Gay Priests
Sample ArticlesWhite Crane Journal #55 Winter 2002
Gay Priests
Sample ArticlesWhite Crane Journal #55 Winter 2002
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Bodies Under Scandal, Bodies Under Law Rev. Edward J. Ingebretsen
Priestly Pedophilia Toby Johnson
Recommended Books The Life of Pi by Yann Martel Reviewed by Bo Young
Leading The Parade: Conversations with America's Most Influential Lesbians and Gay Men by Paul D. Cain Reviewed by Jesse Monteagudo
Secret Places: My Life In New York and New Guinea by Tobias Schneebaum Reviewed by Mountaine
Editor's Note: "In Hoc Signo Vinces"
As I sat to write, news came that Harry Hay had succumbed to old age and a final cancer. Harry was a friend and teacher to me and it seems appropriate to write of him in an issue devoted to the idea of "Gay priests" even though I think he might slap my face, as he did on the first meeting we ever had (it didn't hurt), for applying such nomenclature to his fine revolutionary reputation. Nevertheless, if a priest is a mediary, and someone who presides over ritual, and conveys the essence of spirit through his offices, then priest he was.
I spent three summers and four workshops at Wolf Creek Sanctuary in Oregon in the company of Harry and his partner John, or N'John as he became affectionately known for his close and constant attachment to Harry's name and being. Sitting under the lush green skirt of a spreading walnut tree, Harry would lead us all in the mysteries of SexMagic, a workshop application of his theories and thoughts on the Nature of Gay men. If we were fortunate and trusting enough, and the secret permissions were granted, Harry told us we would reach a numinous place called "ritual space"-- a place something like heaven, I can now tell you, having been there several times; a place where there was no facilitator named Harry or John or Bo or Covelo or Rosie or Light Eagle or Jerry or Clyde or Corbeau or Cheiron or Sapphire Éor any of the other dozens of men Harry chose, like disciples, to learn the sacred ways of the Circle Process. We were all equals in the circle then and boundless were the possibilities.
Circles were what it all came down to in many ways. Not hierarchy, not teacher, not student, nor dogma. Circle. All equidistant from the center, the core, the truth; truth achieved through another sacred mystery called "consensus."
It was Harry's contention (and Harry was contentious if he was anything), it was his mantra, that consensus -- slow, arduous consensus -- was the gift Gay men could bring to the world. And through that a mediation between the sexes. Consensus takes longer than "majority rules," he said, but it is stronger. And indeed, he was right. Consensus was what we aimed at those summers under the Oregon sky, under the green draped walnut tree and in the plein air of the barn. Once consensus was achieved we entered a ritual space and it was here that we were free of our "frog skins" as he called the ravages of hetero-imitation, free to shed those skins and achieve levels of healing and magic that only Gay men could bring to one another and to the world. If this wasn't a priest, then I don't know what priest is.
If I don't know what a priest is, then many of our readers have very good ideas about it. I always feel like we are able only to scratch the surface of topics with each issue of White Crane we produce. This was brought home even more poignantly with this topic as so many of our readers are, in fact, actual priests, or former priests. The founder of WCJ, a former Jesuit, Bob Barzan, contributes his loving wisdom to our brothers of the cloth who must leave the confines of the Catholic. Ed Ingebretsen, recently in our Marginality issue, offers one of the more cogent and perceptive analyses of the current crisis in Catholicism. And Andrew Ramer, with a poetry that is uniquely Andrew's, speaks to the priest in all of us.
We all may be "priests," but many of us are not Catholic and the body of this issue addresses the problems currently plaguing the Roman Catholic Church (some would suggest that it isn't such a current thing but rather a longstanding, systemic problem reaching back to the vague corners of history.) As a result, much of the reference language is Roman Catholic. I want to thank Dan Vera, my dear CorBeau, raven on my shoulder, whose sharp editorial eye (and poetic heart) called this peculiarity of language to my otherwise-recovered-Catholic-but-still-conversant-in-it attention.
Another thing that has my attention: I'd like to know why Cardinal Law hasn't been arrested and charged with obstruction of justice and child endangerment? Or Bishop Dailey of Brooklyn who has admitted he knew of the dangers he was covering up? How is it possible that they are not held civilly responsible for their collusion?
It would be easy to gloat about the hubris of the Catholic Church and feel vague vindication for the pain it has inflicted on so many over the millennia it has polluted church and state with it's astronomically ignorant views of sex, sexuality and Eros. Honestly, I was a little conflicted about spending another drop of ink on something that seems beneath contempt. Perhaps it suffices to remember the Church of Rome remains as knowledgeable and wise on matters of sex as it was on matters of astronomy.
And if Galileo got his apology a mere 2000 years later, perhaps someday Harry Hay will receive his. I can think of no better form for that apology to take than for all Gay men to find the priest within himself or herself and bring those mysteries we know to the larger world. In Hoc Signo Vinces, Constantine proclaimed, "in this sign, victory." And we are here to say that the sign is the pink triangle, insofar as that sign represents Gay men and Gay people everywhere, and the power of loving companions.
Bo Young
Brooklyn 2002
Bodies Under Scandal, Bodies Under LawBy Rev. Edward J. Ingebretsen
Jason Berry's Lead Us Not into Temptation argues explicitly that the existence of child-abusing clerics in the Catholic Church is a result of the "infestation" of the clergy by homosexual priests. At one point, he asks if Jesus would "approve" of an "ecclesiastical culture [that] harbors child molesters [and] tolerates homosexual activity" (Berry, 367). Berry is not alone in his thinking, even though statistics in sex research do not bear out the conclusion. Research suggests that clerical sexual misbehavior with children and homosexuality are not related issues, even though there are concerted efforts (from within and outside the church) to collapse the two. Indeed, the casualness with which, in the current media narrative, homosexuality displaces a range of illegal activities and inappropriate behaviors by priests, underscores the use of "scandal" as a public, ideologically-rich narrative form. Since Chaucer, the sexual priest has been useful in many different narrative contexts. Only very recently, however, has that libidinous priest been directly announced to be a "homosexual."
This point needs to be considered. For example, Florence Rush's expose, The Best-Kept Secret (1957), excoriated priests and the church for a history of abusing women and children. Rush was writing at the height of Cold War paranoia when homosexuals were, like communists, the cultural "bogeyman." Given the culture of the time, that Rush criticizes Catholic clergy for their philandering, while giving scant attention to the possibility of "homosexual" priests, seems to be a remarkable omission. Could it be that the homosexual priest had not yet been found socially useful? A few short decades following Rush, Berry's expose decries a priest who is no longer a philanderer but a pedophile. The shift in emphasis is significant, although it goes generally unremarked in either church or secular media.
In American popular culture, sex in public, of any sort, is invariably announced as a trauma for which alarm and shock are the necessary responses. When charges were first made in January 2002 about clerical misconduct in Boston, media-outrage was directed less at offenses by priests than at the Catholic authorities who seemed either to dismiss sexual misconduct or to treat it cavalierly. One ranking cleric turned the argument back upon the victim, suggesting that parents should have been more careful. Since then the media debate has settled upon the plot line that it is gay clergy who are "responsible" for the church's moral crisis. Fr. John Geoghan had a three-decade history of being relocated from parish to parish, and from diocese to diocese, following multiple convictions of child abuse. When the story broke, it was not long before the Pope's own press agent predictably condemned homosexuals for the church's woes -- this despite the fact that Cardinal Law's disregard of existing civil as well as church law was the issue that caused outrage. Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls remarked in an interview that "people with these inclinations [homosexuals] just cannot be ordained." This comment, with Vatican authority behind it, was quickly seconded by ranking clergy, bishops, and cardinals (some of whom are themselves most certainly homosexual in orientation). Absent from the debate was any protest from the rank and file of priests--with the exception of the occasional heterosexual panic outburst. One priest declared to a classroom of startled children, "I'm not gay. . . I'm normal, just in case you were wondering"
Addressing the congregation during Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral -- the chief pulpit in Catholic Manhattan -- Monsignor Eugene Clark blamed the scandal on "disordered" homosexuals; likewise Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua's inane remarks concerning homosexual pathology, stress and alcoholism: "We have found that, when you have someone -- even using the example of an alcoholic, oriented toward alcoholism -- they may be wonderful in the seminary but when they get into the tension of the priesthood there is a tendency at times to seek some kind of outlet, and that's why some priests who have never touched a drink as candidates, when they become priests, they have fallen into alcoholism." Bishop John M. D'Arcy, Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana took a wider swipe, aiming at homosexuals and "especially effeminate" men. Here, very evidently, is the specter of gender-failure that has driven the anti-gay cleric church discussion since Vatican II. Bishop Wilton Gregory, President of the Bishop's Conference, cast the issue apocalyptically. "This is an ongoing struggle. . . It is most importantly a struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men." Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit suggested that the "problem" is "not truly a pedophilia-type. . . but a homosexual-type problem." Maida said his conclusions derived from "social scientists." Despite the occasional note of apology and distance from such language, one concludes that these well-placed Catholic officials speak with explicit approval of their betters; the noisy gong sounds off with at least a nod from the keeper of the church, who in fact owns the bell as well as pays the ringer. Catholic clergy, and especially bishops, are not in the habit of making public statements that disagree with the Magisterium. Indeed, although "liberal" Catholics and prelates might shy away from the remarks of their leaders, these comments have direct correspondence in church doctrine-- notoriously typified in "Letter to the Catholic Bishops regarding the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons" (1986).
Going unmentioned, and certainly undiscussed, are these various officials' willingness to ordain homosexual men in the first place. There are pragmatic reasons for doing so: 1) to fill a declining cadre of priests and, 2) to capitalize upon the homosexual's storied sensitivity, compassion, and (need I say it?) compliance. Taken as a whole, pronouncements about gay priests made by bishops and cardinals of rank demonstrate that homosexuals serve church ideology very much as they do in civil society, as scapegoats. Scapegoats are rarely the source of the melodramas in which they star. Indeed, long-standing willingness to ordain gay men (Bishop Gregory, cited above, himself has ordained them; some now sit beside him as his brother bishops) suggests that the church welcomes these men and the work they do. (This raises another issue; if there is a rising number of homosexual clergy, one wonders why fewer and fewer straight men want the job?) Accepting the homosexual's ministerial labor, while distancing church administration from him in public, are not irreconcilable positions. To the contrary, they are mutually supportive. One can materially profit from servants in one's home and still keep them out of the living room, fretting about the "problems" associated with these kinds of people. Profiting from homosexual labor does not contradict public denunciation--even in the most "liberal" of terms--of "the homosexual problem." In fact, recent strategies announced to remove Gay clerics means, of course, exactly the opposite. The church can ill afford to lose any more priests, and so it wants to keep them--homosexuals, too--on the condition that they remain silent. There is nothing new here in this modified equivalent of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. What people do "in private" has never been at issue in Catholic politics; it is only what they are perceived to be doing in public that is the problem.
For weeks following the initial charges in Boston no news broadcast lost an opportunity to address "the crisis in the priesthood." It would be quite easy to dismiss much of the media wash as crank and ill-informed. The constant use of "pedophile" when, in fact, "ephebophile" was meant, only demonstrates how seriously uninformed-- not to say malicious--was much of the public discussion. Since those early days, homosexuality has been such a standard feature of inflamed rhetoric that it rapidly became central to it. Occasionally one recalls that sexual orientation is not the issue. Scapegoats are chosen for their political vulnerability and their expendability; too often they are in the wrong social place at the right time. Throughout history a diverse array of bodies have been set apart as bearers of social ill will. Generally such persons had one thing in common &endash; some real or perceived sexual extravagance or deviance--that demarcated their transgressive status. The symbolic uses of lepers, moors, Hottentots, Jews, the French, Blacks, unwed welfare mothers, homosexuals, and the like, serve a variety of civic needs, including social policing and symbolic border management. Scapegoating remains constant, even while the subject shifts. Religious institutions are an example of this.
Often they are more resistant to change than their civil counterparts, and in many Christian denominations homosexuality still remains widely divisive. Liberal church communities can represent the homosexual as an object of pity, useful for the good works of compassion and altruism he makes possible. On the other hand, conservative Christian groups -- and the unchurched forces that sometimes align with them politically -- can demonize the homosexual, under cover of religion, for political gain. In Roman Catholic practice, elements of both attitudes exist. Recent pronouncements of high-ranking church authorities have raised homosexuality to a public media issue second only to abortion. Indeed, Pope John Paul II's astonishing statement from the Vatican piazza about the "offense" of homosexuality to "Christian values" (July 7, 2000) had the dizzying consequence of elevating homosexuality to a higher metaphysical status than Original Sin.
What would move a normally thoughtful Pope to make such a clearly unscripted and heavy-handed remark? A glance at Catholic demographics is useful here. For many modern Catholics homosexuality is one of the last remaining issues upon which sexual clarity and "group-think" can still be attempted. In the United States the first sign of the collapse of Roman hegemony was the widespread response, by clerics and laity alike, to Humanae Vitae (1967). Contrary to expectation, this long-awaited Papal decree emphasized and even strengthened the church's ban against "artificial" contraception. Its regressive nature came as a shock to a liberalizing American Catholic culture. In conjunction with civic movements like feminism and Gay Rights, American laity have moved farther and farther away from Rome in most issues of a personal nature. From masturbation to abortion to premarital sex and birth control -- even to vexed issues of genetic tampering - the laity no longer "buy it." Homosexuality is the one issue still remaining where even liberal Catholics support Rome. An historically odd alliance thus emerges: mainline Catholics and fundamentalist Baptists find themselves in accord on homosexuality while diverging on practically everything else.
Ecclesiastical battles pitched over the homosexual body increased in intensity throughout the late 80s, even as, and arguably because, homosexuals achieved a degree of social acceptance in civil society. The 1986 "Letter to the Catholic bishops on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," issued by the Vatican, took pains to repeat something that had once gone without saying; in the words of the Vatican-approved text, homosexuality was "inordinately disordered." Through the decade that followed, Vatican directive and intervention directly focused upon homosexuality. Considering the American context, it is probable that Vatican energy during these years was aimed more at homosexual clergy rather than at the laity - whose sexual transgressions, after all, kept the priest in business. The Vatican was far more interested in stemming what it perceived to be a decline of clerical prestige in the US, which evidenced itself as a chronic shortage of vocations to the all-male, celibate clergy. Beginning in the early 60s Gallup polls and church rosters reflected a steady erosion of Roman authority. Growing lay cynicism about the church's goals and methods also severely undermined the priest's public authority. The Vatican read these facts differently, however. In the casual but nonetheless firm gender norms governing such things, Father - no longer a "real player" in the American commercial ethos -- was therefore not much of a "man" at all. In the image of the old TV show, Father no longer knew best. The perceived increase and visibility of homosexual clergy provided the Vatican with its excuse and method - a method as old as the twelfth century, emerging in Roman practice with the codification of anti-semitism laws and practices.
Ecclesiastical (and social) contempt for the "homosexual" must be understood as a (perceived) failure of gender rather than a crisis of biology. Social weakness, rather than moral sin, explains the force and apparent unanimity behind targeting homosexual priests. Bishop D'Arcy's statement advising against the ordination of "homosexuals and excessively effeminate men" is to the point; the crisis is not so much gay priests as the perceived social weakness of the vocation they are to embody. The Marines are not alone in looking for a few (good) men. Given the typical reticence of church officials about its internal politics, the energy and the gothic rhetoric is very revealing of how deeply the church experiences the collapse of authority as trauma. Garry Wills observes that many think that John Paul II's "real legacy to his church is a gay priesthood" (Papal Sins, p. 100). It is precisely this perception that strikes Curial officials as apocalyptic - a mode that customarily warrants high-octane speech and public drama.
Even Rome understands the trauma to be less about individual priestly lapses than about the threat to a larger system of clerical life; this accounts for the quick shift of focus from transgressing individuals to a blanket condemnation of homosexual clergy.
The realization, however, that priests also do not "buy" the sexual ideology they are to enforce - particularly requirements for celibacy -- is an "open secret" as old as Chaucer,'s "Canterbury Tales." Garry Wills cites Cardinal Seper, speaking to a 1971 synod of bishops, "I am not at all optimistic that celibacy is being observed" (Wills, 186). Addressing the contradictory and often banal content of sexual doctrine more generally, Wills asks, "Is it any wonder, given such 'doctrine' on sex, that priests themselves do not take it seriously?" (189). Indeed, historically they haven't. If continual anecdotal and written record is to be accepted, Catholic laity on the whole seem indifferent to the sexual lives of their clergy, finding lots of ways to explain the priest's girlfriend, "housekeeper," or other apparent intimate. Often such a relation is presumed even when in fact the priest is perfectly celibate.
The mercurial white-heat attention of scandal fixates, in its accustomed prurient way, on sexual narrative rather than upon ideology. Scapegoating the lustful, sick, or perverse priest means that his guilt, expiation, and eventual expulsion from the social scene can be managed by means of narrative patterns familiar to detective and horror thriller. Such a conflation makes for interesting reading (i.e. familiar to patterns of audience reception), but it leaves untouched a system of governance that finds inventive ways to remain hidden. For this reason Amnesty International addresses the structured authority by which violence is produced in hierarchical systems of authority. Similarly, the rigid structures of obedience and, in effect, personal powerlessness, in which priests live must be called to account, partly at least, for the extraordinary lapses of appropriate behavior exhibited with their clients.
Scandal, however, rarely is interested in much beyond psychopathology. Pathologizing monsters in public dramas burdens individuals with faults that sometimes should be located elsewhere. Naming and locating the monster sets into play mechanisms that distract attention from systems which can never be questioned. It is more dramatic to target vow-breaking priests than to address the system of internal preferment by which these priests learn the codes of power, abuse, and secrecy by which they act. This disconnect in part explains the Gothic nature of public melodramas; they can be dramatic, overblown, even vicious, to the degree that few changes can occur in the mundane realities they breathlessly expose.
Stigmatizing of priests distracts attention from what a critic writing for Amnesty International terms "the crimes of obedience" -- structures by which institutionally vulnerable persons (priests, for example, among others) find themselves trapped into behavior involving illegality, duplicity, and sometimes, outright pain. Although Amnesty International addresses military and governmental systems, parallels exist with ecclesiastical and other corporate structures. For example, a priest might well be guilty of wrong-doing in many of the cases currently in the news. One can argue, however, that in some respects the priest is like the hapless Anderson employee who is caught up in the Enron chain of duplicity. (It is also probable that the cleric cover-up case, following as it did upon a similar Enron case, provided a reservoir of untapped social energy which exploited the succeeding scandal). The parallel is exact. In each case the subordinate's body expiates corporate fault while the institution itself is released from legal compensation. Such behavior is not new, of course; the Nazis who ran the death-camps of Germany kept their hands clean by having Jewish "Sonderkommandos" enforce camp procedures and carry out genocidal laws on their fellows. While status and power were, at least temporarily, the reward for their compliance, few, if any, Sonderkommandos survived either to explain or to defend their actions. Death was the final reward for their silence and complicity. Here, too, the old priest, dismissed out of hand, finds his historical analogue.
Additional Reading and Suggested References in the Text:
"'One of the Guys'" or 'One of the Girls': The Problem of Authority in the Roman Catholic Clergy," Theology and Sexuality, Ingebretsen
(Newsweek, 6 May 2002), p. 39.
Pamela Ferdinand, "Suit Says Archdiocese knew of Priest's abuse, parishes not told, lawyer alleges." The Washington Post, Apr. 9, 2002, Ai.
Melinda Henneberger, "Vatican Weighs Reaction to Accusations of Molesting by Clergy," NYTIMES.COM. "."
Philadelphia Inquirer, (27 April 2002). See "On The Record," The Washington Blade, (3 May 2002), p. 37.
Rhonda Smith, "Bishop to keep gay, 'effeminate' men from priesthood." The Washington Blade, (Vol. 33, #16), 19 April 2002, p. 24.
Jon Meacham, "A Case for Change, Newsweek, (6 May 2002), p. 23.
Lewis Whittington, "Holy Gay Purge," Philadelphia Citypaper.net ,http://citypaper.net/articles/2002-0502/slant.shtml.
Didi Herman, The Anti-Gay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997);
Chris Bull and John Gallagher, Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, The Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc, 1996).
Candice Hughes, "Pope Denounces Gay Pride Parade," AP Online, 7 July 2000.
"'One of the Guys' or 'One of the Girls'? The Problem of Authority in the Roman Catholic Church." Theology and Sexuality.
A.W. Richard Sipe, A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy (NY: Brunner/Mazel, ).
E.J. Dionne, Jr. The Washington Post, 18 June 2002, A 19
Rev Ed Ingebretson is a priest and member of the American Catholic Church. He is Associate Professor, English at Georgetown University and can be reached at Ingebree@Georgetown.edu
Back to Issue #55 Table of Contents
Toby Johnson
The priestly pedophilia scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church and challenged the authority of the hierarchy tells us that there is something wrong in the Catholic teachings and doctrines about sex and embodiment. Priests are pedophiles not because pedophiles become priests but because priestly indoctrination warps men's judgment and their experience of embodiment. These men are victims of religion who end up acting in grossly inappropriate ways without conscious understanding of what they're doing.
These days, with the number of men joining the clergy dramatically decreasing, the Church has sought recruits among the adult population. These so-called "late vocations" may include men who are attracted to the priesthood because of the power it gives them over vulnerable children. But they're not most priests. Most priests today joined at the end of parochial school or high school when they were 13 or 17 years of age. Such earnest young men are driven by naïve zeal, selfless generosity, and the tenets of Catholic doctrine to renounce the things of the flesh entirely for the sake of God's immaterial, ethereal Kingdom. These boys don't join the priesthood because they think it will be a good way to get sex. If anything, they believe they will be able to give up sex entirely.
The scandal that caused the Vatican to call the American bishops to Rome hit the news at a time when there'd just been a series of high profile cases of kidnap-murderers of young girls. These truly horrific, senseless, and tragic (and heterosexual) offenses outraged the public over sex crimes against children. It was in this context that priestly misconduct made headlines.
But the media-driven sensationalization--and the legal claims for huge settlements of Church money--distort the reality of priestly "pedophilia." What is properly called child molestation is predominantly a heterosexual phenomenon, with homosexuals no more likely than heterosexuals to sexually abuse prepubescent children. For what the priests were doing ephebophilia might usually be a more correct term, love of post-pubescent teenagers, the mentoring pattern which some cultures--Classical Greece the usual example--institutionalized as honorable and beneficial. (Of course, even so, you have to wonder how these priests could have been so ignorant of the laws about age of consent.) In the media and in court, the sexual gestures of the accused priest are characterized as ravishment and child-rape to evoke images of forceful penetration--what frustrated, angry adult males do to females. Heterosexual dynamics get projected onto the situation, because the media, the courts, and the public don't understand homosexual sexual dynamics.
With our understanding, we may see that, while some of these acts truly are crimes of rape and molestation, often they are far more innocent, well-intentioned, if terribly misguided, gestures of affection. More likely, we can imagine, these adult priests, obsessed with religious imagery and driven by it to suppress sexual feelings, had come to revere the innocence of the young boys in their care. They see in those boys their own lost boyish innocence. They covet that innocence. And they desire the boy who incarnates it. They likely experience their desire as something totally different from sex, perhaps even as something holy. It certainly isn't the heterosexuality they vowed to abjure. They may believe they can save a youth from a dysfunctional upbringing. They may project onto a boy serving at their altar that this innocent youth too has a religious vocation and think their affection a sign of God's electing the boy to the next generation of priesthood. Drawn by the vision of Christ in the boy, they reach out to touch that vision and find themselves totally unprepared for the sexual emotions and compulsions that follow.
Media attention has made it appear that those coming forward to report that years ago they were traumatized by the homosexual advances of priests and to sue the Church for damages are now heterosexual adult men. About half the victims who've organized to challenge the Church coverup of priestly sexual misdeeds are women; they weren't victimized by homosexual advances. And, of course, some of the victims are gay, but they're not the media focus. Were gay adults all similarly traumatized or were they, perhaps instead, liberated? There is no media attention, after all, given to proclaiming a priest had had sex with you and, even though it might have been embarrassing and a little creepy at the time, you've got good attitudes about your sexuality, have no recriminations against him, and no desire to claim money because of it.
The heterosexual adults, male and female, are right, of course, that they should not have had any sexual, especially homosexual, experience forced upon them. And it would have been especially inappropriate for it to come from a priest. But wasn't the psychological trauma caused less by the priest's advances than by society's and the Church's hysteria around sexuality and homosexuality?
If these people had been raised to understand all sexual activity to be wonderful and beautiful and an experience of God's vitality in the physical world, would they have ended up adult "victims"? Was the traumatizer the inept, psychologically crippled priest or the Church doctrine that made into a trauma what--in a different setting, of course--could have been a simple, playful human interaction?
The homosexually-repressed priests fall in love with the wrong boys. Their gaydar has been rendered defective. Because they have been indoctrinated and traumatized themselves into denying homosexual feelings, they may be self-righteously judgmental toward obvious pre-gay, sissy boys. Having been required by the Church to be themselves "straight-acting and straight-appearing," they fall for boys who are straight-acting and straight-appearing--and really straight.
Straight boys aren't the proper object for the priests' affections and ministrations. They won't benefit from learning that the condemnations of homosexuality are a cover for a secret and a technique for pulling the wool over the eyes of the breeding masses. But gay boys, at least sexually mature gay teenagers, might benefit from a relationship with a priest--not, of course, from Father prematurely and inappropriately manipulating them into adult sexual intercourse. That simply shouldn't happen. But from Father mentoring them in the ways of the world, letting them in on the Church's secret, and telling them how beautiful and innocent and beloved by God they are--and how blessed that they'll grow up to be gay men.
A question that remains unanswered--and maybe unanswerable--is whether priests and other religious have always been pedophiles. Catholic seminarians joke about the so-called jus primi noctis ("right of the first night"), according to which, supposedly, in ancient times the feudal lord or the presiding priest had the prerogative to sexually initiate a virgin bride on the first night of her marriage. Perhaps one of the traditional functions of the priesthood was to initiate young people into sexuality. That's not to defend it, just to question what's actually been going on.
It's a joke in modern American society that parents can't bring themselves even to have the "bird and the bees talk." They become tongue-tied by their reluctance to see their beloved babies grow up to sexual adulthood and by their own sexual awareness of their children. Parents are confronted with feelings that cannot be allowed into consciousness. Fathers can't initiate their sons into masturbation. Mothers can't show their daughters how to feel the pleasure their bodies are capable of experiencing.
Sexual maturity ends the innocence of childhood; sexual, emotional, and relational issues displace the simple concerns of the playroom. Delaying that is probably a boon to the children and an aid to their maturation. But they are going to become aware of their physical urges. Their genital organs are going to mature. That's inevitable. So who should teach sons and daughters how to touch themselves and to celebrate human incarnation in feeling flesh? Shouldn't it be the priests? Who better understands how to place all these feelings in the context of ego-transcending love? Who better to tell boys how to bring themselves to orgasm without snickering and embarrassment? Who better to teach them--at the proper age, of course--the Body Electric techniques for finding ecstasy in sexual arousal?
Obviously it isn't going to be the Catholic priests of today's Catholic Church, with its anti-sexual, homophobia-justifying agenda. To find such priest-initiators we have to recall those hunter-gatherer days when the religions worshipped the Great Mother and celebrated her mysteries with reverent orgies and transcendence-inducing orgasms. To find such priests perhaps we have to create a metaphorical history of such a matriarchal time. Perhaps we need a radically new religion.
Considering the trauma, belligerence, and violence that our current anti-sexual, patriarchal religions have produced, perhaps it's not just the altar boys who've been fucked by the priests. All of us have had the wool pulled over our eyes.
Gay Priests
The ecclesiastical solution to the scandal has been to blame homosexuals in the priesthood and to act surprised that there are such men in their midst. Of course there are homosexuals in the priesthood. Priests are likely to be gay. They are supposed to exemplify self-sacrifice, generosity, sensitivity, kindness, and non-competitiveness--all the traits of gay men.
Celibacy is said to keep homosexuals out of the Church, but celibacy is actually not the renunciation of sex, but of marriage and childrearing. Sex is only indirectly forbidden because, according to Catholic doctrine, sex is only lawful in the state of marriage. Celibacy originated in the need to avoid widows and children becoming the responsibility of the institution. Church property couldn't be allowed to pass through inheritance outside the Church. Priests can't have heirs.
Homosexuals enter the priesthood because they aren't motivated to pursue sex with women, marriage, or parenthood. They're just the kind of men the Church needs. They're drawn to the religious life because homosexuals are basically sensitive and kind and because the Church provides the doctrinal explanation for their disinclination toward heterosexual sex. The Catholic Church helpfully declares that sex is the greatest temptation and boys shouldn't even look at girls for fear of arousing sinful passions. Is it any wonder young, unaware homosexuals seek refuge in the Church?
To solve the pedophilia problem, the Church needs to offer a sex-positive vision, a doctrine of sexual pleasure that allows priests to form sexual bonds with women, perhaps women priests--or with other conscious gay adult men--and that utilizes modern technologies to prevent conception. The Church needs to embrace masturbation (perhaps as meditative, spiritual practice--the way some modern gay men are doing), contraception, even abortion in the service of body-positive, celibate (i.e. childless) sex lives for priests.
Instead, Church authorities address the scandal by driving out the openly gay, sexually aware priests. They say they're getting rid of the bad apples, leaving only properly repressed heterosexuals in the ranks. This leaves the Church with the even more confused, conflicted, repressed men in various stages of nailing shut their closet doors. Proclamations of the evil and inherent disorderedness of conscious gay people ring with hypocrisy.
Everybody sees that the real "crime" is the hierarchical cover-up. The bishops lied and shielded the child-abusers to protect their own public image and fundraising abilities. This has been partly, of course, out of the same kind of loyalty that causes police officers to protect other police officers and doctors to protect other doctors, but perhaps also out of the bishops' innate understanding that the sins of the priests often weren't as heinous as the scandal has made the public believe.
But the bishops are in great part responsible for the public's hysteria, and the hysteria indeed makes the priests' behavior heinous and its consequences traumatizing. (Secrecy and cover-up always make sexual abuse far more emotionally damaging than the actual act of sex itself.) Our awareness of the secret homosexual slant to things and our own understanding of the innocence of homosexual affections allow us to see that the bishops demonstrate understanding and sympathy for the pedophile priests. Perhaps the bishops see this is not something new and that the pedophile priests' behavior though not acceptable is at least "understandable."
But then instead of finding somebody to blame, why don't the bishops defuse the hysteria by telling the truth about homosexuality? As Church historian Mark Jordan describes in The Silence of Sodom, the real crime is that the Church knows it's a gay institution and understands the homosexual peccadillos of its priests while fiercely denying the truth and ratcheting up its rhetoric against homosexuality to bolster the denials. The Church's sin is being soft on conflicted, closeted homosexuals in its midst while being hard on open, self-affirming gay people in modern, secular society. The Church opposes gay rights, fights gay marriage, objects to safe sex education, and condemns homosexuality as unnatural and disordered--all to protect its own secret.
Priests serving in the Church, and especially idealistic young seminarians, identify themselves as gay not in rebellion to Church authority but out of personal integrity. They're not necessarily violating their vows: One can be openly gay and proud and be sexually continent. For men (and women) in the Church, it's an act of courage, psychological health, and honesty to tell the truth--to themselves, to their brothers or sisters in religious community, and to God. Openly gay priests and seminarians aren't disobedient, they're heroic. They're telling that truth about the Emperor's new clothes. They are not the ones who need to be disciplined.
But maybe gay priests should be leaving the Church--for their own sake. Conventional religion--with its antiquated understanding of human psychology, rigid rules of social behavior, and neurosis-inducing attitudes toward embodiment-- is not the place for gay men. Gay men are spiritual and spiritual men are usually gay. These men deserve a religion that enables them to flourish as the saints they are, not one that cripples their sexuality and shapes them into predators of little boys. What a terrible waste of good gay lives!
Talent for Religion
There are certain talents that seem to come with being gay: the ability to decorate a room or to assemble an outfit, for example. These come from what we earlier called gay intuition. Also among these gay talents are mythopoesis, religion, and the creation of liturgy and ritual.
Throughout recorded history, gay men have organized rituals and choreographed events. Gay men have been the shamans who organized tribal dances and the troubadours--the Mattachines--who went from town to town putting on performances and sharing news and gossip. We've been the playwrights, poets, magicians, dancers, and priests. Our modern gay culture still creates rituals: deeply moving AIDS memorials (the Quilt is a dramatic example), innovative Q-spirit "techno-masses," psychotherapeutic Gay Spirit Visions and Billy Club "heart circles," whimsical Radical Faerie extravaganzas and solstice/equinox celebrations, and even spectacular disco rites for the migration of the Manhattan club scene to Fire Island for the summer season.
Rituals are good for people--they create social interaction. They bring people together around shared hopes and intentions. In the modern world, religious rituals are often the only opportunity most people have to sing with others. Rituals have the power to stir deep emotions and to inspire; singing alters consciousness. But they need to be understood for what they are, not for what they pretend to be. The pretending is part of the ritual; it activates their power. But its power is in the mind. The power of a ritual comes from within the ritual, not from whether an observer God is pleased--or displeased--with the details of its performance or some sort of invisible grace or merit is conveyed. For example, the success of a rain dance lay in the tribe's getting together to voice their common concern about drought and the scarcity of food and water, to revel in the good feelings that come from dancing together, and to share scarce water and food with people in the greatest need, not necessarily in whether it rained the next day.
Similarly, church has a positive social role. For many people, its main function is as much social as spiritual: It's a way to meet people, to share experiences and concerns with friends and neighbors. In the gay world, the Metropolitan Community Church (and local variations and spin-offs) provides an occasion for spiritually inclined folks to meet and form friendships with kindred souls outside the sex-charged context of gay commercial milieus. Part of the beauty of MCC is its freedom from orthodoxy. MCCers do not find themselves at odds with one another or with other religions (except regarding homosexuality, of course). There's no reason for MCC to divide into sects--like mainstream Christianity, which does teach orthodoxy. MCCers don't split off because one group believes in transubstantiation, another in consubstantiation, and another that the Eucharist is allegorical. It doesn't matter. What holds the MCC together is gay identity, not doctrinal agreement.
Religion is wonderful. It can bring people joy. But religion is for people, not God.
This article is excerpted in part from Toby Johnson's GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe to be published by Alyson, July 2003
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by Yann Martel
Harcourt Books, 319 pages; $25.00
Reviewed by Bo Young
Quite simply, The Life of Pi is one brilliant book. Most recently awarded the prestigious Booker Prize, the epic story of Piscine Molitor Patel, AKA Pi, the central character of this sweeping novel, is nothing less than an examination of faith, god, religion and life. Born in India, the son of a zookeeper Pi's life veers quickly and inexorably from the rich colors of India to a small lifeboat in which he finds himself stranded with a man-eating Bengal tiger (named Richard Parker, thank you very much) in the vast ocean.
Along the way, the story takes the reader through a world tour of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism with a critical eye and a master's command of language and philosophy. No school escapes Martel's bite, but it is a nip from heart as well as an agile mind. "...reason, that fool's gold for the bright" he warns.
There is much to recommend this book, not the least of which is the underlying thinking of author Martel that permeates and perfumes the beautiful prose. "I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both." He observes.
"To choose doubt as a philosophy of Life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation." He continues. No world religion escapes his loving, but critical eye as the story of The Life of Pi churns around the reader like Pi himself, alone in the middle of the ocean. And the ideas in the book prowl around like that man-eating tiger. In the end, the story is as uplifting as it is well-written; a tale of a seeker whose dark night of the soul is lit by Blake's "tyger, tyger burning bright." And if there is still any question about "What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"...Yann Martel has answered the question.
Brilliant, moving, enchantingÉThe Life of Pi is a must-read.
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Leading The Parade: Conversations with America's Most Influential Lesbians and Gay Menby Paul D. Cain; Foreword by Jack Nichols
The Scarecrow Press; 403 pages; $55.00
Reviewed by Jesse Monteagudo
Leading the Parade: Conversations with America's Most Influential Lesbians and Gay Men, Paul D. Cain's in-depth profiles and interviews with leaders of the lesbian and gay movement, is the latest in a sub-genre that began in 1972 with The Gay Crusaders, "by" Kay Tobin Lahusen and Randy Wicker. (Tobin Lahusen did all the writing.) Since then other books have been written that profiled the leaders of our community, Eric Marcus's Making History (1992; since revised) being the best one. But there is always room for a new collection, especially since our community has a tendency to forget those who got us where we are today. Happily, Leading the Parade: Conversations with America's Most Influential Lesbians and Gay Men is here to remind us.
For first-time author Paul D. Cain, Leading the Parade is truly a labor of love: "After seven and one-half years of serving the Phoenix lesbian/gay community, I found myself 'burned out' on direct activism, and I wanted to find a way to serve the community I love while developing talents that lay dormant within me," he notes. "I realized that as a result of two factors - age and AIDS - we would forever lose the stories of many pioneers and others who influenced the movement if someone didn't document their oral histories, and some we did lose. And without so much as a single contact, I believed I could do it."
The 39 profiles in Leading the Parade run the gamut of our community's movers and shakers. Part I, "Starting from Scratch" features the men and women who began the homophile movement in the 1950's (Kepner, Lisa Ben, Jose Sarria). Part II, "Building on a Firm Foundation", profiles 1960's leaders (Frank Kameny, Jack Nichols, Ginny Berson). Part III, "The Written Word", showcases authors and publishers (Barbara Grier, Mark Thompson, John D'Emilio). Part IV, "Political Creatures", is just that (Ginny Apuzzo, Cleve Jones, Barney Frank). Finally, Part V, "Creating a New World", features subjects as diverse as Jack Campbell, Holly Near and Urvashi Vaid. For the record, six of Cain's subjects - Kameny, Nichols, Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, Barbara Gittings and Troy Perry - were also featured thirty years ago in The Gay Crusaders. (That book's authors also appear in this book.) Cain ends each chapter with a personal note, reflecting on how each subject influenced his own life as a gay man.
In his Foreword to Leading the Parade, Nichols notes that "upon meeting [Cain], I found myself speaking uninhibitedly, knowing intuitively that he would honorably utilize whatever it was I might say." Nichols is not the only one who unburdened himself honestly in response to Cain's friendly questions. In fact, one of the most admirable things about Leading the Parade is how frank Lesbigay activist leaders - with their histories of infighting and personality clashes - were talking about one another. Though Cain's subjects don't pull any punches as to what they think of their less-admirable colleagues, even the most disliked and controversial ones - Dorr Legg, Hal Call, Dick Leitsch, Robin Tyler, Martin Duberman - are given their due for their contributions to the cause.
I have two complaints about Leading the Parade, neither one of which is Cain's fault. Though the book does an excellent job with the 39 men and women that it profiles, it is far from being a complete roster of "America's most influential lesbians and gay men." Death, primarily AIDS-related, has taken away many of the male leaders of the 1970's and 1980's; so much so that Leading the Parade is deficient in its coverage of that particular facet of our movement. Other gay notables, like Harry Hay, were not approached or turned down an interview, for a variety of personal and other reasons. And of course space constraints kept some people that Cain did interview from appearing in his finished book. Hopefully, they and others will appear in a sequel.
The other complaint I have about Leading the Parade is that it is too expensive! I realize that Scarecrow Press manufactures books for the library trade, which explains the $55 price tag. Nevertheless, the high cost of the book will keep many people from buying, reading and enjoying Leading the Parade. This is especially true of young, Lesbigay and trans people, who are coming to terms with their sexuality and who could benefit from reading inspiring tales about our community's role models. Hopefully, Scarecrow will see fit to publish a cheaper, paperback edition of this book, available in bookstores. In the meantime, save your pennies or ask your local library to carry Leading the Parade. As a research tool, it is invaluable.
Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance author and book lover living in South Florida with his longtime companion. jessemonteagudo@aol.com
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My Life In New York and New Guinea
by Tobias Schneebaum; 168 pages
University of Wisconsin Press, $24.95
Reviewed by Mountaine
In travels through faerie sanctuaries and other exotic lands, I've enjoyed the company of many unusual personalities. One of the most memorable is Tobias Schneebaum. Reading his latest book, Secret Places, has increased my sense of awe at the uniqueness of this man.
Toby's fame results largely from a brief encounter (an unpleasantly personal encounter) with cannibalism in the 1950s. His free-wheeling explorations of the Amazon region, searching for a life more meaningful than accumulating money and possessions, led to an extended visit with the little-known Akarama tribe. Toby bonded strongly with the indigenous tribal men, who had little or no experience of modern culture. He found himself embraced as a temporary memory of the tribe, and was included both in headhunting expeditions and same-sex celebrations of body and spirit. On one occasion, a traditional ceremony culminated in eating the heart of a captured warrior from a neighboring tribe; it would have been impolite (and probably dangerous) to decline. (The ingestion was followed immediately by ritual butt-fucking.)
His first book chronicling these and other adventures, Keep The River On Your Right, was published in 1969, and the book soon became a cult classic. Schneebaum became a rather unlikely, and somewhat notorious, celebrity. (Recently, the story has been retold and updated in a fascinating documentary film of the same name, now available on DVD and video - highly recommended.)
Toby's latest book, Secret Places, is one of a series of gay and Lesbian autobiographies from the University of Wisconsin Press. About half the book consists of detailed and fascinating stories of Toby's adventures with the Asmat people of New Guinea. It is probably no coincidence that he describes Asmat stories and myths as "not following any particular pattern. They do not have a beginning; they do not have an ending." My perception may be colored by the way I met the author a few years ago at a dinner party in New York, but to me, the book reads like a transcribed dinner conversation. Unlike any other autobiography I've read, the style is remarkably non-linear. For example, details are often repeated from prior pages as if brand new, as they might be in casual conversation. I found this loose approach unusual, and most enjoyable.
Jumping forward and backward in time and space, incorporating stories of his religious Jewish childhood, of New York friends succumbing to mid-80s AIDS, of aboriginal lovers in faraway lands, of missionaries bringing permanent change to ancient cultures, Toby regales the reader with episodes of his remarkable life. He is struck by the similarity between Catholic communion - eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ - and ritual cannibalism - eating the body and drinking the blood of conquered warriors. He chronicles a multinational company's bull-in-china-shop destruction of untouched wilderness among the Asmat, in an oblivious attempt to drill oil where only water exists. And he mourns the inevitable shift in artistic style among Asmat woodcarvers, from subtle hand-tooled techniques passed down from uncountable generations, to pretty but "soulless" items more easily sold to tourists for easy packing in their luggage or shipping home as excess baggage.
Toby's book is a small but generous gift, offering a glimpse into cultures and climes few will ever experience (and none will experience in the state of preservation that still existed at the time of his youth). It is thrilling to read about Toby's apparently fearless adventures, to enjoy them vicariously through his memoirs. Don't miss this book, and if you ever get the chance to hang out and chat with 80-something Tobias Schneebaum, it will be time well spent.
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Link to Toby Johnson's GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness Last update December 21, 2002
