The Monk and the Skeptic. Frank Browning
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he derived from them.
So far as I know, I had never before lain with a true priest, nor have I since. But it wasn’t long after Brother Peter left my apartment that wintry afternoon that I was propelled back more than two decades to an encounter with a magnificently beautiful and tortured young man who had fled from his seminary on the eve of his ordination. I met that man in Elysian Park in downtown Los Angeles. It was late on an autumn afternoon. The sun falling to the west turned the dry grass gold. The man had just dismounted a BMW muscle bike, which I soon learned was his only possession. He was dressed in Levi’s and a denim shirt, half buttoned. He hadn’t shaved for several days, though the bristle was thin. His eyes were set wide apart, deep and worrisome. I was tending my dog, an Australian shepherd lost in all the fragrances of canine paradise.
The man—Rafe—simply stared at me. Motionless. I pretended to read. He leaned himself against the saddle of his bike and began to stroke his bare and hairless chest. It became obvious that I was not reading. He walked over to me, sat on the same large rock where I was perched, put his arm around my shoulders, and kissed me.
“Can I come home with you?” he asked.
He had not showered in some days, but I agreed. The next morning he asked if he could stay with me.
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“I’ve been in the park for two weeks. I’m a priest. No, not really. I was supposed to be. I was supposed to be ordained this month. I can’t do it.” He began to sob. “I don’t have anywhere [to go],” he whimpered. “They’ll come and get me. Please.”
When I got home from work that afternoon, anguished over what to do and how to say it, Rafe was gone without a trace. There are hundreds of stories like Rafe’s, maybe thousands. Until I crossed paths with Brother Peter, Rafe had all but disappeared from my memory, but Brother Peter’s warm, tactile presence brought Rafe back as though it were with him that I had passed the afternoon. By now he would be the same age as Brother Peter. Calm and at peace as Brother Peter seemed, I would soon learn that his torment in his twenties was every bit as painful as Rafe’s had been. His suffering led him to the cusp of self-destruction.
I never heard again from Rafe, and I frequently felt guilty after his disappearance for not having offered him more. That guilt vanished in time, only to resurface in the hours after Brother Peter left. What sort of institution was this church that for all its promise of deliverance from suffering propelled many of its sons to the ledge of oblivion? Was I drawn to this cultured monk only by the titillation of the exotic? Did the one man’s success at negotiating the contradictions between his mission and his desire erase the other’s desperation at the hands of the same hierarchy? Must I judge? Must I suppress recollection of Rafe’s pain (and his very possible self-destruction) in order to continue these sublime afternoons enjoying both the dialogue and the lust that Brother Peter brought?
In an earlier era, when scarcely the only images of homosexuality were to be found on the cracked vases of classical Greece (and most of those hidden away behind brick walls), Rafe would likely have suffered in silent sublimation. Brother Peter would have restricted his engagements to long retreats in distant lands—not that homosexuality was unknown in the cloth. Prior to the twentieth century the priesthood was frequently the natural home for men who simply lacked the means or the libido to claim women for their dowries and the physical relief they offered. Boccaccio’s Decameron notwithstanding, those who entered the monastic orders were strictly surveilled. Exposure led not merely to defrocking, but also to destitution or death. As recently as half a century ago, there were no models of the happy homo rewarded with public posts as a standard check mark on the diversity chart, and there was scant counseling to reassure homosexual men and women that cocksucking, butt fucking, and cunnilingus were normal, natural sexual activities. In those times I would not have crossed trails with either Rafe or Brother Peter. And even now I wouldn’t entertain lifting the cloth of an obvious cleric. Somehow both the abstract notion as well as the image bears too much the incense of kitsch. Robes and dresses, beads and sequins, collars and bondage, sandals and pumps. To seek it out seems too much like a Sacha Baron Cohen version of Our Lady of the Flowers. Not to mention the bad odor of rampant priestly child abuse that hangs like an acid cloud from Dublin to Culver City, the images from Buñuel’s Viridiana with its swinging lamp in the form of a bishop’s head, or Torquemada (a Dominican) and the burning of the Jews.
Still, both of these believing Catholics tugged at my curiosity. Raised utterly secular (heathen, one friend said), I was fascinated that they seemed equally anchored in modernity and in the Middle Ages. If for Rafe that duality had proved to be an impossible division, Brother Peter seemed to suffer no anxiety at all. Despite my own lack of religious education, I have never harbored any personal hostility to those who do pursue religion. My father fended off itinerant Kentucky preachers by pulling out a newspaper clipping that he stored inside the Seth Thomas windup clock he kept on his desk. The clipping listed the schedule of Unitarian services in far away Lexington, Kentucky. Unitarians were an unknown species in the countryside and were neither more nor less suspicious than sodomites. The preachers usually skedaddled off in confusion. In fact I doubt that my father had ever attended a Unitarian meeting.
Priests on the other hand were fascinating and mysterious sorts for a boy who went to a two-room school and then scampered up the lane from the school bus into a house filled with thousands of books in multiple languages. Priests spoke Latin. They didn’t spit tobacco, or say hain’t for hasn’t, or pronounce the capital of Argentina “Boo-ee-nis Airs,” as my grade school teacher did. Father Hubert, from Saint Charles in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, was as likely to come out to the farm to buy apples on a Sunday afternoon as was anyone else, while the fire-and-brimstone evangelical sorts condemned business on the Sabbath. He seemed lean and fit beneath his black cassock, his face ruddy-cheeked behind wire-rimmed glasses. If memory serves me correctly, he once engaged my father, who had won himself the college Latin prize, in some sort of banter about Augustine and Utopian dreams. And finally, he lived in what I always regarded as the prettiest house in town, a plain, one-story, white building with a tile roof and leaded glass windows bent in French curves. It was said that he drank wine at dinner.
I was shocked to learn decades later about another priest down on the river—the Ohio—who had been sent to the penitentiary for disrobing choirboys and engaging them in cocksucking instruction (however much I might have profited from such expert direction). Cocksucker was then merely a dirty word schoolyard boys hurled at each other as a prelude to a fistfight. It was not an imaginable activity. As well, the reality of being a priest was nearly unimaginable. My young classmates were taught in their Sunday schools that priests were the agents of an alien power run from a secret and largely diabolical temple far across the waters and that Catholics were not Christians. In our home such talk was quickly dismissed as rural ignorance about which we should feel charity but say nothing. Yet such liberal enlightenment only intensified the exotic aura surrounding such an impossible creature: a man who talked about the Bible, who knew the Psalms and the Song of Solomon, and who wasn’t a stupid hillbilly.
Come puberty and the thrice-daily exercise of right-handed self-relief, the exoticism intensified. Catholic boys, I learned in high school, were admonished by their religious teachers not to touch themselves in that way lest they (a) go blind, (b) become deaf, (c) sprout pubic hair in their palms, or (d) descend into insanity. (Being neither Catholic nor any other sort of Christian, I rejected the first three as nonsense, but seriously wondered about the insanity option until well into my twenties. One heterosexual friend, subjected to Jesuit instruction, told me he had never dared to touch his sexual tools until after he had plunged into his first vagina, so terrified was he of the dark consequences. It must have been then that I began to understand personally the diabolical heritage of the Inquisition (whose chief agents were the Dominican order). How did these athletic young men who took up the cloth manage their impulses? And how could they square their rich education, fully accepting of science, evolution, the Big Bang, with the ludicrous teachings about hairy palms? I longed to ask our county public health director, the community’s highest-profile Irish Catholic, such questions. I even imagined a scenario in which his daughter, my coeditor at the high school paper, would invite me to their house where, as she was helping her mom with dinner, I would pose