Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  I thought of Chaucer, and his gaggle of pilgrims making their way to Canterbury. Six hundred years ago the poet had the clergy’s number: the Pardoner selling his indulgences, heaven on the lay-away plan; the sensuous Prioress shivering as she eats her oysters, relishing the tale she tells of a boy murdered by Jews; the Friar and the Summoner, snarling with contempt as they cast each other as the villain of their opposing fables. Bring that crew to the Vatican treasury for a little Easter tour, and the stealing would be so brazen they’d be clanking like knights in armor by the time they came out the other side.

  “If gold can rust,” Chaucer observes, clucking his tongue over all that ecclesiastical corruption, “then what will iron do?” Jerry Silver didn’t fret for a moment about such niceties of ethics. What he’d taken from his years in the Church was a feel for camp, the ridiculous self-importance of the queens in power. In any case Jerry had other reasons for leaving the order, the gay and lesbian revolution first among them. He moved directly from the monastery into a gay commune in L.A. His natural role was to mother the rest of them, meanwhile keeping the commune in jam and honey, cupboards full. And yet what he really longed for was a man to love him back.

  He was hopelessly naive, though, as to how to go about it. He’d fall discreetly for one or another of the beautiful and damned young men of Hollywood. But so discreet was his courting dance that the young men never picked up on it, even if they’d wanted to respond—which they probably wouldn’t have, given Jerry’s vast self-deprecation, the shyness about his rotund shape and his vanishing hair. But he always maintained a brave smile and a deep-throated laugh, with no self-pity that I ever saw. He had a certain simple faith that things were going to turn out all right—even after his two partners in the nursing service he’d founded embezzled the business out from under him, leaving him penniless.

  With his pride and his grin still intact, he set off for Europe. This was just before the plague hit full-force in L.A. No question but that Jerry would’ve made a fortune with his registry nurses, one of those boom businesses that got rich off AIDS. But Jerry was never one to maunder over spilled milk, and within two years he’d set himself up as curator for a huge modernist art collection in Paris. He lived in a shoebox of an apartment, and most important, found himself a boyfriend in Amsterdam. Sporadically, one or the other of us would pick up the phone in the middle of the night to check in, never getting the time lag right.

  “I’ve got everything I want,” he’d say. “I always knew my European years would be my triumph.” And where was the Coptic cross? I asked him. “On a nail right beside my bed,” he laughed.

  We fell out of touch during Roger’s illness, and by the time Roger died, the young Dutchman was sick. We were a pair of widows when Jerry and I spoke again. I could hear the rattle in his voice, the struggle to breathe, and knew he would be next. But he’d managed to finish the five-pound catalogue of the art collection, and shepherded the paintings to Washington for a triumphant exhibition at the Smithsonian, collapsing with pneumocystis as soon as he returned to Paris.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ve had everything I ever wanted,” he declared defiantly. Not a twinge of regret, or any self-consciousness about speaking in the past tense. “I only have one more thing on my list. I have to go first class on the QE2 before I die. I’ll sell the damn cross if I have to.”

  But AIDS caught up with him first, leaving his life list unfinished. It was weeks after he died that one of his old friends in L.A. called me with the news. I gathered he went surrounded by his Paris friends, bohemians of the old style who filled his room with art talk. He died without a sou, I was given to understand. I didn’t protest about the Coptic cross, having no claim on it myself. But I rather hoped one of his bedside vigilants was a medievalist, with the wit to slip it off the nail and pocket it. Jerry would’ve appreciated such a transfer—anything to keep it from those Dominicans.

  Father Gambone and Brother Jerry. Is either of these a story with a happy ending? Not that it’s for me to judge, but I can’t help thinking there was sufficient joy and recovered self-esteem for both in the mere act of leaving the Church. Two more sprung from the savage ignorance and soul-destroying dogma, the two thousand years of belittling women, the enslavement of overpopulation. Every abandonment of vocation strikes a blow against the long history of evil perpetrated by the powers of Rome.

  And yet it gives me scant comfort these days to see how the Church flails, more and more erratically, to pretend its history never happened. For history is its collaborator down the centuries, somehow never connecting the dots between the blood-soaked past and the outrages of the present. The Inquisition’s reign of terror in Europe, burning at the stake anyone who stood up to their hypocrisy, indeed anyone who looked at them funny; the systematic wiping out of the pagan texts after Constantine converted to Christianity in 313. You must destroy the documents if you mean to rewrite history, leaving your own version of events as the only truth. Or take the lunatic presumptions of the Syllabus of Errors, Pope Pius IX’s catalogue of heresies issued in 1864. A veritable paean to ignorance, condemning religious liberty, all liberty for that matter; against science, against progress, against the separation of church and state; establishing control over all literature, over public education. And how does history report all this? On bended knee, of course, because it won’t do to be condemning religion. After all, the Vatican means well, doesn’t it?

  No, it doesn’t. Centuries of oppression have been papered over with quaintness, with a picturesque sentimentality as prettily inoffensive as a line of girls in First Communion whites. I’m glad I lived long enough to see a pop star rip up the Pope’s picture on national television, even if it has meant enduring the prissy backlash. Either you speak nicely about this “holy man,” or you button your lip. In just this way the eyes of history avert their gaze from the collaboration of Pius XII and the Nazis. A real piece of work, old number XII, who wouldn’t intervene even so far as to tell his Polish cardinals to dampen the enthusiasm of the good Catholics running the camps and the ovens. And this at a time when the war was virtually over, the Allied victory assured. You just wash your hands of the final wave of victims—and anyway, how many tears does a Pope really need to shed over the settling of that ancient score, those Jews who killed Our Lord?

  It was fascinating recently to watch the Church rewrite its history again, and this time in public. As if it were actual news, His Holiness accepted the findings of a thirteen-year commission and officially withdrew the charges of heresy against Galileo. All with an utterly straight face, and reported by the press with a big dose of cuddly quaintness—a harmless ritual, wave to Papa. No feel for the degrading of scientific truth, the personal horror of Galileo’s reluctant recantation, because he’d proven that the universe wasn’t earth-centered at all. Galileo died broken, his last eight years under house arrest in Siena, while all the Church ignoramuses and black-cowled torturers went scot-free. And now, three hundred and sixty years later, the Polish Pope merely accuses them of “imprudent opposition”—a bare, limp-wristed sissy’s slap.

  So apparently all we have to do, we gay and lesbian heretics, is wait a few hundred years, and the bubble-enclosed Pope of 2350 will swish his skirts and declare it’s all been a misunderstanding. Don’t hold your breath, kids. The Copernican theory of cosmic motion is one thing, sexuality quite another. The latter is only for making babies, starving ones ideally, because they make better copy and bring in more gold to Rome. Pleasure is forbidden, intimacy more so. Your deepest secrets belong to the Church as well, waiting behind the grille of the confessional. How many gay Catholics have told me of being forced by an overeager priest to tell more and more lurid details of a harmless jerkoff session?

  Obviously I haven’t been in the market for rapprochement with Rome. When I had the first letters from priests, after Borrowed Time was published, they were quick to apologize for the excesses of Cardinal Ratzinger and his Boss. This was a terrible time, they agreed—a r
eturn to the Dark Ages of intolerance—but the only way to face it was to take the long view. The Polish Pope wouldn’t be forever. He hadn’t yet utterly broken the spirit of renewal that seemed a kind of miracle to the participants of Vatican II. Pray for another John XXIII. The new Inquisition would pass. Meanwhile, of course, they were praying for me, if that was all right.

  Except it wasn’t all right, and gave me the creeps besides. I replied that their awesome patience and hope for a better age was of no use to gay and lesbian people who were being wiped out by our own holocaust. And if it wasn’t the same as Europe’s holocaust, with as many as eleven million “innocent” dead, the response of the Church was exactly the same—the washing of hands in the same bowl of dirty water, slick with the scum of piety. Don’t pray for me, please, I declared. Start the revolution instead.

  But the letters trickled in anyway, and I couldn’t ignore the passion with which they spoke about their work fighting AIDS. AIDS, they said, was where Jesus would be. AIDS was the place where they would learn the transforming power of love. Sounded good, but I was still suspicious of their motives; it was as if they were chalking up points for sainthood. I wasn’t quite so far gone in cynicism as my friend Pat, whose flame-red Italian opinion was that the only thing Mother Teresa ever aspired to in her life was to be on the cover of People. I understood the sentiment, but really there were limits. Yet recently I’ve come to hear rumors that she won’t permit the lovers of gay people with AIDS to visit their dying partners in her hospices. Only the family, please. And her Missionary Sisters of Charity—or so it has filtered through the underground—withhold pain medication from patients, asking them to offer their pain to God.

  I think the first crack in my own cynicism was Brother Toby. A publisher sent me the manuscript of Morning Glory Babies, Toby’s account of a lay Catholic community in rural northern California, where he lived with Sister Marti and Sister Julie. They were taking in babies with AIDS, otherwise abandoned, and lovingly caring for them. What was so moving and humbling about the story was its plain-spoken joy, genuine in ways a hypocrite couldn’t fake. They kept themselves solvent by running a Christmas tree farm on their land near Santa Rosa. Of course all the babies died eventually, guttering like so many candles, but in the meantime there were birthdays and holidays, a farmhouse rippling with laughter.

  I still don’t know if Toby and Marti and Julie belong to any official order, but I rather think not. They don’t appear to owe any special fealty to Rome, defining their mission by the largeness of their hearts. Not a scrap of brocade in sight. Now I order a tree every year from Starcross, and Sister Julie scrawls a note on the packing crate to wish me well. Toby and I maintain an off-and-on correspondence, for he has enthusiastically read all my books, no matter how anti-Church they are. He has, as I’ve come to learn, bigger things to worry about.

  When he read in the news about the hospital wards of children in Romania, tainted by AIDS-infected blood and chained to their cribs as they stared hollowly at the ceiling, Toby flew over to see what he could do. There was a haunting scrap of footage on “Prime Time Live,” where he scooped up one of the babies and carried him outside into a ruined garden. A child who had never played or laughed, probably never been out of the crib—and his face was suffused with delight, just to be held and to see the sun in the trees.

  I remember thinking Toby was taking on too much, that he couldn’t take care of every AIDS baby, certainly not a whole country’s worth. But he has persevered, and the Starcross newsletter reports every quarter on their progress, teaching ignorant nurses how to care, tearing down the prison walls. You cannot help but transpose it against the dark little item that landed Starcross in the local papers in Santa Rosa. One night they had an emergency, one of the kids had stopped breathing, and they called the volunteer fire department for help, to bring the kid to the nearest emergency room. And the firemen wouldn’t come, because they might catch it.

  One thing I’ve learned from this unspeakable age of suffering is how myriad are the ways to lash out against the darkness. Enormous though the power is in the hate councils of the Vatican, there’s still room for a little saintliness far off the beaten track, at a complete remove from the hierarchs and patriarchs. Perhaps I’ve even come to oversentimentalize the God-work of Toby and the sisters—the atheist’s sin, to get maudlin in the end, and over things you’d never get away with in a novel, like those Christmas trees.

  You grow attached to goodness when you know it’s the real thing. Still, it’s a bit unnerving to be the recipient of a holy card, an icon of Mother and Child that fell from the folds of Toby’s letter about a week ago.

  I will play surrogate to one of your nun great-aunts and send this to you—the traditional Catholic answer to every problem. This one is put out by a Catholic AIDS group. They are one of the less “brocaded” parts of my troubled church. When they began there was a lot of posturing for who would be the boss AIDS priest, but the epidemic has purified them. The epidemic has purified us all.

  “Your brother, Toby,” it was signed, and I saw it was the plain truth; we were a brotherhood of warriors. I didn’t even flinch that Toby’s God was in there somewhere. At least it wasn’t the Pope’s God.

  About two years ago I began to correspond with Father Tom, a priest from an order I’d never heard of, chaplain to a college way out in Idaho. He enthusiastically endorsed my brickbats against the Vatican, then told me about his own AIDS work. It sounded as if he knew every case in the state personally—barely a dozen when he arrived, but no support systems in place, all kept secret and isolated like a shuttered cabin on the Great Divide. Tom found that though there was no visible gay and lesbian community in Idaho, there was at least an unspoken network. He moved through it to find the sick, comforting them and drawing them together to help one another.

  We’ve met several times, Father Tom and I, and he’s never once mentioned the name of God. If what he’s doing out there in Idaho is spreading the Gospel, he doesn’t put it to me in those terms. We talk about the politics of God, and especially about the witch hunt being engineered in Rome against our people. He leans toward the sixty percent figure when considering our numbers in the clergy. He has successfully come out to most of the powers of his order, who only warn him not to be too public. No one can call him a sinner, because he’s chaste—technically speaking.

  And I find myself rooting for him, not even impatient that he doesn’t publicly spit in the Church’s face, for he’s part of the underground instead, a leader in the Resistance. This means he runs retreats in which gay and lesbian issues are out on the table. He works his own network of queer clergy, offering his counsel to the fearfully closeted. On the clerical grapevine, he hears of more than a couple of bishops with live-in lovers. Rumors frustrating to Tom, for these pointy-hats take no public stance against the Church. Hey, I’ve got mine, Jack, leave me alone.

  Tom plans to study in Rome next year, beating the scholar/dictators at their own game, ferreting out all the loopholes in the Paulist gibberish about the separation of sex and love. Meanwhile he’s got his priorities straight—or not straight, I should say. Two months ago I asked him over dinner in a queer restaurant—his eyes darting about with delight, drawn by so much merriment among his brothers and sisters—I asked him what would happen if he met a man the way Gambone had. Someone to love. And Tom looked at me, a frown of intensity creasing his cherub’s face, and snapped his fingers. “I’d be out of the priesthood like that,” he said.

  To me that’s not hypocrisy, but a man keeping open the options of the heart; options Tom and I agree were not available to previous generations of priests—or so they thought, cowed more by their own self-hatred than by the dogma. It’s the same pattern we see in the current Jeremiah generation of homophobes, that priss tribe of right-wing pundits and op-ed loonies, the Pentecostal preachers coifed like Liberace, mincing and fluttering as they harangue us wayward Sodomites. Never a breath about gay women, for to them it’s a fight to th
e death between one kind of man and another. They’ve got a white-knuckle grip on heterosex themselves, a decision they made in their youth to escape their own carnal ambiguity, the guilt of their secret desires.

  And they’re welcome to it, that desperate choice of straightness, or in the priests’ case, celibacy. But what they cannot bear about us in the post-Stonewall world is how alive we are with pride, how connected to one another. We are laying to rest the shame and self-recrimination, and they’re frantic to shut us up. We reflect too bright a mirror back on them. Meanwhile the old priest, sitting alone in his kitchen, sloshed on communion wine, shakes his head with bitter rue because the world has passed him by. To him it’s not fair that his younger brethren live out their gayness openly, going so far as to think of it as one of the gifts of the Spirit. They ought to be suffering their sexuality, the way he has, or what’s the point?

  As a non-believer I speak, of course, as a rank outsider. I have no sense of the God side in all of this, except what people tell me. Perhaps I protest too much that none of it touches me. I sometimes think I’ve ended up an atheist who’s still an Episcopalian at heart, glad to share community with the fighter-priests, no matter if I think the founding story is just a pretty myth. And yet there have been occasions that have spoken to me in words of another tongue, an aligning of my pagan faith in the goddess of love and the god of the sun with a larger sense of connectedness, a mystery without politics.

  In the late spring before Stephen died, we went on a cruise of the Greek islands and the coast of Asia Minor. Our ship a tub that stunk like rancid cooking oil, rust raining down from the joints whenever we hit a swell. Eight hundred passengers, who mostly came to buy tee-shirts and carpets and usually skipped the ruins. By the time we landed at Dikili in southern Turkey, to make the trek inland to ancient Ephesus, most of our fellow travelers opted to stay on deck and broil their sullen midwestern flesh. The bus was only a third full as we set off through the dusty hills. Melek, our tour guide in knockoff Chanel, explained to us that the sea had receded six miles since the glory days of the port of Ephesus. Now it lay stranded in the desert, a white ghost marble city.