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).

The Field Of God

I am hesitant to enter the field of God. Reluctant to talk about God. She does not need my talk. Etymologically speaking the primary Indo-European and Teutonic roots of the word “God” are “invoked,” “the invoked one,” “the called on Being.” She does not need me to call on Her, if She is all-knowing and all-powerful.

The Greek root for the word “God” from the same family is kauchaomai, which means “I boast.” To presume to call on God is to boast.

That’s what I find so unappealing about all God talk from street corner to coffee shop. It causes us to boast and imagine that because we are having a conversation with the All-Knowing that somehow we are all knowing too.

In all God talk from the bible on, there is a viral overload of distasteful sexism. God is assumed to be a He/Him. Only in the last century have we broken the old iron code and realized that God is both a He and She, Him and Her. Those who cannot handle the pronoun shift, I cannot handle.

For me:
God is
God is love
God’s love will take care of us queers,,for God is the original loving He/She. And He/She is more concerned with love and forgiveness than sin and condemnation, more concerned with saving you and your neighborhood of domestic partners than in keeping anyone away from the Field of God and the stairway to heaven.

The Church and its bully pulpits, with their overly gooey and false interpretations of the Bible are even more virulently anti-gay today, hurling more vile doctrines at us. This is because we are the last to become the first, and because we offer the most serious threat to the monarchical rule of the Church.

When Paul picked out the sin of homosexuality to condemn, he chose it because it was the “safe sin” in his day. If he had picked circumcision or dietary law he would have spoken against sins his audience of Jew, Gentile Christians and Romans. Then as now, because of our long-standing denial mechanism, few if any believed or would say they were homosexual. Paul picked the safe sin to condemn, the one many felt was not serious and and the one they didn’t take personally.

In the daytime, Jesus threw out the Book of the Laws of the Jews. Love God as God loves you. Love your neighbor as you want your neighbor to love you. At night Jesus kept company and ate with some very queer types: whores, tax collectors, street people and us queers too. He loved us queers, and forgave our sins.

The Bible is so overpoweringly sexist: it continually disrespects women and gay men. We are no-accounts both on earth and in heaven. No voice - no rights nor say. The Men of Sodom ask Lot to send out the ambassadors of God “so we can know them” (causing most biblical scholars to twist the verb “know,” like an eight, to mean “have intercourse with” (ha,ha)). Instead, Job offers as compensation his two daughters “who have not yet known a man” (another sick joke). He can do this because the women are property, his property!

Strange, only God does not think you have sinned when you commit a queer act. Your mother does. Your lover does because you have betrayed him/her. Your brother and neighbor, but only She, who like us is everywhere, does not think you have sinned.

The only way to lord it over someone is to love the sin as well as forgive the sinner. Preachers and pastoral letters proclaim that you love your son for being gay, but not for doing gay (sex), sawing your son in half. The essence of being gay is gay sexuality.

Gays and lesbians have progressed like evolution, while the Church inches its way historically. They still refuses to see us for who we are.
HOMOSEXUAL IS NOT GAY.
DOMESTIC PARTNERS DO NOT LIVE IN SIN.
UNLESS THE CHURCH IS WILLING TO
REACH OUT AND OFFER US TOTAL SALVATION,
THE CHURCH IS DOOMED.

A wise theologian once said “To think you can teach and preach this stuff, makes you an ass. But to stay out of the Field of God and the eternally joyous and gay rewards of eternal life, makes you an ox.” We are still a threat to the Church after all these centuries because we challenge–to its face–monarchical and patriarchal ownership. God does not look kindly on people who want to keep us out of Her Church and Field. For by Her love and leave we are either all saved, included, or the Church is doomed.

HER LOVE GUARANTEES
WE ALL HAVE EQUAL ACCESS TO
THE FIELD OF GOD.


[Publisher’s Note: Along with “Homokind,” this makes up the last essays Damski wrote and edited in late October 1997. It was reprinted as Schizo-File No. 57, under the title “Final Scene: Academic odd ball lands in Chicago for mid-life Crisis, ends up writing columns for 20 years - and his last one has to be about the fucking Catholic Church and I’m not even Catholic. (I am out of here.).” in dead/queer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2002)--jmv.]