Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (3 page)

Instead, the e-mail was an invitation to become a member of the Lay Ministry Committee (LMC) at Saint Anthony’s. The LMC organized and trained 150 volunteers for various roles assisting the priests at Mass: lectors, acolytes, eucharistic ministers, ushers, and the ad hoc ministries. For those who are lapsed or otherwise un-Catholic, please consult the handy Catholic vocabulary sidebar.

Handy Catholic Vocabulary Alert!

Q. Who are all those presumptuous nonpriests puttering around the pews
—
and what’s their purpose?

• Lector: Person who climbs up into a device on the chancel called an ambo (a lectern, podium, or pulpit) to proclaim the non-Gospel Bible readings during Mass.
  

• Acolyte: Person-who brings the chalice, water and wine, and host (i.e., communion, Eucharist, or “those, little wafery crackers Catholics eat”) to the priest, helps him wash his hands., and clears away the dirty dishes after the meal
  

• Eucharistie minister: Person who distributes the host to the other parishioners during Mass. Such a person is also known as an “extraordinary minister,”
  

• Usher: If you can’t figure this one out, put down this book and back away slowly.
  

• Ad hoc ministers: People who do everything else, such as rubbing ashes into foreheads on Ash Wednesday.
  

Think of the church as a cloth-napkin restaurant. The priest is the chef. The acolyte is the holy busboy. The eucharistic minister is the one who says, “I’m Wanda, and I'll be your server today.” The usher is the maitre d,’ The lector is like the guy with a violin who serenades your table so you can’t get a word in edgewise to your date without paying the violinist handsomely.

At the time of Father Francis’s e-mail, I had been a lector at Saint Anthony’s for five years, but my involvement in the parish was minimal: I attended an initial theological training and a practicum that made me eligible to read at Mass, receiving a little medallion to mark my passing grade from lector school. Every Friday, I proclaimed a single reading at the Friday-noon mass. Before the service, I greeted the priest and chatted with my fellow servers, and then vanished for another week. We never discussed my life outside the parish. It was almost as if I didn’t have one.

But I did. I had a life with my boyfriend, Scott Whittier. Scott and I shared a condo in Boston’s South End, a gayborhood subsequently renamed Strollersville to reflect the double-wide, space-age, high-tech, all-terrain urban assault strollers of the infant class and their yuppie parents. Not that I have a problem with straight people. Some of my favorite blood relatives are straight. But the strollers cause problems when I have to make my way across four double-wides to secure my bloody Mary.

Scott and I also ran a business writing Harlequin-style romance novels for gay men. Dozens of our erotic short stories appeared in
Play Guy, Honcho
, and
Indulge
, and anthologies of the year’s best porn reprinted many of them:

You have a hundred hands, and your fingertips stink of ass. His butt’s a loaf of bread you want to drive your thumbs into and tear open to let the hot, fresh-baked steam escape.

Sodomy is a fact of my life. As an attorney, I had even been cocounsel in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the antisodomy laws of Massachusetts — and won a ruling from the Supreme Judicial Court that they could not be enforced in private. And now Francis the Franciscan Friar was asking me to assume a more visible leadership position over the volunteers at Saint Anthony Shrine.

I didn’t want to embarrass Father Francis or the Shrine. I had no wish to interfere with the religious experience of parishioners who might be distracted by recognizing my face from TV — or my name from my pornography or my legal briefs, for that matter. And I assumed in turn that the Shrine wouldn’t want me if it knew who I was. One side of my life deliberately didn’t engage the other.

Francis the Franciscan Friar and I scheduled a meeting for the following week. At the appointed time, the creaky elevator took me to the priests’ quarters. Taking an elevator — even a rickety, uninspected elevator — felt like an unnecessary express toward my doom.
If I have to walk the plank
, I thought indignantly,
I should be allowed to trudge under my own power
. I squeaked out a few Hail Marys as a prophylactic against any divinely ordained mechanical difficulties.

The priests’ quarters only added to my discomfort. The air was stale. Sounds were hushed. The furniture was blocky, solid, and simple. Saints lurked in every nook and cranny. Pithy biblical quotations nagged from every bulletin board. It felt as if I were back in junior high, trudging to confession with a conscience heavy with looking at other boys’ penises, self-abuse, and lying to my mother.

Francis the Franciscan Friar had a thick head of prematurely white hair, skin so ruddy it looked freshly scrubbed, and a slow, patient voice that sounded as if it would outlast every human folly. He was wearing a black shirt and pants and a Roman collar. I had never before seen him without his brown Franciscan robes, macramé sash, and tire sandals. To be honest, it was a letdown. If I were going to be chastised for my antics on Beacon Hill and for my perfidious homosexual lifestyle, and assigned a hundred thousand more non-elevator-related Hail Marys, I wanted the punishment to come from on high. Father Francis’s civvies made me feel as if I were talking to an equal.

A dish of horehound candies lay on the table between us. There was little small talk; my vocal cords were still too raw. Instead, I hoarsely explained my willingness to participate on the LMC and take a leadership role at the Shrine. I told him I understood the higher, visibility role and that the friars would be counting on me in new ways. But, I warned, there were things Father Francis should know before he formally made the offer to bring me aboard.

I took a deep breath and quashed an impulse to cross myself. Like many Catholics, I have a sound track that automatically plays in my head for moments like this:
Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee
.

In a rush of words, I confessed that I was gay and had a public role in the same-sex marriage debate. I explained television, the Haitian woman, throat lozenges, Mr. Sodomy, and the evening news. I explained my reluctance to interfere with others’ worship. I talked until my vocal cords again gave way.

Then it was Father Francis’s turn. I told myself to be on my best behavior.
Don’t engage with the other side, no matter what offensive things came out of his mouth
.

Father Francis slid the dish of horehound candies my way. “The friars here at St. Anthony’s are opposed to the Church’s teaching. We think it is inhumane,” he said.

“But-but-but…” I spluttered, thinking,
What about abomination? What about the pope? What about eternal damnation? What would happen if Archbishop O’Malley paid a visit to the Shrine and heard a happy porn-writing sodomite proclaim the Word? What about the livelihood that
as soon as Father Francis handed me the keys to the Shrine, I would rub my palms together, cackle maniacally, declare, “It’s mine, all mine,” and immediately put my radical, life-denying homosexual agenda into place?

Father Francis forestalled my skepticism. He continued, “People have asked us why we friars don’t speak out against gay marriage. This is why. We believe the grace of marriage comes from the commitment, not from who the persons entering the marriage are.”

I was stunned. What Father Francis was saying could have been motorcycle-dyke-megaphone-chant material. With slogans like that, he could have joined us out on the front lines, jostling with Haitians and warding off Mr. Sodomy and Pastor Bob. Who says there are no miracles anymore?

I helped myself to a horehound candy. I was immediately soothed.

Francis the Franciscan Friar stuck out his hand. “Now that
we’ve
got that out of the way,” he said, “welcome to the Lay Ministry Committee. When can you start?”

I

The Tunnel Builders

The existence of different currents of thought seems necessary if an excessive conformism is to be avoided. The Christian message is universal. It addresses itself therefore to very different people. It is to be expected that there would be diverse approaches. This implies plurality
.

— Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI

Mrs. American Bothie

RAM WAS WORRIED
we were all going straight to hell. She didn’t say it aloud. She rarely mentioned the error of our ways. In fact. Gram was almost
too
gracious with her hospitality. Because our ultimate destiny was the fiery pits. Gram determined that we should have a few fond memories of earthly life to sustain us through eternity. Hence the steady supply of fresh-baked whoopee pies and generous servings of Grape-Nuts pudding.

The first time my boyfriend Scott invited me to Gram’s “camp” in rural Maine, we arrived after midnight. I slept through the whole three-hour ride. When I woke, it was as if Boston had returned to its pastoral beginnings: cows on the Common, towering maples, and a winding, unpaved road to her house.

Gram and her then-husband Dick built the camp themselves in 1963 on the shore of Thompson Lake. What Dick didn’t know about plumbing and carpentry, he taught himself. Gram had had a railing put on the back porch and replaced the outhouse with a leaching field, but forty years later, the roof had never leaked and the walls were holding strong, and God bless indestructible kitchen linoleum.

The camp was no more than eight hundred square feet, painted brick red and shaded by a dozen evergreens that dropped needles and pitch relentlessly on the picnic tables below. Reed baskets hung from the roof beams, and every shelf teemed with bric-a-brac that Gram had collected over the years — pottery owls, granite inchworms, brass sailboats, and even a pewter mug that had belonged to Gram’s grandmother and might have been in the family for centuries. It was a world of Mary Kay cosmetics, plastic violets, and a kitchen window bird feeder designed for a hummingbird whose buzzing wings made me want to steal Gram’s badminton racquet and swat it like a mosquito.

That first night, I expected Mrs. American Gothic to answer the door. In fact, Gram was wearing a bathrobe and slippers, but her finger was tucked into a Bible, which she had nested in a book cover knit from spare yarn. The bottle of Palmolive by the sink and the air freshener canister in the bathroom wore matching knit dresses.

Leviticus or Paul
, I thought. No doubt about it.
You’ve got to put on a good show when the sodomites come to visit
.

Gram folded away her Bible, kissed her grandson, and extended her hand toward me with the dignity of royalty.

“You are welcome. You are welcome.” She articulated the words with perfect elocution and appeared as sincere as the friars of Saint Anthony Shrine. She pointed the way to her queen-size bed. “Never mind me. I can sleep on the bunk bed.”

Scott was delighted, but I took a temporary vow of chastity. Aside from the innate wrongness of scoring between your grandmother’s sheets, the interior walls reached only two-thirds of the way to the ceiling, and Gram’s bed squeaked. Weeks later, I learned she was stone-deaf. My attempt to have sex without actually moving a muscle had been a useless precaution.

My squeamishness proved otherwise silly. Saturday morning, I emerged from the bedroom in my swim trunks, shirtless, with a towel slung over my shoulder. Gram darted toward me with surprising alacrity for an octogenarian. I dodged, but she thrust her face against my chest and nuzzled my chest hair.

“Gram!” Scott scolded. “Men have been killed for less than that. Get away from my fur!”

Gram released me, chuckling uproariously, not the least bit embarrassed. She had the same taste in men as her grandson. She was an old-school Yankee with snow-white hair, but she had a swimmer’s body and big breasts, and her grandchildren traded rumors they’d heard about the wild days of the Swingin’ Sixties.

Gram and I got along for the most part. She never held it against me that I shave my head and have a four-inch scar on my left cheek, which makes me look like a serial killer. (As a joke, one of my law-firm colleagues once gave our interns snapshots of Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, and me. He invited the interns to pick out the lawyer from the group. Ted Bundy was the near unanimous choice.)

Gram
did
suspect that a city boy like me would be unable to distinguish loons from ducks, and she watched me like a hawk out of fear that I’d use the undrinkable tap water for the morning coffee. But our main point of contention concerned strawberries. She favored refrigeration. I do not. I set newly purchased strawberries on the windowsill. She whisked them to the refrigerator while doing housework. I liberated them from the fridge before noon, but they were back in the crisper by cocktail hour. Even when I hid the strawberries in our Honda’s glove compartment, Gram somehow sniffed them out. We never directly engaged one another. We didn’t defend our positions; our differences were irreconcilable. In time, we put competing strawberry concoctions on the table and judged our righteousness solely by whose dessert had the smallest slice left after Scott’s relatives had eaten their fill