“Talking About Gayness” and “Being Gay” Are Two Different Things

Gay and Catholic:  Is that even a thing?

You can fill your bookcase with books about homosexuality.  Most of the dozens of titles released in the last ten years help to categorize and explain same-sex attraction, scanning Church teaching and defining terms, offering spiritual support.  There are books which offer helps to break out of the homosexual lifestyle, and books intended to help parents, family members and friends of the active homosexual to better understand their loved one.  Most, though, have a textbook quality–explaining from the outside looking in at same-sex attraction.

Not Eve Tushnet’s book!

Eve has just published Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith.  In it, she recounts her own youthful struggles as a lesbian and as an alcoholic.  Eve is now celibate, deeply engaged in her relationship with Christ and committed to living the full and rich teaching of the Catholic Church.

But reading her candid story of “coming out of the closet” to her liberal family in her early teens, of helping to form a “gay-straight alliance” at her high school, of drifting from one relationship to another, then becoming all-too-dependent on alcohol and its mind-numbing properties, one wonders how she got to this point.

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Eve has been touched with an abundant grace–the grace to embraace her vocation of singleness and to live chastely, and the grace to convey with honesty the reality of same-sex attraction.  In opening her life to the reader, thereby making herself vulnerable to those who might disagree with her, Eve has conveyed an important message  to others who are struggling with their sexuality–both same-sex attracted and heterosexual persons.  She doesn’t gloss over the challenges of embracing the single life and remaining steadfast in chastity; but she shows us that it can be done.  She points to the importance of establishing “community”, of forming spiritual friendships, as insurance against failure.

Eve has advice, too, for others in the family, the community and the Church.  She calls on the Church to reach out and welcome same-sex attracted Christians, and she proposes seven suggestions for cultural change within the Christian churches.

If our mission is to go out into all the world, making disciples of all men, we must welcome the homosexual person as well as the heterosexual, happily married couple.  Want to know how to do that?  Gay and Catholic is a tool kit for meaningful relationships.