DOWN ON MY KNEES–I WANT TO TAKE YOU THERE: It was genuinely odd reading the reactions to my “Romoeroticism” piece. Maybe the weirdest thing, for me, was the recurrence of the idea of “struggle.” People seemed to think I’d bared my heart, shown y’all my hardest fight. This is just not true, and I think maybe it’s important to say that.

There are at least three reasons why maybe you shouldn’t assume that a gay Catholic’s gayness is her *~*struggle*~*.

First, please don’t cover my face with your heart. Other people’s impersonal sympathy can really become a sticky blanket you just want to throw off. I don’t mean at all to denigrate the compassion and prayers people promised in the IC comments. It’s just that you all might be over-reading me, you know?

If I don’t say something is the big hard awful struggle of my life, maybe it isn’t. Maybe I need your prayers more for something else. Maybe your compassion has some element of unintentional refusal to listen.

I think the thing many gay Catholics–even and especially those of us who do attempt fidelity to Church teaching–find most frustrating is simply that no one really listens. People project a lot of interpretations onto us and ignore the ways we challenge those projections. So I’m “self-hating,” or I’m “struggling,” and neither one of those descriptions really sounds like my actual life.

Second, there might be a better metaphor. I’d use the metaphor of surrender. I’m not struggling against a thing; I’m surrendering to a Person.

Now, I’ve noted before that I like femme metaphors better than butch ones! So there may well be gay Catholics for whom the “struggle” metaphor sounds more like how they feel day-to-day, and I’m not meaning to say my metaphor is better. I’m just saying my metaphor is mine, and it helps me understand how to live as a gay Catholic who is basically grateful and joyful. Other people will have other metaphors. All I want is for straight Catholics to let us pick our own metaphors, rather than assuming it’s the one they’ve heard most often.

And third, let my heart rest here. Let me choose metaphors which suggest that it is in the Catholic Church, in the Mass, in the sacraments, where I truly find my place in the world. Let me say that this isn’t where I struggle. It’s where I “feel like… home.”