The Monk and the Skeptic. Frank Browning
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life speaks of a genuine spiritual sensibility. In a world of unprecedented sexual openness and opportunity, that spiritual journey is no longer free of the challenges and temptations of the flesh. Certainly that is the case with “Brother Peter,” who continues to wrestle with the dual dictates of devotion and desire.
In which Brother Peter agrees to interrogation and offers praise to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
New Year’s Day, 1986. Sylvester, the titan of queer soul, took over American television’s Tonight Show, that evening hosted by the comedian Joan Rivers, and sang his gold-plated anthem, “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real.” A few minutes later on the talk show set, Rivers asked him how his parents reacted when they found out he was a drag queen.
“I’m not a drag queen,” he retorted. “I’m Sylvester.”
Thanks to YouTube, anybody, including Brother Peter, can call Sylvester back from the grave to relive the moment. My first conversation with Brother Peter, to my surprise, opened with the case of Sylvester and what it meant to be “mighty real,” what the difference was between Peter’s reality in clerical robes, in denim, or in biker leather. He told me about the two drag shows he’d gone to the previous week.
“Drag shows?” I said.
“Yes,” he answered in the same tone as if he’d gone to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. He had known these particular drag artists for at least ten years. One of them—whose nom de guerre is Madame Raymonde, modeled after the famous heart-of-gold prostitute from the 1930s film Hôtel du Nord—had made his name singing in a Parisian piano bar where Brother Peter was an intermittent regular. Brother Peter had seen some of Madame Raymonde’s sketches online, but he’d never been to a full-fledged drag show.
“Drag? Why drag?” I asked.
“The idea of changing your personal presence completely, the idea of a ‘total transportation.’”
Silently I waited for more. But priest that he was, nothing was forthcoming. It was for me to pose the questions, and when I wanted more, to ask for it. Some people would have stopped the dialogue then. Too much work. The game too tedious. Had he averted his eyes as though bored or genuinely closed off, our encounters might have ended, a glance at the watch, a clearing of the throat, and a shrug. But behind the formality of his confessional training, within the priestliness of the moment, I took his silence instead as a signal of reticent frailty, an indication that he would like to speak and speak not as he would in his formal confessions but to someone he hoped was a kindred spirit.
“So do you make a total transformation in all the identities you wear?” I asked.
“I think I do transform myself, but listen well: all that is form, outside of things. It’s obvious that when I’m in the monastic robes that haven’t been altered since the Middle Ages or when I’m in street clothes that’s a ‘transformation.’ No question. But I’ve done nothing to my sexual identity. I’m a man and I remain a man, unlike these boys on stage who change completely their gender from masculine to feminine. But even though I can feel people may look at me differently depending on whether I’m in my monastic habit or in street clothes, I’m still exactly the same person.”
Sooner than I’d anticipated we were cutting directly to questions of spirit, flesh, identity, and the most mystical of moments in Christian mythology, transfiguration: What is the nature of the human body, how does it (how do we) express our essential nature, and in expressing what it is that we are, do we touch, are we guided by the light that is the integral beauty of the soul? Or is it still possible even in this passage of testo and twitter identities to hold on to the notion of integral selves and essential souls? We’ll return to much of this in a later conversation addressing the question of the Christian idea of an eternal body (old, worn-out, and flabby like Lazarus or the hunky archangel Michael in our family Bible whose warrior physique was one of my earliest jerk-off images). At the beginning of our talks I was much keener to know of Brother Peter’s own personal transformations and how he navigated these several identities so clearly linked to his own dress habits—white hooded robe or leather and denim that hugged his ass tight. Underlying Thomistic theology concerning physical transfiguration would have to wait.
We dwelt instead with Madame Raymonde, otherwise known as Denis D’Arcangelo. “Actors live with permanent transformation, becoming other personalities when they’re on stage. Off stage when I knew him, he dressed like any other guy,” Brother Peter said. “I never saw him looking like a woman, always just a man.” Madame Raymonde is rather more like Dame Edna Everage, the Australian cross-dressing comedian, than a real spikes-and-sequins drag queen. Though Dame Edna became a BBC and later an American television phenomenon of the 1980s—and officially at least was straight—Madame Raymonde is far from straight. Her accordion-playing accompanist sometimes joins her in tap-dancing routines, dressed in flimsy flapper-era outfits at overwhelmingly gay clubs. Together they keep a European touring schedule that would have exhausted Sarah Bernhardt. They are everything that Brother Peter is not: slutty, lower class, peppered with sex and the gutter. “[She] often does songs that are very sad, inspired from the demimonde of working-class bistros, of prostitution, of the women and men who work the streets,” he began. As he spoke a softness came to his eyes, the suppleness of sympathy crept across his cheeks, not at all like the paternalistic priest ready to take confession, but more that of a fellow traveler who had had his own experience in the worn pathways that trim the bushes of desire and loss. “She comes out of the same tradition as the dance halls of the 1930s that were loose . . . naughty,” he added. He looked across the table where the tape recorder spun and began to hum a tune I didn’t know. He had agreed that our conversations should be recorded, but only our conversations. His eyes took on the same light he’d used at the Pierre et Gilles show. Our knees connected.
But we were working.
“Well,” he went on, “the performance was even more compelling because the poor boy—the accordionist tap dancer—had fallen and broken his knee that evening or maybe the day before, so he had to perform on crutches with his leg in a cast, which meant they had to change the dance routines. He had to be suffering. That is why it was so impressive. The show was very, very beautiful and very touching.”
“Touching?”
The hungry, cruising eyes softened toward empathy. “It made me laugh and cry. I cried because in some of their songs—and I believe that’s what interests me in these kinds of shows with men who play women—because they can say things about love, about tenderness, about frailty, about the need to be loved that people often don’t appreciate or don’t forcefully admit when it comes from a tough, virile man. You know, a woman can speak about feeling fragile, her need to be loved, the wounds of love and life, the search for a great love that so often results in disappointment, and thus she can express something more tender, more subtle than a traditional man [can].”
“Why do you think that is?” I asked.
“Because I think that in our civilization, society says that to be a man you have to be strong, you have to be a seducer, you have to be macho. We give very little attention to expressing feelings among men. That’s always seen as a weakness.”
“It’s the same in the Bible isn’t it? The men in the Bible, at least in the Old Testament, are emblems of macho ferocity.”
“The men of the Bible are able to express their feelings. They can cry, they can say that they love. Take David. David loved. He said so. He cries for those he loves, his friend Jonathan, his son Absalom when he is murdered. He doesn’t hesitate to express his feelings, his suffering, or his pain. In the Bible it’s more complicated than you say, more complex.”
He paused, waiting for me to say something, but this time I remained silent. The Bible my agnostic father insisted I read as one of the foundations of English poetry was also