Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  “I like you, Father Jerome,” I said.

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know, you make me laugh.”

  “No. Be honest,” he urged. “Why?”

  He was fishing.

  “Oh,” I hesitated. “I don’t think I can be quite that honest, can I?”

  “Sure you can. Nothing you could say would bother me.”

  “Hmm. Are you sure?” He seemed to know what I was going to say and was encouraging me to say it. It was the kind of dance I’d done with gay people before. You sense you’re in the presence of another gay person, but you don’t always want to be the first one to say it, in case you’re wrong or in case they’re not out even to themselves.

  “Of course,” he said. “Tell me.”

  “Okay,” I said, taking the leap. “Because you’re such a queen.”

  He looked surprised.

  “What’s a queen?” he said.

  “Oh, come on,” I balked. “You don’t know what a queen is?”

  “No. What is it?”

  I was caught here. No escape in sight. “Well, you know,” I said slowly, “an effeminate gay man.”

  I pronounced the words “effeminate” and “gay” haltingly, trying to soften the blow. Could he possibly not know he was gay? Or was it just the terminology he hadn’t heard before?

  “You think I’m effeminate?” he squeaked in horror.

  “Uh, yeah, kind of.”

  “You mean like in The Birdcage?”

  “Well,” I answered, “that was a little exaggerated. I’d say Robin Williams more than Nathan Lane. Lane was a screaming queen. I’d say you’re just a queen.”

  “Stop saying that,” he snapped. “I hate that word.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve insulted you. Forget I said anything, really. I thought you knew.”

  “No. No,” he recovered. “You haven’t insulted me.”

  There was a heavy silence, then he blurted suddenly, “So you think I’m gay?”

  “I know you’re gay,” I said. “Or let’s just say I’d bet odds on it.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “Well,” I said gingerly, “here’s another term for you. ‘Gaydar.’ Have you heard of that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it sort of means it takes one to know one.”

  “So you’re gay. You’ve been with men.” His interest was really piqued now.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, scrambling. “I’ve been with men. And women, too. More women than men.”

  He leapt on this. He asked me more about it. What it was like, what did I do sexually with men and why. He spouted the usual abomination line from Leviticus, and added that he thought gay sex was disgusting. He’d been horrified by what he’d seen of it. Yet he was clearly fascinated by it. He’d researched it thoroughly on the Internet, he said, finding the most appalling Web sites. He’d even watched a few episodes of Showtime’s gay dramatic series Queer as Folk, all purely in rubbernecking horror, you understand, not out of prurient interest.

  I asked him about his sexual history, too.

  He told me that he was a virgin. He’d entered the religious life at twenty and effectively killed his sexuality there. I didn’t know whether to believe that or not, though the few other monks to whom I spoke openly about their sexuality had said something similar. The majority of them had joined the order very young, in their late teens or early twenties, and some, perhaps most, had done so without having had any sexual experiences at all. A couple of them, including Father Jerome, spoke of the inevitable wet dreams and involuntary erections that accompanied puberty, but they did so sketchily and bemusedly, as of something experienced long, long ago and now barely recalled. One of them said simply, “I’m not interested in sex.” He looked very uncomfortable when he said it. The very idea of bodies commingling made him squirm in his seat, as if it were calling up a bad memory.

  Vergil, by contrast, had been characteristically funny on the subject, saying: “There’s suppression and then there’s repression. Let’s see now. I’m trying to remember, which one is the bad one? Oh, yes. Repression. That’s when you say, ‘I don’t have a penis.’ That doesn’t work. Then there’s suppression, which is when you say, ‘Down, boy!’”

  Not everyone had such a clear perspective on the matter, but then, unlike Vergil, many of them hadn’t lived much of a separate life outside the cloister.

  Either way it must have taken superhuman effort or pathological powers of denial for these men to counteract such a strong biological drive. At least Vergil had had the good sense to see that arriving at a chaste existence in this manner, by preemptive force, wasn’t likely to work. He’d gone out into the world and, as he’d said, “had a really good time,” and at the end of it all, when he’d reached the bottom of the fun, he’d realized that pure sex wasn’t what he wanted. He’d seen that, like the world’s counterparts to poverty and obedience—material possessions and limitless freedoms—lust had left him feeling empty and insatiable.

  Wanton sex wasn’t some eschewed evil for him. It was more like a dish once devoured, found wanting and now passed over, not without occasional pangs, but with a kind of earned laxity. Still, Vergil had serious issues with control, and as Ned would learn, that was still part of the sexual and emotional package and probably always would be, partly because Vergil was just Vergil, but mainly because Vergil had chosen to rejoin a community of men that was all about control, self and otherwise. That’s what chastity and obedience meant in the abbey. Nobody there was practicing nonattachment. They were doing it the Western way, discipline, stone cold.

  Father Jerome was a classic example. On our trip to town I had come around to telling him about my friendship with Vergil, and that’s when, like an old pro, he’d said, “You’re falling in love with him.” But how did he know? How could he really know if he wasn’t recognizing in me feelings he’d had himself?

  “I don’t know,” I’d conceded at last. “Maybe I am.”

  I honestly didn’t know. Feelings got strange in that place, isolated from the neat perspectives of the outside world. I suppose if Ned had really been a boy, any moderately observant person would have been right to assume that he was as gay as a parade and having impure thoughts about Brother Vergil. In comportment, I wasn’t bothering to be very butch. I was being me, though purposely less demonstrative than I would have been as myself.

  Still, even toned down, as a man, my hallmark female behaviors, my emotive temperament and even my word choice read as gay, or at the very least odd. Jerome, eager to dispel conjecture about his own sexuality, was quick to jump on these cues and stomp them with all the force of his own self-hatred.

  In his presence I made the mistake once of referring to one of the other monks as cute—the kind of thing that women say all the time about sweet elderly gentleman like the one to whom I was referring. He was in his nineties, and succumbing to Alzheimer’s. Every time you saw him he’d put his hand on your arm, smile at you in the most beatific way and say, “Bless you.” I found it very touching. Though uninventive, “cute” was the word that came to mind over lunch that day, and puppy mush-mush the tone that came with it. But as soon as the offending remark was out of my mouth, Father Jerome pounced on it, sneering.

  “He’s not cute. You don’t call other men cute.”

  I made similar mistakes in front of the other monks. One night at dinner I goofed hugely when I told Father Richard the Tall that he looked very good for his age. He did. I couldn’t believe he was eighty. As soon as the remark came out of my mouth, everyone at the table stopped eating mid-forkful and looked at me as if I had three heads. Father Richard the Tall said a very suspicious, squint-eyed “thank you,” and looked away, clearly embarrassed.

  But the implication from other quarters was clear: “What the hell’s wrong with you, kid? Don’t you know that properly socialized males don’t behave that way with each other?”

  Naturally, I didn’t, an
d I was going to get a bigger lesson in that sooner than I knew. I was going to have to learn, as I suspect most boys do by the time they reach puberty, not to be such a Nancy. This was something I had observed, though not yet thoroughly experienced.

  I had seen the same thing happening with Bob’s son Alex at the bowling alley. By all accounts Alex was a sissy, a mama’s boy who needed toughening up. Everybody kicked him around a bit emotionally for that purpose, pushing him off with a sharp remark when he came to us in tears over losing his ball in the alley machinery, or getting gypped out of a game by the desk clerk.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” Bob would say. “Jesus. Go and get your money back. Or do I have to do it for you?”

  In the same spirit, Jim had once had Alex put his hand on the table and hold it there as long as he could while he thwacked his knuckles repeatedly with a plastic ruler. Alex endured it as long as he could, grimacing, but determined not to fail the test. It was all done in jest, and Jim didn’t seriously hurt Alex, nor did he intend to. The ruler wasn’t that rigid. But the spirit of the thing was there, and the message clear. Thicken your skin, boy.

  And so it was for Ned, though the process was far less overt.

  It wasn’t just the sexual tension of Ned’s presumed gayness, and his awkwardly expressed attachment to Vergil, but his seeming ignorance of masculine boundaries.

  To some of them I think it became clear fairly quickly that I was the weak man in the platoon, the guy you’d have to break in basic before he got to the front lines and put everyone’s life in danger. I didn’t understand this dynamic at first. I certainly hadn’t expected it in of all places a monastery.

  And, of course, it was entirely different than anything you’d find in the military. It wasn’t as if the monks burst into my room in the middle of the night, tied me to my bunk and beat me with bars of soap twisted in pillowcases, or made me do push-ups in mud pits in the pouring rain until I promised not to talk about my feelings.

  But I got a fairly clear sense by the end of the first week that I was a threat to their fragile ecosystem of terse masculine rapport.

  I wasn’t surprised when I got sour looks and disapproving shakes of the head from Father Jerome or from people like Father Cyril. Cyril was the prior of the monastery, which meant, as he lost no time in informing me the first time we met, that he was the second in command after the abbot. At sixty-eight, he exuded the jaundiced outlook of an unhappy man who knew there was no remedy for his unmet aspirations. He was too old to change or grow or do the things he’d left undone, and he took out his insecurities on anybody he thought inferior in intellect or station to himself.

  If I’d been a serious contender for a spot in the novitiate, Father Cyril would surely have done his best to snuff my candle. I expected that of him. He didn’t want anyone in his chosen small arena coloring outside the lines or challenging his authority. Besides, it was his job to enforce the hierarchy of the abbey, which was its organizing principle.

  As a newcomer, you either fit or you foundered. You either learned your place or you left. There could be no place for an up-start in a world where obedience was a vow, and learning to be like the others was a mark of fidelity. Jerome had obviously internalized that message long ago and was a knot of denial and mishap as a result.

  In that place I could see how a person could be broken down. It began happening to me. And once that was accomplished, once you had accepted the terms of the monastic rule and sufficiently humbled yourself before God and the order, Cyril’s ounce of authority, which in the outside world was on par with a manager’s power at a McDonald’s, would suddenly mean a hell of a lot more. In this way it was no different than the military. Submit. Become like the others, a pure predictable machine, ordered and in hand, and never, ever show weakness or need.

  But I was used to showing those things—a free woman’s privilege.

  I was clueless young Ned, at the bottom of the heap, seeking instruction, guidance, open arms. I got lost in the politics, and the pack mentality of the abbey, and I was amazed at how quickly it happened. Ned fell right into character. Ned did fall in love a little bit with Brother Vergil right away, just the way novices and postulants do and aren’t supposed to, and his crush had to be corrected, because that was the obligation of his superiors, cut it off at first sign. In intimate groups of men, Freudian impulses are expected to arise and with help and guidance resolve themselves. It’s part of the process in monasteries, too, part of what the novitiate is for, getting up all the buried stuff, all the daddy issues, the brother issues, the fag issues, and dispensing with them early, before they become entrenched and before the community has wasted too much time and too many resources on a maladaptive cub.

  Still, I was pretty sure that what I felt for Vergil wasn’t sexual, or even romantic, though the twisted mentality of that place, always on the lookout for forbidden desires, had made me wonder. The feelings were very real whatever their motive, and utterly unexpected. They were what drew me into the emotional vortex of the abbey and the fullest possible experience of being a young man at expressive loose ends in an all-male environment designed to rid young men of their messes.

  Experiencing this strange and foreign treatment firsthand, I developed new sympathy for boys and young men, and I felt sadness for the damage done to them in those rites of passage we all condone and inflict to make them into men. I remembered my brothers’ plights with this same process, seeing them as young boys weeping at home with my mother, telling her of the petty cruelties perpetrated against them by other boys and men at school and summer camp. In those days they were every bit as vulnerable as I was, and still able to show it. What’s more, they could still ask for and find comfort and sympathy for their pain. But now, like so many other men, if my brothers show emotion at all, they show only anger, because that’s all they’ve been allowed. I have not seen them cry for a very long time. Perhaps they can’t anymore.

  I know as much was true of at least one of the more candid monks, who, when I asked him how many times in his life he’d shed tears, said that he could count the number of times on the fingers of one hand.

  “I’m a very rational person,” he said ruefully. “I’m not given to outbursts. It’s part of my Germanic male upbringing.” He said he was just beginning the process of unlearning this with his own spiritual adviser, who, significantly enough, was a woman. But it was going slowly, and he had much to overcome. Almost all of the other monks had similar issues, he implied, but most of them weren’t even close to addressing them.

  In such an environment it should have come as no surprise when my first amicable week with Vergil turned inexplicably sour on a dime.

  He stopped inviting me to the shop. He began ignoring me at services, and emanated an unmistakable hostility when forced into close proximity with me. At lunch he sat as far away from me as possible and if we spoke at all in passing, he was curt and superior. It was an unmistakable snubbing that caught me completely off guard, and threw Ned into juvenile pangs of self-doubt.

  Father Jerome had noticed Vergil’s defection, too.

  But then he was looking for it. Kicks and wounds fit right into his schema. He claimed to know the ways of monasteries. He knew, he said, all about crushes and unnatural attachments, and the hierarchies of weakness and hurt, betrayal and emotional control, that festered under the ritual surface of cloistered life.

  “He’s doing you a favor by cutting you off now,” he said. But this was said in the context of so many other paranoid ideas and nasty undercurrents that I didn’t know whether or not to take him seriously. He sounded deeply stung most of the time, as I’m sure I did.

  He’d say things like, “Don’t ever trust anyone here. They’ll betray you. Believe me.”

  He was already paranoid about the ramifications of our “gay” conversation. Every time we saw each other he’d say, “You haven’t told anyone anything we said the other day, have you?”

  I assured him that I hadn’t, which was tru
e, but this didn’t seem to assuage his doubts or deflect his constant circumspection. He was afraid of being exposed to the group and his fear turned him vindictive.

  He assumed an I-told-you-so tone when he raised the subject of Vergil’s new and sudden coldness toward me.

  “Boy, he just can’t stand to be near you, can he?” he said with relish.

  “So I’m not just imagining it?” I asked.

  “Nope, he definitely doesn’t want anything to do with you.”

  That was a dig. He wasn’t just rubbing my face in his predictions, he was also having a go at me for being gay. Ever since the gay chat, he had been sliding jabs into our casual banter, the odd homophobic remark designed to needle me—like quoting a recent newspaper article in which a prominent member of the Catholic leadership had said that marrying a person of the same sex was like marrying your pet. He laughed heartily as he told me about it.

  “I fell on the floor when I read that. It was so funny.”

  “You’re an idiot,” I said, visibly angry. “And so is the person who said that.”

  As I turned away, I noticed that Brother Felix, whom I didn’t yet know by anything but name, was suppressing a laugh as he got up from his chair two seats down from Father Jerome.

  I had noticed Brother Felix before but hadn’t spoken to him directly. He, like many of the other monks, had glasses, a belly and a bald spot in the middle of his thinning hair. At fifty years of age, he was one of what I would come to think of as the midgeneration, or bridge, monks. He was significantly older than Brother Vergil but quite a bit younger than the octogenarian monks like Richard the Tall. He was post–Vatican II, but not so post that he’d entirely escaped the pull of the old ways. Yet he was still young enough to understand and identify with the younger generation. For me, this unique position in the abbey hierarchy would make him the key to understanding Ned’s emotional plight at the abbey and contextualizing it within the framework of the fraught masculinity at work there. He would prove a far more reliable source than Jerome, though not an entirely contradictory one.