Since My Last Confession

Go
to you local bookstore. Do it. Now. Check where they’ve shelved my book.
Yup, you’ve guessed it – in the “Gay and Lesbian” section. Not, decidedly, in
the “Catholic” section.

Well,
thanks to my new best friend Dave Daniels, I hereby ordain you for a very
special ministry. You’ve heard of the Guerrilla Queer Bar
movement? It involves an organized effort to have hundreds of gay people take
over a specified “straight” Boston establishment on a given night to transform
it instantly into a gay club. I have riffed on this concept before,
seeking to establish a Guerrilla Queer Church movement, in which all the gay
Catholics and divorced people and romancatholicwomenpriests
and married priests and anybody else at
the margin of the Church takeover a given mainstream Church on a given Sunday.
(Feel free to start a Guerrilla Queer Church movement in your area; I just started
a Facebook group
for the Boston-area group here. Join now. Maybe we’ll start taking churches
over this fall.)

But
I digress. Your ministry is the Guerrilla Queer Bookshelf. How does it work?
You gather up about half the copies of my book from the “Gay and Lesbian”
section and hustle them over to the “Catholic” section, where you lovingly
re-shelve them (cover facing out, of course!) – and press a copy on anyone who
happens to be browsing in that area. We’ll take back these bookstores, one
shelf at a time!

And,
btw, thanks for Dave for the idea – he is the original Queer Bookshelf
Guerrilla. He is also a photographer — and talk about pornography! Dave has a collection of shots of the inside of
one of Boston’s many churches posted here that are absolutely gorgeous – pure
spiritual pornography, designed to make a gay Catholic boy’s heart race! Take a
look. No box of tissues required to clean up the mess.

Unholy
Wine of the Week (the stuff you wish they would consecrate): Domaine Marcel
Deiss 2002 Engelgarten from Alsace is a magnificent effort. No slight white, it
bursts with strong exotic flavor, edgy acids, a bit of menthol, and a slightly
off-dry, viscous mouthfeel. A blend of the noble grapes of Alsace, mostly pinot
gris and Riesling. Pricy, but can stand up to a wide range of foods. If you read
French, the vineyard is here.

As you will read about in the book,
YouTube can be addictive. I swear I am
on the YouTube wagon, but someone sent me a video I could not help but sharing.

One of my projects is a nascent website
in which you can confess your sins (anonymously). I then post your sins here, and folks on the
internet can then suggest penances or give you absolution.

The idea is that there are so few priests out there, there’s
no one to confess to. So you seek
Web-based confession and absolution here. I call it the Reconciliatron, after the masturbation device in
Woody Allen’s Sleeper.

In any event, someone in YouTube land is thinking the same
thing. Check it out here. (Thanks, Thomas!)

In other, unfortunate news, the Vatican just announced
the excommunication
of my brave friends, the womenpriests. Fortunately, the excommunication did not
take. The womenpriests simply refused
to be excommunicated. You go,
girl(priest)s!

Unholy
Wine(s) of the Week. Memorial
Day weekend permitted a trifecta of tastings of the wines we brought back with
us from the Finger Lakes. The Standing Stone
Riesling 2007 was light, crisp, acidic, refined, with restrained white
stone fruit and some mineral qualities. Should be drunk alone; a little delicate for food. Great value! The Silver Spring Winery 2003
Cabernet Franc was a good, light-bodied, light-alcohol summer red with a darker
nose than taste, sufficient acid to pair with food. We drank ever so slightly chilled and it
changed nice as it warmed in the glass. Lamoureaux (French for
“Love Waters”) Landing 2007 Gewurtztraminer had dry, citrus qualities like
a sauvignon blanc, spiciness mid-to-late-palate, no discernable lychee flavor,
medium bodied with high but perfectly balanced alcohol.

 60,000
people showed up in Yankee Stadium to celebrate Mass with Pope Benedict
XVI. Tickets were in short supply. Several sold on Ebay for more than $200. According to newspaper reports, even those with
strings to pull ended up empty-handed. 

I was one of the lucky
ticketholders selected by lottery by the Archdiocese of Boston. But I spent Sunday in the mountains close to
God.

A phone call prompted my decision
to stay home. I blogged more about it here. Cardinal Sean O’Malley’s Cabinet Secretary
and Chairman of the Catholic Foundation Scot Landry refused to give me the
ticket until I gave him assurances that I would be neither disruptive nor
confrontational. He had read a blog post
of mine in which I solicited ideas on how a gay Catholic ought to approach
Papal Mass attendance “consistent with not ruining others’ worship experience.”

Absent the assurances of good
behavior, Landry said, he could not release the ticket. Grudgingly, I supplied the assurances and
Landry mailed the ticket to me. But the
experience soured my view of the Mass. No longer was I a member of the flock with a right to celebrate Mass
with the ostensible leader of my Church; instead, Mass was a privilege,
withheld pending promises to behave properly. This view of worship-as-privilege is also reflected in the recent acts
of certain American bishops, who have called for withholding the sacraments
from politicians favoring abortion and, last year in Wyoming, from a lesbian couple
who advocated politically for same-sex marriage, and who in March
excommunicated three
women who had been ordained as womenpriests.

Landry’s call also reminded me of
the insularity of the Pope’s visit. Unlike John Paul II, who held open-air Masses to which all were welcome,
Benedict scheduled only closed events, where voices of dissent were
discouraged. These themes of privilege
and insularity made Benedict’s “Apostolic Journey to the United States” feel
more like an invasion. 

Don’t get me wrong. I was moved by the Pope’s meeting
with five Boston-area abuse victims. The
meeting was properly scaled: a pastor and five of the wounded among his
flock. It did not end abuse or
suffering, and it was no recompense, but for many it was a small consolation,
even a bit of a miracle. Stadium-sized
miracles seem less likely absent such human-scale interaction.

Now that the Papal invasion is
over, we gay people return to our churches and the womenpriests among us return
to the pews. No one grants us this
privilege; none of our pastors put insulation between them and us. We take our seats because they belong to us
by virtue of baptism; they are not leased to us contingent upon good
behavior. 

In this light, any single Mass at
my humble home church Saint Anthony
Shrine seemed worth a thousand Papal Masses in Yankee Stadium. I’d rather hear a homily from a friar in his
habit than a sermon from a prince in his finery. 

I still have that gilted
ticket. Sometimes it gives me a twinge
of guilt that someone who did not share my view of the Papal mass could have
had the ticket in my stead. Perhaps as
Penance I’ll auction it off on Ebay and donate the proceeds to the friars of
Saint Anthony, who make the real day-to-day miracles happen.

Unholy
Wine of the Week: Scott and I and the other founding members of our
cooperative Winebuyers.Org traveled up to the Finger Lakes of New York and did
some wine tasting. We rented a fab house
next to a waterfall and visited wineries along lakes Keuka, Seneca, and
Cayuga. Expect to see more N.Y. State
wines in this space over the summer. A
repeat favorite: Dr. Konstantin Frank Vinefera Wine Cellars
Rkatsiteli, reportedly
one of the oldest cultivated grapes in the world, grown at Mount Ararat,
according to our homolicious wine pourer. Clean, crisp, dry, white with good minerals and acidity, decent fruit,
perhaps between a pinot blanc and a dry Riesling.  

According to the Boston
Globe, the Vatican announced that belief in aliens from outer space is
perfectly consistent with belief in God. Extra terrestrials, the Vatican’s chief astronomer pointed out, would
still be God’s creatures:

“Ruling out the existence of aliens
would be to put limits on God’s creative freedom.”

The remarks came in the context of a discussion of the
Church’s persecution of Galileo for heresy in connection with the scientist’s
theory that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa. According to the chief astronomer,

“The church has somehow recognized
its mistakes. Maybe it could have done
it better . . . .”

Indeed. It could do
better today, too. If only the Church
would stop putting limits on God’s creative freedom and acknowledge the
possibility that gay people – today’s aliens – could engage in mutual,
respectful, loving, and fruitful relationships without denying their sexuality.

But then, it’s a lot easier to profess brotherhood with
someone far away like an extraterrestrial than with those who are actually in
your midst.

The Catholic Catechism
has a provision prohibiting leading off a blog relating to my own book by pitching, well,
a different book entirely. But this
would not be the first time I run afoul of official teaching, so here goes.

In Sal Sapienza’s 2006 novel, Seventy Times Seven, Vito Fortunato
gets lots of guidance from God, but the messages do not come via the burning
bush. For Vito, the voice of God is
mediated variously by George Michael,
Madonna (the one that is “like a virgin,”
not actual the Ever Virgin Herself), a queeny flight attendant who loves Saint
Augustine’s Confessions, Cat Stevens (a.ka. Yusif Islam), a
drunken woman on the subway, Deuteronomy, and Barbara Stanwyck. From these diverse sources, the message is
always consistent: Choose Life.

Easy enough for God to say. But Vito isn’t sure how to interpret the phrase. He’s a candidate for brotherhood in a Roman
Catholic order known as the Divinity Brothers. He’s teaching religion to a class of thirty hormonally charged
adolescents. He’s on the verge of taking
his vows and professing himself as a religious brother. Although he’s got sensible reservations about
some of the Church’s teaching — Vito wears his piety lightly and doesn’t sweat
the rules on account of his confidence in Christ’s message – he’s convinced
he’s found a higher calling. 

On the other hand, Vito finds himself torn between the
satisfactions of his religious life and the joys of gay life. He’s a handsome and out (but celibate) gay
man, with a gaggle of gay best buddies who bring him out to New York’s gay clubs
on a regular basis. More than once, he’s
come to Sunday Mass reeking of booze imbibed the night before. 

“I’m really leading two lives,” he complains to his
spiritual advisor. While he knows
instinctively that club life, with its random hookups, is not for him (“God’s
not at the Roxy,” he says), he nevertheless senses the potential for a richer
gay life and he values his friendships with secular gay men dearly. But he also loves teaching, he honors the
saints, and he believes in God. Maybe,
he worries, “like Augustine, [I’m] placing too much value on my earthly
friendships and too little on my relationship with God.”

After a rough school year that brings his dilemma almost to
crisis, Vito leaves both his fellow religious and his partyboy gay life behind. He travels 3000 miles to live and work at an
AIDS hospice in San Francisco. What
follows are some of the most affecting passages in the book, as the very
ordinariness of Vito’s caregiving—a comment here, washed dishes there, a timely
wise-ass remark, building a garden for the patients to enjoy—is set in
deliberate counterpoint to the free-wheeling, death-defying banter of the patients
themselves.

But Vito’s choice harder becomes much more difficult when
God places a herald angel (named Gabriel, of course!) in Vito’s path. The understated, unconsummated romance between
Gabe and Vito personifies Vito’s otherwise vague intuition that a gay life
worthy of God’s apparent admonition to “choose life” is possible. Summer’s end brings Vito to a moment of
decision, when he has to choose a road less traveled that will make all the
difference:

Madonna’s Like a Prayer seemed to fit the moment: “I have no choice/I hear your voice.” But was the “you” calling my name God or
Gabe? They both seemed to fit and they both felt like home.

Vito’s ultimate choice is not a huge surprise, but suspense
does not seem to be Sapienza’s goal. Instead, the most striking thing about his writing is Sapienza’s obvious
affection for the characters he created. Gabriel is awkward as a bag of elbows, unsubtle, blunt, rough around the
edges, but imbued with a haunting loneliness and generosity through which it’s
easy to believe God might be speaking. As
a believer, Vito’s struggle is not between faith and faithlessness, but rather
with discerning what faith demands of him; yet he never loses a sense of
self-deprecating humor. Indeed, for all
the philosophical wrestling in which Vito engages, the book is full of funny
moments: for example, when a nun asks Vito whether he’s ever been to “Spiritus”
(a Catholic retreat center), Vito mentions a trip to the decidedly less holy pizza parlor/pick-up spot on
Provincetown’s main drag that bears the same name.

The title’s reference to the answer Jesus gave when asked
how often a man should forgive his brother who wrongs him (70 x 7 times)
suggests another question: who merits such forgiveness. One of Vito’s students puts forth a possible
answer. The student’s father had long
since left the family for another woman, and the student declares he will never
forgive his Dad. But after some
intervention by Vito, student and father are reunited. To Vito, the father says wistfully, “I think
he has forgiven me.” Vito asks wisely,
“Have you forgiven yourself?”

I confess, Sapienza’s steady stream of Eighties pop culture
allusions left me dizzy—and I grew up in the Eighties! A little less substitution of shorthand music
lyrics for actual mental discourse would have made this a better novel. But in the end, the chorus of sympathetic
Catholics that make up this book’s cast is both novel and affecting, and
Sapienza—himself a former Marist brother—gives us a peek into a world most gay
people deliberately (and with some reason) avoid. And he offers a provisional answer to a question
near and dear to my heart: How can a gay man possibly remain a Catholic? Forgiveness is a good start. 

UnHoly
Wine of the Week: It was a remarkably uneventful week in the world of
wine. Best of show was Turley Wine
Cellar’s 2006 Old Vine Zinfandel, a cheaper version of the more refined
Turley family of Zins. It was knock-you-off-bar-stool powerful, deeply
extracted, rich, but a little one-dimensional with classic Zin jammy flavors
that evoked brambles and bee stings and summertime.

Last year, a lesbian couple in Wyoming, married in Canada, and mothers of three, got a surprise in the mail. At the request of their bishop (David Ricken), their pastor informed them by letter that they were no longer welcome to take Communion.

Their sin, the pastor made clear, was not their lesbianism per se. In fact, they regularly attended Mass and their family picture had appeared in the parish directory. What brought them down was the Smudge. On
Ash Wednesday, they appeared (complete with forehead ashes) in an
article in which they protested an anti-gay marriage amendment then
pending in the Wyoming legislature. This exposure culminated in their being refused communion.

I several times contacted the couple in hopes of speaking about the incident, but they were no publicity whores like myself. They were classy ladies.  So they (understandably) never returned my call.  They continued to go to Church with dignity, heads held high, unashamed, though they did not participate in Holy Communion. At
least one straight couple in the parish also abstained from the
sacrament in solidarity “until everyone is welcome at the table.” I
assumed they faded away, but I was wrong.

In
February 2008, the bishop did an about-face. A nun approached the
couple and invited them back to Church on the occasion of Bishop
Ricken’s upcoming pastoral visit. At Communion time, the couple presented themselves for – and received – his blessing. They hobnobbed with him afterward and told their stories. The bishop apologized for what happened to them and told them he had instigated their being invited back.

After
the visit and after consultation with their pastor, the couple was
again permitted to take the Eucharist beginning on Holy Thursday 2008. “It was so beautiful!” Vader wrote. The whole story is in this pdf on pages 9-10.

Brava, Vader-Huskinsons! Your dignity carried the day here. I
guess my only reservation is the usual: that we not await permission to
participate in sacramental life, but that we take (i.e., receive) what
is by rights ours.  It also bothers me that the initial refusal was widely reported, but there does not seem to be a hint of news about the reconciliation on the ‘Net.  You can contact the bishop’s secretary here to tell him you support his welcoming the couple back to the fold. Her name is Dorene.

Unholy Wine of the Week: 2007 Paul Cluver Gewürztraminer. This is a South African Gewurz, of all things! A
wonderfully dry expression of the varietal, crisp minerality, serious
spiciness, hint of lychee, and the per bottle case price is just 12
bucks! It is not the most complex in the world,
but nonetheless delivers great, full flavor and refreshment comparable
to a European version of 2-3 times the price. Buy this one now!

Don’t get me wrong. I
am pleased and proud that members of the gay Catholic group Dignity staked out the roadside along the
Popemobile’s route through Washington DC. For years, Dignity has been the strongest gay Catholic voice in the
nation. But crowing about the Pope’s
having waved
to the silent Dignity contingent made me squirm. Are we really satisfied with that – a Papal
wave? The news story
makes the members sound like a pair of Okies vacationing in Hollywood who
managed to get a glimpse of a Big Star and imagined the Big Star threw a smile
their way:

The pope appeared to look directly
at about a dozen members of the group as they stood behind a 10-foot long
banner with the message, “Dignity Washington — Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and
Transgender Catholics, Our Families and Friends — A community of Faith in
Action.”
“I thought it was a good chance for us to be seen and he obviously saw us and
waved at us, so I think we got our message across,” said Raymond Panas,
president of Dignity Washington. …
“Whether he actually saw or read our sign, we’ll never know,” said Dignity
member Bob Miailovich. “It was nice to see him, and it was all very prim and
proper. He waved in our direction and that was very nice.”

I confess
that this tendency to let ourselves get excited by the crumbs thrown our way is
one I share. I suppose it comes from
making our way through the desert of spiritual experience that dealing with the
Roman Catholic hierarchy has been. 

For example, when I first heard that the Pope made a clear
distinction between homosexuality and pedophilia in comments made en route to
the U.S., and promised to root those subject to the latter out of the
priesthood, I was initially pleasantly surprised:

[T]he pontiff said: “I would not
speak at this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia, which is another
thing. And we would absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry.”

“Who is guilty of pedophilia cannot
be a priest,” he added.

For a professor trained in subtle theological nuance,
Ratzinger has never made as clear that he recognizes a difference between the
two concepts. His comments delighted me:
all those right wing conservative Catholics will be disappointed because B16 so
undermined their
argument that priestly homosexuality was the cause of the abuse
scandal. 

But on further review, what does B16’s distinction
mean? What value does it have? For example, if pedophile priests are the
issue, why bar
homosexual candidates from the seminary? This initiative was one of the first major acts of the B16 Papacy back
in 2005.

More important, what really shook the faithful was NOT the
acts of pedophile priests, however horrific those acts were. The faithful could have attributed these
terrible acts merely to a (large) handful of sick individuals without losing
faith in the Church. 

What scandalized the faithful was the conduct of the bishops
– bishops who not only protected priests from exposure, but set them up in new
parishes to prey (pun intended) on a whole new crop of young people. In other words, bishops who were panderers
and pimps for their pedophile priests. In this sense, pedophiles were not the whole problem, and certainly not
gay priests. The problem was pimping
bishops. A truly revolutionary statement
by B16 would have been this: “Who is guilty of being a bishop cannot be a
priest.”

As if to emphasize the fact that the laity are really beside
the point in the view of the Pope Benedict XVI hierarchy, it appears that there
will be no
lay ministers serving at the Masses he is celebrating in Yankee Stadium and
in Washington DC. 

And just as an aside, who celebrates Mass in Yankee Stadium,
of all places? That’s an unholy place,
if there ever was one, especially for a born-and-raised boy from Boston who
still remembers Bucky Dent hitting a home run that foiled the chances of the
Red Sox back in the days when we could not fathom an actual World Series
victory. Sigh. [UPDATE: on further review, it turns out that
Dent homerun took place in Fenway
Park. Perhaps Yankee Stadium ain’t
so bad.]

Anyhow …

No lay ministers????? The thought is appalling. At Saint Anthony Shrine in Boston,
we live on lay ministers. Friars get
old, but lay ministers are ever refreshed. They go through boot Camp before they’re deigned fit to serve, and it’s
hard to imagine a Mass without them – and why would you want to, unless you
were one of those people pining for a pre-VatII restoration when we can all
work beads and mumble a lot and believe we had no place in God’s sanctuary? Talk about the good old days.

Anyhow, as a timely recompense for B16’s nonsense, James
Alison has written a chunk of wisdom some of which I set forth below for your
digestion. The test is called “Letter to a Young Catholic.” The whole thing won’t take much time, but
what really caught my eye was the humility of the piece. Alison says, essentially, I may not be right
in all I preach, but as long as I know it as truth, I will continue to preach
it:

I don’t want to pretend that being an openly gay
Catholic is something easy or obvious. It isn’t. For a start, merely the fact
of your wanting to read a letter like this at all is a sign of how many
obstacles you must have overcome already. You may have faced hatred and
discrimination in your own country, from family members, at school, at the
hands of legislators eager for cheap votes, through shrieking newspaper
headlines that sear your soul, and in the glare of which you are speechless in
your own defence. And you’ve probably noticed that at the very best, the Church
which calls itself, and is, your Holy Mother has kept silent about the hatred
and the fear. While all too often its spokesmen will have lowered themselves to
the level of second-rate politicians, lending voice to hate while claiming that
they are standing up for love. The very fact that, through and in the midst of,
and despite, all these hateful voices, you should have heard the voice of the
Shepherd calling you into being of his flock is already a miracle far greater
than you know, preparing you for a work more subtle and delicate than those
voices could conceive.

You will share in all the contempt which the modern
world has for the Catholic Church by virtue of holding firm to the faith you
have been given – you will be considered as having little of worth to offer.
And by virtue of being a Catholic you will always be on the brink of being
considered something of a traitor to whatever project your contemporaries seek
to build. …. [Y]ou will be considered something of a traitor within the Church
as well. “Not quite one of us”. And certainly not someone who can publicly
represent the Church, be a visible part of the sign which leads to salvation. …
[Y]ou will be considered a bad Catholic, if a Catholic at all. For, long after
the evangelical groups which gave birth to “reparative therapy” and the “ex-gay”
movement have moved on, and their leaders apologised for leading people astray,
such ideas will find Catholic backers and supporters, since they flatter
current Church teaching. But don’t be afraid of those ideas, and don’t hate
their propagators. They are our brothers. The very fact that these brothers
understand that if the Church’s teaching is true it must have some basis in the
discoverable realm of nature means that ultimately it is the evidence of what
is true in that realm which will set us free.

But what of the long “meanwhile”? For you, called
by your name, … being Catholic implies a vocation to some sort of ministry,
some sort of creative acting out, some sort of public imitation of the life and
death of Our Lord. So I don’t want to pretend: you will find yourself
developing a ministry, as I find myself developing one, without any public
backing from Church authority. It will be as if you did not exist. You will
have to learn to live in the silence of being neither approved of, nor even
disapproved of. You will fall out of the gaze of men, and if you are anything
like me, desperate for an approving glance, you will experience this as a form
of dying. …

Let me give you an analogy. I don’t know whether
you are old enough to remember the Cold War? … One of the spin-offs of the Cold War was a literary and cinematic genre
of spy stories, tales of intrigue and underground life waged (in the worst
cases) by goodies against baddies and in somewhat rarer, better, cases by
morally ambiguous people on both sides of the NATO/Eastern Bloc divide.

Try to imagine yourself an agent for one or the
other side … . Now imagine that long ago you received your instructions from
the head of the agency which is to “run” you, and were given appointed
“handlers” for your mission. So, confident that you were being backed up by
them, you plunged into your work, starting to build up community, small signs
of the kingdom you serve, deep in enemy territory. Then imagine that something
weird happens, there is something of a coup within the agency that sent you
out, a policy shift, and all the people who had “handled” you, knew you, and
prepared you, are quietly retired. So you find yourself with no direct line to
anyone back at the agency. You are deep underground, and you are suddenly
without cover, without back up, without resources, without even recognition. So
much so that the new agents sent out by the agency don’t even know of your
existence, and would probably heartily disapprove since if you are who you say
you are, then you are part of an older and currently discredited approach to
the “enemy territory” in which you have long gone underground.

… What are
you to do? …. [D]o you allow your anger and resentment at your treatment by the
agency to cause you to give up working on the project for which you were
originally called and trained? Or do you so love the project that you are
prepared to love the agency which now hates you, confident that eventually,
things will work out? Loving the agency when it loves you is easy enough, but
loving it even through the time when it disowns you? Now there is the finger of
God!

This is where I would urge you, as I urge myself,
often with a fainting spirit, to see the privilege of what we have. Yes, … they
either don’t know of our existence, or need plausible deniability for their own
sakes, but meanwhile here, deep in enemy territory we can carry on building not
just a wee little corner of something defensive, but the Catholic Church itself
– the full thing, the whole whack. And curiously, with less interference from
busybodies than would be the case if the lines of communication were up. So, do
we dare to have our love stretched by building without approval, as we wait
longingly for the day when some Berlin Wall comes down, and communication is restored?
Can you take responsibility for that? Can you persevere?

“¡Esto va para largo…!” “This is going to be a long
haul!” – that was the sage advice to me of one of my formators, one of my
handlers, who in addition to being a gay man is an historian. He was telling
me, as I am telling you, that the process of adjustment to truth in this sphere
is going to take a long, long time. …

Who knows, my friend, whether this opportunity for
communication will be repeated? … One
way or another, let me tell you what I have discovered in my years underground
in enemy territory: you are not alone, and His promises are true.

This is what we need to do to build the Church. We need to accept responsibility. It is not a responsibility conferred from the
hierarchy on us, but one conferred by the Almighty directly on all of us,
including the gay and lesbian among us.

Here in Boston, we are taking that admonition
seriously. We continue to build the
Church of the Gospel, the Church we love. As I write, we are gathering representatives from all the faith
communities, whether parishes or otherwise, who welcome the gifts and charisms
of gay people. We are sharing
ideas. We will soon have a website to help those who have not
yet found us, to find us. We have events
planned through June, and we expect in particular to have a gay pride
event. This effort represents a
resurgence in Boston. We gay Catholics
are re-taking our churches here.

Interestingly, there is a phenomenon in Boston (and other
cities) called Boston
Guerilla Queer Bar. The idea is
simple: once a month, the group agrees to descend on a very straight bar on a
particular night at a particular time. Result: a formerly straight venue is charmed with the benefits of gay
appeal. For one night, it is the gay
boys who are out on the dance floor. The
music is the same, the drinks are the same, but the effect is magical. An instant queer bar where once a straight
bar had been.

What would happen if we selected a particular parish church,
one per month? All the gay Catholics
would descend on it at, say, the 10AM Mass. We would sing, we would worship, we would be indistinguishable from our
straight friends in the pews, except perhaps for the ferocity of our love, our
kiss of peace, and the fact that we would leave petitions in the collection
basket in lieu of dollars to avoid contributing to a corrupt hierarchy. We could invite members of Dignity to join us. We could invite womenpriests. We could bring our families, however
constituted.

The genius of it is that this would not be an act of mere
civil disobedience or profanation like ACT-UP’s
spilling the Holy Eucharist at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. This would be a
celebration, an exercise in ordinary worship with all its glorious earnestness,
awkwardness, false starts, distractions, simplicity, ritual, incense,
adoration, amazement, and radical transformation. 

Alison invited us to build the Church. But we should also feel free to take back
what is ours.

Unholy wine of the
Week: Rhys Vineyards
“Alesia” Green Valley Pinot Noir 2006. (Note that, according to Rhys, I shouldn’t have drunk the bottle at
all! Mea culpa! Only so many bottles I can “hold’ in a 950
square foot apartment!) A brilliant
new release for which I waited interminably on the waiting list. An unusually rich pinot, with the viscosity
and color of a syrah, a powerfully compact delivery of flavor, dark fruits
strongest (cherries, plum), balanced acidity and alcohol. Like meeting a big stud who also happens to
have an amazing vocabulary. (Did you
guys see the NY Times
piece on the Gladiator? Nothing like
a Scrabble-playing street fighter to get my panties in a bunch.) I would never pick it as typical of pinot,
but it has its own brawny merits.

I won the lottery. Not Powerball, not Megamillions, not any kind of lottery where you
retire to your own private island and hire serving minions to cool you with
palm fronds and scoff at those who tormented you in your youth and so are
ineligible to get a taste of your prodigious bounty. No, I won the right to rise at 3:45AM and
board a bus for New York City (“New York City! Just like I pictured it! Skyscrapers
. . . and everything!” – Stevie
Wonder), where I will cram myself into Yankee Stadium with 60,000 of my
best Catholic friends to listen to a man who has done more to hobble the civil
law/civil rights advancements of my people than anyone on the planet. Yep, you guessed it – I’ve drawn a seat to
the 2008
Papal Mass courtesy of the Archdioceses of Boston and New York. In other words, a lottery more akin to the
famous Shirley
Jackson short story.

The question is, what’s a gay Catholic to do with this sort
of opportunity? I planned to bring my
digital recorder and camera, of course, and to wear my “I’m Loved By a
Second-Class Gay Citizen” rainbow pin that I wore during the rallies for
same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. But
what else ought I to do, consistent with being reasonably respectful of others
beliefs and spiritual experience (or at least consistent with not getting
arrested by Homeland Security operatives – apparently, all our names have been
submitted to the agency for pre-screening)? Any suggestions for civil disobedience? Do I engage the masses (so to speak)? Seek dialog? Hand out business
cards about Since My Last Confession? Show off wallet photos of my boyfriend and our Scotty dog? Give your regards to B16?

I am open to any and all suggestions. Email me at scott.pomfret [at] gmail [dot]
com.

P.S. We don’t really
have a Scotty dog, I promise.

Unholy Wine of the
Week (What You Wish They Would Consecrate): 2006 Saxon Brown Pinot Noir Parmelee Hill. An unusually dark pinot with the punch to
back it up. Perhaps lacks nuance or layering,
but densely packed flavors barely give the palate a rest. Acid is high and alcohol may be slightly out
of balance at 14.5%, suggesting another year of cellaring might help it out. Look for dried and dark fruits, barnyard, and
saddle flavors.