Like the Sisters of Mercy in early California, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence took up their mission in bad repute. Unlike the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of P.I. have done everything in their power to maintain a bad repute.
They have their detractors. I was one. I wrote against them because I saw them as mocking heroic lives. Thirty years ago I had lunch with Jack Fertig, aka Sister Boom Boom, in a taqueria on Mission Street. He arrived wearing jeans and a T-shirt. On the wall at the rear of the restaurant was a crucifix—not, I assumed, ironic. The nun in mufti approached the crucifix and fell to his knees. He blessed himself; he bowed his head. Whether this was done for my benefit I don’t know. There was no follow-up, no smirk, no sheepishness, no further demonstration of piety. I did not question him about it; I was astonished. But, as I say, I wasn’t taken in.
Before he died, Jack Fertig converted to Islam.
A few years ago, I stood on a street corner in the Castro District; I watched as two or three Sisters of P.I. collected money in a coffee can for one of their charities. Their regalia looked haphazard on that day—jeans and tennis shoes beneath their skirts, like altar boys. I couldn’t help but admire how the louche nuns encouraged and cajoled the young men and women who approached. The Sisters’ catechism involved sexual precaution, drug safety, with plenty of trash repartee so as not to spook their lambs: “Do you have a boyfriend, honey? Are you getting enough to eat? Where do you sleep? Are you compliant with your meds?”
I experienced something like a conversion: Those men are ministering on a street corner to homeless teenagers, and they are pretty good at it. No sooner had I applied the word “good” than I knew it was the right word. Those men are good.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do what nuns have always done: They heal; they protect; they campaign for social justice; they perform works of charity. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have an additional mission: They scandalize.
For example, on Easter Sundays, the Sisters host the “Hunky Jesus Contest” in Dolores Park. The Sisters and their congregation seem only to be interested in satirizing the trappings of S&M already available in Roman Catholic iconography. (One cannot mock a crucifixion; crucifixion is itself mockery.)
I do not believe the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are enemies of the Church; I believe they are a renegade church of true vocation. They are scourges; they are jesters. Their enemy is hypocrisy. In a way, they are as dependent upon the Church as I am. They are as dependent on the nun in a brown wool suit as I am. Without the Church, without the nun, they would make no sense at all.
6. The Gray Cat
My father grew up an orphan. The extent of his patriarchy was his sense of responsibility to our family. He otherwise observed no particular rules or rites of masculinity beyond self-possession, and he imposed none beyond respect for our mother. My father was mild and bemused, never touching but lightly, as a child will pet a cat. While our two older siblings had proper names at home, I was “boy” in direct address by my father and “the boy” when I attracted some notice in the third person. Helen was “the girl.” Our home was entrusted (in the prayers of our parents) to the care of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and we all rather liked it that way.
Outside the Rodriguez home, God made covenants with men. Covenants were cut out of the male organ. A miasma of psychological fear—fear of smite, fear of flinty tools, fear of lightning—crackled in God’s wake. Scripture began to smell of anger—a civet smell. Scripture began to taste of blood—of iron, of salt. I associated heavy, dangerous elements with fathers, with men, but not with my own father.
When I was a child we had a cat. The cat had kittens. She hid them in the shed. The Father Cat, as we called an indolent wild gray, searched for and found the kittens; he smelled them, I guess, or he heard them mewing. He entered the shed. He carried the kittens away in his mouth, one by one, to kill them. I saw the Father Cat flee the shed with a kitten in his soft mouth. I yelled Stop! I threw a clod of dirt at him. He would not stop, could not; he looked confused, utterly overruled by his natural compulsion. His eyes were terrible; they were not his normal eyes. They were fixed in jealousy—pulled back, as if by some invisible hand at the nape of his neck. That was the name the child’s imagination branded him with: The Jealous Cat. He came again. Even after my mother came out to shoo him away with a broom, he loitered at the edge of the yard, biding his time, withstanding the barrage of clods exploding on the wooden fence.
I see dependable Everett Fox (The Five Books of Moses) has wondered before me, as thousands before him have wondered, about a “bizarre episode” in Exodus: Yahweh divulges to Moses the mission Yahweh has chosen him for. Moses is to return to Egypt and, once in the presence of Pharaoh, is to demand the release of the Israelites in Yahweh’s name. Moses accepts Yahweh’s command with great trepidation and every excuse in the book—but accepts. So Moses with his wife and sons begins his journey to Egypt. In the desert, at night, Yahweh finds Moses in his tent and seeks to kill him! Moses’s wife takes up a flint and cuts off her son’s foreskin; she touches the foreskin to Moses’s legs and says: “Indeed, a bridegroom of blood are you to me!” Whereupon Yahweh releases Moses.
Everett Fox cites the great rabbi, Martin Buber, who explains this passage (in Fox’s capitulation) as “an event that sometimes occurs in hero stories: The deity appears as divine demon and threatens the hero’s life. Perhaps this underlines the dangerous side of contact between the human and the divine.” Fox explicates the passage further as a prefiguring of the blood smeared on the door lintels of the Israelites during the tenth Egyptian plague.
I can only think of the hormonally conflicted gray cat.
I read an article recently about a medical study that traced a decline in levels of testosterone among new fathers, if those fathers were intimately involved in their infants’ care—feeding, holding, changing. Thus does Nurture attempt to vanquish the gray cat.
In Hebrew scripture there is no more valuable signifier than male seed. It is the mucilage of Yahweh’s blessing. It is the particulate matter of immeasurable proportion, of metaphor: as many as, as numerous as . . . It is the promise of the future. You will hold the desert land by your seed. Multiply, be fruitful, is the overarching instruction. Important kings and prophets come of very bad conceptions. Seed is God’s intention, however scattered.
But now it is the twenty-first century and the mitered, bearded, fringed holy men have cast women as gray cats. Destroyers of seed.
7. Daddy and Papa
“He” is the default setting in scripture—Jewish, Christian, Islamic. The perception, the preference, the scriptural signifier, the awe of the desert religions, is of a male God. Father. Abba. Lord. Jesus refers to God always as Father, though he insists that God is spirit. Yahweh is unnameable but for the name He (as I was going to write) gives Himself: I Am. There is no “He” in I Am. The theologian John L. McKenzie proposes (The Two-Edged Sword) that a more accurate translation of the holy name might be: “He brings into being.” Bringing into being was a potency that the prophets, the evangelists, the compilers of scripture, conceived anthropomorphically as male.
In the desert cultures of the Middle East, religious communities regard homosexual acts as abominations—unnatural, illegal, unclean. But homosexual behavior does not preclude marriage or fatherhood. The notion of a homosexual identity is a comic impossibility. What alone confers an appropriate sexual identity on the male is fatherhood.
Two young men fussing over a baby girl in a stroller. You were not charmed. You said no straight man would make that kind of fuss.
No straight woman, either, Darling.
The new gay stereotype is domestic, childrearing—homosexuals willing to marry at a time when the heterosexual inclination is to dispense with marriage.
Divorce rates in the United States and Europe suggest that women are not happy with the relationships they have with men, and vice versa. And whatever that unha
ppiness is, I really don’t think gay people are the cause. On the other hand, whatever is wrong with heterosexual marriage does have some implication for homosexuals.
The majority of American women are living without spouses. My optimism regarding that tabulation is that a majority of boys in America will grow up assuming that women are strong. My worry is that as so many men absent themselves from the lives of the children they father, boys and girls will grow up without a sense of the tenderness of men.
The prospect of a generation of American children being raised by women in homes without fathers is challenging for religious institutions whose central conception of deity is father, whose central conception of church is family, whose only conception of family is heterosexual. A woman who can do without a husband can do without any patriarchal authority. The oblique remedy some religious institutions propose for the breakdown of heterosexual relationships is a legal objection to homosexual marriages by defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
The gay counteroffensive to the religious argument is (the American impulse) to seek an African American analogy to homosexual persecution, to claim some historical equivalence to the government-sanctioned persecution of African Americans over centuries. Many African American churches take offense to that particular tack. From the pulpit, the argument sounds something like: We didn’t choose our race; homosexuals choose their lifestyle.
I believe there is a valid analogy to be drawn between the legal persecution of homosexuality and the legal persecution of miscegenation—both “crimes against Nature.” But the course more comparable to the gay rights movement is the feminist movement, dating to the nineteenth century.
Suffragettes withstood condemnation from every institution of their lives, condemnation that employed the adjectives of unnatural aspiration, adjectives such as “thwarted,” “hysterical,” “strident,” “shrill.” Still, it was the brave suffragette (and not the tragic peacock Oscar Wilde) who rescued my sexuality.
In the twentieth century, gays emerging from the closet were beneficiaries of the desire of women to define themselves outside the familial structure. The feminist movement became inclusive not only of wives, mothers, and unmarried women but also of lesbians, and thus, by extension of nonfamilial sisterhood, of homosexual men, of the transgendered, of the eight-legged acronym, LGBT.
A generation ago feminists came up with “Ms.” as a titular designation of gender not based upon marital status or age. Ms. was no sooner on offer than most women I know and most institutions gratefully adopted it. Ms. transported the woman signified out the door and into public life, independent of cultural surmise.
Using the homeliest of metaphors—coming out of the kitchen; coming out of the closet—heterosexual women and homosexuals announced, just by being themselves without apology, the necessity of a reordered civil society. We are—women and homosexuals are— for however long I don’t know, dispensed (by constitutional laws, state laws) from having to fit into heterosexual roles and heterosexual social patterns that have been upheld for so long by reference to “the natural law.” Natural law, as cited against sodomy, against abortion, against birth control, against miscegenation, is neither exactly the “natural moral law,” which is a philosophical construct—the understanding placed in us by God at the creation—nor exactly the law of Nature; that is, how Nature works. Rather, it is a value placed upon behavior by someone or some agency, most often with reference to some divinely inspired statutory text, that denounces or declares illegal or punishable any deviation from what the authority or the text declares to be natural human behavior. Boys will be boys and girls like glitter.
I know there are some homosexuals who see the gay couples in line for marriage licenses, or filling out forms for adoption, or posing for wedding announcements in the New York Times, as antithetical to an ancient culture of refusal that made the best of a short story—of youth and chance and public toilets and then the long half-life of irony and discretion.
There certainly are homosexuals of my generation who never dared hope for a novel of marriage but only one of renunciation. E. M. Forster imagined a marriage novel, but then stipulated it not be published during his lifetime. The Church regards homosexual marriage as a travesty that will promote the undoing of marriage. But I propose the single mother is a greater threat to the patriarchal determination of what constitutes a natural order.
I am thinking of David Grossman, the Israeli novelist, who, in a profile in the New Yorker, said: “If God came to Sarah and told her, ‘Give me your son, your only one, your beloved, Isaac,’ she will tell him, ‘Give me a break,’ not to say ‘Fuck off.’”
I am thinking of the Mormon mother who told me on Temple Square in Salt Lake City: “The Church teaches us that family is everything. And then the Church tells me that I should abandon my homosexual son. I will not do it!”
It is clear to me that civic attitudes toward homosexuality and gay marriage are changing. In countries we loosely describe as Western, opinion polls and secular courts are deciding in favor of the legalization of gay marriage. Nevertheless, the desert religions will stand opposed to homosexuality, to homosexual acts, unless the desert religions turn to regard the authority of women. And that will not happen until the desert religions reevaluate the meaning of women. And that will not happen until the desert religions see “bringing into being” is not a power we should call male only. And that will not happen until the desert religions see the woman as father, the father as woman, indistinguishable in authority and creative potence.
My place in the Church depends upon you, Darling.
8. The Sultan’s Wives
But you’re right, of course.
“Darling” is a feeble impulse to cover some essential embarrassment in my situation. In my life, I should say. Will I be bringing a spouse, for example. Well, that depends, doesn’t it?
It is the queer lexicon that is behind the times now. Is my partner a husband? Is my husband a partner? We are not a law firm. Is my partner my “friend,” a wreath of quotation marks orbiting his head? Lover sounds sly. Boyfriend sounds fleeting. Husband sounds wistful.
This might amuse you, Darling, now that you are dead. It wouldn’t have . . . well, maybe it would have. In the dawn of a warm spring morning, the road to Jerusalem was shrouded in fog. Jimmy and I arrived at the American Colony Hotel. The Palestinian clerk looked at me, looked at Jimmy. The clerk said there was a problem with our reservation. The problem was that the suite we had reserved—all the suites, in fact—had only one bed.
That’s no problem, I said. (I was annoyed with myself; I had asked friends who know Jerusalem well if there would be a problem about our sharing a room. And I had been assured there would not be a problem.)
For the desk clerk, there was a problem.
In a previous life, this wonderful hotel had been the palace of an Ottoman sultan whose several wives were salted away in various rooms that still surround the courtyard; Begum Monday next door to Begum Tuesday, and so on. Now suites.
Ah! The reservation clerk seized upon a solution; he even dinged his little bell.
Please, if we would care to take a little breakfast on the patio, he would see to our room.
After we had finished with breakfast, the clerk led us up a staircase to our room, and voilà: A cot was unfolded and was being made up as a daybed by a middle-aged Palestinian man whose sensibility we were conspiring to protect. The Palestinian man finished smoothing the coverlet then he stood back from the cot. He turned to us, where we stood in the doorway. He smiled. He winked!
Q: Why do I stay in the Catholic Church?
A: I stay in the Church because the Church is more than its ignorance; the Church gives me more than it denies me. I stay in the Church because it is mine.
I meant what I said to the nun: I will stay as long as she does. I may even stay longer. The Church and I have the same dilemma, really. To
wit: “Tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ [CDF, Persona humana 8.] They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, second edition, copyright 2001. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Libreria Editrice Vaticana.)
I can walk away from the bishops’ formulation of my “intrinsic” disorder, but the Church cannot walk away from the bishops’ formulation, even though some within the Church may be sympathetic toward homosexuals. I know this is supremely boring to non-queers and non-Catholics and readers of Faulkner, but stay a moment and then we will go to Costco. Sexual complementarity is not, obviously, insurmountable, or there would be no problem. I will object with my last breath, however, to anyone denying “genuine affective complementarity” to queers. I would not deny “genuine affective complementarity” to a dog. Or a cat. Or a parakeet. (My aunt had a parakeet named Sanchez. They were devoted to each other.) Or to an apostle.
At the time I write this, the only institution on earth that recognizes my ability to love is Costco. On the Costco registry, I have a spouse.
What I will not countenance is that the Church denies me the ability to love. That is what “affective complementarity” is: It is love. If that is the Church’s position, the Church is in error. Keep the word “marriage.” Let marriage mean one man and one woman. (Sanchez died a week after my aunt died.) But I want a word. How about “love”?
We are gathered here, in the sight of the security cameras at Costco, to witness . . .
What are you smiling at, Darling?
9. An Angel Hovers over the Garden of Eden
Can we do something on Sunday? A movie? A walk?
If not each other’s walkers, we were certainly each other’s talkers. A professor of mine remarked a good many years ago that the vocal cords are the most reliable, longest-enduring sexual organs. It was the exercise of vocal cords that led us to step over the bodies of our sleeping lovers to drive twenty miles north, to slide into the banquette of the Garden of Eden. A brilliant February morning. A foggy July evening. Your skirt hiked up for driving; your yearly new car.
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