Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (6 page)

Pushing aside a zigzag fold of fresh condom wrappers, I plucked a copy of
The Problem of Pain
from my backpack. By His grace alone, and without any knowledge of Michael’s religious predilections, Lewis’s explanation for why a good God permits humanity to suffer just happened to be among my current stack of to-be-read books.

Michael’s eyes lit up like a slot machine: jackpot! My interest in Lewis was — ironically — a definite turn-on. Unfortunately, mutual mental masturbation was the day’s high point. After some awkward and unsatisfying physical fumbling, we gave up getting it on and lay around naked in Michael’s bed talking about his desire to convert to Catholicism, who might be the perfect mentor, and what local parishes might embrace gay men.

Michael, a journalist, had nominated the Jesuit Urban Center at the Church of the Immaculate Conception as the “Best Non-Bar Venue to Pick Up Gay Men” for
Boston
magazine’s Best of Boston annual picks. Known for its gay-friendliness and a theology focused on social justice, Immaculate Conception hosted an after-Mass doughnut social every Sunday, where, according to Michael, you could score if you’d been unlucky Saturday night.

A day or two later, Michael e-mailed me. Among other things, he described his coming-out. The first time Michael had walked into a room full of gay men, the burden of his self-consciousness had fallen away from him, and the air seemed to change colors.

“Not I,” I wrote back. “No way. Gay men make me acutely self-conscious. When in a room of heteros, I go thankfully ignored. With gay men, my thoughts race, my gaze flickers, and I am acutely conscious of not wearing this year’s ‘it’ shoes. Or last year’s. Or any year’s.”

When I finally forced myself to attend Mass at the Jesuit Urban Center, I understood immediately why the Church of the Immaculate Conception attracted the aesthetically supercharged. The church was a hundred-fifty-year-old soaring edifice of white New Hampshire marble, its architecture precisely calculated to produce shocked dogs and cowering jellies. It had no permanent pews; the entire floor of the sanctuary was open. Were you to feel especially butch, you could have held a game of touch football between the holy water font and the altar.

The palpable gayness of the place knocked me off my feet. It felt as if my skin was sloughing off in great waves. A cluster of Scottie dogs was tied to the railing outside the front door. The seats were brimming with sophisticated men thin as a pair of folding spectacles. Bearded bears served as acolytes. Rainbow banners streamed from the ceiling. The preferred sign of peace was a same-sex kiss.

It made me panic. And it was hard to concentrate on worship while counting gay men like sheep before bedtime. I ran out without taking advantage of a single cruller.

Doing My Religious Business

Blame my beloved, erudite grandfather. When it comes to religion, my tastes run to the Gothic, not the gay — hence the pew,
The Problem of
Pain
, the learned helplessness, and the atheist boyfriend. Modernized biblical language and Unitarian ecumenism leave me cold and unsatisfied. Give me hoary nineteenth-century cathedrals, goblins and gargoyles, Latin benedictions, heavy arches, hidden naves, and unforgiving priests wearing white stoles decorated with the five wounds of Christ smiting the faithful. Therein lies the good stuff. I’m talking spiritual nipple clamps and an electrified floor.

As frequently happens in relationships and religion, fantasy gives way to convenience. Rather than locate the ecclesiastical dungeon of my dreams, I settled on Saint Anthony Shrine as my church of choice.

I found the Shrine the old-fashioned way: on Ash Wednesday, 1999, I followed a trail of forehead smudges. They were streaming from a dull, Cold War-era building that had no bell or steeple. A bank and the Boston Stock Exchange anchored one end of the block. A CVS Pharmacy and a Macy’s guarded the other. Stuck in the middle, the Shrine, too, looked like another place of commerce. A half-dozen glass department-store doors listed its hours, as if the friars might someday hold a white sale on altar linens.

Even the two-story hammered-bronze crucifix over the front door seemed circumspect, as if Christ’s final agony was just a minor discomfort. Only when approached from the subway entrance across the street did the crucifix take on a menacing aspect, as if you had wrongfully escaped from hell, and Jesus was going to extend a hammered-bronze leg and boot you back where you belonged.

Saint Anthony Shrine is known as the Worker’s Chapel, because its downtown location is accessible to thousands who sneak out from their day jobs. The Shrine’s two sanctuaries alternately crank out masses every half hour, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Statues of Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint Clare, and the Holy Virgin receive nonstop devotion, and there’s a steady traffic in votive candles. Outside the ground floor chapel, a great silver font contained enough holy water to drown a cat.

On that particular Ash Wednesday, at least sixteen people were dispensing ashes from various corners of the sanctuary. A group of Franciscan friars was gossiping in the lobby. If you ignored their habits — brown robes and knotted belts — they were indistinguishable from a gaggle of old gay men at a P-town cocktail party, effeminate and affectionate, though the teasing wasn’t sexual.

Next to the Franciscans stood a display case holding dolls — nuns, Franciscans, popes — made by one of the friars. A hand-lettered sign above the case read “Not for Sale.” Rumor had it that the dolls’ outfits were religiously correct down to the very undergarments.

A Franciscan Fashion Show

Q. What is good Father McButterpants wearing under his habit?

A. A priest celebrating Mass does not just throw on a dress like some Appalachian hussy who just finished kissing Daddy. Here are a few sartorial essentials for a well-stocked sacristy:

• Alb: A white full-length slip often seen peeking out provocatively beneath Father McButterpants’s chasuble. Basically, it’s a camisole secured at the waist with a girdle. (Brides aren’t the only ones who don’t want to look fat at the altar,)
  

• Amice: A liturgical bib. If Leviticus hadn’t outlawed eating shellfish, it would serve well at a lobster feed or clambake.
  

• Cassock: A religious hoodie, A close fitting ankle-length garment with or without a mantle (or “buraoose”), depending on your level of fabulous. Also, a dirty anagram. Gram always did love word games.
  

• Chasuble: Capelike outer garment for gay superheroes. Its color changes every liturgical season.
  

• Cincture: A liturgical belt, generally white to signify purity and chastity. Take a deep breath before tightening to emphasize that wasp-sized waist.
  

• Cope: A full cape worn by liturgical super heroes such as Super Transsubstantiator and his sidekick, Homilist Man.
  

• Crosier: The shepherd’s crook bishops carry to yank misbehaving priests from their parishes. Historically, clerics used it as a weapon as well as an aid in hiking the grand marble staircases of their Episcopal palaces.
  

• Mitre: A bishop’s triangular hat, from the Greek word for turban. (Think Joan Crawford.) Stole: A liturgical boa.
  

• Surplice: Another liturgical undergarment, but it may be worn without overgarments á la Cindy Lauper or Superman.
  

Banners over the Shrine’s front doors announced, “All are welcome,” and the friars damn well meant it. While I awaited my turn with the ashes, I cynically classified the Ash Wednesday crowd into categories:

• good Catholics
  

• bad cops
  

• daily communicants
  

• chronic masturbators
  

• the homeless
  

• the drunk
  

• lapsed Catholics returning briefly to remind themselves of
  

• all they hate
  

• priests
  

• old Irish guys drawing disability and state pensions
  

• Vietnamese women who run T-shirt stands outside the church and consider themselves children of God, even if they do sometimes cheat the tourists
  

• skeptical twenty-something paralegals in low-rise jeans and tight belly shirts who never put out on the first date
  

• Shrine security
  

• back-row lurkers
  

• the confessing
  

• the confessed
  

• the certifiably crazy
  

And then there was me. The homosexual. The
lone
homosexual. Aside from the friars, of course, but priests don’t count.

My childhood fear of the altar took hold. I sat as far back and to the side as possible, so that neither God nor anyone else would notice me. It was not so much that I felt out of place, or acutely conscious of my sins. Rather, I felt like some rare bird, some impossible hybrid, some fucking lunatic.

For the next few months, I used Saint Anthony Shrine like a religious version of an X-rated theater. I slipped in, did my religious business anonymously, and slipped out again. Maybe I was ashamed of these private acts, but they gave me a short-lived, lukewarm satisfaction, like peeing down your pant leg after struggling for hours to hold back a weak bladder.

During this time, I made every effort to avoid the matter of the Church’s attitude toward homosexuals.
Homo who? Shut up, and give me another communion wafer
.

Deals with God and Boyfriend

Compared to picking a Protestant pew, picking up a Protestant boyfriend was no sweat. Acquiring boyfriends had never been a problem for me. I’ve had dozens, mostly brief, and frequently overlapping.
Mea culpa. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned
. …

I met Scott at a Catholic Charities event for disabled children. A child on crutches was making her way toward the front of the room. She stumbled. Scott and I jumped out from opposite sides of the aisle and caught her before she fell. We took one look into one another’s eyes, and romance caught fire. We dropped the child and flew into one another’s arms. Now, along with Rory and Jezebel, we live in chastity and are saving ourselves for marriage.

If your suspicious, filthy mind is thinking this tale is a figment of my deepest imagination or something I prepared for my mother’s benefit, you can stop thinking that right now.

You are absolutely correct.

Truth is, I met Scott on gay night at a dance club called Manray. It was the Feast of the Epiphany in the liturgical calendar, which Scott loves to point out; he views himself as
my
epiphany! Scott was twenty-six years old, impossibly slender, with dark spiky hair and blue-gray eyes. His T-shirt hugged his pecs like a second skin. After boosting my courage with a couple of vodka tonics, I slipped up next to him. I pretended to survey the dance floor as I inched closer, until I could have taken Scott’s pulse with my elbow. From time to time, I stared at the side of his head until he looked at me. Then I looked away. Forty-five minutes of this courtship technique left me with a back cramp, a full bladder, and a bald patch on my forearm from frantic “casual” brushing against his skin.

In that moment of extremis, I made the following deal with God:
God, if this hot guy is still at the rail when I come back from the men’s room, I’ll take it as Your will. I'll ask him to dance
.

When I returned, the space at the rail was empty. My heart fell. Apparently, God’s will was for me to go home alone and masturbate.

Despondent, I turned to the bar for a little solace. And there he was.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“What’s your name?”

“Scott.”

“Hey! Me, too! Buy you a drink?”

“Sure, vodka tonic.”

“Hey! Me, too.”
Oh, my God, we had so much in common! God obviously meant for us to be together!
“Wanna dance?”

"Sure."

I was on a roll. “Wanna come home with me?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

Amen
, I thought. Thy will be done.

Scott and I started dating, which complicated my religious life. We had a bit of a scheduling conflict. The problem was the Sabbath. God chose Sunday for its celebration, unless, of course, you are Jewish or Muslim. Unfortunately, in our gayborhood, Sunday is for brunch. Communion wine hasn’t got a chance against a bloody Mary in a pint glass at our local gay sports bar, Fritz. Yes, that’s right: gay sports bar. Not an oxymoron. They exist.

Now, God appreciates a good bloody Mary, too, so He and I reached a mutually acceptable compromise — a covenant, if you will. Friday became my Sabbath; specifically, the noon mass at Saint Anthony Shrine. I kept it holy. And honored my mother and my father and my pint-sized bloody Mary, and all those other commandments.