Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (2 page)

Author’s Note

am the wrong person to write this book, I’ve met hundreds of Catholics far better suited to the task. They walk old ladies across the street, and visit the sick, and clothe the naked, and bury abandoned babies, and adopt ailing children with birth defects from Cambodian crack houses, and experience rainbow stigmata.

Me? Not so much. I am not pretty enough for prime time, a bad godfather, a worse boyfriend, and — according to said boyfriend, who is reading over my shoulder as I type — a really poor sugar daddy. Worst of all, I am impious, irreverent, and a shade profane.

But let me prevail on your good graces: please view my irreverence and impiety with charity. This is not an attack on the Church. It’s an invitation to laugh.

As the nun said to the schoolboy, “Sister’s doing it because she loves you.” Then she whacked him on the knuckles with a wooden ruler ten sharp times.

Prologue

hadda we want?” cried the motorcycle dyke through her megaphone.

“Equal rights!” shouted the crowd.

“When do we want ‘em?” she yelled. She was wearing a stars-and-stripes scarf, a leather vest pierced with gay pride pins, baggy pants, and impossibly small shoes that made her look as if she would topple any second.

“Now!”
we shouted.

A man shouldered his way behind me and my boyfriend. His “Sodomy: It’s to Die For” sign cast a long shadow.

“Whadda we want?” the motorcycle dyke yelled.

In perfect time, we responded, “Civil rights!”

“Bleeding rectums!” shouted Mr. Sodomy.

“What do we want?” she cried again.

We yelled: “Gay marriage!”

“Kaposi’s sarcoma!” yelled Mr. Sodomy.

And so it went. The dyke called, and Mr. Sodomy and the progay crowd responded in harmony. Not your typical religious call-and-response, for sure, but it had its own charms.

“What do we want?”

Us: “True equality!”

Him: “Syphilis!”

“What do we want?!”

Us: “Safe families!”

Him: “AIDS!”

Trying to drown out Mr. Sodomy, I shouted louder and louder until my voice broke like a pimpled teen’s. A full morning at the protest had worn my vocal cords raw. A young Haitian woman next to me tore a hole in a package of throat lozenges. She shook a single golden lozenge out into her pink palm and unwrapped it with agonizing deliberation. She plucked out the candy and discarded the wrapper, not on the ground — I had hoped for an opportunity for some Earth Day-based moral superiority — but in the public waste receptacle. She placed the lozenge on her shockingly pink tongue. As it moved around in her mouth, the lozenge clicked against her teeth. Her placid expression reflected its triple-strength soothing action. My heart filled with envy.

“What do we want?” the motorcycle dyke shouted.

A throat lozenge
, I thought wistfully.

It was February 11, 2004. Three months after the highest court of Massachusetts had legalized gay marriage, the legislature had convened yet another in a series of constitutional conventions. The proposed amendments included proposals for longer legislative terms, biennial instead of yearly budgets, a process for appointing House or Senate members if a terrorist attack led to massive vacancies in the legislature — and, of course, a ban on same-sex marriage.

Crowds gathered between the State House and the Boston Common, where the Minutemen had assembled in April 1775 on the way to Lexington and Concord at the start of the Revolutionary War. (Until 1817, the Common was also the forum for public hangings.) Nothing separated opposing points of view. White-collared female Episcopalian priests surrounded a clean-cut Christian youth holding a sign that read “I Want to Marry My Dog”; a dozen apocalyptic preachers straight out of Flannery O’Connor bellowed among cops on horseback and queer youth with pink hair playing hooky from high school; lesbian mothers tripped friend and foe alike with double-wide strollers; curious passersby procrastinated on their way to work; and duck boats full of passengers screamed “quack, quack” as the driver intoned something about the Revolution.

On the Common, vendors hawked everything imaginable: silk scarves and sweatshirts; sausages and statues of the Founding Fathers, JFK, and rogue mayor James Michael Curley; fake Louis Vuitton bags, pirated CDs, books with covers torn off, and a thousand other counterfeits. An empty flatbed truck boomed techno music. A contingent of twenty-somethings wearing T-shirts that proclaimed them “queerspawn” marched up from the Common with arms proudly linked. Three drag queen slatterns clung to the wrought iron gates of the State House and chain-smoked.

Not far from us, a man who identified himself to a reporter as “Pastor Bob” loudly proclaimed his hatred for the sin of homosexuality. He said, however, that he loved the homosexuals themselves.

When someone yelled, “Hypocrite!” Pastor Bob responded: “Would I be standing here with a sign like this if I didn’t love you?”

The sign read, “Homosexuals Are Possessed by Demons.”

All morning long, the Haitian woman and her companions had said their prayers. During one lull, they sang a French hymn that took my breath away. When Mr. Sodomy came on the scene, they rolled their eyes and shuffled away from him. There was something endearingly immediate in the sisters’ reverence. They seemed open to the possibility of a miracle, right here, this day, on this crowded street among the jostling demonstrators. Not that they were
expecting
a miracle, mind you. It seemed obvious they would go home, make dinner, and kiss their husbands good night no matter how the day ended. But if a miracle had happened on the double yellow line down the middle of Beacon Street, these Haitian sisters would not have been caught by surprise.

Stealing a page from the religious playbook, the motorcycle dyke started a new chant: “Love thy neighbor.”

“Love thy neighbor! Love thy neighbor!” we repeated.

The Haitian women were also chanting a religious phrase I could not make out. It had a similar beat, and gradually we got in sync with each other.

The woman with the lozenges glanced at me and smiled. My voice broke. The Haitian woman held out her bag. Gratefully, I accepted the lozenge she shook out on my palm.

“I have an extra bottle of water, if you want it,” I shouted over the din.

She declined, smiling again.

As I popped the lozenge — oh,
sweet Jesus
, it was pure ecstasy — I reflected that, under other circumstances, I could have prayed with this woman. My father, who went to Catholic high school, had taught us the
Notre Pére
. Wouldn’t it have been a kick for me and the Haitian to say it together in French?

Maybe afterward she and I might have discussed
les choses frangaises
or American stuff. Perhaps we would have talked of the lives of the saints. I might have asked her how different Haiti was from, say, St. Maarten, where my boyfriend and I had recently vacationed. I might have asked her how long she had been in the United States and what had brought her here. I might have tried to understand where she was coming from.

And maybe I’d have had the courage to pose the question that had been plaguing me all morning:
How in God’s name could a refugee who presumably came to America for its freedoms and opportunities wish to deny freedoms and opportunities to others by amending the constitution to forbid gay marriage?!

These conversations went unhad. Reporters skirted the crowd; cameras zoomed in on our faces. My boyfriend and I exchanged a long, slow kiss for the camera. We rarely resist the opportunity for gratuitous public whoring.

But the cameramen were looking for the money shot. They were looking for conflict. They rushed off to Ruben Israel, who had traveled from Los Angeles to participate in the protest. He was parading in a sandwich board. One side said “God Abhors You.” The other said “The Wages of Sin Is Death.” He accused almost everyone he saw of being a sodomite or an abomination.

“This is what I do,” Israel explained to a reporter. “My job is to be as blunt as their sin.” If my sin were as blunt as he suspected, I would be a porn star.

To demonstrate his point, Israel explained to a gay anarchist with three tats and a ring through his lower lip that he was going to die of AIDS. The anarchist turned purple with fury. Toe to toe with Israel, he spewed a torrent of abuse. Cops drifted toward the conflict more slowly than the television cameras.

Scott and I stayed put. The organizers of the rally had repeatedly instructed us to be on our best behavior. They said, “Don’t engage with the other side.” (I’m sure the organizers had issued an official secular indulgence for throat-lozenge engagements.)

As the convention got underway, we abandoned the street. Security in the State House was as tight as an airport: all bags and jackets were X-rayed, signs and bumper stickers confiscated, and the metal-detecting wand liberally used. Once we passed security, we heeded the protest coordinators’ call for volunteers to help out in the Great Hall on the third floor, directly outside the joint legislative chamber, where the Constitutional Convention was taking place.

The Great Hall, a massive, rectangular room, stood two stories high, with a balcony skirting the second story. Revolutionary war murals covered the walls. The floors were marble. Velvet ropes separated the public from the heavy, dark doors with opaque oval windows that marked the entrance to the legislative chambers. Media filled the no-man’s-land between the doors and the demonstrators.

Marriage opponents and marriage supporters jammed side by side, jockeying for space. Any time a television camera panned, the crowd surged toward the lens. I battled for position against a trench-coated man with a neatly knotted tie and bloodshot eyes. From time to time, jackbooted troopers waded among the protestors, plucked the belligerent from the crowd, and hustled them out.

Gay marriage supporters launched into “America the Beautiful.” Locked arm in arm, we were boisterous, jubilant, happy, a long line of singing queens. In the 1950s, we might have been gathered around a piano in some unmarked dismal dive, singing show tunes. But instead, the year was 2004, and we stood in a brightly lit Great Hall under the public eye of the cameras. We sang “Shine a Light on Me” and the “Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” We tried a chorus from “We Shall Overcome,” but it proved too dirgelike for this exuberant crowd.

Energy never flagged; in fact, if anything we got louder, and by five o’clock, virtually all the marriage equality opponents had climbed aboard their buses and gone home. Gay marriage supporters had free rein in the Great Hall. We probably sang the national anthem two hundred times, until almost everybody was hoarse. The two-hundred-year-old chandeliers shook and danced, and some miracle worker produced a case of lemon throat lozenges at 10:00 P.M. to keep us going through midnight.

Soothed again, I thought:
We, too, have saints on our side
.

When the final votes were tallied, we had won. The legislature had deferred consideration of the amendment to a future date. (We later lost, of course, when the amendment finally came to a vote. In 2005, we won again, when the amendment was defeated without much fuss. Then we lost in 2007 again. And won again, too. But well get to all that later.)

At work the next day, my receptionist said, “Hey! I saw you on TV! On the news!” I grinned the silly grin of the instantly, undeservedly famous, but I couldn’t say anything. It took six days before my voice recovered. During that time, it was prone to sudden, disconcerting midsentence adolescent pitch changes and a rasp that sounded as if I had chain-smoked four cartons of Lucky Strikes. In women, such a low rasp can be sexy in a come-hither way. In me, it sounded as if I were minutes away from having my larynx removed and talking for the rest of my life through one of those creepy electronic devices you hold to your throat.

Within days of the protest, an e-mail appeared in my in-box from my pastor at Saint Anthony Shrine. Perhaps Francis, the Franciscan friar, had also seen the evening news. I was “busted,” as we used to say in seventh-grade social studies class when the teacher caught us wadding up spit balls.