Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (37 page)

These not-so-public clerics taking to the halls of power in defense of those of us in the street brought tears to my eyes. To all of you priests who so participated — and I mean this in the best Mohawk way — I’d like to eat your hearts.

While Gunner went about with her quiet missionary work among the Catholic priests, the Cardinal Sean political machine also kicked into high gear. Gunner persuaded a priest to speak to his legislator, and Cardinal Sean FedExed customized letters to parishes, providing contact information for the local representatives. Father Lewandowski organized a teach-in regarding same-sex marriage at a local state university, and the MCC made available the terrible dishonest video that drove Jean Marchant to womanpriesthood. Gunner provided a Jesuit to consult with a Haitian-American legislator about matters of conscience, and the bishop of Worcester announced, “Catholics, especially public officials, who willingly and with approval facilitate the legal sanctioning of same-sex unions are involving themselves in cooperation with evil.”

Nevertheless, cooperating with Satan became all the rage. Other churches in the archdiocese came out as gay-friendly. Like the gay bars of old, no sign identified them, and no rainbow flag hung in the window. Instead, you’ve got to follow the smudges, keep your eyes peeled, and your ears open.
Listen. What do you hear?

Maybe the Saint Anthony’s G-L Spirituality Group advertises in their bulletins. Perhaps gay and lesbian couples appear in their parish directory with their children. Maybe every once in a while their pastors raise questions about the propriety of the Church’s political efforts against same-sex marriage. Maybe a girl like Mikaela is brought to the altar and baptized while her two beaming mothers look on.

Spiritual Flamer

Inspired by all this gay Catholic history, I went back to the JUC shortly before they closed. It was the first time I had been back since my abortive trick with Michael days after I arrived in Boston a decade earlier. Bright multicolored bunting draped down from the roof of the sanctuary.

“For gay pride?” I asked a fellow congregant.

My comment won the kind of chilly stare commonly reserved for a small turd or the person who had failed to collect it from the sidewalk.

“Pentecost”
he snapped righteously. “It’s a representation of the flames of the Holy Spirit coming down on the apostles.”

Pentecost! I hadn’t even realized it — my favorite feast! It celebrates a gathering of the faithful in which the Holy Spirit filled the apostles and they spoke in different tongues understood by every person:

They were all in one place together. And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were. Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem. At this sound, they gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language. They were astounded, and in amazement they asked, “Are not all these people who are speaking Galileans? Then how does each of us hear them in his native language? We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, yet we hear them speaking in our own tongues of the mighty acts of God.”

To reflect the different tongues, the JUC lectors proclaimed the Prayers of the Faithful in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swahili, and Chinese. The homily concerned the hymn “Come Holy Spirit,” sung in every Catholic church worldwide on Pentecost to emphasize universality. The presider said that Pentecost celebrated the birthday of the Church. He noted that Christ has no body in this world now except us, no hands but ours, no feet but ours.

“Let peace begin with me,” he said. “Let it begin in this church. Go out and meet Christ when he comes; do not wait for Him to come to you.”

Meet Christ? Hell, I have trouble trying to get a date with Cardinal Sean!

Then God said,
Shut up. Listen. What do you hear?

Different voices, all the same God. On Pentecost, everyone was a flamer — even Cardinal Sean, the man of many tongues.

Inflame me, God
, I asked.
Make my eyes as big as saucers, like a child, like Mikaela. She is who I must be, spiritually speaking
.

XVI

Acts of the (Gay) Apostles

Ours is not the escapism of some kinds of religion, nor is it the disconnected boring experience Tm afraid some Catholics remember
…
You re always standing with the demonized, so that the demonization stops. You’re always with the people on the outer fringes of the circle of compassion, so the circle of compassion can expand. You're always at the margins, so the margins once and for all disappear. And you re always with the disposable, so the people stop being disposed of

— Rev. Gregory Boyle, Diocese of East Los Angeles

What Do You Do to Get in the Mood

NEW GENERATION OF WOMEN
in the Bible Belt is turbo-charging the traditional Tupperware party their mothers used to throw. Instead of considering the miracle of plastic, they drink mint juleps and explore the wonderful world of sex toys.

At the G-L Spirituality Group, we, too, like to think of ourselves as hip to the newest trends. So we hosted a similar party — only we substituted prayer aids for marital aids, drank juice boxes instead of mint juleps, and nothing we were hawking required a nine-volt battery. It resulted in an entirely different kind of ecstasy.

“What do you use to get in the mood’ for prayer?” Mama Bear asked.

The group emptied its pockets, man-purses, shoulder bags, and wallets and spilled a startling array of items on the table:

• Prayer cards (Abacus)
  

• Wooden statuary (me)
  

• A Psalter littered with colored sticky notes: red for sad, yellow for peace, blue for the Virgin (Martina)
  

• A rose-colored rosewood rosary made of rosettes dipped in rosewood oil (Sherwin — who else?)
  

• A spiritual journal (Alphaba)
  

• Religious collage (Mama Bear)
  

• Candles in the shape of Catholic saints (Job)
  

• A CD with the Sanctus on it (Magoo)
  

• Rilke’s
  Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
  (June and Ward)
  

• Prayer box containing written intentions (newbie)
  

• Hot Sauce
  (no one, but they could have!)
  

Mama Bear took the cake. He showed off an entire authentic home altar torn from the bowels of a defunct church. No surprise, really — this guy had maintained a home nunnery as a preteen.

One by one, we explained what significance the objects held for us, how we incorporated them into our prayer life, and how well they worked. A current of excitement and relief passed around the table, as if prayer life was a shared vice. We all recognized our prayerful peccadilloes:
Been there. Done that. Not every prayer experience feels like what we think of as an encounter with God
.

We spoke of things many of us dared not say in our gay life for fear of ridicule. Shame transformed into pride, even defiance. To be in a room of people just like us — gay but spiritual, lesbian but a believer — gave us all a little thrill. Abacus in particular seemed to shave points off whatever sentence he had accorded himself in the hereafter, and he actually invited me to join another prayer group at a neighboring church. It probably cost his spiritual bottom line when I declined to attend.
Mea culpa
.

At the next meeting of the G-L Spirituality Group, Mama Bear challenged us with a reading from the first chapters of Genesis, concerning the creation of the world. The snitches and Mr. Sodomy point to this text as evidence that God’s plan excludes homosexual love. (They take the line “God created them male and female” as a prohibition.)

“What’s the overall message of the reading, and how is it applicable to gays and lesbians?” Mama Bear asked. “What do you see in this reading that’s applicable?”

Alphaba, the caustic lesbian, spoke first. “I don’t see anything in here. What’s it say about gay and lesbian?”

Abacus pointed out the repetition of the two phrases: “God saw it was good” and “Each according to its kind.” He said, “That means that all that God made — including gays — is good. And gays can be good according to their kind!”

“If we are in God’s image and we are gay, there must be some aspect of God that is gay,” Mama Bear added. He compared it to the Trinity — three beings in one God. He imagined gay and straight as aspects of that one being.

Alphaba stopped squirming. Occasionally, she interrupted to interject odd non sequiturs — “What translation is this?” “Where are we?” — but she was listening intently.

Job raised the idea of gay apostles, but a consensus quickly emerged that we didn’t need them to be gay.

“It’s irrelevant,” said Magoo. “It makes no difference in how I conceive of Jesus.”

Mama Bear’s eyes twinkled. He had a knack for finding mayhem between the lines, playing with voices, timing, and words we thought we had exhausted. He pointed out verses that suggested God had prescribed vegetarianism for animals and man — green herbs, fruits from trees, and seed.

“Where?” Alphaba demanded. “I don’t see that.”

When the verses were shown to her, she let loose an appreciative gasp.

“I like meat!” Magoo confessed wistfully.

We all laughed, talking of translations, getting the words right, and using inclusive language.

“Look at this message of affirmation in Genesis, over and over,” Mama Bear said. “When was the first time anyone looked at your gay-ness and said, It is good’?”

Martina, who was fifty years old, was the first to speak: “My brother did.”

“When?” 

“Um, last week.”

An appreciative laugh rippled through the group. “Long time to wait,” Mama Bear said quietly. We all nodded.

At the end of the evening, Mama Bear hugged me, saying, “I enjoyed what you had to contribute tonight.” I hadn’t said a single word.

Pomfret’s Lives of the Well-Intentioned, Reasonable Courageous, Everyday Clerics

Father Butterballino, a handsome, silver-haired sixty-year-old, had a strong brow and a slightly uneven goatee that looked like he might have tried to balance it out by shaving off a little bit on the right, a little bit on the left, more on the right, more on the left, until it was hopelessly lopsided. Frequent recourse to Twinkies had defeated his sexual appetites, and it showed.

“Just as well,” he told me cheerfully. “If I were twenty years younger and a hundred fifty pounds lighter, I could get into all kinds of trouble. I wasn’t a bad-looking guy, you know.”

The purpose of my pilgrimage to his rectory was to listen — to hear the story of a priest who had struggled, whose actions had garnered less attention and perhaps involved less risk, and whose story did not fit squarely into a modern-day
Lives of the Saints
.

“Tell me what it’s like,” I asked.

Father Butterballino said he had no vocabulary for being gay as he grew up, but, he said, “I knew what pictures I liked to look at.” Trapped in inarticulate yearning, he entered the seminary and was ordained. “We were sexually repressed. When I committed myself to celibacy I might as well have been committing myself to go to the moon.”

Years after ordination, his sexual feelings emerged. Occasionally he was tempted to act out. “For priests,” he explained, “[who] have been brought up with idea that if you are gay you are a pervert and a child molester and sexually promiscuous, and you then start sensing those same-gender feelings, you think, /
dont want to be a predator. I don’t want to be this and that
. It takes a lot of courage to get over that baggage and say, Yeah, I’m gay, and I’m good. It takes a lot of courage.”

He learned to accept his feelings and put a name to who he was and recommit himself to celibacy and ministry. He came out to a small circle of fellow priests after the sex-abuse scandal.

When the Brown Bag started issuing statements concerning same-sex marriage and adoption, Father Butterballino addressed them directly in his parish bulletins. For example, he wrote that to call gay adoptions “gravely immoral” and a form of violence proved only that those issuing such statements had never spent a second with gay adoptive families.