Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (30 page)

The year’s bad news piled up like a judgment:

• Mary Flanagan slipped on the wet stairs of the subway, and her hip and collarbone shattered on impact.
  

• Francis the Franciscan Friar announced he was leaving Saint Anthony Shrine for a parish in Virginia.
  

• My ex-girlfriend’s elderly mother — whom I had loved dearly — signed a petition in support of an amendment banning gay marriage.
  

• Solely to spite me, B16 made Sean a cardinal, rewarding his loyalty with a red hat.
  

What next? Mikaela murdered? Scott crushed in a freak pew accident? Gram drowned in the lake? What meaning was I supposed to extract from these events? That rage and persecution would drive me from the Church began to seem like destiny, my loss of faith as inevitable as death and taxes.

Help me understand, God. Are you trying to remind me of learned helplessness? Are we two-and-three-quarters times around the chapel with the Devil at hand? You enjoin us to see you in others, but this is the God I see in Cardinal O’Malley: a cheap, mean bastard with a vicious sense of humor Is this who You are? A God who takes the Church to which I was born and perverts it beyond recognition, so that my heartbreaking pride turns to embarrassment, so that I am forced to explain, mitigate, excuse, and justify? My Lord, for Your sake, give me something to work with here. The lives of the saints are so yesterday
.

My prayers streamed at maximum bandwidth, a drone as loud and steady as city noise. More prayers went up to heaven than ever before, whether in good times or bad, bald times or gay. My steady prattle must have kept Him up nights, prompting Him, no doubt, to question why He didn’t do me and Himself the favor of killing me off in my sleep.
If I should die before I wake
, indeed.

Then the archdiocese turned on the goldfish. Two days before the last class at one of Boston’s parochial schools was to graduate, O’Malley closed the school in the dead of night, worried that parents would occupy the school the way they had occupied closed parishes. The children showed up the next morning to find padlocks on the doors. They begged to be allowed to recover their belongings left inside, including several bowls of goldfish. The archdiocese, however, was not falling for this clever ruse, for these so-called childish tears. Saint Anthony may have preached to the fish, but Archbishop O’Malley and his minions let them go belly-up.

Selling Holy Rocks

At the annual street fair in honor of Saint Francis, card tables and concession stands lined the sidewalks beneath a giant inflatable saint. Nurses from the Shrine’s Wellness Center were testing blood pressure. There were free hot dogs and pizza and fresh goldfish. The last of the religious-goods stores not driven out of business by the Internet set out a table of rosaries, medallions, and Jesus action figures. Friars drifted about two by two. Retired priests from the friary across the street had parked their wheelchairs on the sidewalk and waved benevolently.

Lost in resentful meditation, I stalked up and down the block, cursing this pathetic, dying Church with its repressed sexuality and barbaric beliefs in black magic and the healing powers of thousand-year-old chips of bone and foreskin.
May it dissolve into goofy obscurity, its churches, run by rule-worshipping Teutonic automatons and professional scolders, destined to become museums rather than living vessels of the Holy Spirit
.

I wanted to bust open the case of religious dolls in Saint Anthony’s lobby and stick pins through them until somewhere a cleric screamed. I wanted to crash a conference of cardinals, knock miters astray, and snap crosiers over my knee. Most of all, I wanted to bind the goldfish-murdering archbishop with his own rosary beads and thrice-knotted cord. My fury was so hot that everywhere I looked, it started fires. Nuns jumped out of my way. Children wailed.

At the far end of the block opposite the hot-air Francis stood the “Super Colon,” an inflatable walk-through intestine infested with polyps, cancers, STDs, and all kinds of other colonic mishaps. The chief of the Wellness Center, a diminutive nun with a shock of snow-white hair and a gorgeous Irish accent that reminded me of my mother, offered to show me around the Super Colon, but I brusquely assured her that I was reasonably familiar with the geography.

Mama Bear and I took our places at the G-L Spirituality Group table, set up next to the colon by a nun with a sense of humor. Pamphlets explaining the group and its ministry as well as dozens of bookmarks and prayer cards to Saint Anthony littered the table. Stones served as paperweights to keep random gusts from scattering homosexual literature to the masses like tickertape at the Macy’s parade.

Several people picked diffidently at the literature. They really wanted the rocks. “Where did these come from?” “Did you get them from the Holy Land?” “Have they been blessed?” “Are they for sale?”

Mama Bear and I exchanged glances. Father Bear-Daddy would never know if we converted the stones to cash. Anyway, the group needed the money. How else would we keep ourselves in multigrain bars and juice boxes? Just before we consummated the sale, a woman marched up and demanded to know whether we were “condoning this stuff.”

“Sales of holy rocks under false pretenses?”

“Homosexuality.” Then she quoted Corinthians at me.

I mumbled something about the primacy of conscience.

She pressed, “You
are
telling them the truth?”

I mumbled something about the Super Colon.

“Father Tom told me they’re teaching lies here at the Shrine,” she said. “About
them”
She tapped a piece of our literature that featured a photo of a smiling homosexual.

Determined to radiate benevolence, understanding, and goodwill, I pasted on a frozen and toothy grin that you could have lifted from my face with a spatula. “I’m one of them," I explained.

Not surprised, she had obviously assumed my sinfulness, even if she didn’t yet know what form it took. She in turn confessed to me her own divorce and her son’s multiple adulteries.

“I never judged,” she said, “but I told him the truth, and now he has come around. God is good.”

She asked for my name and took my hand. She promised to pray for my conversion. I returned the favor. I said I hoped her heart would heal, her boy would make her proud, and God would see fit to convert her thinking on what, precisely, the truth was.

As she walked away, resentment flooded back into my heart. Corinthians!” I muttered. “Corinthians also tells women to cover their heads. Where’s your headscarf, bitch?”

I glanced around for support, but Mama Bear had completely de-materialized at the first sign of conflict.

“Where the hell have you been?” I demanded when he returned.

“Washing my hair,” he said, flashing an innocent smile.

“You’re as bald as I am,”

“To get some more Saint Anthony prayer cards,” he said, placing three more cards next to the two hundred already on the table.

“You’re a bastard.”

“I already did my time with one of the lunatics before you came,” Mama Bear said.

My right hand tightened around a holy rock. I ached to strike Mama Bear in the temple. There would be no witnesses, and I could hide his body in the Super Colon.

The Cock Crowed for the Third Time

Having walked into a glass door, Father Myron was suffering from a hand wound and dizzy spells. It hurt to see someone I knew and loved grow old before my eyes. I wanted him to stay the way I knew him. To cheer him up — and me —-I invited Myron to lunch.

When the food arrived, I dug in, but Myron stayed my hand. “Well say grace,” he murmured.

“Of course we will,” I said. “Right after I shoot myself for being such a godless ingrate.”

The conversation turned to gays and marriage. Myron’s gentle spirit had always struck me as queeny, so it surprised me when Myron began to rant, “Marriage is a sacrament. God created it. It’s man and woman. If you didn’t have man and woman, there would be no human race at all. So God planned that. And that’s what it is…. I would like to have the marriage amendment put on the ballot and let the people vote.”

I tried to interrupt.

“Let the people vote!” he repeated, slamming his wounded fist down on the lunch table so that our plates jumped.

I tried to take Myron’s coming-out to me as a same-sex marriage opponent with the same grace with which he accepted my coming-out as a gay erotica writer. It was hard. In fact, it was all I could do not to stiff him with the check.

Soon after, I attended another same-sex marriage rally. I passively took out my fury with Father Myron on the assembled crowd, counting missed opportunities to do good as if they were sheep putting my soul to sleep:

1. An antigay activist was struggling down the steps of Boston Common with her stroller, while her husband took care of their two other children. An impulse to help her quickly gave way to bitchery:
Let Myron give you a hand!

2. A bitter gay activist confronted the antigay crowd, shouting that they all had gay people in their families. I reached out a hand to lead him away from the engagement, but immediately dropped it.
Fuck it
, I thought.
They deserve this lunatic. Myron can intercede if he likes
.

3. An antigay older couple thanked me for letting them pass through a doorway at which I had arrived first, but I couldn’t muster so much as a “You’re welcome” in response.
Screw you, I’m fresh out of graces
—
Myron took the last one
.

As if the parish rooster had crowed for the third time, I remembered the best definition of sin I have ever heard: Sin is a failure to love when you have the capacity to do so.

My experience of going to Mass changed entirely. Incense now smelled like moldering garbage. The brass bell sounded like trashcan lids clanging together. The Book lost its music. Chewbacca remained a bright spot of pure courage, but also a reminder of inexorable, degenerative forces at work in the world. For the first time in my life, opening the lectionary and reading the Bible filled me with fear. No doubt some elderly Myronic party-line friar would use these passages against me.

“You are reading to people,” Father Abraham once told me, “not to a ceiling, not to God. He knows the words already: they’re His. Each time you look up during the reading, make contact with a different pair of eyes. Don’t sweep the room with your gaze like you would your back porch. Find an actual person. Just one.”

Every pair of eyes looked inhospitable, disgusted, judging — or asleep. The judgments were various:

You don’t believe what you’re saying
.

You don’t love Jesus
.

You would be more reverent if you had real faith
.

Your belt doesn’t match your shoes
.

This last judgment reminded me that there was at least one more homosexual at Saint Anthony Shrine besides me. But hell hath no fury like a fellow homosexual who doesn’t want to be out. Scorpions and black widows are more friendly. This one sniffed, his lip curled, and he buffeted me with waves of disapproval far stronger anything Scott Whittier had directed my way in our recent fights.

“Then I sent Moses and Aaron, and smote Egypt with the prodigies which I wrought in her midst.”

My eyes caught the gaze of an ax murderer keen to smite me.

“The Egyptians pursued your fathers to the Red Sea with chariots and horsemen.”

This time, it was a baby rapist.

“I sent the hornets ahead of you.”

A little old lady, her gaze as sharp as a bee sting.

After Mass I approached the priest, a friar with whom I had never served.

“Sorry, Father,” I said. “I should have cleared the dishes at the end, right?”

“Yup.”

“I’m not normally a eucharistic minister,” I explained, feeling considerably less than extraordinary. “I’m just filling in for Mary Flanagan, so I’m not used to the rules.”

He gave me an icily unforgiving look, as if he were going to report me to Father Bear-Daddy. I yearned to tell him that he mispronounced “Girgashites,” and his socks didn’t match, and he needed a makeover. Silence wisely prevailed.

Father Bear-Daddy asked me to jot down reasons for insisting on a relationship with the Church. I wrote:

10. I don’t cut and run.

9. I can save the goldfish.

8. I like big Catholic words.

7. Guilt

6. Learned helplessness

5. I want to be the center of attention.

4. I have an abiding love for all the world’s godchildren.

3. Mental illness

2. Delusions of grandeur

He read through the list with pursed lips. “The number one reason?” “That I’ll be ignored.”

Q. Anthony of Padua, patron of lost things, my cause is what appears to he lost. What shall I do?

A. That’s Saint Jude’s department. Next!

Dreaming Julia Roberts

I hoped to be the Julia Roberts character at the Saint Anthony Shrine pro bono legal clinic. I imagined showing up wearing hot legal briefs that exposed my shapely legs. The clients would be righteous, progressive, faultless, and pure enough to make Mother Teresa blush. Crooked landlords would fall. Greedy companies would spend billions to clean up their environmental messes. High-powered teams of nasty defense lawyers would beg for mercy.

Within a few weeks of launching the clinic, my dreams of being Erin Brockovich with a rosary and a tonsure came face to face with reality. The legal advice center attracted mostly lunatics and lonely people. Forget Perry Mason. What the clients most craved was what I wanted as a gay man: to be taken seriously by a person with an unjudging ear.