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PÁDRAIG
Nobody told me I was allowed to imagine.
Growing up in 1980s Ireland, I was introduced to the idea of homosexuality by ads on the television warning the viewers about HIV and AIDS. If it was ever mentioned at Mass, it was in the context of sin. But – for some years – it was barely mentioned at Mass; not because there was any permissiveness, but because it was the unspeakable.
I still hadn’t spoken it.
In 1984, 87 per cent of the population of Ireland attended religious services weekly. In 1990 this had only dropped to 85 per cent. Religion was everywhere. Mind you, so was criticism. Sinéad O’Connor was ripping up pictures of the Pope, and there were always stories of the carryon in the Homes for Troubled Children. I learned that sin was like a blight on your soul and the rot would begin to creep up your throat if you sinned enough. When my mother sent me to confession, I sat up there, blessed myself and told the priest: ‘I’m only here because my mother made me.’ ‘What do you want to talk about?’ he asked me. ‘About why the Catholic Church is corrupt,’ I said. ‘OK,’ he said, and he listened. He was a young priest, trendy. He wore sunglasses and everybody thought he had notions. He died in his fifties.
People wondered if he was gay, but I knew I was.
I made some Protestant friends when I was fifteen. Theirs seemed a more immediate religion, with fewer authorities and a sense that God gave a damn. It was there that I heard that homosexuality was either a demonic possession or a deep-seated psychological disorder. It was said with ease, with calm: if it’s a devil, we’ll exorcise it; if it’s a psychology problem, there’s cures for that too.
I have plenty of devils, but not the gay kind.
Anyway, religion was in my bones. I liked some of the rhythms of Catholicism, and I liked some of the promises of Protestantism. I went to summer camps, I made friends, I prayed that God would hide me from the fires of hell, I avoided masturbation, I never told a soul I was gay, I hoped it would all go away. When I was eighteen, I joined a missionary organisation. I had no skills to offer, but they didn’t seem to mind. The missionary organisation’s dialogues bringing Catholic and Protestant people together to talk carefully about difference were so groundbreaking that it launched me on a career in conflict resolution.
But more of that later.
‘Have you ever been involved with the following?’ the Missionary Application Form asked. It presented four categories: alcoholism, drug addiction, occultism, homosexuality. These days I note how homosexuality was something to be involved with, rather than a way of being human. It didn’t occur to me to lie. It didn’t occur to me that I was stepping into a diabolical little closet that would take decades to break from. It didn’t occur to me to imagine that there might be something better.
I told you I didn’t know that I was allowed to imagine.
The first week in the missionary organisation, an exorcism was arranged. People shouted loudly at the devil in me. I cowered down and prayed for it to end. There were two more exorcisms. When those were deemed unsuccessful – whatever was in me was still in me – it was decided that if I was to continue in the organisation I should go to Reparative Therapy. Reparative Therapy is a misnomer. It is neither reparative nor therapeutic. It is not accountable. It has no professional standards, no professional supervision, no framework and no sociological analysis about why a person would have ‘unwanted same-sex attraction’. I had been told that if I indulged in my homosexual tendencies that I’d lose my faith, family and friends and spend an eternity in hell. Of course I wanted rid of this pestilence.
‘Let my people go,’ Moses told the Pharaoh.
I had accidentally stumbled into a love of the Bible. Somewhere along the way, I learned that the Bible was less a manual for keeping out of hell and more a library for the living. Whatever the future, it told stories of people who had the courage to live now: these people survived genocides; they gave God new names when the old names stopped working; they changed; they survived; they made rituals to mark the horror that had broken them. One of them called God a ‘deceiving stream’, but still wept in prayers. In this vast landscape of language there was an argument about what God meant, and that argument welcomed all kinds of people.
Including me.
Quietly, I began reading the Bible like it was poetry. When I read it like this, it opened up. I couldn’t tell anyone. It was my secret. I kept a book in which I wrote my own engagements with the Gospels, my own considerations of the lives and loves of the characters in the text. I felt like it was a record of blasphemy, but when I read those journals now, it reads like a prayer of the desperate in the face of the devil.
It worked.
‘Let my people go,’ Moses told Pharaoh. Pharaoh had seen the Hebrew people and believed that they were the problem. So he decided to get rid of them. He blamed the people he hated by projecting his hate onto them and making them the problem, not him. It’s an old trick. Change them and everything will be OK. For years I was the them. I believed I needed to change. I believed the lies that the pharaohs around me told. If homosexuality were indulged, it would wreck families – it would mean the end of love, it would wreck a childhood, it would cause death. I was a person under the thumb of a frightened pharaoh, and I believed all his damned lies.
Let my people go.
Here’s how the Reparative Therapy went: the therapist told me it was my mother’s fault; he told me it was my father’s fault; he told me gay men are like cannibals because they want to consume the very thing they wish most to become; he told me that Jesus had watched me during the times when my homosexual condition was developing; he told me I needed to do homework. He had his qualification displayed in a frame on the wall; it was from a group with Christian in its name. I wondered about a university of love; he told me to fantasise about the bodies of women I knew in order to stoke the heterosexuality within me. I told him I wouldn’t do that; I queried his methodologies; he got angry at me; he told me my deepest problem was language; I realised that he was making everything up; everything; everything. I stood up; I left; I was free and frightened and exhilarated.
And I had nobody to tell.
At the time it felt like an excommunication. I still loved the Church. (I still do, sometimes.) I didn’t love the Bible. (I do now). I felt like I was all alone. I knew a few gay people – men who #struggledwithahomosexualorientation. I knew that I was no longer one of them. I was on my own. I felt like I had no people. I felt like I’d fallen off the edge of the holy and was now plunging deep into the abyss of sin. I had never kissed a man. It would be years before I would. I was not fantasising. I was not masturbating. I was free. I was burdened. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know where to turn. Sometimes I’d walk outside the gay resource centre in Dublin and look at the men walking in, coming out. I’d wonder if they were keeping secrets. I’d wonder if any of them feared God the way I feared God. All the while there was a tempest in me. It was loud, it was distracting. I stopped being able to sleep well. I began to need more time alone. I prayed, and I prayed that I could be released from God. I went on a retreat at a monastery in France in order to leave God behind. It was Easter. God was about to die. I felt like the only way I could live was by leaving everything behind, but I had nothing to go towards. In the death of God, a monk helped me find God. I watched as I saw something new emerge: resurrection. Not of God. Of me. I began writing. I have not stopped.
Language
