Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (12 page)

Case in point: Archbishop Sean. His first chance to rant occurred exactly three weeks after Scott and I launched our gay romance line. On November 17, 2003, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ordered the Commonwealth to open civil marriage to gay couples.

The court’s decision actually made me cry. I had been taking testimony from fraudsters in a windowless room all day long. Afterward, I trudged back to my desk and popped open my Internet browser. As I read the headline on CNN.com, my backbone slipped out of me. Tears streamed down my face. I ran from office to office trumpeting the victory like a herald angel. I threw open my office window: a crowd of triumphant gays was gathering at City Hall Plaza. It never occurred to me that anyone could possibly deny our joy.

But before the ink was dry on the court’s order, Archbishop Sean denounced it: “It is alarming that the Supreme Judicial Court in this ruling has cast aside what has been … the very definition of marriage held by peoples for thousands of years. My hope is that legislators will have the courage and common sense to redress this situation for the good of society.” I’m not sure why I expected anything different. Sean was a Vatican man.
What about the lepers, Sean? Remember them?

The Friday that followed the court’s decision, I made sure I wasn’t late to Mass. Rumors had been flying that Archbishop Sean had asked priests to read a statement condemning gay marriage as a “national tragedy” at every.Mass in every church in the archdiocese. Since I wasn’t yet out to the friars — except perhaps Myron and Bear-Daddy — I expected the worst. Filled with foreboding, perched on the edge of my pew, I swore to myself that I would storm out if they read Archbishop Sean’s statement.

Francis the Franciscan Friar presided. The pews were full, the Marys were cheerful. The day’s Gospel reading was from Matthew: the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Father Francis never read the archbishop’s statement. Instead, his homily focused on that word,
love
.

“So often,” Francis said, “we regard love as a feeling. We say, ‘I’m in love.’ But gospel love is a verb, an action word. One loves through acts. This is what Jesus meant, when he said love one another.’ How you actually feel about a person is largely irrelevant, as long as you act toward him with love.”

I hardly heard any more of Father Francis’s homily, because a different, louder voice spoke up inside me. In Francis’s sense, I realized, I had to learn to love the Church. How I felt about it was secondary. And since love involves action, I could not sit around and wait for Archbishop Sean to surprise me with a change of heart. I had to love him, actively.

Francis concluded, “One of the most neglected acts of love is to pray for a person, and in particular to pray for wisdom.”

It was an instruction: I had to pray for Sean. I had to pray for his wisdom. I had to pray that he would see the error of his ways.

Errors
, I thought,
are where the spirit enters
.

Make me believe that you believe
.

My course of action suddenly became obvious: what the archdiocese needed was not a ministry to the gay and lesbian community, but a ministry to the Church
by
the gay and lesbian community. Archbishop Sean, his fellow bishops, and the Vatican itself obviously didn’t understand. Archbishop Sean had not met me and Scott. He knew nothing of gay love. Like Myron, he had not yet read
Hot Sauce
.

If I explained it the right way, Sean would see the light. He was a linguist. I just had to speak to him in the right language, to say the right words. If I reasoned with him, he’d surely come around to my point of view. I wasn’t asking for a miracle, after all. I didn’t plan to ask Archbishop Sean to serve as grand marshal in the gay pride parade. I just wanted him to witness the dignity and power of love between men and to acknowledge that a gay man could be as good a Catholic as any other. God and I had worked out an arrangement concerning the Sabbath, right? We could work something out on this score, too.

The accent known as the fada changes the meaning of the word. “Sean” without the accent means “old.”

Gay Vocabulary Alert: A size queen is a gay man with an “open door policy,” for whom the phrase “the bigger the better” was coined.

Quandamas
isn’t actually Italian. Father Bear-Daddy later confessed to me that he had invented the word on the spot.

V

Lives of the Saints

It is necessary that all the Pastors and the other faithful have a new awareness, not only of the lawfulness but also of the richness for the Church of a diversity of charisms, traditions of spirituality and apostolate, which also constitutes the beauty of unity in variety: of that blended “harmony” which the earthly Church raises up to Heaven under the impulse of the Holy Spirit
.

— Pope John Paul II, “Ecclesia Dei”

Beheadings, Burnings, and Other Children’s Literature

COME FROM A LONG LINE
of drama queens. My father used to throw temper tantrums over the loss of the shavings catcher on a forty-nine-cent pencil sharpener. My paternal grandmother bullied us grandchildren into unwilling Rockettes for a home rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock.”

Even the family dog was a drama queen. My sister, God bless her, used to dispose of her used female sanitary products in the bathroom wastebasket. Occasionally the dog would hunt these products down and pull them out for inspection. On one of these occasions, I tried to remove the Snausage substitute from his jaws. Rather than give up the bloody goods, the dog fled. I chased him down the hall, skidded the córner, and dived for his little dog ankles. When captured, he growled, snapped, whined, and promptly went into a week-long sulk. (Needless to say, wresting my sister’s tampon from Fido’s jaws marks the exact moment in which I lost any residual chance of being a straight man.)

The first indication of my own drama queenliness was my obsession with Butler’s
Lives of the Saints
. I turned to martyrs the way other kids discovered the Hardy Boys or Judy Blume. The
Lives
contained nonstop hangings, burnings, stonings, spearings, beheadings, drownings, slashings, quarterings, scourgings, immersions in boiling oil, stretchings on racks, defacings (nose, ears, eyelids, and underlip cut off), beatings to a pulp, and being forced to watch your daughters die and to drink their blood. And that was just October!

Butler's 
Lives of the Saints

Butler’s
Lives of the Saints
is a
month-by-month, multivolume
compendium that gives biographical information for virtually every saint ever canonized in graphic, uncompromising, and horrifically bloody terms, It was a must-read for Catholic kids before Harry Potter.

My consumption of the
Lives
mirrored my sinfulness. Murdering a pet gerbil called for a half-dozen martyrs and three saints. Thoughts of naked boys cost me ten virgin saints, preferably female. Failure to pass the collection basket at home Mass meant a whole month’s worth of saints’ feast days. Had I made it two and a half times around that Irish chapel, I would have to have read all four volumes from cover to cover.

I committed dozens of the lives to memory as faithfully as my father memorized the Baltimore Catechism. Even today I can tell you that, after being beheaded, Saint Justus picked up his severed head and went out to meet his brother. Saints Crispin and Crispinian — nearly as gack-inducing as Scott & Scott, don’t you think? — defied their tormentor’s attempts to boil and drown them, which so infuriated the tormentor that their persecutor jumped into the fire he had prepared to roast them alive. Step aside, X Games. Martyrdom was the extreme sport of the early Christian period.

The influence of the
Lives
in my life became obvious. A messianic craving for martyrdom expressed itself in quixotic and self-destructive ways:

• I chose Thomas a Becket as my patron saint. I ached for someone who had been fed to the lions or tortured to death by having his skin peeled off and eyes plucked out, but my pastor assured me that a sword through the skull was sufficient suffering for sacramental purposes.
  

• Under the influence in New Orleans, I imagined myself to be the Great White Hope who was going to unite the black and white races. I marched down Canal Street with my arms spread wide, embracing black strangers. A guardian angel whisked me back to Bourbon Street before anyone embraced me in return with a baseball bat to the head.
  

• I conceived of a program modeled on the Peace Corps called Homosexuals for the Heartland, in which armies of gay men would go to Iowa to impart faith, friendship, and fashion sense.
  

Law school largely purged any messianic impulse. The only time the
Lives of the Saints
seriously crossed my mind thereafter was when a thousand-dollar-an-hour lawyer explained how his fraudster client was the incarnation of Mother Teresa.

Martyr from the Mothballs

Archbishop O’Malley brought the martyr in me out of retirement. I vowed to be this holy homo, a progressive porn god, who would lead the faithful by the nose (or some other extremity) to a new openness to gays in their midst.

To prepare myself, I cracked open the
Lives
. In honor of the Shrine, I flipped straight to Saint Anthony.

Bingo!
Saint Anthony had been a lector, just like me! At the feast of the Pentecost in 1221, Anthony preached before a great assembly of fellow Franciscans. He had no prior speaking experience, and he stumbled at first — no doubt on Sosthenes and Habbakuk. But then his voice filled with the Holy Spirit, and he wowed the assembled audience with his oral skills.

As an itinerant preacher, Anthony attracted upward of 30,000 people at every sermon. He needed a bodyguard to protect him from fans armed with scissors who wanted to snip off a piece of his habit as a relic. He called on the rich and powerful and accused them of greed, tyranny, and luxurious living. When no one listened, he preached instead to the fish in the sea. (Ecclesiastical history doesn’t record whether the flounders repented.)

Anthony was no martyr; he died of natural causes. When exhumed as part of the canonization process, his body had decomposed, except for his tongue, which remained healthy and whole. Anthony is the patron saint of lost and stolen items, sailors, travelers, and fishermen. (Do fish have ears?)

Lost dignity, stolen lives, a traveler in an alien world — it was a perfect fit. A man whose sermons caused people to patch quarrels and brought mortal enemies together! It even turned out “Anthony” was the thirteenth-century equivalent of a screen name; his real name was Fernando. (Can you hear the drums?) Saint Anthony became patron of my own cause, and my fishing expedition started with Archbishop O’Malley.

The Stalker’s To-Do List

1. Buy dark glasses.

2. Find- someone who knows Cardinal Sean’s most embarrassing secret from middle school

3. Google.

4. Listen to Guy Noir episodes on
Prairie Home Companion
.

5. Consult Massachusetts antistalking statute.

6. Blurk* a conservative Catholic blog to figure out what makes the enemy tick.

7. Google more.

8. Take Fernando as a screen name.

9. Induce Father Myron to drop a dime on Cardinal Sean and give up the fruits of the confessional —- the masturbation and the temper tantrums, the moments
of doubt
, the regret over beating I up on the gays, the clandestine sticking of pins in a B16 doll he I borrowed from the case in the lobby at the Shrine.

10. Find Archbishop Sean’s calendar of public appearances.

11. Learn Archbishop Sean’s screen name.

12. Have a friar make a religious doll of Archbishop Sean with religiously correct undergarments into which I could stick pins.

13. Give Archbishop Sean a big wet leper’s kiss.

Stalking the Archbishop

“Quiz me!” I demanded. “Ask me anything.”

Scott looked at me like I was crazy. “I don’t want to.”

“Quiz me!”