I did my glow in the dark rosary beads every night. I squeezed my eyes tight to summon up God, and I nearly heard him. My teachers had suggested the possibility that if I were really special, I might be cloistered with the most sincere, devout elite to study for the priesthood. The appeal wasn’t sexual at that early stage. It was all about the glamour.
I remember getting into the fashion accessories of priests. Those dark cassocks and silver crosses were the accepted form of all the demonic props from my favorite horror films. By the time I reached the eighth grade, my classmates said (or had I taught them to say?) that I was most likely to become “The Priest with the Damien Stare.” To perform an exorcism—that dark, sacred and exclusive ritual in which one confronts Satan and wins—was a privileged rite I longed to experience—though I saw it as mere metaphor, even at that early age, just as I took the “Body and Blood of Christ” in the chalice and host as a mere symbol of God. The whole hierarchy of the Holy Trinity, its relationship to mortal beings, its manifestation on earth, and the words used to speak of it seemed infinitely complicated. I hoped to understand with an algebraic clarity—as one hopes for an immediate understanding of the grammatical rules of a foreign language—the exact order, nature and name of each spiritual and physical entity. Though I wouldn’t have been able to express any of this with my limited awareness of my thirteen years, I was mainly interested in becoming a priest out of my desire to be initiated into the grammar and vocabulary of a complicated language that would allow me to participate in the world’s highest theatre, in front of the world’s most ornate altars, in the world’s most complicated, rich, and mysterious secret order.
That year, I visited a cousin at the seminary where he was attending high school. When I saw the dormitories where the boys slept near each other, I learned for the first time that this school was different from others in that something took place here after hours that couldn’t be described to outsiders. There was vague talk of evening prayers and morning services, rites that could only be completely understood by the initiated. I wanted to know what transpired here when the lights went out. What mystical secrets were planted in the hearts of the young seminarians to allow them to get closer to the most beautiful, loving and gentle man who ever lived—Jesus Christ? What sacrifices had to be made in order to achieve such an enlightened state?
It’s easy to imagine why my homosexuality might have attracted me to this prison-like, all-male universe, though at that early age I certainly didn’t think any sex would come from the experience. But over the course of my year inside the seminarians’ world, it became evident to me—even as my budding sexuality became equally apparent—that the church had baited mostly young homosexual boys who were unsure about their invisible sexual urges, those strange stirrings that lacked both a name and a purpose in the “moral” society. The seminary was a place that gave a spiritual reason for these disturbing drives (we were the ones “chosen” to follow God) and permitted them to exist in a deliciously restrained fashion. Here one could confess one’s dirty secrets at great length with older men (at least one of them, the most popular priest on the grounds, was even cute) who shared remarkably similar (and thus “normal”) fantasies. Touching was limited to warm “brotherly” hugs before communion (unless there was real sex going on in some Reconciliation room I never knew about, being only a Freshman), and sex was always discussed apologetically behind closed doors, preventing an explosive disclosure that would have shattered the whole delicate universe. Imagine the orgy which would have resulted from a joint confession in which every boy and priest admitted to lusting uncontrollably after the man flesh around him!
Jesus on his cross was no more here than a mythic homosexual fantasy shared by a group of repressed, horny men united under a protective lie. Somewhere deep in each young seminarian’s quivering heart was an unspeakable, indescribable prayer. If only someone would have shattered the fragile but effective boundaries that barely held us back from jumping upon the altar to tear down the cheap wooden symbol, cracking it to sound off a glorious fuckfest—a mass of naked young bodies on the chapel floor! For that was the rite that every boy dreamed of in some part of his psyche when the priest offered up the “body and blood’ of Christ—transformed from something inanimate and stale into a pulsing, living promise of sexuality before the eager mouths and pricks of the other fragile children bent at their knees before those empty, helpless symbols.
It was a mistake to think of the priests (hardly more than boys themselves) as sinister, calculating demons who lured innocent young men into an infernal trap of mind-altering ritual, as I would later come to think of them when I would verbally reject the church to embrace a shiny new atheism as my chosen religion. But by destroying my references and blaming the believers, I failed to recognize the complexity of the world from which I thought I’d escaped.