Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (33 page)

The ten men told no dramatic, self-abasing rock-bottom stories. Masturbation, of course, posed a chronic problem for Courage members. Ewald confessed to “looking at pictures I shouldn’t have been looking at.”

According to Father John, these guys suffered primarily from fear of rejection and low self-esteem, not loneliness: “It’s hard for them to see themselves as lovable or having worth.”

When the hour-long meeting ended, Father John said to me, “Good night, brotha. See you next time.” I half expected to bump chests or knock fists with him.

Then “Demetrius,” a thickset sixty-year-old in Bermuda shorts and white sneakers, shook a packet of brochures from a crumpled brown bag that probably once held a bottle of bourbon.”^ He said he had been coming to Courage since 1990 and had been “out of the lifestyle” since 1981. He invited me to consider the materials and take them home with me.

My-Favorite Courage Quotes
.

• “It is therefore easy to see how the homosexual relation fails as a totally human relationship.”
  

• “People who have successfully integrated homosexual desires with their personalities … are rare indeed,”
  

• “Here one sees the sterility of the homosexual relationship in ‘ which there’ is no family and no family history.” (Does Gram know she doesn’t exist?)
  

• “Finally, homosexual actions have no meaning in themselves. They can mean whatever the person wants them to mean.” (Sounds good to me.)
  

• “(The homosexual] must come to realize he is powerless over homosexual acts,” (Only if your master says so. Sir,)
  

• “Frequently the friendship of a priest. becomes a source of strength to the homosexual in his loneliness” (I bet!)
  

Asked whether all the depictions in the media of happy gay couples raising children and getting married in Massachusetts raised doubts in some Courage members’ minds, Father John said, “When they are honest, yeah…. [But] only a few guys question, ‘I wonder if same-sex marriage is for me/ Most don’t believe in it. We don’t make apologies for Church teaching. The guys support that.”

In our discussion, Father John mentioned same-sex couples, one male and one female, who had spontaneously embraced chastity and reduced their romantic unions to friendship while continuing to live together happily and in harmony with the Church’s teachings on sexuality.

“I’d love to meet them,” I said.

“Oh, uh, they don’t live in Massachusetts.”

I suspected the truth was, the couples only existed on whatever planet Father John went to when overdosing on the pain medication for his old football injuries.

Father John didn’t attend my second Courage meeting, and a palpable sense of struggle and misery took hold. Dan was having trouble praying. Demetrius expressed the shame he felt as he got older: “Everyone else is getting married, and they look at you and they know something is wrong with you. When you were younger, you could get away with it, make excuses.” Ewald bitterly noted that certain straight people were called to chastity, but he had no choice in the matter. Ben admitted that it was a relief not to have to make choices, saying, “You don’t have to try to figure out God’s will for you.” Their alienation from their sexual identity was compelling — but also obscene, like watching a little girl with a box knife cut herself.

Unchurching

My energetic frustration was turning to enervating despair. Everything seemed inexplicable, cross-eyed, ass-backward, and upside down. Mother Teresa might be able to handle a fifty-year-long dark night of the soul, but I — in the words of Lloyd Bentsen and my friend Tim — was no Mother Teresa.
Let them all go to hell
, I thought, and a voice answered:
There is no hell
. Another voice echoed:
Hell is here, hell is now
.

Salting my wound, the Rat issued a statement barring priests with “deep-seated” homosexual tendencies from seminaries. Gay men, intrinsically disordered, were unable to relate even nonsexually to both men and women, explained at least one bishop — reasoning that suggested that the seminaries would turn away the huge population of ordained priests who were gay if they were to apply today.

Two American bishops spoke out. William Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote: “There are many wonderful and excellent priests in the Church who have a gay orientation, are chaste and celibate and very effective ministers of the Gospel. Witch hunts and gay bashing have no place in the Church.” Bishop Matthew Clark of Rochester, New York, assured his gay priests, “We deeply value your ministry.” To gay men discerning whether to enter the seminary, he gave welcome, promising, “We treat all inquiries fairly. Yours will be no exception.”

Most bishops, including O’Malley, said nothing. “No comment,” according to newspaper reports, which Father Kick-Me confirmed.

Screw Seamus Heaney
, I thought. /
am going to disavow words like
thanksgiving, host, communion,
and
a whole bunch of others besides
. I swore never to crack
The Lives of the Saints
again. I vowed to content myself solely with secular saving ministries. Was it too late to become an EMT?

Outside the Shrine, a homeless man sat on the sidewalk with a giant Bible open to a page that never turned. It looked as if he had made it this far and then stopped, unable to understand or move past what lay before him, plain for all the world to see.

At home, Scott was falling precipitously out of love with me. We were keeping separate calendars. We were engaging in separate YouTube sessions. Garbage and dirty clothes piled up. We fought over whose turn it was to replace the toilet paper. Necessity forced Scott to break first. He returned from the store with a single roll on which he placed a sticky note that read “For Scott W’s beautiful ass only.” We had transformed our condo in the largest intact Victorian neighborhood in America into a latter-day gym and frat house — without the casual sex.

One night, Scott was lying on the pew. Having broken a rib while skiing, he clutched a pillow to his chest just beneath his chin like a little boy hugging a teddy bear. He had read somewhere that hugging a pillow reduced the pain from coughing. His eyes had become slits. Raw hostility hit me the moment I walked through the door, as if I were responsible not only for the sins of the Catholic Church but for all the coughing he might endure.

That weekend, at a friend’s wedding, Scott and I had a meltdown in front of straight people, whose prior approval of our relationship had made me want to shout “anal dildo” and “crabs.” We were like a couple of show poodles gone wrong.

A few weeks later, in January 2007, the Massachusetts legislature considered whether to put an amendment banning gay marriage on the 2008 ballot. More than two-thirds of the legislators had announced their opposition to the amendment, but the antigay faction needed only 50 votes to succeed. Sure enough, we lost — 134 votes against, 62 in favor.

Shortly afterward, the Jesuits announced the closing of the Jesuit Urban Center, the ultra-gay church. The order’s provincial cited the high costs of maintaining the building but made no effort to reestablish the ministry in a cheaper rent district.

The personal, political, and spiritual news seemed inextricably mixed. Praying Hail Marys to keep an airplane from crashing looked positively sane compared to my frantic efforts to keep the Church holy for gay people. The questions raced through my head:
Why am I doing this? Why chase the cardinal? Why go to Mass? At least the goldfish know
they’re not welcome
. Wanting something — anything — from O’Malley felt far too much like unrequited love. It was far too much like being a gay teenager falling head over heels for his straight best friend, filled with an inarticulate yearning but lacking the vocabulary to capture what he dreamed.

I reminded myself over and over to love Sean. I ransacked my Brown Bag dossier for positives. Like a mantra, I repeated:
He hates cats. He loves languages. He hates cats. He loves languages. Tastes great. Less filling
. I repeated it until I was blinking stupidly, smiling inanely, asking for spare change, and hanging around airports in bright orange robes chanting, /
love Sean. I love everyone
.

Gram would have looked at me kindly, slipped an extra ace from her sleeve, and said, “Well, you
are
gay, after all.”

I wanted to be someone else. Every once in a while, I crossed over, just for a sense of relief. A new acquaintance at the Shrine mistook me for an actual Catholic — a good one, pious and loving, likely to make a good husband and father and to wear a brown braided belt with navy shorts dotted with pink and green golf bags or whales. After checking my left hand for a ring, that new acquaintance suggested I might want to meet her daughter. And in truth, I had nothing against meeting the daughter — perhaps for a joint mani-pedi. So I played with her misconceptions. I talked knowingly of nights up at 3:00 A.M. with crying infants, parochial schools, the high cost of diapers, and sundry other factoids I had absorbed from spending too much time with godchildren and straight people. These strange sessions of make-believe became a dirty pleasure.

The auguries were ominous. At Gram’s camp, a hummingbird plucked a struggling insect from a spider’s web. A robin’s nest spilled an egg, which split and cooked to the sun-baked pavement near Gram’s back door. Everything was going to shit.

One night at my parents’ house, Mikaela was gumming a frozen waffle. As I made polite conversation with Mikaela’s mother, cocaptain of the Bush Household, Mikaela toddled around the kitchen. Already conscious that she was different, she sought out others similarly wounded. Her grandfather’s thumb, which he had smashed in his youth and which had healed strangely, fascinated her.

When the basement door near the entrance to the kitchen stood completely open, it nearly touched the wall opposite. Mikaela managed to wedge her head between door and walk Trapped, she screamed. It was the third way of destroying herself Mikaela had devised that morning.

Despite her terror, Mikaela had retained a firm grip on the waffle, which, once free, she calmly resumed eating — a reflex that would serve her well when she started drinking martinis and had to backflip while still holding upright the miraculously unspilled glass. Why the hell did she need a gay godfather if she already had this trick down cold?

It was time to leave the Shrine and let go of my spiritual waffle. Shortly before I announced my decision to the Marys, Father Bear-Daddy, and the G-L Group, Father Bear-Daddy’s brother, the director of human services at the Shrine, called. He invited me to join yet another advisory committee, this one overseeing the Shrine’s human services, including the legal clinic, Wellness center, programs for kids and seniors, résumé-writing workshop, Lazarus Center, and dog-blessing during Saint Francis Week.

“Well,” I said, “the thing is —”

“I know you’re busy,” Father Bear-Daddy’s brother interrupted. “I know you already do a lot for us, but before you say no, I want to tell you a little about some of the other programs.”

“I don’t want to hear about friars blessing household pets and issuing certificates to pet owners commemorating their blessed pets’ blessedness,” I said.

“No, I was going to mention that we’ve really been having a lot of success with the seniors program, and we got all the kids outfitted for school, and of course we buried three abandoned babies last week —”

“What?”
Did he just say
…
?

“Three abandoned babies. Just last week. The medical examiner brought them. One was abandoned in the streets. One was killed in a car accident — they delivered him dead, and the mother wanted nothing to do with him. One overdosed on cocaine in his mother’s womb. We shut down the Shrine, and all the friars and the nuns and the music ministry said a private Mass for them, and then we went out to the graveside and laid them to rest together, side by side. Someone’s donating a headstone that we’ll mark Baby Anthony, Baby Jessica, and Baby Claire. So, anyhow, can you help us out?”

My brain said no, but my goddamn gay voice said: “When do I start?”

Daniel was a Franciscan brother and martyr who was beheaded and his body mangled when he refused to renounce his faith.

SSA is “same-sex attraction.” Courage discourages use of the
terms gay
and
lesbian
, which, in their view, involve a lot of parades.

Ewald is the name of a pair of martyr brothers, one fair, one dark, one of whom was killed by the sword and the other torn limb from limb.

Saint Demetrius was a martyr who was speared to death in the public baths.

XV

Gay Voices before Mine

That raving deinstitutionalized stranger who proclaims that he is Jesus Christ? He is Jesus Christ, in a form that’s particularly difficult to see
.

— Sean Cardinal O’Malley

The Celestial Skywriter

LAME IT ON LECTORS’ BREAKING HIPS
, moving away, and falling from grace. The Shrine was running short on lectors, so Father Bear-Daddy had ordered a new session of lector boot camp. The appointed day was a cold, rainy September Saturday, a day of spiritual low tide, when all the bilge water, wadded Wal-Mart bags, used hypodermics, and other spiritual detritus washed up on the beach of the soul and lay exposed for the sand flies to pick at, children to collect for Mommy, and crazy old cranks with metal detectors to sift through.