JHD: Dignity and the Rat Master | 1986

 Orsetti detail which would be used for dead/queer/proud cover. Firetrap Press, 2002.

31YOU GOT KICKED OUT OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH? AND YOU WANT TO GET BACK IN? 

HELLO? THEY SHOULD WANT YOU.

The Vatican’s letter “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” will not stop people from being gay or Catholic. But it will make life more tense when you try to he both gay and Catholic at the same time. Cardinal Ratzinger, writing for the Company of Men, asserts that gay groups (though he never calls us by name) such as Dignity, have no right to meet and hold services on church property. 

In an ironically gay use of words, the Rat wants us to obey his dignitas, which in Latin meant “office, rank and authority,” and was often used by the Emperor to refer to himself. The Society of Homos still have visions of extending the Holy Roman Empire to America. And they become very upset when ordinary Americans question their authority.

As the Rat states: “The use of church buildings by these (gay groups)... and permission to use church property may seem only just and charitable, but in reality it is contradictory to the purpose for which these institutions were founded: it is misleading and often scandalous.”

Should any “homosexual persons” come together on church property they must first abjure and renounce themselves: “No authentic pastoral program will include organizations in which homosexual persons associate with each other without clearly stating that homosexual activity is immoral.”

Lesbian and gay people are not welcome on church property. Harsh lines are drawn: it would seem that the only gay priest would be an ex priest, the only lesbian nun would be an ex nun and the only gay Catholic would be an exCatholic.

What do you do? Do you fight or quit? Stay on or drop out of the church? Do you attend services wearing a red letter “G” on your forehead and cause a scandal? Or, as one rebel suggested, do you chain yourself to your pew and force them to throw you out? It seems like the Holy Father is saying: “This is my church, love it or leave it!”

Fortunately, life is not a series of pseudo dramatic often neurotic either/or choices. As theologian Rosalle Muschal Remnhardt says, “you can be both/and and more/than.” When you are gay or lesbian there is no reason you have to cut yourself off from your church, family, or country. It is your choice how you place yourself. Inside or outside, or both in and out and more. Stay where it is comfortable for you. Adopt a style that is comfortable for you. Be confrontational, or moderational, as you feel free to be. Go along, or make trouble, do what you feel most expresses your love for your church and country.

Once you overcome the negativity of this Vatican letter and get yourself back in place a lot of issues will start to clarify. I can suggest a few and I’m sure you can think of others: 

1. If you want to get their attention fast start a movement to tax their Company. This is still America, where the idea of individual freedom prevails. Each person is free to act on her own authority according to the promptings of her own conscience. The founders of this country ran away from Kings, Queens (of either gender) and Emperors, to make this land the home of freedom. We are not now going to allow some Company of Foreign Men extend their vision of the Holy Roman Empire to our shores. We don’t accept the teaching of foreign potentates here, be they Ayatollahs, Bhagwans, or Popes. If the Company of Men in Rome want to assert their corporate rights of private property, let them begin to pay corporate taxes in America–and property taxes. Let the pseudo masters in Rome know: there will be no magisterium without taxation.

2.  The Society of Homos can't look you in the eye and won't have you in their "house". Ask yourself why.  Nowhere in the Rat's letter is the word gay or lesbian mentioned. They treat us as though we do not exist. They do not know our mores, our morals, our ways and means of existence. Their lack of respect and willed ignorance of us reveals much about themselves. They don’t understand that people who fight homosexuality are always fighting their own homosexuality. Since most of us have done the work it takes to come out, this is something we know that the Pope's gang doesn't. It's a Company loss, but they make us pay.

3. The Company of Men has "a long tradition" says the Rat. He's right. It's called lying and the Society of Homos have a special name for it: jesuitical "Crafty, intriguing, or equivocating person.” Though they say we "deceive" they are the real masters of deceitful Sophistry (here their magisterium fits). They've been "sodomites" for centuries: They ripped the "sin" of Sodom (inhospitality) out of its biblical roots, made up something new and have been killing people for this truly original sin ever since. The Rat takes the art to a new extreme: he blames us for the AIDS plague. Their letter on "pastoral care" (one more touch of sophistry) is a plague of words. It falls back on the Church of Rome. 

What are these liars hiding? They are on the run, terrified of the "gay" plague. They tell the world, that plague is AIDS. The thing that scares them, the dis-ease which freaks out these old homos, is a very young idea: two gays or two lesbians, together, publicly. Honest gays and lesbians threaten the entire Homo Order! Now we understand what the Rat means about "the lives and well-being of a large number of people."  He's out to save his Company of Men. 

If any of them are smart rats, they'd better start practicing 'pastoral care' at Homo Heights, first,  and leave morality to those who can handle it. I've been a witness to such strength: every breath taken by a person with AIDS is a moral act. Without serious homo (mental) health-care at the Vatican–and lessons about how to treat guests–the Company of Men has no healthy future. It will die of its own terminal theology. (Rome has fallen before.)

For the recovering Catholics out there, Ratzinger's letter is just one more piece of junk mail. Send it back: addressee unknown. Or trash it.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press. Originally appeared in Damski's JHD column, November 27, 1986 and republished in Damski's dead/queer/proud as Schizo-file#31 (Firetrap Press 2002).

JHD:The Pope's Gay Bangers | 1986

Early iteration of  what would become Damki's 2002 Firetrap Press book, dead/queer/proud.

30THE POPE'S HOMO GANGBANGERS (OR, RELIGION AS RETROVIRUS–NOTHING FUNNY HERE).

We’ve all known for years that the Pope and his gang at the Vatican live like homos without the sexuality. They are men who prefer the company of men. They are the Society of Homos and they prefer to run the church from Rome as a company of men. And they lay down laws and discipline the church as though it were an army of men.

In their everyday life they imitate the homo lifestyle without the sexuality. To get rid of their guilt, they come out in public and condemn the homo lifestyle, without acknowledging that it is pretty much their lifestyle too.

I have never been in a living situation with a high prelate for longer than a week; I see them most at meetings and interviews. I think they avoid and contain their sexuality as much as is humanly possible. I would not say that homosexuality is rampant inside the church–they are not a bunch of horny gay Thornbirds.

They behave more like retroviruses. They replicate the homo lifestyle and get everything backwards. Instead of having homosexual urges, they have power urges: and, often, the will to gay bash and destroy comes over them. Everything gay must seem alien to them. They feel they must attack and invade the living gay cell in order to control and ultimately destroy it.

In speeches and proclamations they babble on endlessly about “inclinations and tendencies” of the homosexual kind. I am a gay person. I have no tendency or inclination to be a homosexual! I am light years beyond that point. The Pope and his gang dwell and live at that point. Often they seem like timid men stuck in a teenage hang up.

Gay is the way my life force flows. I am not back at the crossroads deciding whether I should be or do gay. They are still at the crossroads. Talking like top men, they want us to hang up our sexuality on a cross. In their company of men you can he homo, but not sexual. Everything sexual is a disorder to them because it threatens their nice order, their theological company. They are pure homos: they don’t want their order disturbed.

When you join the Society of Homos you put your body on the cross between homo and sexuality. You give up your own sexuality for the love of Jesus. As Cardinal Ratzinger put it in the Vatican’s recent letter On Homosexuality: ‘Just as the cross was central to the expression of God’s redemptive love for us in Jesus, so the conformity of the self-denial of homosexual men and women with the sacrifice of the Lord will constitute for them a source of self-giving.” After a little act of psycho-castration, you too can join the Company of Men and live on ethereal Homo Heights.

The Catholic church has always been an eternally fascinating and attractive organization for young men. And in reverse, the Church has been eternally fascinated by and attracted to young men. They share a homo symbiosis.

Many young men come to join an order and be a priest because they are having trouble handling their sexuality-or are handling it too much. They feel compelled to join the Company of Men where they can be pure homos and at the same time escape their sexuality–give the troubled thing up. When they arrive, the church gives them a cross and a stiff doctrine to hold on to.

In many cases the solution works. Most clergy toe the line of celibacy. And those who can’t usually quit along the way. The church allows you to forget your body and yet keep some of the manners, forms and gestures of the homo lifestyle. You can wear elaborate ecclesiastical drag. The Bishops at their conference in Washington, D.C. could buy many “gay” sartorial trinkets: gold-filled pectoral crosses, brilliant colored sashes, bishop rings and magenta zucchettos (skullcaps) lined with chamois.

The society at large tolerates a lot of gay theater inside the church in ceremony and dress. They allow men to kiss each others’ hand, ring and finger. At Easter they can pick up some poor beggar and wash and kiss his feet. They can walk down the aisles dressed like a bride with two young guys in black holding up their gown. They can bless each other with church room odorizer. They are free to put on a show of queens, because as prelates they live a pure homo life.

The Pope and his gang at the Vatican  live like homopuritans, not homosexuals. They are not repressed homosexuals. They are all form and no body and their acts are only imitation ceremonial acts.

Clothes make the holy man. But behind those clothes is flesh, which sometimes feels the pull and tug of their mortality. The Pope does not always act rationally or in his best political interest. Why would he send out the message of a stern Polish Holy Father, condemning homosexuality in America and then plan his trip here so it ends up in San Francisco? Does he want to engage the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in a street fight? Does he want a pie in his face? Does he find us in the flesh so irresistible?

The Pope and his gang will not be shaken from their Homo Heights. The wimpish American bishops have again submitted to his authority. His place is secure.

But they are not secure in their place. Gay frightens them: it’s new and it’s free and it’s lustfully loving. They never had the gay option when they were young in Poland and now they want to bash it when they see it in the flesh.

And yet the Pope plans to plop down in the middle of it in San Francisco. Are we his last temptation?

Gay liberation represents almost the ultimate in Protestantism. We say you can love yourself and your friend and Jesus directly. You do not have to ask permission from the top men in the Society of Homos in order to love.

Like all mortals, the Pope and his gang are panicked by this new gay option. A world where you can be gay and don’t have to be homosexual; be sane and don’t have to be a sinner; be a body–a loving body–and don’t have to be a theologian–all this zaps their mind.

But if they don’t catch on soon to the winds of freedom, they might just get left behind when all the people take back their church for the love of Jesus and leave them behind, a company of forgotten old men.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press. Originally published in Windy City Times in Jon-Henri Damski's JHD column, November 20, 1986. v1r3. Published as Schizo-file#30 in dead/queer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2002).

Jon-Henri Damski's Nothing Personal: Sleaze Buckets (1979)

Still from Nighthawks (1978), grabbed here.

"SLEAZE BUCKETS" | 1979

We, that is, homosexuals, or as they like to pronounce it on television, HOmo-SEX-U-als, are more and more in the news.

We are in the news because they want to know about us. 

Often, journalists report on our activities as though we were a sub-species, a sub-culture, or some subterranean night crawlers from another planet. 

The rule is: when talking about homosexuals, keep your distance. Never expose your own sexuality. Hide behind your objectivity. But this rule and style of reporting often breaks down, because in matters of sexuality, there is no clear and fixed distinction between them and us. 

When you are talking about homosexuality, it is hard to tell who is them, who is us, and who is hiding. The traditional canons of objectivity fail. 

People are always saying you can't be a little pregnant without eventually showing it. True. But you can be a little gay without ever wanting to show it. In fact, that's the state most people live in. 

And so, since there is always a little bit of us in them, journalists have difficult time with us. 

Most journalists, when talking about homosexuals, get their facts right, but err in interpretation. For straight facts often lead to queer interpretations. 

Roger Ebert in his review of Nighthawks

 (Sun-Times, Oct. 16, 1979), for example, has all his facts right, but his quasi-objective and distant point-of-view distorts his interpretations. 

For Ebert, Nighthawks is a movie about them (gays)--for them. And his conclusion is: let's hope nobody is like them. 

He keeps his critical distance from us and our world, and he dutifully reports in his liberal family newspaper that gay is sad, and gay is bad. 

Factually, he is right: Nighthawks is a dull, uninspired, two-star movie. It has left town after a week at the 3 Penny.

 Even with foreign kudos, it couldn't hold an audience: gay or curious. 

Jim, the school teacher/nighthawk, is an anti-anti-hero: so ordinary that he stirs little more than a yawn. Sure, he does the best his lukewarm British flesh will allow, but he has a difficult time keeping a stiff upper anything. 

The movie is so ordinary, in fact, that it begs all kinds of interpretations. And a critic can't just say, "well, folks, that was one I slept through." So Ebert fills in with gratuitous interpretations and musings on gay life. 

For Ebert, Jim is a victim, his haunts are gloomy, and his life, dead end. And the last and only good thing you can say about the movie is that it was playing at the 3 Penny, and not at one of those male "sleaze buckets" on Clark Street. 

For Ebert, Jim is a victim because he cannot find an "Enduring Relationship," which according to Ebert is the "social epidemic" of the 20th century. 

But: male homosexuals have been having and surviving transitory relationships for centuries. It's nothing new for us. That's why we are probably better able to cope with this urban situation than most self-proclaimed, married-again monogamists. 

True, among homosexuals you will not find too many American Gothic, til-death-do-us-part couples. In a gay "marriage" it's more likely that both partners will be holding a pitch fork. 

There are millions of couples in New York, Chicago, and London who have discovered that an exclusive, one-on-one relationship is not essential. Many of us don't even have an enduring weekend together. 

But that does not mean life is a horror show. It means we have changed our expectations, or totally abandoned them. And for us it's not a dead end; it's a life cycle on speed. 

Further, to call homosexual haunts gloomy is a prudish cliche. Gloomy for whom? That's where we find other guys, our sex partners, our sun shine. 

It might seem sad to you, an outsider, because you are not there for what we are there for. But the wait is worth it, honey; the wait is worth it! For when the arrow hits the target, you scream inside like a Zen master. 

And as for "sleaze buckets": I remember the Newberry Theater [note: a gay porn theater],  now a parking lot on Clark. Cold seats, fat men, leaking roof, stink bombs, and the projectionist sleeping at the switch. 

Who used to go there? Dirty nighthawks. Sure. 

And kids from the suburbs. Who found out about the all male sleaze bucket from reading Roger Ebert's Sun-Times movie section. And since they never read about an all-male anything else, they would flock to the Newberry, often for their first coming out experience. 

Yes, I remember one kid, in his early twenties, arriving at the Newberry on a cold, rainy Friday: going to the bathroom, showing a half of dozen men what he had to offer: and then, leading them, like a good shepherd, down in front to the cement floor, and while another dozen men watched, he made sure there were a lot of satisfied customers at the Newberry that night. 

And all the while he performed, there was a movie going on above them. Duffy's Tavern, with a couple of long haired blond kids making it on a pool table, while the Stones rolled on in the background. Talk about Apocalypse Now. Talk about a real movie experience. 

So, Mr. Ebert, do keep your critical distance: for if you were to slip into one of the sleaze buckets on Clark Street, and review one of our movies, it just might turn out to be a living experience. 

And if you looked down beneath the screen, I just don't know who you would recognize. 

Originally published in "Gay Chicago," October 25, 1979.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press Cooperative.