Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (7 page)

Having reached this covenant with the Almighty, I felt guilty. So I made one last gratuitous concession — as God no doubt knew I would. Omniscience is a boon at the bargaining table. My concession was this: I’d take added responsibility for the liturgy on that Friday Sabbath of mine. I agreed to serve as a lector at Saint Anthony’s.

“Lay ministry?” Scott said. “That sounds hot!”

“It has nothing to do with getting laid.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “Whoa! Wait. You’re going to do this during working hours?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want this religion business to interfere with my long-term plan to sit home and eat bonbons,” he warned, shaking his finger at me. “Go easy on it. How are you going to get a job as general counsel of a hedge fund and start supporting me in the manner to which I could easily become accustomed?”

“Half hour, once a week,” I promised. “No sweat. It won’t affect worklife.”

“Well, OK, I guess that’s not so bad. But keep a lid on it.” Then he added cheerfully, “You know I don’t believe that religious crap, but if it makes you happy and makes you a better person, I’m all for it.”

Like a fool, I took him at his word.

III

A Church to be proud Of

You start off with Harry Potter, who comes across as a liveable wizard, but you end up with the Devil. There is no doubt that the signature of the Prince of Darkness is clearly within these books
.

— Rev. Gabriele Amorth, chief exorcist of the Vatican

Channeling Fames Carl Jones

LINGERED ON THE SIDEWALK
like a John at an X-rated theater. I pretended to read the weekly bulletin taped to the window. I glanced nervously over each shoulder, and a voice in my head kept asking:
What’s a nice porn writer like you doing at a mean church like this?

What if someone I knew
saw
me there? Scott’s warning was right on the money. It just wouldn’t do for a self-respecting homosexual professional to be seen among the faithful. It was too throwback, too neocon, too much like saying I believed in magic. Or had a guilty conscience. Which I did.

There was nothing wrong with church attendance per se. For a straight person. Within reason. On Sundays and holidays, for example. Once-a-week religion on a straight career was like a pocket square: it looked nice, but everyone understood you didn’t take it too seriously. Real piety, on the other hand, killed conversations. It was a form of spiritual flatulence on a down-bound elevator.

I was about to turn away and welsh on my covenant with God when a homeless woman halfway down the block shouted, “Got any change?”

Dammit! I yanked open the door and ducked inside.
Change? No, I'm sticking to the deal we made. Swear to You, hope to die
.

Bulletproof glass more appropriate to a pawnshop than a church shielded the information booth in the lobby. A woman of indeterminate age with a skull as narrow as a pencil manned the booth. I smoothed my clothes and tried to project deep spirituality. And maybe heterosexuality.

“Lector training?” I asked.

The woman looked me up and down, as if she were cataloging my sins. This thought visibly passed through her mind:
Priests might need to hear you whine in a box to now, but I had you pegged from the moment you walked in the door, homo
.

She jerked a thumb toward the basement.

Certain people go to foreign lands, seek out strange gods and different cultures, indulge in smoking the local intoxicant, participate in local customs like the consumption of raw aardvark testicles at the birth of the third son, easily absorb languages consisting entirely of clicks and snaps, become inured to the local habit of paying one’s respects via presentation of a virgin gecko, and otherwise delight in the company of radically weird strangers as far from home as possible.

Said people are not Boston Irish Catholics. A journey farther west than the local coffee shop gives us hives. When we are looking for a culinary adventure, we switch from Bud to Bud Light. We have trouble pronouncing surnames that don’t begin with “O” or “Mc.” Shaking hands with strangers smacks of communism. In short, we seek out and cling to our kind, and we have to be dragged screaming to make the acquaintance of others not like us.

The basement frightened me. A dirty velvet curtain flanked a stage with an American flag and a podium. Thirty collapsible tables with folding chairs were arranged between an unused statue of the Virgin and an industrial-strength kitchen. The air stank of cigarette breath, stale coffee, and stainless steel polish. Someone had set out a plastic platter of day-old pastries and enough Equal to choke a horse.

The virtuous had arrived early. A polished, unapproachable Cape Verdean woman was cataloging her gold jewelry; a frumpy Chinese woman sat by herself and looked eager on cue; two soft-shouldered Irishmen with pale blue eyes wore nylon jackets celebrating Teamsters Local 259. It looked like an assembly of actual holy people who tithed, said grace, and never once countercheated against Gram in a high-stakes cribbage match. They no doubt led tidy lives, spent their vacations building homes for the Appalachian poor and making pilgrimages to Lourdes, and were in bed by 9:00 P.M. People, in other words, who had nothing in common with me.

Lo! There’s the homosexual!
I expected the Cape Verdean to cry out.
Let's burn him!

I decided to pretend that I had wandered off course while looking for Filene’s Basement. I was here not for spiritual substance but for knockoff Prada shoes. Francis the Franciscan Friar whisked me to a seat and buried me in registration forms.

“All are welcome,” he reminded me.

If only you knew, Father
, …

Father Francis divided us into two groups. Eucharistic ministers remained with him. Lectors fell to the purview of a take-charge, no-nonsense priest whose brown robes whisked around him while he walked and whose rope sash cracked like a whip. He had an angular face, an Abe Lincoln beard, and limbs like ax handles. Well call him Father Abraham.

Using a whiteboard and lots of nervous energy, Father Abraham gave a short history of lay ministry. He explained that lay ministry actually pre-dated the clergy. No distinction existed between clergy and worshippers in the early Church. All ministers were necessarily lay ministers, and no special status attended their ministry. The earliest Christian missionaries were laymen. Many of the religious orders began as lay movements that the Church later clericalized. Saint Francis, the founder of Franciscans and friend to all animals, was a layman.

The origins of the early Church notwithstanding, later Church leaders discovered that God had never actually intended for uppity lay-people to carry out works in His name. Laypeople were to attend liturgy, not to participate in it. For several centuries, the Church limited the consumption, let alone the distribution, of Holy Communion to the clergy. Because the altar was holy, no layperson could enter it.

Vatican II reinvented laypeople. No longer would they sit passively and be the “catchers” of religious activity. Now, the laity would serve as religious “pitchers” as well. (I’ll spare you a Handy Gay Vocabulary Alert on this one.) After Vatican II, anyone could read the word of God.

“Anyone?” I asked.

“Anyone,” he said. “Of course, you
are
the public face of the Church. So an added burden rests on your shoulders. You need to look and act the part, so that you don’t detract from the message you are delivering.”

Looking and acting the part wasn’t the problem. Truth was, only one thing really worried me about this whole lector business. It wasn’t that I suck cock. Or that I write dirty stories. Or that I covet throat lozenges, own a Protestant pew, or look like a serial killer.

No, it was a much more serious matter: no one has ever mistaken me for James Earl Jones. In His infinite wisdom, God gave me a gay voice. It’s not precisely lilting or fey, but it has a light, weightless quality — a feathery tone like an insouciant diva offering her jewelry for a kiss in lieu of a handshake. And it doesn’t help that I can’t enunciate my S’s and F’s clearly enough for others to distinguish them. My junk mail regularly comes addressed to Mr. Pomsret.

My outgoing voice-mail message plagues me. A hundred times, I’ve recorded over the old greeting, listened to the new one, rerecorded it, and listened some more. I never quite get the stern, majestic tone that might convey the august power of the law enforcement branch of the United States government to which I belong.

I try the greeting with “U.S.,” but it comes out “U.F.” I try just “S.E.C.,” but that comes out “F.E.C.” Stringing the whole thing together sans acronyms and using a diaphragm-stretching deepness of voice that I could barely sustain, I say, “Scott Pomfret, United States Securities and Exchange Commission.” I call Scott, play the greeting, and ask him what he thinks.

“You sound like a nancy queen,” he says every time.

My two consolations are, first, that I am actually gay. After all, I could have been straight and had a gay voice. Imagine the tragedy, the comic irony, the proof that God has a sense of humor. Second, I take consolation that I’m in reasonably good company. Numerous evangelicals and many of the horse-wranglers from the hate state of Texas, including President Bush II, share this affliction — a squeaky high-pitched whine like a loose telephone wire caught in a brisk wind. Listening to President Bush always gives me that acute sense of mortification you feel when hearing your own alien voice caught on digital audio.

Father Abraham fixed his gaze on me and said in a loud baritone, “ As I used to teach young seminarians preparing to say their first Mass, the trick is to make
me
believe that yew believe. This should be true not just on the altar, but everywhere you go, eucharistic ministers and priests alike. You have personal responsibility with respect to the way you live your life. You must be a witness.”

Easy for you to say
, I thought bitterly.
You could be James Earl Jones’s white brother

Before I could chicken out, Father Abraham marched us to the second floor chapel for the dreaded practicum, in which we broadcast the voices God gave us — gay, straight, and anywhere in between. Father Abraham stood in the back row. We trainees huddled like shocked dogs under the glorious stained glass above the altar. The Cape Verdean queen went first. Her Highness rushed through the reading like she was in a race for the finish line.

“Do you have some other place you need to be?” Abraham asked with mock politeness.

“What?”

“Slow down!”
he boomed. Abraham had no need for amplification.

Her Highness started the reading a second time. Abraham again interrupted. He noted how important em-PHAS-is was. “E-NUN-ci-ate,” he chided. “You must enunciate.”

Abraham had once been a drama teacher — and I don’t mean that phrase as a euphemism for “gay.” He was a professor of homiletics — the art of giving homilies, which is what Catholics call sermons — and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to show off. With exaggerated diction, he spouted great chucks of scripture, with each character therein given a different voice.

“Do
that’s”
Abraham commanded when he had exhausted himself He might as well have asked Her Highness to turn water into wine.

“Um, OK,” she said, close to tears. He mercifully let her get through her text and then slink off to the pews to be alone with her shame and gold jewelry.

One of the nylon windbreakers went next. In a cramped Irish voice that he swallowed whole, he said, “A readin’ from the first book —”

“The first thing you need to keep in mind,” Abraham said, cutting the Irishman short, “is that the microphone is unkind. It amplifies everything: snuffles, labored breathing, nose wrinkling, gas. Even shyness. God may be forgiving, but the microphone is not.”

Once Abraham had reduced the Irishman to a puddle of warm Guinness, I approached the ambo. The microphone radiated evil. Think of the smoking swastikas on the crate holding the Ark of the Covenant in
Raiders of the Lost Ar\
. Like the God of the Old Testament, that microphone could perform acts of great cruelty and vengeance. Just when you thought you’d made a covenant with it, the bitch turned on you. It would refuse to amplify a word you said until the moment when you cursed it under your breath; then it broadcast the curse so loud it made your ears bleed. If you laid hands on it, it wilted like an orchid, went slack, and emitted a snap-crackling boom across the entire sanctuary.

“A reading from the First Letter of Paul to…”

I couldn’t go on. The microphone, in its ever-inventive cruelty, made me sound uber-gay. We’re talking far-out San Francisco fairy-queen, hand-on-the-hip, triple-snaps-in-a-Z-formation, rainbow-ribbon-rippling, Maria Callas-worshipping gay. Imagine saying the name “Sosthenes” with a lisp.

“Sorry, Father,” I apologized, covering the microphone with one hand.

“Lesson number two,” boomed Abraham. “Never apologize! Keep right on going with what you were doing. Don’t call attention to your errors.
This is not about you!’