PROLOGUE
"Whadda we want?” cried the motorcycle dyke through her megaphone.
“Equal rights!” shouted the crowd.
“When do we want ‘em?” she yelled.She was dressed in a stars-and-stripes scarf, a leather vest pierced with gay pride pins, baggy pants and impossibly small shoes that made her appear top-heavy.
“Now!” we shouted.
A man shouldered his way to a place directly behind me and my boyfriend.His “Sodomy: It’s to die for” sign cast a long shadow.
“Whadda we want?” the motorcycle dyke asked again.
In perfect time, we responded, “Civ-il Rights!”
The sodomy man shouted: “Bleeding rectums!”
“What do we want?” she cried again.
We yelled: “Gay Marriage!”
The sodomy man yelled, “Karposi’s sarcoma!”
And so it went.The dyke called, and the sodomy man and the pro-gay crowd responded.
“What do we want?”
Us: True equality!
Him: Syphilis!
“What do we want?!”
Us: Safe families!
Him: AIDS!
Trying to drown out Mr. Sodomy, I shouted louder and louder until my voice broke like a pimpled teen’s.A full morning at the protest had worn my vocal cords raw.
Next to me, a young Haitian woman tore a hole in one corner of a package of throat lozenges.She shook a single golden lozenge out into her pink palm.She unwrapped each end with agonizing deliberation.She plucked out the candy, discarded the wrapper not on the ground (I had hoped for an opportunity for some Earth Day moral righteousness), but in the public waste receptacle.She placed the lozenge on her shockingly pink tongue.As it moved around in her mouth, the lozenge clicked against her teeth.With envy in my heart, I imagined all the soothing going on inside her throat.
“What do we want?” the motorcycle dyke shouted.
A throat lozenge, I thought wistfully.
It was February
11, 2004.Three months after
At dawn, crowds gathered between the State House and the Boston Common, where the Minutemen had assembled in April 1775 on the way to Lexington and Concord at the start of the Revolutionary War.(Interestingly, the Common was also the forum for public hangings until 1817.)
The demonstration was a cross between a carnival and an old-time revival.Hundreds milled on the sidewalks with no separation between opposing points of view.Within minutes, I saw white-collared female Episcopalian priests; a clean-cut Christian youth holding a sign that said “I want to marry my dog;” a dozen apocalyptic preachers straight out of Flannery O’Connor; cops on horseback; queer youth with pink hair playing hooky from high school; lesbian mothers tripping friend and foe alike with their double-wide strollers; curious passersby procrastinating on the way to work; and duck boats with all occupants screaming “quack, quack” as the driver intoned something about the Revolution.
Not far from us, a man who identified himself to a reporter as “Pastor Bob” loudly proclaimed his hatred for the sin of homosexuality.He said, however, that he loved the homosexuals themselves.
When someone yelled, “Hypocrite!”, Pastor Bob responded: "Would I be standing here with a sign like this if I didn't love you?"
The sign read, “Homosexuals are possessed by demons.”
On the Common where the gallows used to stand, vendors hawked everything imaginable: silk scarves and sweatshirts; sausages and statues of the founding fathers, Joseph F. Kennedy, and the rogue mayor James Michael Curley; fake Louis Vuitton bags, pirated CDs, and books with covers torn off, and a thousand other counterfeits.An empty flatbed truck boomed techno music.A contingent of twenty-somethings wearing t-shirts that proclaimed themselves “queerspawn” marched up from the Common with arms proudly linked.Three drag queen slatterns clung to the wrought iron gates of the State House and chain smoked.
The majority of the same-sex marriage supporters, however, looked like a convention of librarians acting out.They seemed unsure of whether it was permissible to raise one’s voice.
Early on, my boyfriend and I found ourselves next to the Haitian women and her companions.We had been competing all morning.They said their prayers, and we shouted our slogans and songs.During one lull, they sang a beautiful French hymn that was breathtakingly lovely.When Mr. Sodomy came on the scene, they rolled their eyes.
There was something endearingly immediate in the sisters’ reverence.They seemed open to the possibility of a miracle, right here, this day, on this crowded street among the jostling demonstrators.Not that they were expecting a miracle, mind you.It seemed obvious they would go home and meet their kids after school and make dinner and kiss their husbands good night no matter how the day ended.But if a miracle had happened right on the double yellow line down the middle of Beacon Street, these Haitian sisters would not have been caught by surprise.
Stealing a page from the religious playbook of Mr. Sodomy and Pastor Bob, the motorcycle dyke started a new chant: “Love Thy Neighbor.”
“Love They Neighbor!Love Thy Neighbor!” we repeated.
The Haitian women were also chanting a religious phrase I could not make out.It had a similar beat, and gradually we got in sync with each other.
The woman with the lozenges glanced at me and smiled.My voice broke. The Haitian woman held out her bag.Gratefully, I accepted the lozenge she shook out on my palm.
“I have an extra bottle of water, if you want it,” I shouted over the din.
She declined.She smiled again.
As I popped the lozenge -- oh, sweet Jesus, I was immediately soothed, it was pure ecstasy -- I reflected that, under other circumstances, I could have prayed with this woman.My father, who went to Catholic high school, had taught us the Notre Pere.Wouldn’t it have been a kick for me and the Haitian to say it together in French?
Maybe afterward she and I might have discussed les choses francaises, or things American.Perhaps we would have talked of the lives of the saints.I might have asked her how different Haiti was from, say, St. Maarten, where my boyfriend and I had recently vacationed.I might have asked her how long she has been in the United States and what had brought her here.I might have tried to understand where she was coming from.
Maybe I’d have had the courage to ask the Haitian woman the question that had been plaguing me all morning: How could a refugee who presumably came to America for its freedoms and opportunities wish to deny those freedoms and opportunities to others by amending the constitution to forbid gay marriage?
All these conversations went unhad.Reporters skirted the crowd; cameras zoomed in on our faces.My boyfriend and I exchanged a long, slow kiss for the camera (we rarely can resist the opportunity for some gratuitous whoring).
The cameramen did not linger.They were looking for the money shot.They were looking for conflict not love.They rushed off to Ruben Israel, who had traveled from Los Angeles to participate in the protest.He was parading in a sandwich board.One side said "God abhors you." The other said "the wages of sin is Death."He accused almost everyone he saw of being a "sodomites" or an "abomination."
"This is what I do," Israel explained to a reporter. "My job is to be as blunt as their sin."
To demonstrate, Israel explained to a gay anarchist with three tats and ring through his lower lip that he was going to die of AIDS.The anarchist turned purple with fury.Toe to toe with Israel, he spewed a torrent of abuse.Cops drifted toward the conflict more slowly than the television cameras.
Scott and I stayed put.The organizers of the rally had repeatedly instructed us to be on our best behavior.They said, “Don’t engage with the other side.”
As the Convention got underway in the state house, we abandoned the street.Security in the state house was as tight as an airport: all bags and jackets were x-rayed, signs and bumper stickers confiscated, and the metal detector used.
Once we passed security, we heeded the protest coordinators’ call for volunteers to help out in the Great Hall on the third floor directly outside the joint legislative chamber where the Constitutional Convention was taking place.
The Great Hall was a massive, rectangular room two stories high, with a balcony skirting the second story.Revolutionary war murals covered the walls.The floors were marble.The double doors to the legislative chambers were heavy, dark wood with round opaque oval windows.Velvet movie star ropes separated the public from the doors to the legislative chamber.The no-man’s land between the doors and the demonstrators was reserved for media.
Marriage opponents and marriage supporters jammed side by side, jockeying for space.Any time the TV cameras panned, the crowd surged toward the lens.I spent an hour wrestling against a trench-coated man with a neatly knotted tie and blood shot eyes.From time to time, jack-booted troopers waded among the protestors and plucked the belligerent from the crowd and hustled them out.
Gay marriage supporters launched into America the Beautiful.Locked arm in arm, we were boisterous, jubilant, happy, a long line of singing queens.We might have been gathered around a piano in some unmarked dismal dive in the Fifties singing show tunes.But instead, the year was 2004 and we stood in a brightly lit Great Hall under the public eye of the cameras.We sang Shine a Light on Me and the Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America and Yankee Doodle Dandy and Grand Olde Flag.Once we tried a chorus of We Shall Overcome, but it was too dirge-like for this exuberant crowd.
Energy never flagged; in fact, if anything we got louder, and by five o’clock, virtually all the marriage equality opponents had climbed aboard their buses and gone home.Gay marriage supporters had free reign of the Great Hall.We probably sang the national anthem two hundred times, until almost everybody was hoarse.The two-hundred year old chandeliers shook and danced, and some miracle worker produced a case of lemon throat lozenges at 10 p.m. to keep us going through midnight.
Relieved, I thought: It’s not only them -- we, too, have saints on our side.
When the final votes were tallied, we had won.Meaning:the Legislature ad deferred consideration of the amendment to a future date.(We were later to lose, of course, when the amendment was finally brought to vote, which provoked front-page tableaus of our opponents’ jubilant fists in the air; I suspected few of them were likely to be on my throat lozenge-sharing list.Ultimately, in 2005, we won again when the amendment was defeated without much fuss.)
At work the next day, my receptionist cried, “Hey!I saw you on TV!On the news!”Later, when the line of gay romance novels my boyfriend and I wrote became, briefly, famous, I would frequently be on TV, radio, and the pages of the New York Times, but that appearance during the protest was my very first time, so I grinned the silly grin of the instantly undeservedly famous.I said nothing.My voice was so hoarse from the demonstrations it took six days before I recovered, during which time I was prone to sudden, disconcerting mid-sentence adolescent pitch changes and a rasp that sounded as if I had smoked four cartons of Lucky Strikes.(On women, such a low rasp can be sexy in a come-hither way.On me, it sounded as if I were minutes away from having my larynx removed and talking for the rest of my life through one of those creepy robotic electronic devices you hold to your throat.)
Within days of the protest, there was an email in my inbox from my pastor at St. Anthony Shrine.I feared the worst: perhaps Father Frank, too, had been watching the Evening News.I was “busted,” as we used to say in 7th grade social studies class when the teacher caught us wadding up spit balls.
In fact, however, the email was not a denunciation.It was a request that I become a member of the Lay Ministry Committee (LMC) at St. Anthony’s.The LMC was responsible for organizing and training 150 volunteers for various roles assisting the priests at the Mass:
·lectors, who proclaim the non-gospel Bible readings and psalms from the pulpit;
·Eucharistic ministers, who distribute the host at communion time; and
·others, who perform ad hoc worship-related tasks such as distributing ashes on Ash Wednesday.
At the time of Father
Frank’s email, I had been a lector at St. Anthony’s for five years, but my involvement
in the parish was minimal:I attended an
initial theological training, a practicum, that made me eligible to read at
But I did.I had a life I shared with my boyfriend of five years Scott Whittier.With Scott, I ran a business writing and publishing Harlequin-style romance novels for gay men.I also published dozens of erotic short stories in PlayGuy, Honcho and Indulge.My stories were frequently included in anthologies of the year’s best porn:
You have a hundred hands, and your fingertips stink of ass.His butt=s a loaf of bread you want to drive your thumbs into and tear open to let the hot, fresh-baked steam escape….
And now Father Frank was asking me to assume a more visible leadership position over the volunteers at Saint Anthony’s.
I was initially reluctant:I had no wish to embarrass Father or St. Anthony’s.I had no wish to interfere with the religious experience of parishioners who might be distracted by recognizing my face from TV.Or reading my pornography, for that matter.And I assumed in turn that the Church would not want me if it knew the truth.
I called Father Frank and requested a meeting for the following week.At the appointed time, I rode the creaky elevator to the priest’s quarters.Taking an elevator -- even a creaky, rickety, uninspected elevator -- felt like an unnecessary express toward my doom.If I was to walk the plank, I thought indignantly, I should be allowed to trudge under my own power.
The priests’ quarters at St. Anthony’s only added to my discomfort.The air was stale.All sounds were hushed.The furniture was blocky and solid and simple.Saints were stashed in every nook and cranny.Pithy Biblical quotations nagged from every bulletin board.It felt as if I were back in junior high, trudging to confession with a conscience heavy with self-abuse, lying to my mother, and looking at other boys’ penises.
Father Frank was simply dressed in black shirt and pants and a Roman collar.I had never before seen him without his brown Franciscan robes, macramé sash, and tire sandals.It was a bit of a let down.If I was going to be soundly chastised for my antics on Beacon Hill and for my “lifestyle,” and assigned a hundred thousand Hail Mary’s, I wanted the punishment to come from on high.Father Frank’s civvies made me feel as if I were talking to an equal.
We sat facing one another.A dish of hoarhound candies was on the table between us.There was little small talk.My vocal chords were still too raw.Instead, I quietly explained my willingness to participate on the LMC and take a leadership role at St. Anthony’s.I said I welcomed the extra involvement in the church and understood the higher visibility role and that the church would be counting on me in new ways.But, I warned, there were things Father Frank should know before he formally made the offer to have me aboard.
I took a deep
breath.I quashed an impulse to cross
myself.Like many Catholics, I have a
soundtrack that automatically plays in my head for moments like this:Oh my
God I am heartily sorry for having Thee…
In a rush of words, I explained my being gay and my extreme public role in same-sex marriage debate.I explained television, the Haitian woman, throat lozenges, and the Channel 5 Evening News.I explained my reluctance to interfere with others’ worship.I talked until my vocal chords again gave way.
Then Father Frank got his chance to speak.I didn’t know what to expect. I told myself to be on my best behavior.Don’t engage with the other side.No matter what offensive things he said.
Father Frank slid the dish of hoarhound candies my way.Then he said: "The friars here at St. Anthony’s are opposed to the Church's teaching.We think it is inhumane.”
“But-but-but…”I spluttered, thinking: What about abomination?What about Pope JP II?What about eternal damnation? What would happen if Archbishop O’Malley paid a visit to the Shrine and heard a happy porn-writing Sodomite proclaim the Word?
Father Frank forestalled my skepticism.He continued, “People have asked us why we friars don't speak out against gay marriage.This is why.We believe the grace of marriage comes from the commitment, not from who the persons entering the marriage are.”
I was stunned.What Father Frank was saying could have been motorcycle-dyke-megaphone-chant material.With slogans like that he could have joined us out on the front lines jostling with Haitians and warding off Mr. Sodomy and Pastor Bob.Who says there are no miracles?
I helped myself to a hoarhound candy.I was immediately soothed.
Father Frank stood.He stuck out his hand.
“Now that we’ve got that out of the way,” Father Frank said.“Welcome to the worship advisory committee.When can you start?”