Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (21 page)

At eighteen, Mama Bear left home for Boston. Still deeply religious, he made the rounds of the local churches and settled on Saint Anthony Shrine as his spiritual home. Still deeply sexual, he made his rounds of the cruising grounds and nightspots. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Mama Bear struggled to integrate his religious and sexual experiences, often frightening away sexual partners by launching into enthusiastic postcoital thanks to God for the wonderful orgasm. “God was there,” he explained. “How could I deny Him?”

Mama Bear was religiously promiscuous, too. He found like-minded souls at Dignity. He attended Mass at the Jesuit Urban Center. He took spiritual direction from a nun who had never before worked with a gay man but was willing to try. He joined the lay ministry at Saint Anthony Shrine. In fact, long before I realized I was gay, he had come out to the friars and the Lay Ministry Committee. In many ways, Mama Bear proved to be my ancestral forebear.

Mama Bear’s extraordinary talent for ritual, reaching out, celebrating and cementing relationships, and talking freely about them astounded me. As Scott has made clear several times, usually at high volume, my approach consisted of: If I love you, you have to guess it. If I am angry, you must divine it. And never ever mention desire aloud.

Infinitely creative, Mama Bear, too, had the Broadway bug. He proposed, produced, codirected, and starred in a G-L Spirituality Group prayer service called Sisters and Brothers Together. Mama Bear promised that it would draw on a dozen religious traditions and involve seven languages, chant, song, psalm, incense, silence, commentary. And, of course, dance.

Before the service, a half dozen stepladders and a full-body wolf suit folded up on a chair behind the altar came to my attention.

“Didn’t Francis the Franciscan Friar tell you?” Mama Bear asked. “We nominated you to be the wolf”

If dance was on the schedule, wolf suits were certainly possible. I fell for it.

Mama Bear led the service, and next thing I knew I was flapping my arms, flowing like water in the pew, and spinning a hula hoop around my hips. We drew twenty-five people, all of whom, like me, seemed a little unsure of how to act during this strange service — when to stand, when to speak, when to dance. Job drifted in and out as the intestinal urge hit him. Ward and June clung to each other nervously. Martina belted out brash a capella hymns in a voice like a trumpet. Alphaba fidgeted like a bag of elbows in the back pew.

“I think that went well,” Father Francis said afterward.

“It went OK,” I conceded. “But if Mama Bear threatens me with another prayer-dance, I’m through.”

The Godfather

I don’t know what it is, but something about a religious, hula-hooping gay man makes people do the craziest things. Case in point: when word leaked out about my Catholicism, however suspect, straight people swarmed to me like flies to honey. To understand this phenomenon, take the following multiple-choice quiz:

Why on earth would someone ever entrust me with the spiritual care of his or her offspring?

(A) The Church requires a Catholic to be in good standing in his parish, and there are only so many of us left from whom to choose. (At last count, Massachusetts had approximately five active Catholics.)

(B) The birth parents calculated that I would produce no biological heirs who might compete for my inheritance.

(C) Someone had too many margaritas the night before the baptism.

(D) I could post the baptism on YouTube.

(E) I love children.

If you picked (E), you get an F. Notwithstanding my ability to produce gas on demand, children terrify me. Not simply because of the fragility of their little limbs and noggins and budding psyches — one look at a child, and my mind automatically recites a rosary of the Horrible Mysteries: crib deaths, car accidents, nasally lodged Legos, Saran-wrapped breathing passages, abductions, pedophile priests, electrically tortured canines, stroller malfeasance, butter-fingered babysitters, kindergarten bullies, malfunctioning playground swings, lead-painted toys, and stolen gabums.

More than all that, though, children (and dogs) possess an innate ability to recognize the truth of one’s inner being. And so they put me in mortal fear of being unmasked — a whole line of children and barking dogs pointing at me with mouths open, like Donald Sutherland in
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.

My godparenting was godawful: First Communions missed, ages forgotten. Why couldn’t the squalling toddler yank himself up by the diapers and bone up on
Business Week 
so we could discourse intelligently on what — other than greed — was causing all these hedge-fund meltdowns that occupied every waking minute of God-Daddy Scott’s working day? On my first godchild’s first birthday, my co-godparent —- out of the country at the time — shipped the child a hand-carved, life-size antique wooden horse last used during the battle of Troy, My stuffed Elmo from Toys “R” Us paled in comparison and highlighted my patent inadequacy for the job.

I wanted to pull my toddler godchild aside and give him a real-world lesson straight from the heart:

Listen, you little twerp. Lemme explain how it works. I’m not here to shower you with gifts and money. I’m here in case Mommy and Daddy die in a tragic car crash. Stop sniveling. Crying gives you crow’s feet, and then no man will ever want you. Now go get God-pa another throat lozenge.

I foreswore further godchildren — until my niece Mikaela was born. A child perfect in every other way, she lacks three fingers on her left hand. My brother Bruce and his wife requested that I be her godparent.

What better excuse for turning down godparenting than one that came from the mouth of Archbishop Sean himself?

Dear Reverend Kick-Me,

Remember me? — the annoying gay guy wanting to serve as a lector at a Mass presided over by Archbishop Sean?

I’ve got a question: Can a gay man licitly serve as a godparent?

Love and leper kisses,
Scott

The chancery hadn’t responded to many prior inquiries and invitations, but this question elicited a response. Reverend Kick-Me assured me that he knew no position taken by the archdiocese or the Church concerning an openly gay man being a godfather, nor did he expect one to be developed.

With no theological excuse available for turning down the request, I asked my brother plaintively, “Why me? Wasn’t Captain Handsome available?”

“Because you understand what it’s like to grow up different,” Bruce explained.

Ah, yes.

The Theology of Baldness

Between bouts of YouTube and apologies to Mama Bear, Tim’s spiritual intervention gnawed at me. I knew I should have had a better explanation for remaining Catholic, but every time I came up with one, the Vatican and/or the archdiocese countered with a fresh condemnation of gay people. It was like a game of spiritual table tennis.

Strangely, the Church’s campaign against gay issues made my worship seem more mad and divine. In the twenty-first century, it’s no longer spiritually impressive to dance as Pan on a rural hillside, fucking boys and scarfing hallucinogenic mushrooms. It’s been done a thousand times since Robert Bly.

But Gothic churches, hard pews, and stained glass presented huge opportunities for ecstatic madness. They represented spiritual gold mines where I and thousands of other self-flagellating gay albino monks named Silas could celebrate the bawdy, unkempt Spirit and an untidy, misunderstood God.

Tim’s question turned upside down:

If not Catholic, then what? What else can I do with this instinct to bow my head for a blessing, to genuflect at a tabernacle, to bark out a Hail Mary just before the wheels hit the tarmac?

With whom shall I share these moments that tend upward? What would I do with this inarticulate yearning to give thanks, to give praise, to look for grace?

Other than priests, whose job it is to pluck something worthwhile out of a text, to ask unsettling questions of me? Who else will give me spiritual sticky notes to reorient me to what is good?

This spiritual frenzy pressed me for a way to explain my holy outrage in terms Sean could understand. I needed a spiritual bridge, a tunnel from my condominium straight to the chancery, a way of speaking to him that he could not fail to hear. After all, not every bishop opposes legislation in favor of gay unions. Sixty-two-year-old Bishop Raul Vera of Saltillo, Mexico, gave his support to a civil-union bill modeled on France’s pacts of civil solidarity, saying, “As the Church, we can’t assume the position of homophobes. We cannot marginalize gays and lesbians. We cannot leave them unprotected.” Similarly, the bishops of New Zealand endorsed a civil union proposal. The Vatican’s ambassador to Spain, Monsignor Manuel Montiero de Castro, told a conference of Spanish bishops that “there are other forms of cohabitation [besides marriage between one man and one woman] and it is good that they be [legally] recognized.” Even here in Massachusetts, one of Sean’s brother bishops testified before the legislature that — while he opposed gay marriage — the question of distributive justice regarding who should get spouselike benefits was a topic ripe for discussion.

My breakthrough came while watching a clip of Archbishop Sean on Catholic TV Between the two of us, I realized, Sean and I had almost as much hair as a naked mole rat.
Baldness
would be my bridge!

Out came the writing tablet:

Dear Archbishop Sean:

Imagine a different Church, one that proclaims that baldness is intrinsically disordered yet proscribes all attempts to cover bald heads as morally inferior to hairdos of all kinds — even those from the Seventies.

You and I would both be in trouble in such a Church. Wearing your bishop’s miter would be an act of grave sin. Yet, isn’t that how God made us — bald? Isn’t it our nature? Isn’t it arbitrary to forbid someone to act on baldness’s imperative — to cover your head against the winter wind?

This is how I experience the Church’s condemnation of homosexuality and homosexual activity. It denies that God made me and that grace might inhere in loving another man.

Moreover, even if I accepted your idea that God’s intended use of sexual organs was solely for procreation and that same-sex desire was therefore defective, why do we not treat other physical defects the same way? Is my goddaughter Mikaela to circumscribe her activity on account of her handicapped hand? Do you preach that blindness is somehow a question of moral culpability? Has the Church issued a fatwa prohibiting the use of Braille?

Good Lord, Sean! That kind of thinking is a throwback to when we blamed people for their infirmities and suggested they were a punishment from the Lord. To be sure, this outlook is vintage Old Testament, so it’s clear how a well-meaning person might make a mistake.

But now we have science to explain outbreaks of disease and deformity. We no longer need to ascribe them to an angry deity. Well, unless your name happens to be Jerry Falwell, who assigned moral freight to AIDS, Katrina, and Tinky Winky, and who saw God’s retribution in 9/11.

Love and blessings,

Scott

It seemed so reasonable, I could puke. After all, Christ Himself had made my argument two thousand years earlier. Just substitute “bald” for “blind” in the text of John 9:2-3, “His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born [bald]?” Jesus answered, ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.’“

My missive to Cardinal Sean ended with a long P.S. that stated five simple ideas:

1. The Church does not accept that the “plain meaning” of the Bible should in each and every instance be credited as God’s law.
My Baltimore Catechism includes the following teaching:

Q, Are all the passages of the Bible to be understood according to our modern manner of expression?