The Long Shadow
I had not intended to go out today. It’s Black Friday. After a Thanksgiving alone hunting for food and a stiff drink, I intended to rest today. I’d brew some tea and coffee (in that order), read, write, and relax. Why an unemployed man needs to relax is a mystery, but let’s go with it.
When I put aside my morning reading and switched to the computer, I began with Patrick Gothman’s “I Thought Gay Celibacy Was My Only Option — I Was Wrong.” The parsimonious summary? He coped with being a gay practicing Catholic. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating read of a gay Texas Catholic wandering to France and Honduras in search of meaning, belonging, and his God.
After reading it and feeling hungry, I decamped to Gainesville’s Asian fusion spot, Liquid Ginger for sushi — and sake. The sushi served as an excuse to drink sake. I hadn’t intended on drinking today, but I couldn’t resist as I confronted my reality.
By Catholic standards, I am apostate. I have voluntarily (and vociferously) rejected the Catholic faith, into which I was baptized and confirmed. While it did not knowingly reject me, it did not welcome me.
The separation begins sometime in the late 1990s. I might have been seven or eight years old. My mother, my sister, and I went to mass at our local parish, Our Lady of Victory. The priest mentioned something about communicating with and hearing the voice of God. I heard nothing. I strained my hearing, and I heard nothing, in spite of all my efforts.
As I’ve reflected on that inauspicious start, I have lambasted myself for taking a metaphor literally before realizing that for True Believers, the relationship with God is real and literal (for them). As a small-ish child, I felt broken. That set the stage for the next decade of my life.
After I finished elementary school (we were odd in that we were pre-K to 6 versus pre-k to 5), I attended the Latin School (i.e. middle school) of Kellenberg Memorial High School. The idea was that I’d be fed into the high school my maternal uncles attended, Chaminade. I was lost from Day 0. Orientation involved coming in before Labor Day (in NY, school starts after Labor Day) to meet our teachers, be told about the workings of the school, religious stuff, and fraternizing over lunch and sports.
When I began school, my mother had taken a new job to pay for it all. She moved from being an adjunct at New York’s St John’s University to a job teaching math in the Great Neck public cchool system. Her salary jumped from under $20,000 to approximately $60,000 per annum. She had her own pre-school year stuff to attend to, so my sister and I stayed with my grandparents. I woke up, washed, and skipped breakfast so my grandfather could take me on a wet August morning to school.
It was large and stark. I learned the concept of a homeroom and met my teachers. I received a copy of my class schedule. A large portion of the day was given over to ‘fun and games’ in the form of gym class. I hated that. From age 7 or 8, I began to balloon and by now was a fat kid. I didn’t (and don’t) know how to play football or basketball. I had the basics of soccer, baseball, and dodgeball down. Still, I sucked as befitted a sedentary kid who had more or less unfettered access to high-fructose corn syrup-sweetened beverages.
Even lunch was a disaster, I was a socially awkward (read: incapable) kid forced to sit at a table of strangers with our meals: stuffed (with cheese) crust pizza with fries. I hate cheese, and the fries managed to suck. The 20oz coke was agreeable. I hope the menu has changed, for the sake of the children.
I retreated into my shell and hid for two years. I remember the kindness of my 8th grade Latin teacher and my 7th grade religion teacher. I remember the awkwardness when I figured out that (here and there) some girls were friendly to me. I had no interest and couldn’t reciprocate. Worse, I wondered how anyone could find a bullied fat kid with dandruff attractive. In conversing with my mother, I vented this self-loathing as fumbling early-teenage misogyny. My mother told me that I wouldn’t fare well if I thought of girls who liked me as “sluts.” Yes, I was clueless enough to refer to the sweet redhead that treated me like a human being as a slut — openly, to my mother. Yes, I had such a bankrupt self-image that any peer who liked me (with all my manifold imperfections) was as contemptible as I was.
My sexual identity was off to a rough start. My too-long-held gazes at the snout-fair members of my own sex began sometime between the summer of eight and ninth grade. The target? The lifeguards of the local pool in my grandparents’ quite affluent town. I seemed to prefer them my local talent. For as long as I can remember, my tastes have always been aspirational.
In 9th grade, I began at Chaminade starting in autumn 2004. Worse than Kellenberg’s 2 or 3 day orientation, Chaminade featured a five day initiation. After a failed conversation or two on the first day (yes, I remember one perfectly), I wrote off my future tenure as a failure. When my mother picked me up after an unproductive afternoon of sports, I answered “how was your day?” with silence. Her frustration was far more vocal than mine. I failed myself and my mother. Woe unto me or as a Latin student might think, Vae Victis.
I did what I could to stay out of the way. My memories of 9th grade are minimal — my geology/science class, the dark-ish corridors of our annex, religion class, and so on. I do remember one morning overhearing a particularly vicious harassment of one of my classmates for being a “faggot.” The only other memory of 9th grade? Each month the school hosted a dance so that Chaminade Men socialize with (read: could get their ration of) women. In the car on the afternoon of the first 9th grade dance, my mother asked if I wanted to go. I stiffened up and answered with a curt, fast “no.” My utter absence of romantic interest in women (as well as despising the idea of a dance floor) has been a lifelong constant.
For some reason, junior and senior year were appreciably worse than the first two. I wonder why, but I can only offer theories. I did begin to question more openly and without shame rocking the boat (if only in my mind). The loneliness of my HS experience weighed on me. I felt like the butt-of-jokes in my family and the whipping boy of the school. During all of this, I had no friend to confide in or relax with. I didn’t leave home, ever. There were no after-school.
During this time, I struck my final bargain with God — for a friend, for Jack, the family Siberian husky. He’s still alive, living with my father in New York. He turns 11 in February. I forget what I bartered away — faith, goodwill towards men, never asking for anything else. I don’t know. My torment has been in breaking the covenant by leaving him at home and never coming back. A couple of years ago, my sister made an off-handed comment (over the phone) that I couldn’t have had much affection for him. I secretly fumed. Jack was my companion in those last two years. I walked him and loved him for his snuggly kindness. His purchase price was my mother’s concession to desperation.
That summer between junior and senior year was one of something resembling mental breakdowns at the prospect of returning. My one poignant memory of that summer includes my mother waking me up at some hour of the night to ask me — did she ask? She was wondering (in terror) if I was all right. There’s a sine non qua built in — you don’t worry yourself sick into the wee hours of the morning over nothing.
At some point, I decided to explore the concept of vocational life — primarily with the Jesuits. In hindsight, I was engaged in a form of mental escapism. My mother was less than supportive. My aunt (and godmother) was interested (or feigned it, what she really thinks/thought, I cannot say). It fell off the radar in a matter of months. I felt unprepared and lacked the confidence to make such a decision. I also finally acknowledged a long-standing lack of Actual Faith™.
The prospect of college called for a radical change. The opportunity to go to college in Scotland materialized. I jumped at it. I reinvented myself for it. In a feat driven by pure self-loathing and disgust at my station on my 18th birthday — aging into manhood — I decided to drop my excess weight. I was the fat kid in from 4th-12th grade. I did it, largely be eliminating HFCS beverages, moving more, and eating better.
Even as I was physically progressing, my mental state explored new lows. I was just tired. I was tired of religion. I was tired of the particularly vicious Fox News style, low-brow, ethnic-white NY suburban conservatism — my general reading (history, politics, and sociology were staples) slowly bulldozed through the tropes of “welfare queens” and “hard work (always) = success” that I was raised on. I was tired of being alone. I was tired of the lying and shame — I was ashamed of my taste in music, and I concealed my parents’ divorce.
College was a night-and-day experience. I had friends. My family seemed proud of me. I was normal. I noticed that on occasion, a fellow student (either sex) would look at me a little too long. Sure, I was still a bit quirky/odd at times, but I was finally accepted into the fold of mainstream humanity. No more suffering on the margins!
My mother’s cancer diagnosis and death changed everything. I lacked the community and comfort (real or imagined) of religion when she was ill. At no point during her illness did I give a whit of thought to or about God. I did grimly muse as her survival rate plummeted from 95% to 50% to 30% to terminal that I wished family and friends would cease in their prayers. My thoughts and actions were bent solely on her, barring when I would burn out at night. This turned into conflict trying to protect the interests of my sister and I versus some careless last-minute estate planning spearheaded by my grandfather.
All that’s left of that time are two instructions. First, I must not to suffer/become a (proverbial) victim of the cancer, too. That bit of well-wishing died with her, as my grandfather and I were fighting within a week of her death, and I fell out of speaking terms with my father. The second is a still-pending, shall we say, secret decree.
That summer (2011 — why do my summers seem to suck?) also featured the epiphany of sexuality. I wondered why I didn’t seem to get the “chase women” software upload. “Oh shit, I’m gay.” This wasn’t the first time the thought crossed my mind. I had been chasing off the notion since I was 15 with all sorts of rationalization. I won’t belabor this piece with them. Suffice it to say, the emotional exhaustion that accompanies proximity to a terminal illness left me with nothing for denial and repression.
My mother died on September 8, a Thursday. I was on a plane by the 17th to go back to for my final year of college. I threw myself into my bachelor’s thesis. I drank liberally with friends, and occasionally I vented brutally. The locus of the trauma was the utter collapse of family relations rather than mom’s passing. The combination of catatonic days, almost-crazed research days, and time with friends together allowed me to put any sexual persona on the backburner. Although for all my (lack of desire), it wasn’t on the backburner so much as thrown out the window.
Immediately after graduation, I left for Australia for an MA and to get as far as hell away from my relatives. Fights and disagreements were inevitable. I couldn’t and still can’t brook pushback on, for example, my non-relationship with my father. [They’ve got an enormous blindspot/prodigal-son-in-law mentality helped by not having had to grow up under him. Even my mother’s ‘concerns’ were brushed aside — who gives a shit about the wishes of a dying pushover in a Lord Grandfather knows best family?]
I made new friends, did well in classes, and became a stronger researcher and writer. I was (and still am) unsettled and felt a need to move on. Such is life on a temporary student visa. In my two years there, I put on 50 pounds of beer weight. I found that extremely counter-productive in any attempt to live authentically out. In a way, Australia was a sandbox to experiment being out. I wasn’t out in the US or to my UK compadres, but that doesn’t really matter on the ass-end of the planet. I looked down at my burgeoning gut and wrote off my chance of an Australian dream-lay.
My overall gay value was communicated when I got back to the US after finishing in Australia (now Feb 2014). A deeply soul-crushing grindr-tryst pointed out how I’d be hot if I hit the gym. He wasn’t exactly unravaged by the standard American diet. Being back in the US meant being back in the closet. It also meant being in my mother’s now empty home.
In between February and September 2014 (when I left to do a PhD in New Zealand), I got back on the weight-loss track. Unfortunately, my apparent social and sexual success with my 32” waist versus my 39” waist has continually validated the more negative lessons of mainstream and gay society.
I decided to come out to my family in July of 2015. I was seeing someone. What if it became serious? I wouldn’t hide him. Hence, I took the plunge. 10,000 miles and the Pacific Ocean would be a fine moat if things fell apart.
In lieu of a phone call or flying around the world in person, I couriered a letter to my (maternal) grandparents in New York. It gave me control, as I could express my thoughts precisely and decide when to talk about it. I could see when the letter was delivered — NZ Post and the USPS delivered on time. Grandad was surprised, as I think his idea of a gay man is the 1980s version of a “walking glitter-bomb” My grandfather made supportive noises, promised to pour a particularly strong glass of Crown Royal for my grandmother. (Note: these two are as close to parents as I have, now).
Apparently, Crown Royal let me down. On a follow up phone call to my grandmother, things did not go well. I couldn’t possibly be gay. I wasn’t an artist, a writer, or (dramatic pause) an actor. I didn’t imagine that she’d necessarily become the poster-grandma of PFLAG, but I thought she’d at least be OK with it after having her own son come out (surprise: he’s an actor). There was a great deal else I won’t go into here.
The great irony? Given the men she ogles (she is unabashed in her compliments, as befits the family matriarch), I think I inherited my taste in men from her. Out at restaurants or about, she might occasionally point out an attractive waiter or patron to me. I serenely smiled and, in the silence of my mind, noted her exquisitely agreeable taste. After coming out, those days are long gone.
I only spoke of “the gay” with my grandparents and my other uncle (not the gay one). My not-so-secret intention was that the family grapevine would spare me the shock and queries. I am not sure that I could have handled it. My family is deeply Catholic. My grandfather promised me (unsolicited) to not mention it to anyone else. I didn’t care, and I knew my grandmother couldn’t keep a secret to save her own (or anyone else’s) life.
Coming back from NZ after dropping out was hard (Feb 2016). I lived with them in Florida for a few months until it fell apart. I heard some of the worse commentary in my head on repeat, like a broken record (might as well enjoy the idiom before it becomes utterly obsolete).
On a visit to NY in March, I saw most of my family at a party. After the party (I was not quite sober), a few of the cousins (my age) asked me if I were indeed -gasp- gay. Yes. Yes I am. “Why didn’t you tell us?” “You’re all so bloody Catholic.” “So?”
Casual banter, insults, and abstract denigration that straight people forget are remembered by closeted gays. They’re burned into the psyche like cattle brands. I remember so much, and I can’t forget. The memories stayed my hand for so long. They robbed me of so much: candor with my mother, adolescent/youthful romances — a base to enter the higher-stakes world of adult relationships.
What were the wages of coming out? Being an on-again-off-again expat takes a toll on relationships. Not all of the skype calls, phone calls, and emails can totally stave off “out of sight, out of mind.” My grandfather usually picks up the phone. My grandmother and I haven’t spoken in 20 months. My aunt (the aforementioned godmother) can be reached after phone-tag/appointment-making. Friends have been accepting, but friends are frequently far away. I consider anyone in a 500-mile radius to be (relatively) close. It’s been isolating. This widely circulated Huffington Post piece on gay loneliness resonates.
It’s difficult to articulate the complex panoply of cultural forces that create such sad dynamics in families. The 3,000 word mark, my subsequent unwillingness to call upon your attention for much longer, and the toll that this piece has exacted from me compel me to finish soon.
I lay significant blame on the doctrine of “intrinsically disordered” (see items 2357–59). Every so often, I will listen to whatever is being said from on high about the gays, as I find it useful and prudent to gauge the zeitgeist. During my freshman year of high school, Bush 43 made noises about amending the constitution to declare marriage as an institution of one man-one woman. The “intrinsically disordered” rhetoric from the American Catholic community was in full pitch. My cohort was taught that our homosexual brothers and sisters (nothing about BTQ) were called to a life of chastity (read: absolute celibacy), lest they (we) fall into a mortal sin. This is in effect an emphasis on items 2357 and 2359.
Pope Francis’ more compassionate rhetoric focuses on what was a hitherto downplayed (to great detriment?) doctrine in 2358 — “The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.”
And there we have an attempt to harmonize doctrine and reality. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to work in the field.
The preceding item 2357 is a cavalcade of monstrosities. Gay sexy stuff is “of great depravity,” and desires run counter to “natural law” (see Gorsuch’s judicial philosophies on why I am not comfortable with him on the court).
Love the sinner, hate the sin. Here’s the difficulty: this doctrine becomes abusive when the “sin” is intrinsic to “the sinner.” This won’t score me any popularity points, but I view gay Catholics as being in an abusive relationship, being simultaneously “loved” (it looks like pity to me) and inherently prone to debauchery. It feels a little like the 21st century version of using the Sin of Eve to justify misogyny (or a simple beating) against a pre-modern wife or daughter. The solution is inhuman — lonely celibacy or damnation. Sadly, this doctrine fuels a great deal of righteous bigotry and hysterical screeds (e.g. anything that Bill Donahue says on homosexuality).
Nowadays, I seldom deal with the Catholicism of the past. A friend of mine might argue that I still labor under embedded norms concerning transgression, guilt, and repentance. That said, I did confront my past in a discussion with a friend in DC (gay, retired lawyer). In an attempt to conjure a solution to ongoing employment woes, I asked about bartering my soul/ethics in exchange for some position in an unsavory part of the government economy. Without missing a beat, I was told that I’d made a great “non-obvious” escort. I was shocked that I had market value in that way. Abruptly, I asked what the other option was. After confirming that I was Catholic (baptized, communion’ed, and confirmed!), he offered a suggestion of networking via conservative churchgoers.
Remembering the eight-year-old that never heard the voice of God, bartering my body by the hour seems the more honest path.
It’s difficult to describe the sterilizing effect this long experience has had on the seemingly inherent human spiritual drive. The last stanza of an 8th century Irish ballad Donal Og, translated by the Anglo-Irish aristocrat Lady Augusta Gregory, captures the sentiment well enough:
You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!
Reaching Out is a publication dedicated to gathering LGBTQ stories from people of all faiths under one roof and around one table. Please share this with all your Medium friends and hit that 👏 button below to spread it around even more!
