American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  When my mother used to call with bad news—a relative I hadn’t seen in years diagnosed with cancer, an old friend with a desperately ill grandchild—she would always say, “I know you don’t pray, Daniel. Just keep them in your thoughts.” My mom knew that thoughts were the best I could do. And for months after my mother’s death, sitting in the pews at St. James Cathedral, I stared at a marble statue of the Virgin Mother, trying to keep my mother in my thoughts.

  We were close in that cliché way that so many gay men and their mothers are. Today anti-gay bigots argue that being gay is a sinful choice that gay people make because our parades look like so much fun. Psychologists and psychiatrists used to argue that being gay was a choice your mother made for you. Mothers who were too close to their sons, mothers who “smothered” their sons, risked turning them gay. The shrinks got it backward, mistaking one of the consequences of being gay—one of the perks of being gay—for the cause. The kind of relationship I had with my mother didn’t make me gay. I had that kind of relationship with my mother because I was gay.

  By her own estimation my mother was a good Catholic. She believed that Jesus was her savior and that He died for her sins; she believed in the Resurrection, the Trinity, the Sacraments, the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception. (Don’t make the mistake of confusing those last two: Jesus was born to a virgin; his mother Mary was conceived without original sin—those are totes different paranormal phenomena, people.) My mother also believed that sex was sacred, and that people, particularly people who had children, should be married. To each other. But she didn’t believe that being a good Catholic meant blind obedience to the old men who ran her church.

  You could say that my mother was a good American Catholic. She believed that women should be priests and that priests, male or female, should be allowed to marry. Even each other. And after four pregnancies in four years—and a heart-to-heart with a parish priest who told her that the pope might be wrong about birth control and definitely wouldn’t be paying her children’s Catholic school tuition—my mother concluded that birth control was not a sin.

  “Catholics have long realized that their own grasp of certain things, especially sex, has a validity that is lost on the celibate male hierarchy,” the Roman Catholic author and historian Garry Wills wrote in an essay in The New York Review of Books. My mother was one of those American Catholics—a woman with a better grasp of sex than the elderly celibates.

  My mother prayed that the leaders of her church would come around during her lifetime, particularly on the issues of celibacy and the ordination of women. Unfortunately, the Church, under the last two popes, moved further away from her. Whenever the current pope, “Benny,” as she called him, or the previous pope, “JP2,” condemned birth control, attacked gay people, or insisted that women could never be priests, my mother would call me, sigh audibly, and say, “It’s like they’re trying to make Lutherans of us all.”

  But she refused to leave the Church. It was her church, too, she insisted, just as much as it was Benny’s or JP2’s. And popes had been wrong in the past, she’d say. If previous popes were wrong about the movement of the planets, then, by God, the current pope could be wrong about contraception. The little voice in her head said the same thing the little voice in mine did: “That can’t be right; they must be wrong.” But that voice, a voice that destroyed my faith, somehow strengthened hers.

  And my mother’s faith was tested.

  When I was in high school, the Catholic television network in Chicago featured my family in a special—my dad the deacon, my mom the lay minister, and all four of their confirmed children. (Confirmation is like a bar mitzvah for Catholic kids, only with fewer presents and more modest parties.) One of their sons was even a high school seminarian. We were the perfect Catholic family. We used to joke—just a few years later—about the Catholic television network returning to do a “Where Are They Now?” special. We were still a Catholic family, of course, but we were no longer perfect. My dad had divorced my mother, resigned from the deaconate, remarried, and moved to California. My mother was dating and having sex outside of wedlock. My brother Billy had gotten a vasectomy. A couple of pregnancies were terminated. And I had come out of the closet.

  While my mother was a liberal, pill-popping, ordination-of-women-backing Catholic, she nevertheless took it hard when I told her I was gay. Her first impulse was to call a priest. Father Tom, whose last name I won’t disclose for reasons that will become clear in a moment, rushed over. Sitting on the front porch, my mother broke down in tears and told Father Tom why she was so upset: “Danny says he’s gay.”

  Father Tom put his hand on my mother’s knee and said, “So am I, Judy.”

  Father Tom told my mother that it was better this way. He knew I had thought about becoming a priest and worried that I might be doing it for the same reason he did: to hide from my sexuality. He had tried that, and it didn’t work. Then he had tried to drown his homosexuality in alcohol, as so many Catholic priests of his generation did, and that didn’t work either. He assured my mother that it was better for me to live this way—it was better for me to come out, even to her, especially to her—than to live the life he had lived.

  Whenever someone asks if I was abused by a Catholic priest—and you would be surprised how often gay Catholic adults are asked that question—I always say no, I was never abused by a priest. I was saved by one.

  Thanks to Father Tom and my mother’s own moral sense, the same moral sense that prompted her to trust her own judgment about contraception, my mother came around on the my-son-is-gay issue pretty fast. And she came out swinging. A rainbow bumper sticker on her car, a PFLAG1 membership card in her purse, and an ultimatum delivered to the entire extended family: I was still her son; and anyone who had a problem with me had a much bigger problem with her.

  The Catholic Church still has a problem with me.

  One of the cards in the back of the pews at St. James, tucked in with the hymnals, is addressed to nonpracticing Catholics. WELCOME BACK it reads in large letters across the top.

  Are you a Catholic who’s been away from the church? Welcome Back classes are designed to help you return to the sacraments and regular church attendance.

  A return to the sacraments. I sometimes fantasize about “returning” to the sacraments, particularly the sacrament of confession. “Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It’s been twenty-nine years since my last confession. I hope you packed a lunch.”

  I sit in the pews at St. James because part of me—the part that had me slipping away from work and into church—wishes what I was taught at St. Ignatius was true. I want there to be a heaven. I want my mother to be looking down on me. Though, and I say this both as a gay man and a professional sex-advice columnist, not all the time. There are things a mother has a right not to know, my mom used to say, and I did my best to keep those things from her while she was alive.

  My mother’s death, somehow and unexpectedly, drew me back—not to the faith or to sacraments, but to church, to a church, to the pews of St. James Cathedral. I was tempted. I am tempted. I wouldn’t have wasted so much time sitting in St. James in the months after my mother’s death if I weren’t. My husband wouldn’t have found numerous WELCOME BACK cards in the back pocket of my jeans that awful spring if I weren’t tempted.

  But when I feel tempted, when I feel like, maybe I could go through the motions, maybe I could return to the sacraments, maybe I could take what comfort I could from the Church and its rituals, the pope goes to Africa and says that condoms spread AIDS, or an archbishop in Brazil excommunicates a Catholic mother for getting her nine-year-old daughter a life-saving abortion but not the Catholic man who raped and impregnated that woman’s nine-year-old daughter.

  Or I contemplate how the Church views me and the two people I love most in the world, my husband of eighteen years and our fifteen-year-old son, and I think, no, I can’t even go through the motions.

  The Church doesn’t want me back—not as I am.
Every other week there’s a story in the news about a Catholic grade school expelling a child who has gay parents or a Catholic parish firing a gay employee—someone they knew to be gay or lesbian when they hired them—for marrying their same-sex partner. When it comes to homosexuality, church leaders are growing ever more, er, rigid.

  Gay Catholics are being targeted in ways that straight Catholics are not. While the Church still opposes birth control and abortion, divorce and remarriage, and all non-procreative sex acts (even within marriage), and has become more aggressively political over the last two decades, it can’t identify and persecute heterosexual Catholics who trust “their own grasp of certain things.” Catholic women have abortions at the same rate as non-Catholic women. Ninety-eight percent of Catholic women use birth control—presumably with Catholic men. Ninety-three percent of Catholics support the use of condoms to prevent disease and HIV transmission. Seventy percent of American Catholics think abortion should be legal. Sixty-seven percent of Catholics believe premarital sex is morally acceptable.

  When it comes to the issues of sexual morality, straight Catholics—Catholics like my mother—are telling the celibates that while they may run their church, they may not run, or ruin, their lives.

  When a Catholic priest stands on the altar on Sunday and looks out over his congregation—like my father once did—he sees Catholic mothers and fathers sitting with one or two children. He can’t see the birth control pills and the abortions that prevented those couples from having more children than they wanted or could provide for. He can’t tell just by looking who among his flock has been divorced and remarried—or who, for that matter, masturbates. The Church condemns homosexuality as “intrinsically and gravely disordered.” The Church uses the exact same language to condemn masturbation: “Masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action,” reads the Catholic catechism. But there is no effort to turn away the children of divorced and remarried Catholics, or the children of Catholic families that by some miracle only have two children, or to seek out and fire heterosexual church employees who use birth control or masturbate.

  The pope, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and priests know that straight Catholics are using birth control, obtaining abortions, having premarital sex, having sex for pleasure, and masturbating. But they can pretend not to know it because they can’t actually see it. All straight Catholics automatically get rounded up to “good Catholics” because their sexual sins can only be guessed at or inferred.

  Priests can’t do the same when a gay couple walks into a church. A priest can refuse to see—or refuse to do the math on—all the masturbating, birth controlling, divorcing, and remarrying that he knows straight parishioners are getting up to, but he can’t not see homosexuality. So long as we insist on coming out, so long as we insist on living and loving openly, our “sin” is visible to the naked eye. And Church leaders can’t see past our homosexuality; they can barely see our humanity, which is hugely ironic, considering how many of those priests in the pulpits of Catholic churches are gay themselves. Father Tom was one of them. I was almost one of them.

  Of course I don’t think homosexuality is a sin at all. But for the Catholic Church it all comes down to the nature and purpose of sex. Back to the Catholic catechism: “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose,” as human sexual expression must open to the “gift of life.” Birth control, masturbation, homosexuality—any sex act that isn’t open to the “gift of life” is wrong. Some well-meaning “liberal” Catholics claim that the Church isn’t singling out gay people since all non-procreative sexual activity is wrong regardless of whether it’s gay or straight. But only gay people are expected to live lives devoid of intimacy and romantic love. (And, I’m sorry, but you can’t claim that supernatural phenomena—miracles—routinely take place and then insist that homosexual acts are closed to the “gift of life.” Either God can do anything or he can’t, AMIRITE?)

  “The natural purpose of sex is procreation,” Wills writes, summing up the Church’s position, “and any use of it for other purposes is ‘unnatural.’ But a primary natural purpose does not of necessity exclude ancillary advantages. The purpose of eating is to sustain life, but that does not make all eating that is not necessary to subsistence ‘unnatural.’ One can eat, beyond the bare minimum to exist, to express fellowship, as one can have sex, beyond the begetting of a child with each act, to express love.”

  The Catholic Church would like human sexuality to be about one thing—reproduction—but biology tells us differently.

  “For Homo sapiens, sex is primarily about establishing and maintaining relationships, relationships often characterized by love, or at least affection,” writes Christopher Ryan, in Psychology Today. “Reproduction is a by-product of human sexual behavior, not its primary purpose.

  “The vast majority of species have sex only to reproduce—a function reflected in a very low ratio of sex-acts-to-births,” Ryan continues. “Gorillas, for example, have intercourse at most about a dozen times per birth.” Humans are different. “We and our chimp and bonobo cousins typically have sex hundreds—if not thousands—of times per birth.”

  The Church got sex wrong. It is confused about what sex is for, confused about what sex does, confused about why we have it and why we have so much of it—shocking, I realize, considering that the Church is run by people who don’t have sex. (Or aren’t supposed to have sex.)

  Fact is, straight people have more sex—a lot more sex—than they do babies. And gay people have sex for the same reasons straight people do…most of the time. Gay or straight, we’re all having sex for pleasure, for release, and to cement bonds of intimacy. And every once in a while, some of us—even some of us who are gay—have sex in order to make a baby.

  The Church has backed itself into a familiar corner. One day the Church will have to admit that it made a mistake. And one day the Church will have to admit that scores of popes, hundreds of theologians, and countless princes of the Church were wrong. Wrong about sex. Wrong about birth control. Wrong about masturbation. Wrong about pleasure. Wrong about homosexuality. One day the Church will have to admit that it got human sexuality wrong, just as it got the movement of the planets wrong.

  I’m not holding my breath.

  This is typically where Catholics and non-Catholics alike jump in and ask why someone who isn’t a Catholic—or isn’t a Catholic anymore—cares so much about the Church’s teachings on human sexuality. Why concern yourself with the teachings of the Catholic Church when you’re not a believer? I could claim that the Catholic Church’s teachings concern me only inasmuch as they impact my life. I could point out that the Catholic Church is a political player in the United States, and it backs anti-gay legislation and supports efforts to ban my marriage, adoptions by same-sex couples, and civil rights protections for sexual minorities. I could insist that I don’t have the luxury of ignoring the Church.

  But I would be lying.

  Oh, the Church’s teachings do impact my life and the Church actively persecutes gay people and I don’t have the luxury of ignoring the Church—all of that is true.

  But while I can’t see myself going back to the Church—I can’t see myself going through the motions of the sacraments, despite their comforting familiarity—some part of me wants the Church to want me back. I want the option of going back. Not because I believe—I don’t—but because I ache. I ache for my loss.

  There are very few tangible remains of my childhood and of my connection to my mother. I have photographs, yes, and I have my memories, and I have some mementoes. But the family home is gone, my mother’s possessions dispersed. There’s nowhere I can go to feel my mother’s presence, no space I can enter that we once physically shared, other than church.

  That’s why I wound up spending so many afternoons at St. James, the church that reminded me so much of St. Ignatius—St. Ignatius, the church where my mother was baptized, where she to
ok her first communion, where she married, and where her funeral was held. In church I feel her presence, not God’s presence, and I can almost feel her looking down on me from the heaven she believed in so passionately.

  And if she was right—if there is a heaven and she is looking down on me—I hope she remembers to look away now and then.

  Because there are things a mother has a right not to know.

  1 PFLAG stands for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

  2. It’s Never Okay to Cheat (Except When It Is)

  Is it ever okay to cheat?”

  There’s only one answer to the question. Wait—that’s not true. There’s more than one answer to that question, but there’s only one answer an advice columnist is allowed to give. And it goes like this: “No, nope, never, don’t even think about it, you scumbag, and don’t ask me that question again. Ever. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  To roughly paraphrase the favorite author of hopeless romantics everywhere: It is a truth universally regurgitated (at least by people in my line of work), that a married man in possession of a wife must never be told that cheating is okay. The same goes for a married woman in possession of a husband. No one should ever be told that cheating is okay. Because cheating isn’t okay. Ever.1

  It’s not just advice columnists: Licensed therapists and daytime talk show hosts are never allowed to tell married people that cheating is okay. Because cheating isn’t okay. Ever.

  Except for those times when it is okay. Except for those times. And except for those times when cheating isn’t just okay, but absolutely, positively, and without question the right thing to do.

  Except for those times—and some other times—cheating is never okay. Ever.

  Okay?

  I’ve been writing Savage Love, my syndicated sex-advice column, for more than twenty years. My typical workday begins with a brisk swim through a deluge of e-mail that arrived overnight from married people trapped in sexless marriages. (When strangers ask me what I do for a living—I spend a fair amount of time in hotel bars—I say, “I get e-mail from sexually frustrated married people, and no, I don’t work for AshleyMadison.com.”) Some of these sex-starved spouses are in honest, sincere, and pathetic love with their other halves; some have small children; some have chronically ill wives or husbands who depend on them for their health insurance and day-to-day care. Some have faced emotionally crushing sexual rejection at the hands of their spouses for years—some for decades—but they have refused to physically or emotionally abandon the partners who sexually abandoned them long ago. Other e-mail missives are from married people with harmless kinks that their spouses will not or cannot indulge, needs that could be met discreetly and safely by, say, a professional sex worker (a dominatrix, a foot model), instantly alleviating the kinky partner’s simmering resentment (“Why won’t she do this for me?!”) and the vanilla partner’s exasperation (“Why won’t he stop asking me to do that for him?!”).2