Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (31 page)

One afternoon, a big-hipped, bearded white guy in filthy sweats made an appointment. He called me “brother” right off the bat. His voice overwhelmed the tiny room. He said he had a formal education, but he sprinkled too many five-dollar words into Boston Irish street lingo otherwise so pure that I longed to learn it as if it were the language of my long lost tribe.

“My name is Seamus O’Dooley,” the client said. “My daddy’s name was also Seamus O’Dooley.” From a Target bag, he dumped a smothering pile of documents on the table between us. He showed me copies of two ten-year-old wills meant to show that he had been screwed out of his inheritance, a rap sheet long as a roll of toilet paper, his First Communion certificate, and the restraining order he had obtained against some former roommate.

He rifled through his pile of sacred relics until he located two articles torn from an ancient
Boston Herald
. Each pictured an old man passed out and slumped sideways near the fence surrounding the Boston Common.

“That’s my daddy,” he said. Sure enough, the caption referenced one Seamus O’Dooley.

“Sorry to hear it,” I said grudgingly, reluctant to lend my ears to one more pity party without a resolution in sight, when my own pity party was raging.

He said a teacher had framed him with accusations of violence. This incident sent him spiraling. His father had taught him to smoke dope, and he had multiple convictions before he was sixteen. Then he cleaned himself up and found Jesus. He had a chance to go to an evangelical Protestant college, but he had no money on account of having been screwed out of the inheritance.

“My whole life went downhill from there,” he said.

It was the Church that did it, right?

He blathered about Section 8 housing, getting digitally raped by a cop who frisked him for marijuana, and a former male landlord who accepted sex in lieu of rent.

You can tell me. It was B16, right?

“Oh, I can tell you some things,” he said. “I can tell you stuff you wouldn’t believe. Cops, hah!”

Vatican cops? The Swiss Guard?

Every story came with a specific address.

Thrown out of public housing? 224 Dorchester Avenue.

Digitally raped? The alley behind 623 Shawmut Street.

First taste of smack? Loading dock of 66 Charles Street by the Common.

What happened at the chancery, 2121 Commonwealth Ave.? They filled your goldfish, didn’t they?

He told me about a slip-and-fall claim, adding that he was now ready to sue the lawyer handling it. Everyone was cheating him. He tried to enroll in a mental health program, but when he told them he would rather have a white counselor than a black one, they refused to serve him.

I admitted that I was just posing as Erin Brockovich. I couldn’t actually help him resolve his legal problems, for which the statutes of limitations had passed years before.

He quickly gathered his relics.

“Mr. O’Dooley, not all is lost,” I said. “I’ll call you on this last issue, this restraining order you want expunged.”

“No, brother,” he said. “If you can’t help, you can’t help.”

Then he disappeared. He had come to Saint Anthony Shrine for assistance, but the tabernacle lay empty, the pages of the lectionary were blank, and the homilies full of false promises. Outside the Shrine, none of the people among the rush-hour crowd seemed unhappy. They brayed about their knockoff Kate Spade handbags and lobster-covered Hub of the Universe sweatshirts. They brandished pictures of a shrinking polar ice cap, ultrasounds of fetuses at the local abortuary, and a portrait of Lyndon LaRouche that looked as if he had been preserved and stuffed by a drunken taxidermist with a cruel sense of humor.

I turned back to the Shrine and kneeled in the dark, trying to pray for Seamus O’Dooley — without success. I couldn’t begrudge him a word. I might as well have been in a polyp-filled Super Colon as in the bowels of a Catholic church.

Simple Words with a Dozen Syllabus

Real life streamed by, and every hard fact or solid circumstance rendered my religious life less real. At Gram’s camp in rural Maine, where hi-speed Internet was still a pipe dream and video choked bandwidth, we abandoned YouTube and sailed unchecked into campfire conversation with Scott’s extended family. Politics, religion, abortion, extramarital sex, and cholesterol — the land mines detonated. Scott’s shirt frequently came off so he could show off his abs to his blood relations. He and his female cousin flexed for the camera. Gram laid out the breakfast table, took her morning swim, and emerged from the kitchen hours later with eight mason jars of pickled brake greens and another of asparagus. She had cleaned every surface, including beneath the refrigerator, though she refused to say how she moved it herself.

Minor household disasters regularly ensued. Scott’s four-year-old second cousin announced, “I have to pee,” which actually meant, “I have already peed and am now standing helplessly in a puddle of my own urine waiting for an adult to hose me off.” Scott’s Uncle Wayne cheerfully sought ways to fleece us city boys. Jezebel took pictures of everything, which often proved necessary in the morning for those pesky blackouts.

Gram inspected one of these photos, and then, smiling wickedly, she held it out toward me. “Your best profile,” she said.

The photograph showed me bent over a cooler, fetching a beer and exposing my backside. If I had had a Super Colon, it would have been dead center.

Rory and Jezebel’s Catholic fervor had cooled. They were prepared to admit, for example, that Father Pamplemousse was “a gay,” now that the good father had quit the priesthood and taken to selling auto insurance. They acknowledged that they had known he was gay at the time of the wedding, but something had kept them from admitting it.

“His being gay would have diminished your wedding?”

“N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-no,” Jezebel said. But the word had a dozen syllables.

“You didn’t want Scott to have all his antireligious beliefs confirmed?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Rory conceded. “Scott wants to make everything gay.”

“Maybe you weren’t ready to concede the hypocrisy of an antigay Church led by gay men, so your day could be pure?”

I went to another mass in rural Maine with them. A beautiful college kid on summer break took the collection. He had thick, straight brown hair that ended in ringlets at the back of his neck and gorgeous green eyes. As he worked his way through the crowds, he showed two smiles. One was coy, involved lots of eyelashes, and gave him two dimples. The other smile, mischievous, he used on a friend. The boy held the collection basket too long in front of his friend, even though it was obvious his friend had nothing to give.

When the boy reached me, I tried to catch his eye. He closed up like an oyster, swallowing even the possibility of a smile. Not unlike God Himself, Who offers one smile to some, but a different, closed look to people like me.

What do you want of me, God? You want my Super Colon? It’s yours. My holy prepuce? My right arm ? Another body part? Be my guest. Just give me a sign here, for Your sake! Throw me a bone
.

The homily and prayers of the faithful passed with nary a word about intrinsically disordered, perfidious homosexuals, but just when it seemed the Lord had finally heard my petition, the priest announced that the Knights of Columbus stood ready in the narthex with a sheaf of petitions seeking a ban on gay marriage in the federal Constitution. Je-RU-salem!

After Mass I asked Rory and Jezebel, “How do you guys deal with gay issues in the youth groups you lead? Has a student ever linked from Jezebel’s MySpace page to our Romentics gay romance site and been scandalized?”

“We told one of the students that Rory had a gay brother,” Jezebel said.

“Other than that,” Rory said, “we haven’t discussed it.”

“If it comes up,” Jezebel added, “I’ll tell them the truth.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m supposed to teach what the Church teaches, but I don’t agree with the Church on this and a few other things.” She refused to divulge what the “other things” were. “So I would tell them what I believe. I would describe our relationship to you guys, how you are at least as normal as other relationships we have known.”

“The bar for normal is not that high in these families,” I pointed out, laughing bitterly.

Jezebel readily acknowledged it.

“So why are you not affirmatively speaking up?” I asked. “Why aren’t we all speaking up?”

Jezebel shrugged. It was the same old story. My straight Catholic acquaintances would say: “I have no problem with your being gay, but those other Catholics …” They saw themselves as enlightened, but had zero faith in their peers, who, they warned us, rejected homosexuality out of hand. Therefore, went the syllogism, there was no sense in speaking up.

Back at camp, I made a beeline for the bathroom. I gave the stuffed-loon doorstop a good swift kick. The sign over the toilet, which read, “Closing the lid … will not cause brain damage,” took on new meaning. Stating what you believe to be the truth won’t cause brain damage, either.

The face in the mirror was as guilty as anyone’s.

Here’s my confession: I lied in the prologue of this book. When Father Francis told me that the Church’s teaching on gay marriage was cruel and that was why the friars didn’t preach it from the pulpit, I wasn’t in fact encouraged that the brown robes stood on my side. Their cowardice disgusted me.
Why aren’t you speaking out, not merely remaining silent? Why do you lac,’courage?

But my eagerness to belong allowed the cowardice to pass. Homosexuality had never made me feel ashamed, but this puppyish eagerness to pass haunted the dark corners of my psyche. Now — in the middle of Gram’s camp — it had finally put its mitts firmly on my soul. That’s the power of Catholic guilt. You can seem perfectly happy and well-adjusted, and forty years later you remember a childhood shame so acute that you spontaneously combust, sell your worldly goods, become a recluse, and herd goats in the Central Andes for the rest of your life. I had all but packed my crosier.

XIV

Confessions of a Crossover

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth
.

— Oscar Wilde

Confessions of a Crossover

RESISTED THE ONSET OF GAYNESS
with the tenacity of a tongueless Jesuit missionary grunting Hail Marys as a Mohawk scraped off his skin. The argument in my head went something like this:

Q. Are you gay?

A. Don’t be ridiculous! I’m captain of the football team!

This brilliant reasoning carried me straight through to my second year in law school. It defeated such inconvenient counterfactuals as oral sex with male high school friends and the porn video catalog I found by the side of the road and treasured for years. Such things never happened. “Experiment” spilled from my lips as if it were an Act of Contrition. “This is not happening,” I told myself. “This
never
happened” —- the same phrase I used after bottoming for the first time.

No one’s kind when you come out at twenty-nine.” Potential lovers patronizingly drawl that they will not date you because you need at least a year’s worth of random sex before you’re ready for a relationship. Other gay men, who discovered their orientation in the womb, sniff at your years as a closet case. When you carry on conversations with people who knew you as straight, you discover that the word
boyfriend
has about thirty syllables. And you don’t know how to react when a scary troll pins you to the bar, shoves his tongue in your mouth, and insists with tent-revival fervor that effeminate men just skeev him out.

Serves you right,
 I told myself, backhanding the spittle from my lips.
That's what you get for being a crossover
. Crossovers — religious, sexual, or otherwise — deserved no respect in my mind. But with the prospects for gay Catholicism fading and prayer all but impossible, I packed my crosier and hopped over to the non-Catholic side of the fence.