This is an interview I did with my friend Peter. I wanted to talk to him because he\u2019s lived through a tumultuous period in Church and American history and come through with his faith and sunny disposition basically intact. How does somebody end up as a faithful, practicing, openly gay Catholic in his 50s? (Warning: The answer is pretty long! This is a super-long post really.) I met with Peter in his apartment. The background for our conversation was the sound of opera arias and Cole Porter tunes. Peter\u2019s apartment is a great microcosm of his life: the curving chair from Damascus, inlaid with <\/span>ebony and<\/span> mother-of-pearl; the Harvard-logo VERITAS throw pillow his mom embroidered for him<\/span>; the poster for \u201cMiss Desmond Behind Bars.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n He showed me some family photos during this interview: Peter at his baptism, Peter and his mom and a nun, Mom with Peter holding a holy card, Peter sitting <\/span>beside<\/span> a statue of the Blessed Mother. A pretty intensely Catholic childhood, in what may be a vanished world.<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t post this interview to hold up one person\u2019s experience as a model. But a) this is a kind of American, Catholic life we hear very little about; and b) I think Peter\u2019s description of his family may be helpful to families wondering how best to love and care for their gay members. We\u2019re so prone to second-guess our gentlest instincts. We argue ourselves into \u201ctough love\u201d and out of, you know, regular love. So I hope this interview can portray familial love as well as the love of God.<\/span><\/p>\n So talk to me about your background<\/b><\/span>. I was born in 1956. I had two priest uncles; none of my siblings stayed in consecrated life [although some spent time in religious life]. My family were stereotypically devout, <\/span>procreating<\/span> people. Who has seven or eight kids anymore? One of my uncles and his wife had ten children. <\/span>My parents had eight of us. <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n In Lebanon, where the Christians have small families and the [<\/span>mostly rural]<\/span> Shiites have big families, when I\u2019d tell people about my family they\u2019d say,<\/span> \u201cYou\u2019re Shiites!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n My [lesbian] cousin<\/span>, <\/b>on my mother\u2019s side,<\/span> had a terrible time. On my father\u2019s side there was a gay boy <\/span>[<\/span><\/strong>cousin]<\/span>, John, but he struggled with his parents. And who was their go-to person for comfort and guidance? My mother! My mother told me how much she loved [the lesbian cousin] and felt and prayed for her. John would have these long phone calls with my mother. My mother was a schoolteacher, she has a husband,\u2014she has all this laundry<\/span>\u2014and she has the time to listen to John on the phone! So wonderful parents are part of the reason I\u2019m not dead or something.<\/span><\/p>\n She wrote long, long letters to me wherever I was in the world.<\/span><\/p>\n I would come home from <\/span>high<\/span> school and there\u2019s Mrs. Q\u2014- saying, \u201cOh Ann, my Bernadette\u2019s so disrespectful since she turned fifteen,\u201d and instead of \u201cI\u2019m busy\u201d my mother said, \u201cOh, what do you think is happening?\u201d A poor old widow with a chronic speech defect, who was depressed, would come over to our house<\/span>\u2014[<\/b>she lived next door\u2014<\/b>]<\/span> and she\u2019d be weeping as my mother would be ironing, saying, \u201cI don\u2019t get out of bed some days, I have no reason to get up.\u201d My mother would talk to her so kindly, give her a snack or something. Me and my little brat brothers and sisters would be thinking, \u201cShe\u2019s a depressing crazy lady, we\u2019d like her to go home now.\u201d And my mother would say, \u201cPeter, Joseph, set an extra place,\u00a0<\/b>Mrs. F\u2014-<\/span> is having dinner with us.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n On the gay front\u2014my father\u2019s just as decent and saintly as my mother, but she\u2019s the mother, she\u2019s running the show because Dad\u2019s at work. My mother was playing counselor to two gay relatives before it even arose with me. So that speaks to her character. My family\u2019s very big in my life. They\u2019re wonderful and sometimes maddening. <\/span><\/p>\n So [I had a] very Catholic family and parenting; that made it easy for me to be gay and certainly not ostracized from the Church or the family. I also had very supportive siblings, very forward-looking modern siblings. As jerky as they can be, I never had a moment of trouble with any of them [<\/span>on that front]<\/span>. The only uncomfortable thing, when I had to kind of make the announcement [coming out] to people, wasn\u2019t any negative reaction\u2014I knew there wouldn\u2019t be\u2014but their oversharing! They thought, \u201cPeter has done the traumatic and heroic thing of sharing something sensitive and shaming, so I\u2019m gonna [help him] by sharing something too!\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n [And I would be left thinking,] \u201cI\u2019m trying to unsee this!\u201d But that was their way of trying to be kind.<\/span><\/p>\n Our neighborhood was entirely Catholic. We had one Protestant family. We had one Protestant church. I used to run past it! It had no windows! No stained-glass windows. My mother had a lot of Jewish friends [<\/span>from a nearby part of town\u2014she had a great reputation there as a remarkable teacher and mother<\/span>.] Our street, it might have been a street in Vatican City. So we\u2019d go marching down the hill, [<\/span>girls and boys with our mothers],<\/span> to the church with rosaries, either Mass or rosaries or 40 Hours devotion, or Stations of the Cross if it\u2019s Lent. It was very communal. I wore a cross, I had a scapular.<\/span><\/p>\n So I loved the church, did first communion, did confirmation, did the May procession. We were into all of those. My mother belonged to everything. My father was in the choir. My mother was more involved than most. But it was pretty typical. I grew up in the \u201960s and \u201970s so everybody had a lot of kids. The church, every Sunday Mass was packed. Bazaars and bingo and Sunday school. <\/span><\/p>\n You would have a nun or a young woman, with a classroom full of mostly boys [in CCD], talking to us about the saints and Catholic living. And I\u2019ll tell you something else, there was a period where I was not churchgoing later in life, and what I <\/span>blame that on [in part]<\/span> is that I was really not well-catechized in the \u201970s. It was a confusing period in the Church. When I say I love the Church it was the singing, the church itself, I loved God and I loved Jesus and I believed every single particle of it. But I didn\u2019t understand the Mass. And so I didn\u2019t understand the Church [<\/span>well<\/span>, <\/span>despite my faith.]<\/span><\/p>\n You could say Fr. Damien or St. Francis or of course the apostles and Jesus and Mary, I got. My father had Bible study at home, not a common thing for Catholics! He loved St. Joseph. My mother says St. Joseph got a raw deal\u2014he\u2019s not even quoted in the Bible but he made so many sacrifices. But I didn\u2019t know the big church. <\/span>My [intermittent]<\/span> lapsing had nothing to do with being gay.<\/span><\/p>\n They were trying to be modern, our poor poor struggling Sunday school teachers, just trying to keep these stupid teenage boys interested in Catholicism. \u201cHey, it\u2019s groovy.\u201d So I didn\u2019t get a serious, informed education. It wasn\u2019t trying to make us spiritual or more pious. It was just trying to keep us in line, keep us in the Church.<\/span><\/p>\n The detail that jumps out at me [<\/span>from my very young childhood]<\/span> would probably be [that] we said the rosary after dinner. Like a decade each. And they would include me, in the high chair. I\u2019m sure I <\/span>scarcely<\/span> knew what I was babbling. But I can hear my father now, saying, \u201cThe family that prays together stays together.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n My mother, \u2019til she died, every house we ever lived in was floor-to-ceiling saints and crucifixes and the Holy Child Jesus\u2014it was a lot of visuals<\/span>, [especially of the Virgin Mary.]<\/span><\/p>\n Did you get anything like \u201csex ed\u201d?<\/b><\/span> That was a special speaker at Sunday school. My parents answered the questions I asked about where babies came from. But the more gory details came from something they showed in the church.<\/span><\/p>\n But of course there was nothing about gay stuff. It was marriage and procreation. <\/span><\/p>\n Did they get into contraception at all?<\/b><\/span> No no no, it was a non-topic.<\/span><\/p>\n [I remember] something on the radio about abortion, in the run-up to <\/span>Roe v. Wade<\/i><\/span>. We were getting this from New York; they had New York accents, talking about abortion, a word I had never heard before. [They said,] \u201cHavin\u2019 gabortions.\u201d So I asked, \u201cWhat is \u2018gabortion\u2019?\u201d I was 15, 16, and I had never heard the word \u201cabortion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n How did you start to think about being gay? <\/b><\/span>It was pre-\u201cgay.\u201d Or \u201cgay\u201d didn\u2019t have the currency [in public life]. My feelings about same-sex attraction would go back to early, early childhood, even to the extent that when we were hearing the facts of heterosexual and married life I was thinking, \u201cThis is irrelevant to me unless I magically change.\u201d The way your baby teeth <\/span>come out and you get a new set,<\/span> maybe someday this will flip. I thought, \u201cUnpredictable things happen to your body and your mind, your voice changes, so maybe your erotic interest changes too.\u201d At a certain point I thought, \u201cWell, if it\u2019s gonna change it would have changed by now.\u201d That was high school. Early to mid-high school.<\/span><\/p>\n [In high school] boys and girls are going steady. If you\u2019re gay you\u2019re just part of a pack, which in my case was mixed [boys and girls], and we were readers and listened to T. Rex and we thought we were kind of special and smart: a little bit bohemian.<\/span><\/p>\n One of [my high-school friends], J., was very openly gay. And still good Catholics. In this world none of us were rebellious except that we\u2019d read better books and listen to better music. We\u2019re all from churchgoing families. So some boys and girls were \u201cdoing it,\u201d we assumed. Some people thought it was cool, some people thought it was shocking and trashy. There was a lesbian girl too. She went by \u201cBunny.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n But there was never any suggestion that the gay boys and girls would do anything. No one touched alcohol, no one touched drugs, no one had sex, but people went to movies. I was attracted to many specific boys, and even the gay ones wouldn\u2019t have dreamed of [sex]. \u201cI just know he\u2019s cute, that\u2019s all.\u201d So that was kind of particular to the era.<\/span><\/p>\n I knew the term homosexual, I remember looking it up in the dictionary. \u201cIs that what I am? Yes.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n So I was in this cool crowd of people. We saw foreign movies, honey! We saw British movies, even movies with subtitles! I had read the poetry of Rimbaud and Verlaine; I knew that they were lovers. I read Proust. So gayness as a thing\u2014even if I had been not gay I would have known that this is what it is and these characters from history were like that. So there was no trauma, no awkwardness with trying to understand what it was. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFirst love, first crush\u201d hit me like a runaway train. So that was the first painful thing. Because if it had been otherwise, if we had been male and female, we would have been dating, even if it didn\u2019t go beyond hand-holding. He was one handsome dude. I totally worshiped the ground he walked on. Russian literature was his thing, he read Dostoyevsky. He was an athlete too. I took his sister to the prom<\/span>.<\/b><\/span> So I learned I had to keep it platonic; I thought, \u201cAlas.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n But then I thought ahead: What will adulthood be like? That was in the back of my head. It wasn\u2019t the religious dilemma, I didn\u2019t see the Church as the problem or solution in any of that. But in my family people tended to marry young. It was unrelated to the Church\u2014I was still a loyal happy little Catholic.<\/span><\/p>\n In college I had a crush on my roommate, who was the first person I made aware that I was gay. He was Jewish, wealthy, from New York, very very prosperous family, child of divorce, hated his stepmother, didn\u2019t like his stepfather either, very very handsome guy, very athletic, he played squash. Funny, loud, laughed at his own jokes. Very brash. I got to know his family and he got very attached to me; we were just an odd couple. Part of it was I had really serious feelings for him\u2014thank God it wasn\u2019t as dire and deadly as the first time that happened. <\/span><\/p>\n He started dating a girl; they were sleeping together, a really nice girl. But there was a time when he was spending all his time with her. I never knew how much he knew or suspected about how I felt about him. But at one point after he\u2019d broken up with that girlfriend he said, \u201cWas that hard on you, when I was dating her?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n So I thought, What assumptions are being made? And I said, \u201cIt was okay,\u201d and he said, \u201cI\u2019m really sorry if that was hard on you.\u201d He was a really decent guy for all the loudness and the brashness.<\/span><\/p>\n But another thing happened in college, which was that I stopped going to church. Nothing rebellious, no unhappiness with the Church, just I was so darn busy, [<\/span>and probably intimidated by the secular atmosphere\u2014something new to me].<\/span> I felt very bad about it. I was too ashamed to go to confession. I was a fastidious penitent in the confessional because I went so often, so I was used to confessing little tiny sins and <\/span>never<\/i><\/span> missing Mass. \u201cToo guilty to go to confession,\u201d it took me into adulthood to get over that. But nothing to do with [being] gay. <\/span><\/p>\n [Cairo, Egypt was] where I dated the first guy. I always thought it would be gross for two guys to sleep together. I changed my mind about that! My Catholicism was kind of on hold. I was being quite sinful because I was so enthralled by this other guy. My academic year ended in Egypt [and] I went home and I was miserable because I still had feelings for him.<\/span><\/p>\n It was obvious to my family that I was sad. I\u2019ve never been a depressive person, always a cheerful happy bouncy gabby person. So my mother said, \u201cIs something bothering you?\u201d \u201cNo, it\u2019s jet lag, I\u2019m just readjusting.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n My cousin John, this is when he was going through a hard time with his parents, and he talked about being gay. So [my mother] said, \u201cPeter isn\u2019t himself. He\u2019s quiet and melancholy. I wonder if something terrible happened in Egypt.\u201d And of course John busted out with, \u201cI think he\u2019s probably gay.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n So we broke up but then got back together again. My family was talking and somebody said, \u201cWhat is eating Peter? He looks like his best friend died!\u201d and my mother said, \u201cI know what the issue is.\u201d So everybody became \u201cwitting,\u201d as <\/span>they<\/span> say in the intelligence world, and that\u2019s when everyone thought it would be good to share shocking and gross stories [<\/span>about their sexual misadventures]<\/span> to make me feel better. [sardonic laugh]<\/span><\/p>\n There was never a point at which I thought my church and my orientation were opposed. I always knew what the Church\u2019s teaching was. I bought \u201cWhat the <\/span>Church<\/span> Teaches About Homosexuality\u201d and it said desires, orientation, this is what\u2019s not sinful, this is what is sinful. <\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s this typical guilty thing with Catholics. I started going to St. Matthew\u2019s in Long Beach [Calif.], [with a] super priest, some nuns around. I went to daily Mass but was keenly aware that I wasn\u2019t taking Communion. I felt horrible. I missed the church. [I thought,] \u201cSooner or later you\u2019re gonna have to get your sorry ass into a confessional.\u201d I didn\u2019t want to have confession with a priest I knew. I wanted to go to the ends of the earth and confess to a total stranger. And I thought maybe a priest in West Hollywood would not be a total stranger to having a gay person walk into his confessional. <\/span><\/p>\n I wouldn\u2019t repeat everything I said, of course, but I said something to the effect of, \u201cIt\u2019s been a while.\u201d By then I\u2019d had relationships with a number of guys. And I just went through the whoooooole sorry tale. And of course he was one of these great priests who said, \u201cGod and the Church have been waiting for you and calling you back.\u201d And I just knew, it just flooded back into me: \u201cNow I know why I missed the church. Because this is the most prayerful thing.\u201d That was the fall of \u201989. And I just bounced out of the church, as you do.<\/span><\/p>\n That was one of the happiest days of my life. I pray for [that priest] every morning.<\/span><\/p>\n [When I wasn\u2019t going to confession I felt like,] \u201cHow on earth, where do you start?\u201d And I instinctively knew, \u201cBy telling the truth. These priests have heard everything, they\u2019ve heard about murders.\u201d But I didn\u2019t have the nerve. And I paid for it by suffering. By feeling separated. But I didn\u2019t care, to be frank; I was in my 20s and 30s having a lovely time, not terribly promiscuous but dating guys. It was fun. If I had talked to a Protestant I would be Catholic and argue Catholicism in the middle of my extremely unfaithful life, because I never lost that identification.<\/span><\/p>\n So the way I grappled with that was, \u201cThere\u2019s no way [confession] isn\u2019t going to be painful but am I sorry? Yes I am. Honestly contrite. The only thing the priest can get you on is if you\u2019re not honestly sorry and you refuse to change your life. So I\u2019m gonna humble myself because I know this is what I must do.\u201d All the way I was raised and taught took me there. There was simply no alternative. So I did the confession frankly. It killed me, it killed me! It wasn\u2019t just the sexual stuff. It was many things. So when he was just reassuring me and being kind it blew my mind. [I thought,] \u201cThis is home.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n So then I was traveling a lot and I fell away again from regular church attendance. I remained in my tiny little head a good Catholic\u2014but not a <\/span>very<\/i><\/span> good Catholic. So that led to yet another confession where I had been away, years of non-attendance. And that was another wonderful priest. And that\u2019s kind of it, I can\u2019t think of anything else to say!<\/span><\/p>\n Do you worry about the future? <\/b><\/span>The only concern I have for the future is being financially stable. My mother died at 104 in perfect health. If I\u2019m going to live to that age I have to insure myself and invest wisely. <\/span><\/p>\n [But] in spiritual, Christian [terms], I don\u2019t have any apprehension.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m not a worrier. I\u2019ve maybe even said this in the confessional: It isn\u2019t even that sin and temptation plague me. I\u2019ve gone looking for <\/span>them!<\/span> But ultimately there are these deep, deep influences. And the Church is a part of every single one of those [influences from my family]. Obviously the charitable behavior; the endless infinite love and forgiveness, never holding a grudge; the always trying to be helpful. That\u2019s my mother and father to a T. So you see what an advantage I had. <\/span><\/p>\n Do you think it\u2019s harder now to be gay in the Church, with so much public pressure and controversy around these issues? <\/b><\/span>I\u2019m not old enough to remember adult gay closeted life. Like in the \u201950s. That must have been hellacious. Now we have stuff like gay marriage, which I\u2019m not [necessarily] on-board with, and people expect that you will be. We ask, \u201cWhat is homophobia, what are microaggressions?\u201d These are real First World problems, that some of our gay friends think we\u2019re weird because we\u2019re churchgoers. I can deal with that.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an interview I did with my friend Peter. I wanted to talk to him because he\u2019s lived through a tumultuous period in Church and American history and come through with his faith and sunny disposition basically intact. How does somebody end up as a faithful, practicing, openly gay Catholic in his 50s? (Warning: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[1264,30,80,79,117,41],"class_list":["post-9654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gay-catholic-whatnot","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-gay-catholic-whatnot","tag-mackerel-snapping-2","tag-memories-are-films-about-ghosts","tag-moral-memories-of-the-past","tag-mothers","tag-reading-and-repentance"],"yoast_head":"\n
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