Scott Pomfret - Since My Last Confession

Copyright 2008, 2011 by Scott Pomfret

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Title page illustrations by Dennis Cox/iStockphoto

Some names, identifying characteristics, topics of discussion, and the timing of events have been changed to protect confidentiality.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61145-500-7

am the wrong person to write this book, Ive met hundreds of Catholics far better suited to the task. They walk old ladies across the street, and visit the sick, and clothe the naked, and bury abandoned babies, and adopt ailing children with birth defects from Cambodian crack houses, and experience rainbow stigmata.

Me? Not so much. I am not pretty enough for prime time, a bad godfather, a worse boyfriend, and according to said boyfriend, who is reading over my shoulder as I type a really poor sugar daddy. Worst of all, I am impious, irreverent, and a shade profane.

But let me prevail on your good graces: please view my irreverence and impiety with charity. This is not an attack on the Church. Its an invitation to laugh.

As the nun said to the schoolboy, Sisters doing it because she loves you. Then she whacked him on the knuckles with a wooden ruler ten sharp times.

hadda we want? cried the motorcycle dyke through her megaphone.

Equal rights! shouted the crowd.

When do we want em? she yelled. She was wearing a stars-and-stripes scarf, a leather vest pierced with gay pride pins, baggy pants, and impossibly small shoes that made her look as if she would topple any second.

Now! we shouted.

A man shouldered his way behind me and my boyfriend. His Sodomy: Its to Die For sign cast a long shadow.

Whadda we want? the motorcycle dyke yelled.

In perfect time, we responded, Civil rights!

Bleeding rectums! shouted Mr. Sodomy.

What do we want? she cried again.

We yelled: Gay marriage!

Kaposis sarcoma! yelled Mr. Sodomy.

And so it went. The dyke called, and Mr. Sodomy and the progay crowd responded in harmony. Not your typical religious call-and-response, for sure, but it had its own charms.

What do we want?

Us: True equality!

Him: Syphilis!

What do we want?!

Us: Safe families!

Him: AIDS!

Trying to drown out Mr. Sodomy, I shouted louder and louder until my voice broke like a pimpled teens. A full morning at the protest had worn my vocal cords raw. A young Haitian woman next to me tore a hole in a package of throat lozenges. She shook a single golden lozenge out into her pink palm and unwrapped it with agonizing deliberation. She plucked out the candy and discarded the wrapper, not on the ground I had hoped for an opportunity for some Earth Day-based moral superiority but in the public waste receptacle. She placed the lozenge on her shockingly pink tongue. As it moved around in her mouth, the lozenge clicked against her teeth. Her placid expression reflected its triple-strength soothing action. My heart filled with envy.

What do we want? the motorcycle dyke shouted.

A throat lozenge, I thought wistfully.

It was February 11, 2004. Three months after the highest court of Massachusetts had legalized gay marriage, the legislature had convened yet another in a series of constitutional conventions. The proposed amendments included proposals for longer legislative terms, biennial instead of yearly budgets, a process for appointing House or Senate members if a terrorist attack led to massive vacancies in the legislature and, of course, a ban on same-sex marriage.

Crowds gathered between the State House and the Boston Common, where the Minutemen had assembled in April 1775 on the way to Lexington and Concord at the start of the Revolutionary War. (Until 1817, the Common was also the forum for public hangings.) Nothing separated opposing points of view. White-collared female Episcopalian priests surrounded a clean-cut Christian youth holding a sign that read I Want to Marry My Dog; a dozen apocalyptic preachers straight out of Flannery OConnor bellowed among cops on horseback and queer youth with pink hair playing hooky from high school; lesbian mothers tripped friend and foe alike with double-wide strollers; curious passersby procrastinated on their way to work; and duck boats full of passengers screamed quack, quack as the driver intoned something about the Revolution.

On the Common, vendors hawked everything imaginable: silk scarves and sweatshirts; sausages and statues of the Founding Fathers, JFK, and rogue mayor James Michael Curley; fake Louis Vuitton bags, pirated CDs, books with covers torn off, and a thousand other counterfeits. An empty flatbed truck boomed techno music. A contingent of twenty-somethings wearing T-shirts that proclaimed them queerspawn marched up from the Common with arms proudly linked. Three drag queen slatterns clung to the wrought iron gates of the State House and chain-smoked.

Not far from us, a man who identified himself to a reporter as Pastor Bob loudly proclaimed his hatred for the sin of homosexuality. He said, however, that he loved the homosexuals themselves.

When someone yelled, Hypocrite! Pastor Bob responded: Would I be standing here with a sign like this if I didnt love you?

The sign read, Homosexuals Are Possessed by Demons.

All morning long, the Haitian woman and her companions had said their prayers. During one lull, they sang a French hymn that took my breath away. When Mr. Sodomy came on the scene, they rolled their eyes and shuffled away from him. There was something endearingly immediate in the sisters reverence. They seemed open to the possibility of a miracle, right here, this day, on this crowded street among the jostling demonstrators. Not that they were expecting a miracle, mind you. It seemed obvious they would go home, make dinner, and kiss their husbands good night no matter how the day ended. But if a miracle had happened on the double yellow line down the middle of Beacon Street, these Haitian sisters would not have been caught by surprise.