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).
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