Gay Lent: A Discipline of Joy

            Last week, I attended a panel discussion called "Sex on the Margins."  Hosted by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, the people who brought us gay marriage in Massachusetts, the program took place in the Old South Meeting House, a Puritan meeting house in downtown Boston with a remarkable history.  For example, it hosted the revolutionaries who kicked off the Boston Tea Party.

            This night, the meeting house hosted a different kind of revolutionary.  The three panelists consisted of popular polysexual pornographer Susie Bright, polyglot gay culture maven and Dartmouth College professor Michael Bronski, and John Ward, the founder of GLAD, whose first case was to fight a crackdown on gay sex in the men's room of the Boston Public Library.  Current GLAD litigation director Gary Buseck moderated the panel.

I confess I came in with high hopes:  what were the new frontiers of sex?  And who was having it?

The discussion proved a letdown.  The only sex mentioned was Larry Craig's in the bathroom stall at the Minnesota airport. That disappointment aside, what fascinated me was to learn that all four "sex on the margin" panelists were products of a Catholic upbringing!  None now practices, but Buseck and Ward had apparently attended seminary before they dropped out of Catholic life.  It made me proud that such pro-sex luminaries and GLBT leaders came out of the Catholic tradition, that they were not simply out and proud today, but were in fact the very people who – thirty years ago -- paved the way for, among other things, gay marriage in Massachusetts.

            Because my experience, even today, is tells me that many gays who still identify as Catholic are NOT proud and incapable of being pro-sex.  Month after month, they come to our Gay-Lesbian Spirituality Group at Saint Anthony Shrine.  Shame has clouded their eyes and bent their backs.  Guilt trips up their speech.  They say things like, "Do you ever really get to a place where you think gay is normal?"  They talk about priests who have assured them in the confessional that being gay was their cross to bear.

            At the most recent such meeting, the topic was Our Lenten observances.  To try to raise spirits a bit, I offered my gay dance club experience as one of the unforeseen graces of Lenten observance.  One year during Lent, before I regularly attended Gay-Lesbian Spirituality Group meetings, my boyfriend Scott and I were at a gay dance club.  I shocked one of our friends by ordering water.

Are you on Ecstasy???? he asked.

No.

It's due to his unfortunate religious affliction, Scott explained.

Affiliation, I corrected.

Whatever.  Scott leaned over and whispered to my friend, It's ok.  Catholics make such excellent designated drivers.

My friend yanked his boyfriend from the crowd.  Nudging him toward me, he said, My boyfriend gave up drinking for Lent, too!

I stared at the boyfriend as if he were some kind of rare bird.  He, too, was an unlikely gay man, although in an entirely different way than me.  In appearance he was a cross between a hippy and a rather untidy Hasidic Jew.  He was tall, rail thin, and his clothing was vintage and rumpled.  He was not particularly fastidious in terms of a daily shower regime. 

Club music thumped around us.  Justin Timberlake announced that he was bringing sexy back.  Club kids with skillfully distressed tufty hair reached around us to snatch their Cosmos from the bar, and two large-hipped dykes muckled next to us, and a big queen squealed.  Multi-colored spotlights made the boyfriend's shadow dance around him, as if there was a happy person inside this rather morose artsy liberal.

You're Catholic?

He nodded.

My world turned upside down.  If I could dig down and scrape up a gay Catholic in a place as unholy as Timberlake-land, maybe I could find them everywhere, in places I least expected.  I just needed to open my eyes.  To take a second look.   It opened up a whole world of gay Catholic possibility: we are truly everywhere.  Nothing to be ashamed of.

Encouraged by my sharing, most of the group fired up the usual suspects of their past Lenten regimens, which were similar to mine except without the gay dance club: forgoing chocolate, beer, sweets, cakes, etc. 

Mama Bear, co-leader of the discussion, pointed out that these sounded like children's observances, rather than those of adults.  A wave of shame swept the room.  One after another, gays and lesbians alike admitted they rarely made any Lenten observance at all.

            Their reason for giving up giving up was largely the same: as gay people, they felt so oppressed and they had been denying their identity to so many for so long, that the notion of subjecting themselves to more privation and self-denial was repugnant and impossible.  More suffering?  No, thanks.  I'm always suffering.  Enough already.

            A straight woman, clearly lonely, suggested an answer for these gay folk.  Some years, she said, her Lenten observance consisted of a discipline of joy.  Once or twice a week, she forced herself to ask someone to dinner or drinks.  She forced herself to really be present for that person, to really listen, and to enjoy herself.  She offered up to God these periods of joy that at the same time brought her into community.

            This seems to me a Lenten observance that my broken gay friends must embrace: a discipline of joy.  They needed to forgive themselves to allow it to happen, and they needed to shed their burden for a time to be fully in the moment accepting the daily consolation of the other person's company.  And, like all Lenten observances, the process should bring them into the community, not separate them from it.

            May your Lent bring you into the presence of God and (gay) friends!

Holy Wine of the Week

Patricia Green Cellars Ribbon Ridge Vineyard Estate Pinot Noir 2006.  Austere Oregon pinot with good acid, somewhat understated fruit, long finish and good alcoholic balance.  I had it with a Trader Joe salmon with chimmi churri sauce.  Yum!