Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (4 page)

Scott and his grandmother were startlingly alike in personality and looks. Both were unnaturally slim, with pale skin that tanned olive. Each had blue eyes and a hooked nose, and neither had patience for the presence of other cooks in their respective kitchens. They were fiercely competitive at cards, obsessed over Scrabble, and played marathon games of cribbage. They were too much alike for either to get away with the rampant cheating they both saw as just another part of the game. Both were vain about their age and their figures and would as soon be seen in public without hair product as appear naked on national television.

Though Gram clearly viewed my unwillingness to play cribbage ad nauseam as a character flaw, she never once suggested that our homosexuality was a problem. This had not always been the case. When Scott first moved to Boston and came home on summer weekends talking about his then-boyfriend, Gram cornered him one afternoon. She made Bible noises. Stern with moral righteousness, she said, “I’d be disappointed to have to tell people my grandson was like that.”

Scott had been Gram’s favorite until that time, but the exchange broke the bond between them and replaced it with suspicion and mistrust. Scott didn’t go back to camp for years.

“Leave it in Boston,” Scott’s father said approvingly.

No Skin Off Gram’s Ass

Sodomy was not the only — or even a primary — reason Gram believed that her grandchildren were going to hell. A confirmed Protestant, Gram viewed Catholicism with the lip-curling disgust many profess to have when they see two men kiss. To her, it was a spooky combination of paganism, mysticism, sexual deviance, and funny costumes. Growing up, she firmly believed that a tunnel ran between the priests’ rectory and the nuns’ quarters, through which the priests passed nightly for unlimited sexual orgies. She believed the priests reported their unholy machinations over a telephone hotline to Rome. Of course, it didn’t help that Gram’s ex-husband had been wooed away by a “French Canadian Catholic harlot” named Clare. Clare was a sweetheart. She always gave me lottery scratch cards for Christmas stocking stuffers that never failed to win.

Clare aside, Gram’s anti-Catholicism was purely theoretical, born from observations on the idolatrous worship of Mary and the saints and the absurdity of putting a man between you and God when it came time to confess your sins. It was no skin off Gram’s ass what all those Mary-worshipping tunnel builders did in their spare time. With the exception of Clare, Gram could live and let live.

That is, until Scott’s brother Rory became a crossover.* His crossing over was strictly religious, though. Raised, like Scott, to be a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in order to marry his girlfriend. (Let’s call her Jezebel. Gram did.)

Having a gay grandson must have been a trial, but Rory’s conversion made Scott and me seem positively saintly. With the ferocity of a purebred, the normally stoic Yankee retreated to her kitchen muttering about idolatry and popes, wondering what she had done to have her grandson betray her and turn his back on God and family. Her habit of having an afternoon margarita in a mason jar only threw fuel on the fire.

Gram, Rory, Jezebel, Scott, and I were sipping summer wine. The day was clear and blue, the lake calm. We discussed loon sightings and supper plans and in-season fruits. Without warning, the conversation spiraled into condemnations and defenses of Catholic principle and practice.

Gram was my first up-close and personal experience of anti-Catholic sentiment. In eastern Massachusetts, where the immigrant Irish, Italians, French Canadians, and Portuguese had long since overwhelmed and mongrelized the
Mayflower
Protestants, you coundn’t swing a cat without knocking down a parish priest. Everybody was Catholic. Those few who weren’t knew Catholics, and no one talked about the tunnel.

Scott, who has no interest in religion, rolled his eyes and slipped away to discuss boob jobs with his cousin. Rory, Jezebel, and I defended Catholic doctrine as best we could, but wished we had a simple primer to help Gram understand, if not get over, her prejudices. We imagined it would look something like this:

A Catholic Catechism

Q. Is there really a tunnel between the rectory and the nunnery?

A. Yes, But 60 percent of priests are gay, so the traffic is typically for tea parties or the next diocesan fashion show.

Q.
Why do priests wear dresses when they say Mass?

A. See above. And it’s called a “cassock.’

Q. How do you know the pope is infallible?

A. Because he said so in 1870.

Q. Was he infallible before that?

A. No. God flipped a switch, and it was so. Amen.

Q. What’s up with the bread and wine?

A. We believe it becomes the body and blood of Christ during Mass.

Q.
Why?

A. The pope said so. And he’s infallible.

O.
But isn’t that cannibalism?

A.
(Shrug.)
Tastes like chicken.

O.
What up with Mary-worship?

A. We don’t
worship
Mary. We just think she’s extra special — ‘‘blessed amongst women/ as we say — so we build monuments to her, see her image in drainpipes^ and accept that she appears to small peasant girls centuries after she was whisked bodily into heaven. And we ask her to pull strings on our behalf with the Almighty.

Q. Sounds a little corrupt. Can’t you get by on your own merits?

A. Hell, no. We’re guilty, serious sinners, bad people — the worst.

Q. How do you know that?

A. Our moms told us so.

Q. Are your moms infallible, too?

A. Dude, don’t talk about my mom.

Scott’s father also bellowed about his proposed daughter-in-law’s wearing of the religious pants. Scott’s mother gently questioned why her own faith wasn’t good enough. Even I looked down on Rory’s crossing over since, religiously speaking, I was a purebred.

Rory made matters worse by embracing a very bold and rule-bound form of Catholicism. He became all-Catholic all the time. He presented his mother with an array of photos of statues of saints. He wore a crucifix and foisted unwanted graces on his family’s table. He and Jezebel mentored Catholic youth groups and chattered incessantly about their parish priest and how religious people in America were brutally oppressed.

Then they announced that they were abstaining from sex until their wedding day. Never mind that (A) they had been living together for six months and (B) they had already done the nasty.

Their vow led to particularly animated conversations over the fire pit at Gram’s camp, as Scott tried to understand what precisely they could do during this period and what was
verboten
.

“Intercourse?”

“Out.”

“Blow jobs?”

“Out.”

“Manual stimulation outside the clothing?” 

"In."

“Direct manual stimulation?”

“Out.”

“Kissing?”

“In.”

“Let me get this straight,” Scott finally said. “You’re not going to have sex for
six months?”

“Worse,” I interjected. “Masturbation is out, too.” I turned to the happily engaged couple. “Right, guys?”

Rory and Jezebel nodded wistfully.

“So no orgasms at all,” I said. “Zip. Zero.”

Scott and his cousins gasped, but Rory offered a correction. “Urn. On the manual stimulation over the clothing point?
That
could theoretically lead to orgasm.”

Then he blushed. He was obviously speaking from (messy) experience.

The Naughty Alter Boy

Scott’s religious skepticism didn’t limit itself to the convoluted rules guiding Rory’s premarital sexual practice. Growing up, he had been the kind of out-there atheist who lost no opportunity to confront the faithful with his aggressive unbelief. Long before Rory crossed over, Scott’s most caustic disdain had fallen upon Catholicism. Based on his experience with a string of naughty Catholic boyfriends, Scott viewed Catholicism as an ill-deserved get-out-of-jail-free card. As he understood the Church’s basic tenets, Catholics could do anything, no matter how venal, depraved, and contrary to his wishes, so long as they said sorry. Confession was an oral permit to go and sin some more. “You guys let yourselves off too easy,” he complained.

When it came to religion, he and I agreed on exactly one thing: the five-foot cherry wood church pew we found on eBay. It was going to look fabulous in our living room. We ignored the look of sheer horror on the face of a designer friend when he heard what we proposed to add to our decor.

“That’s the one!” Scott insisted.

The pew was the platonic ideal of pew-ness: stark, spare, uncomfortable, and upright. Just staring at the thumbnail images made me start mumbling Hail Marys. It was so hard that it made sodomy seem infinitely less like a pain in the ass.

According to the seller, the pew came from the wreckage of a defunct church north of Albany, New York. It was only five feet, end to end, so I imagined a quaint, intimate chapel with a neatly mowed lawn set against a backdrop of oak trees and blue sky. I imagined a congregation hardly more than a dozen strong, where the pastor was as familiar with each parishioner’s sins as his own. I imagined a congregation so small that perhaps they had been wiped out all at once in a tragic
E. colti 
accident at the church fair by some contaminated spanakopita prepared by the (now deceased) choir master.

And all so that God’s plan could be fulfilled, and the pew could find a new home in the distant Boston gayborhood where it would become a member of our family. Oh, the humanity! Nothing opens an Irish Catholic pocketbook faster than a potent combination of melodrama and tragedy — imaginary or otherwise.

My only misgiving? It was Protestant. Scott, a Protestant-by-birth boyfriend, I could tolerate. A Protestant pew in my living room, on the other hand, seemed positively heretical. Channeling a million Irish mothers before me, I said, “I gotta find a nice Catholic one.” If Gram could have her religious bigotry, I was damn sure going to get my share.

Scott went across the street to get another bottle of wine. I tried eBay searches for “pew catholic,” “pew saint,” “pew holy,” and “pew our mother of perpetual motion,” The search results yielded enough loot from sacristies nationwide to stock the home dungeon of any pedophile with a Catholic high school girl fantasy. But the resale market for readily identifiable Catholic pews was astonishingly limited. Few Catholic churches had given up the ghost. In the decades-long death match among flavors of Christianity, Catholics had edged out the Protestants, at least in terms of online pew availability. Thank the Good Lord for His small Graces.

The nearest authentically Catholic pew for sale was in Albuquerque. It was ten feet long and three thousand miles away. Fueled by an $8 pinot noir, Scott and I furiously debated the pews’ relative merits.

Four glasses into the evening, Scott hit rhetorical pay dirt. He clicked a link to reveal the Catholic pew’s $500 shipping price tag. My theological misgivings evaporated instantly.

“Bring on the Protestant pew,” I said in defeat. There was only so much tragedy a good Catholic boy could afford.

While the auction ran its course, Scott and I took measurements and rearranged living room furniture as if we were bringing a little pink bundle of joy home from the maternity ward. We discussed bidding strategies, confessed eBay sins we had committed in the past, and watched the prized pew like hawks.

Sip of wine. Refresh the browser. Check pillow fabrics. Refresh the browser. Sip of wine. Take a pee. Refresh the browser.

We were toasting our imminent victory when Satan himself— screen name: SnuggleMonkey — appeared in the auction’s final moments. SnuggleMonkey bid a few dollars more. We bid. SnuggleMonkey raised the stakes. Back and forth it went, until I wanted to throttle SnuggleMonkey and leave the corpse to be devoured by sand mites.

The seconds ticked down. We stared at the screen, awaiting the e-mail that would herald our victory or loss.

“You bid too low —” I accused.

“Shh!” Scott shot back.

While we squabbled over our final bid on the pew, and the division of labor, financial responsibility, and, ultimately, love in our relationship, the auction ended.

The dream pew was ours! Eat your heart out, SnuggleMonkey!

Now full of frisky conciliation, Scott slipped Sade into the CD player and nudged me in the ribs.

“When we get the pew,” he said, “I’ll play the naughty altar boy if you want to be the evil priest.”

At last!
I thought. We were finally getting to the raucous debauchery to which the religious right had promised the gay lifestyle led.

*Crossover
is a derogatory term for a gay man who had sex with women before coming out. A
purebred
, on the other hand, has only had sexual experiences with men. Purebreds typically feel superior to their brethren who have crossed over.

II

Follow the Smudges

I could not disavow words like “thanksgiving” or “host” or “communion bread. They have an undying tremor and draw, like water far down
,