"Don't make me put my baby down."
Someone sent me to an opinion piece published in the New York Blade. The writer, , had just seen “Gay Sex in the ‘70’s” and felt moved to express some thoughts that clarify for those among us who ever gave him the benefit of a doubt the distressing way in which his mind turns.
I have stopped by his blog roughly a dozen times in the last couple of years. His writing always left me unsatisfied, but I returned perhaps because I am easily fascinated by men who are well educated but seem not to have fetched much truth or insight from their discipline.
I met him once, at a gathering of bloggers.
We were introduced, and when he heard the words “farmboyz” and “Perge Modo”, he winced. He actually winced and grimaced, albeit briefly, and swiftly supplied a patronizing and pained smile in an attempt to cover his distaste for the introduction. It was the look I have seen on the faces of some archbishops when forced into contact with an unsifted and unwashed assemblage of laity.
I extended my hand, and he looked at it with horror as if I had just sneezed upon it all the contagious detritus of hell. To his credit, he did manage to shake my hand without fainting. He then avoided conversation by moving to another part of the room.
Guess he had read a bit of my blog. Guess he didn’t much like it. Guess he had consigned me to hell.
I had never before had the experience of being judged in that way. Never had it since. It is not a good feeling.
Throughout my entire life, I have never once felt judged in that way by God. Never once felt condemned or even disapproved of. There are church leaders who are swift to roll their eyes at what I write or do, but even they have never diminished their opinion of me an inch because of the choices I have made.
They simply pray harder for me, but while praying, would never avoid visiting me, or calling me or consider cutting me out of their lives because of how I have lived my life.
Perhaps he would recall the moment of our introduction either differently or not at all. Perhaps the dissing was all in my head, imagined.
It does not matter. In the New York Blade article, the excruciatingly odd thoughts he strings together about sex and disease and behavioral consequences seem to come from the provinces of childhood nightmares, or seem like lessons gleaned from a book of fairy tales intended for the small of mind.
It would be easy for me to list the possible reasons for his disliking anonymous sex, but I don’t know this man well enough to get it right.
Were we to meet again, I would probably tell him that men who choose to spend their days perched on their sofas with their legs crossed tightly at the knees should not trash the Olympics just because they themselves choose to be unathletic.
I’ve been a runner all my life. I am sure this has done some damage to my knees and shins, but I am not about to start campaigning against marathons.
I’ve tried not to run too much. To stay on forgiving paths. I don’t run drugged or drunk.
These days, I keep to the right, letting the faster or younger have the inner track. But I would hate to think what life would be like without the exultation of the race, and I would never blame Nike for whatever aches and pains I’ve had along the way.
I could go on, but to what end?
You can’t much reach men like that. They condemn the things they are afraid of. Things they might love too much.
They cling to the safety of their convictions like mussels to rock in waves.
PS: - and perhaps a source of greater indignation – his characterization of the men of the ‘70’s as “unkempt” is simply ignorant. We spent most of our waking hours kempting ourselves into a look somewhere between Al Parker and Farrah Fawcett ( the opposite ends of the narrow bandwidth of beauty in those days).
Would that we had had the luxury of the buzz cut, or clothes from the Gap and butch boots available at any mall. We might have had more time for sex.
Are You Here for the Party? (Part Seven)“So the three of us meet for dinner in an East End restaurant, and it’s hardly surprising that all Englishmen are gay because their food is so forgettable you realize that they’ve spent generations nurturing other appetites and I can feel Thaddeus pushing his approval and desire at me across the table as if they were salt and pepper for the bland fare, and after dinner, outside the door, he makes a point of asking me to go to some art gallery with him that he suspects I’d rather enjoy, and the three of us are grinning because we know it’s not a plan for the three of us, but rather a “Date” for just two of us, and not at all about the Tate Gallery, and the Assistant Pastor is smirking with self-satisfaction over my agreeing to this, and I was really on the fence about it. I mean, the results of this “date” would certainly be reported to him, making me socially defenseless, but, I figured this to be preferable to giving it away to any of the several gossipy old lecherous priests at the Cathedral who were also hungry for a slice of fresh American deacon, and besides, I couldn’t really be sure which ones, if any, my classmate was doing and I couldn’t afford a complicated overlap.
Little did I know that by the end of the summer, what my friends would buzz about with disapproval was that I had taken up with an Anglican rather than keep it in the family. Even Mark. You see there was someone else in London with us that summer.
Another American seminarian. Mark, from San Francisco. He was a year behind us in Rome and therefore not yet a deacon.
He was simply on vacation for the summer, and being kept by a doctor whom he refused to introduce to T and me because we were not really all out to each other, as hard as that might be to imagine, it’s just how things were done in those days among the Vatican clergy. Never any direct asking and telling, but lots of dead- on gossip. Different among the domestically trained clergy, so I hear.
Anyway, Mark was eager to show off the doctor’s flat so he brings me round one afternoon while the guy is at work and he’s set up a sort of sleeping bag in the guy’s walk-in closet, with all the guy’s shoes kind of pushed off to the sides, and he’s claiming that this is where he’s bedding down every night and that they are just friends and I go along with the whole thing all the while thinking that a London doctor is even safer than an Anglican minister when it comes to keeping one’s private stuff private.
“I really miss Mark. He’s died many years ago.
In the first wave. He had been ordained, and after only a year, he up and left his parish and was living with a big-muscled boyfriend in the Castro. His parents took it badly.
The boyfriend sometimes beat him. We were all surprised when Mark returned to his parish. Returned to the priesthood.
We didn’t know he was sick. And once we did, we weren’t sure if he had returned out of guilt, wanting to make a neatly shriven end of it, or needing to return for the medical benefits since he had none and was always practically broke and fishing about for a post-Church career that he had never found. In his final weeks, his voice over the phone, so tired, so dry.
Cross country we spoke, now not bothering to unfold all the secrets that I had always hoped we would someday savor together in the telling, but knowing everything in just the few words that constituted our good-bye, and then a call from a stranger and for the first time in my life, it was real, this horrible thing that I had only read about, only heard about. This killer that had taken a friend who should have been with me throughout my life, and others followed. A pattern developed.
‘Why haven’t you called?’. ‘Been under the weather’.
‘Taking a sabbatical’.’Is there anything I can do?’ Updates and bulletins from friends, and then ‘You better call him today because we’re starting the morphine tomorrow.
’ And then you sit with your hand on the phone for as long as it takes to prepare to make that call and the words that come out of you don’t matter. You invoke some shared memory of some crazy night when you were both young and perfect and then the call is over, and another part of your family evaporates in a bed in another part of the country, and you don’t even know what that bed and that room, the last things he saw, look like, what his friends look like who took care of him at the end, stepping in because the Church, like a fearful and confused child, didn’t know what to do with him. His friends who had become skilled at guiding their friends through those last days, who would pick up address books and calmly make calls around the country to priests they had never met, calmly saying that Mark was gone.
”
“So what did Thaddeus look like?”
I am jolted back to the moment, glad for the fact that Stretch had missed most of what I had said for the last several minutes while he wrestled with the zipper of my jeans without any assistance from me, and as we all know, if you don’t help with your own zipper, you are really working at cross purposes, especially while seated.
We continued like two suburban housewives who have approached each other on opposite sides of their low common fence on a hot sunny morning.
One with hands on hips and listening. The other with a basket of damp laundry at her feet, shaking out each piece and applying it to the line while overhead the clouds fly by on fast-forward and then extra-slowly and then at their normal speed.
“Well he was a little taller than me.
Thick strawberry blonde hair and beard. Thick lenses in his gold rimmed glasses magnifying light blue eyes so he always looked startled by what he focused on next. Ruddy.
Sturdy. Very ‘public school’, as I learned to say in London. He taught me the rejoinder that was popular that summer in churchy circles: ‘…said the actress to the bishop’, or ‘…said the bishop to the actress’.
The idea was to use it after anything that someone else might say that could be twisted, by its application, into a double-entendre. I brought it back to Rome at the end of the summer and managed to use it once or twice in Italian as ‘ha detto l’attrice al Vescovo’, but there’s not much opportunity for lewd humor in the Vatican.”
Stretch frowned slightly at the direction of all this, so I reeled him back in, as would a fly fisherman, with a good yank on his scrotum, a voluminous handful with lots of soft black hair.
I kept hold of it and continued.
“He kept ringing me up – that’s Brit for telephoning – because I hadn’t allowed for the cementing of the details of his proposed “date”. Finally, I agreed to August the fifteenth, which is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
His suggestion, not mine. Or maybe God’s plan. Like Mary, I was bound for someplace I’d never been before.
I really like the name of that ‘Holy Day of Obligation’ as it goes in German: ‘Der Himmelfahrt von Marie’. Thaddeus was gonna take me on a Himmelfahrt. How to dress…”
Are You Here for the Party? (Part Six)“I was a naive twenty-three year old Roman Catholic Deacon, having been newly ordained just a month earlier in St. Peter’s Basilica by a handsome young Italian who had been consecrated a bishop exactly one day before he, in turn, ordained me to the diaconate.
You could say, and we did, that I was sacramentally his first-born. Giuseppe Ferraioli was his name and he was appointed the Proto-Nuncio to Ghana, not exactly a peach of an assignment, unless, as I suggested to him, you liked black men. Anyway, Thaddeus said that my hair was as shiny as a new apple.
He spoke those words while watching me undress in my bedroom at Spanish Place Rectory, an elegant Catholic address in London's West End. I loved his attention. His ardor.
His looks, which were like those of Keith Carradine in “Pretty Baby” or later in “Nashville”. You know, that dissolute smolder. I loved the fact that after I had escaped from my East End parish where we had met, he had tracked me down to my posh assignment at Spanish Place.
I especially loved the fact that he was an Anglican priest, and therefore safely removed from my future by exactly one Pope whose skirts would shield me from any inconvenient entanglement that might follow my dalliance with him, and yes, oh yes, I planned from the get go to dally with him all summer long and then never again to see him upon my return to Vatican City. Never even to write, to destroy his letters unread, but I’m rather jumping ahead here, aren’t I?
“We had arrived for the summer, my classmate T and I, via a dusty twenty-four hour train trip from Rome to begin our prescribed summer of “apostolic ministry” among the ‘real’ people.
Baptizing, preaching and visiting the sick. Think Paris and Nicole going to Jersey to flip burgers. T had snagged a sweet assignment downtown as the deacon of Westminster Cathedral.
I, unfortunately, was assigned to a threadbare parish on Commercial Road in London’s dangerous and downtrodden (but brutally butch) East End. T kindly included me in the shimmer of social events that filled the Cathedral that summer. In fact, they made a record of one particular Mass in which I, weighted down by forty pounds of gold- threaded brocade dalmatic tapestry, intoned the ‘Ite Missa Est’ two octaves higher than the Westminster boys’ choir anticipated, making them strain their angelic little balls to keep up with me.
I still have that record. I need to hitch up the turntable some day and see if I can still hit those notes.
“So, there I am in the East End, ruefully eating the humble and tasteless dinner served up to the Pastor and the Assistant Pastor and checking my watch while planning my nightly escape for the evening, taking the tube downtown to the Cathedral, when I could feel the Assistant Pastor studying me.
After dinner he said that he wanted to introduce me to a friend of his, an Anglican minister named Thaddeus, in a neighboring parish. I could tell by the way he looked at me that he was sure I needed to get laid. He was right.
I didn’t need another cocktail party at the Cathedral. I needed dick. English dick.
Any kind of dick, but definitely dick with no strings attached. I am quite sure he wanted to offer me his own, but knew that a hot house Vatican flower like me would never be so indiscreet as to pray and play under the same roof. He was right about that.
He didn’t have a chance with me. We shared a bathroom with no lock, and he had already manipulated a few shower scenes to allow me a look at his dick of which he was quite proud. It was the kind of dick that got much wider at the head.
Like the clapper in a big ole church bell, he’d swing it about while insisting on conversation while he toweled off and grinned at me, his big ears red with mischief. I wondered what his friend might look like. I readily agreed to dinner with them later that week.
“To reach Thaddeus, we had to take a bus, a fact which symbolized for me the further and deliberate descent into a region of depravity that I wholeheartedly sought. A car from Connecticut. A jet from New York, A train from Rome.
The tube from the Cathedral, and now a bus. This could hardly be termed a surrendering of virtue. I may have been born with the map to Thaddeus in my heart, but I could have ignored it at any juncture, if that’s what I had wanted… If, if that is what I had wanted.
News RSS