Before coming out, and even before my sex education classes, I went with my mom and godmother to see the new Pope roll through the streets of Chicago. I must have been about 8 years old. I had only a vague idea at that time of what it meant to be “The Pope,” but I knew he was the head of “The Church” and that he was supposed to be in almost direct communication with God, more than any other mortal. Packed along the curbs of some Chicago street, we watched him whiz by in his convertible (that was before the days of the Popemobile). He turned to us and (yes, I was sure I saw him do it!) made the sign of the cross right at me. “Did you see that? He was looking right at me!”
“I really felt the warmth coming from him,” noted my mom.
“He’s a good man,” said Katy.
Aunt Katy. My mom and I visited her every December 23rd in her little apartment in Blue Island, Illinois where she sat next to her ceramic Christmas tree and her quilted map of Ireland holding out Christmas presents to us. She used expressions like “That’s a lovely shade o’ yeller!” and “Don’t you look swish-maisey!” Towards the end of her life, Aunt Katy would become helplessly senile, having violent seizures in her lonely apartment where she’d fall into her own vomit and lie in it, sometimes for days, before someone found her.
Driving her home that day, we saw some fresh black graffiti: “The Pope is Satan.”
Sweet Aunt Katy was deeply hurt by that. “They didn’t know what they were saying.”
Sweet forgiving Katy who went to mass every Sunday like they’d told her to. She didn’t know what she was saying.
• • •
What if we were to allow ourselves to see things in terms of Christian mythology just for a moment. We might start by asking ourselves, “Just how will Satan collect the souls he’s got coming to him?”
The first thing to do is find the Pope a new home. In Central Africa. Say Rwanda. In a refugee camp on one of those imaginary little lines that’s fucked up the dynamics of hundreds of ancient tribes—a border laid down by Europeans to mark off their own interpretation of the limits of African “countries.” Get him a nice grass hut all set up in the middle of the mud, and set him down in it, white robes and all, next to a couple goats and a bonfire. Then take off. Let him figure out God’s plan for him.
The people probably wouldn’t tear him to pieces. That would be too fair and quick. Anyway, he’s convinced half of Africa he’s on their side. His God holds the secrets. His white robes hold the riches of heaven. They’d probably worship him like a god. People are stupid in ways that other animals and plants could never be. Americans are stupid. Europeans are stupid. And, yes, Africans are stupid. So they would give him all their food and starve themselves to death to feed him like a king. They’d wash his feet in precious oils. They’d pray his prayers in a language they don’t even speak.
But God would take care of him. God is everywhere and everything. God is all the good and all the bad. God is in the Pope, and God is in the diseases that would rot out his intestines. For starters, he’d catch bilharzia. He’d know he was going to catch them, but there’d be no way to sterilize the water, and he’d get thirsty. Snails, lurking in the lake’s depths, would be busy spouting little parasites left and right. A friendly young local would scoop up some of them in a wooden ladle and feed it to Popesy, who’d have no choice but to drink from the well of microscopic life. Parasites would begin eating into the veins of his upper intestines. He’d shit them back into the lake to feed the snails till his next gulp. His body would help manufacture its own torture.
The dysentery would come from the blood flukes and a million other fun little friends writhing around inside him. Shitting blood and pus and weeping like a baby, he’d think of himself as Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. No parasite in the world could wipe out that mega-martyr complex. Even while witnessing the resilience of those suffering around him first-hand, he’d accept his own physical agony as a mystical penance, suffered at the hand of Satan to insure the safety of God’s Good Church in the world. He’d pray and pray. But there’d be no Satan and no God. Just bloody, pussy shit dribbling out of his withered old ass.
The bugs would be next, burrowing their eggs into his skin: lice, tsetse flies, scabies, crabs, ticks, fleas, bedbugs, mosquitoes… all transporting a special sub-Saharan souvenir to welcome him to the continent which he and his church did so much to help. He’d develop all the old favorites (malaria, yellow fever, hepatitis A&B, cholera…) and lots of new and unknowns. By some miracle, he’d remain precariously balanced on the edge of life and death, covered in the powders and trinkets of dozens of tribal witch doctors whose remedies he would reject in the name of his beloved Roman Empire.
The stench of the dead around him, rotting and festering along with his own boils, sores and skin diseases would stink clear up to his high heaven, producing no visible effect from the cosmos but a further increase in temperature. With his papal robes torn into dishrags, people would stop being impressed. They’d begin to suspect that maybe old whitey was the reason for the agony they were suffering. All the village prostitutes, whom he personally converted to his condomless Christianity, would force him to reveal what he was hiding under his demonic robes. Nothing but the rock of the church, he’d swear. Ripping off his garments, they’d find his little dick withered up like a cherry stem and oozing with gangrenous pus.
Seeing for themselves that he was neither god nor demon, they’d take pity, giving him an emergency transfusion with blood pooled together from the whole community and injected into his ass with a makeshift bamboo syringe. He’d never have time to feel the long-term effects of the HIV in his body since he’d die within seconds of the deadly dose. But the tribal cocktail would be so full of other nice bits of viral information that he’d live his last seconds with more intensity than the rest of his entire life compacted together. One agony upon another would surge through every nerve, pore and cell of his being. In the flash of an instant he would know what it meant to lose one’s sight with CMV and cough out the insides of PCP-infested lungs. To feel the marrow of his bones evaporate into thin air and hear the splintering of their brittle husks. To watch the skin peel back from gaping holes in his plastic-yellow chest and arms. To lose his speech to sores melting the gums off blackened teeth and a swollen blue tongue bleeding against the roof of his lesion-ridden mouth. His blood would freeze then boil. And in the final moment before he expired, he would—by some quirky irony of the godless, Satanless universal chaos—be granted one millisecond free of agony in which to grasp the full implications of an unimaginably horrifying idea just entering his head for the first time in his interminable and unfortunate existence: “I am no better and no worse than any other man, woman, plant, or beast on the face of the earth.”
Or would he, in his last feverish vision, imagine his god opening a golden gate to eternity, welcoming him inside with the wave of a skeletal arm? And would that ghastly god, boiling an eternity of poisonous juices, look more like Satan than Jesus? And would that god say, through its theatrically sick grin, “I’m the rock of your church, sweetie. I’ve been waiting for you for a looong time.” And would that revelation come as even the slightest surprise to the papal refuse, or would he bow his sobbing head and cry, “You never told me our contract had come due!”
Now that I’m no longer a fourteen-year-old kid waiting for the stern librarian to look away so I can check out the word “homosexuality” in the card catalogue, I can write about what I want to and stick it in my desk drawer or mail it to a thousand publishing houses or hang it out on the clothesline for the neighbors to see. I can take off my pants and dance naked in my apartment and play with my pee pee or stick it in another boy’s butt. If I want to declare that Darren and Paul and Dan and all the other names on The List of People I Fucked are all part of my family, I can go right ahead and do it. No one’s going to stop me. It’s a free country, and I can write what I want. I can sell what I want to too. If no one wants to read about the guys I fucked then it’s no one’s fault that my book wasn’t read. I should have written about something people found more interesting and important, just like the Great Books of All Time do. The books that everyone rushes out to get their hands on, even today, because their words are so full of wisdom and beauty. Books like ___________insert titles of your favorite books here___________.
If I’d grown up in Cairo or Bangkok or Mexico City, I’d have different ways of thinking about my desire and communicating it to people. Maybe I’d let married men fuck me in alleys, and maybe I’d like it like that. Or maybe I’d get married, assuming all men had trouble fucking their wives without conjuring up fantasies of soldiers’ taut bodies. Or maybe, if I’d grown up in a little village in New Guinea, I’d be fucking girls and guys in sacred tribal rites, and maybe I’d like it both ways. Or maybe I’d be playing the role of the Sacred Drag Queen in an American Indian village. Or under a distant island’s blinding white moon, on the floor of a mud hut with the bodies of my brothers and cousins pressed up around me, maybe my longing for touch would never have the chance to develop into an insatiable thirst. Or maybe some mad emir would chop my balls off in one cruel swoop of the machete for cruising his only son and heir. And then again, maybe I’d love a boy in one of the most homophobic societies on earth, without ever uttering an apology. And maybe that love would give birth to revolutions. That we can place our chests against each other to feel veins thumping through one another’s skin—through muscle and bone—is the tangible, living miracle merely hinted at by every religious text ever printed.