The Monk and the Skeptic. Frank Browning
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In any case, the show, I can tell you, it touched me deeply.”
Brother Peter’s use of the Bible was not always as curt and formulaic as that response, but like many religious men who had come to their religious life late—he was well into his twenties when he took his orders—he was always cautious about revealing any fissures of doubt. He insisted that doubt had never touched him since he gave himself over to the order. My companion, Christophe, who was raised in the church, occasionally listened to parts of our conversations; for him, Brother Peter’s words varied little from mainline Catholic dogma.
To many gay priests—not a locution Brother Peter uses; he prefers to say that he is a man who is a priest who has homosexual desire—the conflict between desire and religious stricture is insurmountable, as it was for Rafe. The conflict provokes first a terrible wedge of doubt in the ecclesiastical regime, then it challenges the practice, and finally it weakens the faith. But what I found so compelling in our encounters (because our encounters were often as physically engaged as they were intellectually stimulating) was how they seemed actually to reinforce Peter’s faith. Faith, he told me at one point, had enabled him to understand the frailty of desire. Frailty is a word that came up often. He believed deeply that at a certain point the pure power of faith would release him from desire. It was as though his transformation from being an ordinary, secular young man raised far from Communion and confession into a man of the cloth had itself opened an extraordinary insight into the perpetual tension between soul and flesh. Touching the cusp of early manhood as a fairly standard heterosexual, including erotic adventures with women, he had not been visited by genuine love until he fell into his first grand passion with a man who happened to be a middle-aged priest (about which we will also return to later). Most of my gay and straight friends were ready to dismiss his account as a classic story of a closeted youth who finally realized who he was sexually.
But no, Brother Peter insisted with some agitation that by the simplest measure he had never had any problems becoming aroused by women, and he had no recollection of locker room or campground attractions to other boys or men. First he had a thoroughly unexpected spiritual experience unrelated to any other personal attachment, which led to his initial religious studies, during which he in turn fell in love with the older priest. As he told the story, it was a triple transformation: from nonbeliever to believer, from secular life to spiritual mission, from personal isolation to love. The switch from hetero desire to homo desire was the least profound of these transformations. His first intense spiritual revelations came not as a flight from forbidden desires (the usual clichéd track that took tormented, young gay men to the cloth); rather, his intensifying devotion led him to pursue the multiple contradictions of being fully human. Meanwhile, though he expressed no interest in living within a fully gay context, progressively he needed to engage deeply with the visible, organized gay world. Drag, transvestism, motorcycle clubs, making pickups in art galleries, admiring the hearty male bodies he found in the steam rooms of the public gyms wherever he was sent to preach: these were and are all doors to that experience.
As were his encounters with a group I would have assumed he would detest for its manifest blasphemy: the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
“Mother Rita,” he began with another smile.
“Mother Rita?”
“Mother Rita of Calvary, or ‘L’archimere Rita du Calvaire.’ That’s what they called her in France.” Brother Peter came to know Mother Rita when he was visiting France and working in Paris. Mother Rita remains the founder and mother superior at the Paris convent of the International Order of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, founded in 1979 in San Francisco. There are now thirty-one convents of the Sisters in eight countries. Regular fare for a soft news day on television, the Sisters—all militant gay men—appear publicly in nun’s garb with starched white head dress, white-face, and often full beards. Along with San Francisco’s Cockettes, they are the true mothers of radical gender-fuck. For a man who takes the word of the Bible seriously, not least the distinction imposed in the Old Testament on the inviolate distinctions between male and female, it was, to say the least, a stretch to hear Brother Peter describe the Sisters as kindred spirits.
“At the beginning,” he admitted, “I was a bit shocked, but when I first met some of the boys myself back at the beginning—and some, you know, are no longer with us for health and other reasons—and I spoke with some of my [gay] friends who were in touch with them, and then when I read their website, two things struck me. First their use of certain religious folkloric effects, like their robes and the white cornets on their heads. That didn’t bother me too much. After all, that’s just folklore [as was women’s traditional headdress in their variations from Brittany to the Alps to the Peloponnesus].
“In Europe, when people saw the nun’s outfits and headdresses in the nineteenth century, it was a sign of a caregiver, someone who visited the poor, someone who pricked your conscience, overall a positive image that drew people’s attention to the plight of the poor. [The Sisters’] presentation . . . oh, maybe it’s a bit silly, maybe even a little extreme . . .”
I broke in: “Well, it’s an obvious mockery of Catholicism.”
“No,” he answered, his voice stern, almost irritated. “Curiously not, and they often said to me, when they undertake a public action and they cross paths with real nuns in their habits, they said it always turns out to be a good day and a good action and everything goes well.”
“The real nuns aren’t annoyed?”
“I don’t know myself how the actual nuns react. On the other hand, to mock the actual religious celebrations inside the church, the Mass, the sacraments, then, yes, I would be very much bothered by that because that is not simply folklore like the habits and traditions that exist on the outside of the sacred [rituals]. To touch the things that are more deeply linked to the faith, that I stay away from. But using a cornet or a nun’s costume doesn’t bother me.” He repeated the point to be clear. “To touch prayer or the ritual celebrations inside the church—I am very bothered by actions that touch on what is most profound in the church.”
“But wait.” I said, “Isn’t that forgetting the origins of the Sisters? They started out in San Francisco as a militant homosexual rights group who argued that nearly all religious institutions, and specifically the Catholic Church, have brought on terrible suffering.”
He shook his close-cropped, sandy-haired head. “The ones I know, when they discovered who I was, were astonished to meet a real priest in a gay milieu.”
“A real priest?”
“A priest ordained by the Catholic Church and not . . . well, you know that among the Sisters there are some who wear the soutane, though that’s not always true anymore. And they were often very interested in having a serious religious and spiritual discussion with a member of the Catholic clergy.”
“They were not hostile or suspicious?”
“No, not.”
“What kind of religious discussions? What did you talk about?”
“Usually they ask, ‘Why are you a priest? Why have you chosen that path? What does it mean?’ And I say that one day I had a personal encounter, very real, of the presence of God in my life.”
Before I go on, and before many of you as readers roll your eyes with the remembered testimony of Tammy Faye or the perennially priapic Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, I should say I grew up surrounded by grade school classmates in Kentucky, usually adolescent girls experiencing the first premenstrual twitches of puberty. They would come to school recounting how on the previous Sunday they had been saved by Jesus! Oh yes! A wave of warmth had swallowed them up while they sat on the hard poplar pews as the Savior had entered their breasts and drawn them, half crawling, half running, forward to the altar where they fell to their trembling knees before the preacher, declaring how Jesus had led them into the light of glory. I was saved! I was saved! they had cried. And wept. And wept.
Too often, within a year, if not months, these country girls became pregnant by a more local savior who had taken them to the back of the barn for an even more penetrating