gazed at him in awe.

I gazed at him in awe.

“Hello, son!” boomed the pilot. He knelt next to one of the toddlers and ruffled his hair. Then he glanced at the parents with an expression that said,
You better be raising this child right, or Captain Handsome is going to come and clean house
.

Waving my government ID frantically, I parted the toddlers. “Excuse me, kids, pardon me. Step aside, please. I have some urgent business with Captain Handsome up in the cockpit.”

Scott yanked me back down into my seat.

I protested: “You’re depriving this man who has our lives in his hands of something he desperately needs — namely me?! Suppose his soul is in agony. Suppose he ends it all and takes us and all these children with him.”

“Captain Handsome can do just fine without your ministrations,” Scott growled.

“He needs help,” I said. “His soul is crying out to me. Forgive him, Captain Handsome,” I mouthed toward the cockpit. “He knows not what he’s doing.”

As my luck would have it —- and perhaps as divine retribution for the adultery in my heart — the woman sitting in front of us farted steadily from the moment we took off. She proved to be an odiferous imperialist colonizer, counting on people like me to turn the other cheek, as it were.

Don’t get me wrong. I admired her gumption. She had picked small and winnable battles. She was not by any means an egoist. She was not, like me, trying to take on an entire archdiocese and a thousand years of tradition with a handful of damaged homos, hugging Dignitarians, and priests with good urinary function but little courage. On the other hand, it hardly required a parochial education to discern the evil of her ways: even the youngest toddler aboard that flight agreed there was something profoundly immoral about not owning up to your own gas.

I prayed for spiritual guidance:
Should I blind myself to greater indiscretions, God? Should I speak to her because she was the one You placed in my way? What would Captain Handsome do? Mmmmm, Captain Handsome …

Ultimately, I gave her a taste of her own medicine. We farted and counterfarted over most of Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, and Long Island Sound. It was only when we were about ten feet off the runway in New York that I realized my counterfarting campaign had caused me to forget the necessary Hail Marys.

“HailMaryfullofgracetheLord’swiththeeblessedartthouamongst—”

BOOM!

The rear wheels touched down, then the front. Rubber screeched. The woman in front of me gasped — or perhaps just farted again. The plane bounced once and lurched left. The flaps went up, and the brakes squealed. We rolled to a stop.

My vengefully flatulent nature and raw spiritual laziness had endangered a whole planeload of people.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
. Not even Captain Handsome could make a plane take off or land safely unless someone aboard was madly reciting pleas to the Virgin on behalf of each and every passenger. Hey, he has his work; I have mine.

A twink is a young, tall, thin, smooth-chested gay man with insubstantial intellectual gifts but a prodigious desire to please. My kind of guy, in other words.

A democrat
is … oh, forget it. There are so many gay vocabulary words in that sentence that I could spend a whole chapter on it. Google them yourself.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of books banned by the Catholic Church. First published in 1557, the Vatican updated it until 1966, when it was finally abolished.

IX

The Godfather

Pain is no more reason to avoid friendship than is sacrifice to avoid virtue
.

— Saint Augustine

How to Read Just Right

HE BAR IN LOWER
M
ANHATTAN
had no name. Purple light bathed the back room. The crowd was bohemian — women were big and dykey, men tattooed, patched, scrawny, and visibly gay. Every shirt was made of hemp. The room overflowed with decaffeinated tea, isms of every variety, and organic dark chocolate from endangered forest areas and socialist collective farms. At the back of the bar, a talented lesbian erotica writer educated us about strap-on devices, distinguishing the “softie” she wore on days she expected no action from the more rigid member she sported when she expected something hot, wet, and delicious.