Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (39 page)

We suffer from uncertainty, a lack of entitlement, an acute feeling that perhaps we have been tricked, duped, snowed, swindled, cheated, and deceived. This doubt suffuses our worship with invigorating desperation. It keeps us humble, grateful even. Satirists commonly caricature people of strong faith as people whose minds are closed to all but their own beliefs. The G-L Spirituality Group members exemplified quite the opposite: that faith comes to those whose minds accept both doubt and possibility.

As one gay priest preached to a Dignity service I attended:

The opposite of faith is not doubt or disbelief. The opposite of faith is certainty.… Genuine faith takes root and grows when we confront uncertainty and can embrace it and live with it and within it.

Everybody who sits in this church today has wrestled with faith and its demands. It is what brought you here the first time and keeps you here. You could have chosen to stay in the closet, choose denial, silence, and invisibility. You could have rejected your religious heritage, your baptism, your call to believe and to serve. You did none of this. You did not suspend belief, neither in yourself or your God.

At the next G-L Spirituality Group meeting, two new lesbians showed up. Newly civilly married, they had been together eighteen years, Thelma wore her hair short under a man’s Irish walking cap, Louise flaunted a big feminine fighting spirit, full of passion and anger. Both had a few rough edges, but they had gone on a pilgrimage to Trinity College, Dublin, to see the Book of Kells.

I explained my project with Cardinal Sean and the big wet kiss. “We’re like the lepers,” I said.

“Nothing wrong with me!” Louise snapped. “I’m no leper.”

“I was referring to our status in society, not suggesting that we were diseased.”

After considering this a moment, Thelma said, “Mother Teresa went among the lepers. Mother Teresa wouldn’t have judged my being a lesbian.”

Mama Bear confirmed that Mother Teresa had met with AIDS sufferers while she visited the United States and treated them as humans. She had said, “They are Christ.”

“Cardinal Sean knows Mother Teresa,” I said brightly. “Or knew her.”

Mama Bear frowned. This was the problem with a gay spirituality group. We tossed ideas out and rapidly discarded them. Sudden inspirations and intuitions and nonlinear thinking carried us away. We couldn’t stop it. We’re gay people. We create. We rehab old items, or we build from scratch. We have an eye for good bones hidden by surface blight.

Louise shared the story of a colleague who complained incessantly about Stop ‘n’ Shop Catholics. He prided himself on being a real Catholic. He said that when he was young, his father had him regularly do the seven stations of the cross.

Louise pointed out there were fourteen stations. “Twelve years of Catholic school,” she said. “I did learn
something
.”

Her colleague disputed the number, until the Internet proved her right.

“Still, I go to church,” her colleague said. “Why don’t
you
go to church, Louise?”

“The Church doesn’t want me,” she replied.

To the group, Louise asked plaintively, “Why did he ask that? He knows Fm a lesbian.” She folded her arms over her ample chest. “At least / know how many stations of the cross there are.”

The Group’s discussion frequently unleashed these pent-up reservoirs of smoldering hurt and unrequited love.
B-b-b-b-oyfriend. P-p-p-p-partner. Guh-guh-guh-girlfriend. Sppppppppouse
. Words the Group never thought they would utter under a church roof. They still seemed occasionally afraid. They still seemed like they were just taking their freedom for a test drive.

“Say it again,” I suggested. “Repeat it enough times, put it in words, that’s what helps. Whether it’s a naughty word, or a God word, or something else entirely. I speak from experience.”

B-b-b-b-b-b-oyfriend. P-p-p-p-p-p-partner. Guh -guh -guh -girlfriend. Sppppppppouse
.

At first forbidden, it feels revolutionary, then secret. We imagine the party must imminently end. “They’ll turn us out in the street,” people at the JUG used to complain when the community got too gay. The same as Abacus way back when.

B -b -b -b -b -oyfriend. P-p-p-p -p-partner. Guh -guh -guh -guh -girlfriend. Sppppppppouse
.

Repeat it like a prayer, like a benediction, like a decade of the rosary. Speak it aloud. Proclaim it on high. Use your gay voice. Take your damn pew. Amen.

Amazing Grace and Leftover Miracles

The first sign that Scott and I might overcome my Catholic fixation occurred after Dick Cheney sprayed his hunting companion in the face with buckshot. Newly cardinalized, O’Malley, who typically wore brown Franciscan robes, quipped that he was unlikely to don a red cardinal’s robe — unless, of course, Dick Cheney invited him to hunt. Scott laughed out loud when I showed him the quote. It was the first real laugh Fd triggered in him in months that wasn’t tinged with caustic bitterness. A few weeks later, Scott and I spent Thanksgiving Day with his family. Gram confessed that she had finally read one of our romance novels.

“What did you think?” I asked.

“Now I know what you guys do.” she said, nudging me in the ribs.

“Do?”

“In my bed.”

All eyes in the room swiveled to her bedroom door except mine. A half-dozen pornographic movies played in their faces, each and every one starring yours truly.

After the meal was done, many bottles of wine were drunk, and Gram had gone to bed, Rory and Jezebel confessed that they were having trouble getting pregnant. Indeed, medically speaking, it turned out that Rory and Jezebel had about as much chance of making a baby as Scott and I did.

IVF was out of the question. They believed, in accordance with Church teaching, that the procedure guaranteed violence to the little lives in the eggs. They resisted the argument that every method of getting pregnant involves losses and miscarriages the parents often don’t know about. Even for a Catholic like me, their version of my religion made me feel like a goose being prepared for foie gras.

“Let’s talk about what’s possible,” Jezebel suggested, “rather than what we can’t do.” They hoped to obtain embryos from others who had succeeded with in vitro fertilization and had leftover eggs.

“You need a marketing concept,” Scott suggested. “A way to get out the word.”

“A marketplace, maybe,” I said. “You need an eBay for embryos.”

Riffing on this concept, Scott started drafting marketing materials right on the kitchen table. (He writes advertising copy for a living.)

Rory and Jezebel exchanged a grateful glance. Even I was amazed. For the sake of his newly Catholic brother, Scott put his talent behind this pitch for a cause in which he did not believe.

“We need a tag line,” Scott said.

We all spewed out drunken suggestions, then came up with a logo, a Web site, and everything short of venture capital.

Suddenly, Scott held up a hand for silence. “Leftover miracles,” he said, jotting it down. “Give us your leftover miracles.”

Jezebel wept.

* * *

“That was very generous,” I said to Scott as we got ready for bed.

He shrugged, embarrassed. “It’s nothing, no big deal”

“I believe God put us together,” I said.

Silence fell between us. He stared at me.

“Now, having told you that, I want to hug you,” I added.

“So hug me.” I can t.

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure if I would be hugging you as an expression of affection, a bribe, or just to stop you looking at me like that.”

XVII

I See Broken People Everywhere

The hard part is allowing myself to cease being fixated on pastors and politicians, named individuals who either silently or vociferously wage a war against us, determined that it is God’s honor that is at stake, an honor to be defended at whatever means, however great the cost
.

— James Alison

Gap People 1, Cardinal Sean 0

N
J
UNE
14, 2007, the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts convened the last constitutional convention to address the citizen-proposed and Church-supported petition for an amendment banning gay marriage. The bad guys needed 50 votes out of 200. If they succeeded, gay marriage would be put to popular vote on the 2008 ballot in Massachusetts.

In a statement that was to be included in parish bulletins, the archdiocese had urged Catholics to contact their legislators to support the amendment, O’Malley also sent a letter of support to those legislators who had supported the amendment in the past and a second letter to all legislators seeking additional support. On June 9, he blogged, “Marriage should not be blithely undermined by an overactive judiciary.” On the morning of the convention, Cardinal Sean got on the horn to Catholic legislators, urging them to vote to put the amendment on the ballot.

But the Brown Bag’s moral authority had so waned by June 14 that at least one conservative Catholic legislator — Representative Paul Kujawski — refused to take his call. According to newspaper reports, Kujawski said that while driving down the highway toward the State House, “the bottom line came down to putting myself in the position of what if I was gay. How would I want to be treated?” Kujawski had decided that gay people needed his help more than the opponents did.

As Kujawski and his colleagues made their way to their State House offices, Scott and I found a place on the street outside the capital building. I hoisted a handwritten sign that read “Another Catholic for Gay Marriage” to my shoulders. When my mother arrived, I pressed the sign into her hands.

The police had divided the demonstrators so that same-sex marriage opponents stood on one side of the street, and we stood on the other. You know the dueling banjos scene from the film
Deliverance?
 Substitute dueling children. Across the street, the opposition hauled out fair-haired tykes and stuck their clothes with dozens of “one-man-one-woman” stickers. On our side, gay dads boosted their adopted Cambodian offspring to their shoulders with little rainbow flags in the children’s hands. The other side mustered a preteen church group with percussion instruments. The lesbian moms on our side formed a phalanx of double-wide strollers.

To their credit, our opponents kept strict discipline, fielding a unified front of mass-produced identical green signs that said. “Let the people vote.” When a group of Russians showed up with more expressive handwritten signs depicting anal sexual activity and asserting direct connections between homosexuals and the Nazi party, the opposition leaders funneled them down the block to the less camera-friendly precincts.

From the Boston Common behind our opponents came a deep sound like lowing cattle. Gradually it grew and became identifiable: hymns from the civil rights marches of the 1960s. They grew louder and closer. All of a sudden, the “Let the People Vote” signs parted like the Red Sea. Carrying hymn sheets, rainbow stoles, and pocket Bibles, 250 clergy poured through the gap. The people around me picked up the refrain: “We shall overcome.” The clergy streamed across the street to our side and gathered behind us, one solid chorus, until there was hardly room to stand.

My lesbian boss found a place beside me. A moment later, a ripple passed through the crowd.

“We won! We won!” someone shouted.

I leapt into the arms of… well, my lesbian boss, and then Scott. (Hey, it was all about proximity.)

The final tally came to 151—45. Church-backed opponents of same-sex marriage had fallen five votes short of the number they needed. Representative Paul Loscocco, a staunch Catholic who had promised to back the amendment during his election campaign just eight months before, switched his vote to defeat the amendment. According to someone who heard it directly from Loscocco, Cardinal O’Malley had called Loscocco to say that the issue was all about natural law. Loscocco interrupted the cardinal, saying, “Wait a minute, Cardinal. It’s about civil rights. We’re talking about civil rights.” When the final vote was announced, Loscocco’s wife, a daily communicant, sent him a text message that he received on the floor of the legislature. It read, “You are my hero.”

Most of the demonstrators against gay marriage dropped their signs and went home. The Russians were not so easily dissuaded. They brought their stick-figure renditions of anal sex front and center. The signs read, “Not even dogs do it that way.”

The governor of Massachusetts urged gay-marriage supporters to make peace with the other side of the street, but the Russians jeered, made obscene gestures, and did everything they could to drown him out. Cardinal Sean showed scarcely more grace in defeat. The four bishops of Massachusetts issued a statement calling the vote “tragic,” and claiming, “Today the common good has been sacrificed by the extreme individualism that subordinates what is best for children, family, and society.” They also hinted at unfair backroom political pressure and decried the supposed influence of “powerful special interest groups.” Sour grapes are no substitute for the hearts of Jesuit missionaries.