Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

delivered. The dog learned to move from the electrified part of the cage to the nonelectrified part after hearing the buzzer sound. In the second phase of the experiment, the entire floor was electrified, so the dog could not escape the shock. When the buzzer sounded, it cowered helplessly. This behavior persisted even when half the cage was de-electrified. In other words, the dog still cowered even when it had a chance to save itself. That’s how I felt at the altar.
    On a dark New England evening, a single streetlight shone down from the roof of Saint John’s. In the back seat of my mother’s car, I played shadow games. Up front, my mother was interrogating my older brother about the words of the Hail Mary and the Our Father, on which the kids in my brother’s CCD class were scheduled to be tested.
    My brother didn’t need her help. But to me, the prayers seemed fantastically long, truly biblical. Wars took place and people died and eons passed before my brother finally reached the end. “Amen,” we all said. That someday I, too, would be forced to endure the trial my brother had faced paralyzed me. There were only so many grandfathers I could afford to lose.
    Years later, after a long absence from churchgoing, I returned. Not only the Our Father and Hail Mary, but also great big chunks of the liturgy, had stuck in my brain. I stumbled only where gender-neutral language had crept in since I was a kid.
    Marking Territory
    Irish-American guys are dogs. It’s not simply the learned helplessness, but the primordial instinct that compels us to mark our territory when we move to a new place:
     
Find a bar.
Find a church.
Get laid.
    Shortly after I graduated from law school and moved to Boston, I jumped to bullet point three. “Michael” was a couple of years younger than I. His online picture showed him wearing a black leather coat. He lived in a lovely Victorian brownstone that I suspected he could not afford on his own, but my gay vocabulary didn’t yet contain the phrase sugar daddy .
    I had prepared for the awkward, husky-voiced, precoital conversation (“So … what do you like to do?”) between arrival and lust. I had packed condoms in my backpack. I had even bothered to shower and shave. But the first naughty thing Michael did to me was to mention his hearty dislike for the writings of Christian philosopher C. S. Lewis.
    Needless to say, this opening gambit startled me. But because I had written via e-mail that I was “game for anything,” I played along. Michael thought I was humoring him. To him, my responses sounded like disingenuous intellectual foreplay, the sort of dubious behavior you would expect from a public-school boy insufficiently versed in spiritual matters. An honest, God-fearing parochial school boy would have gone straight to the sex without pussyfooting around.
    Pushing aside a zigzag fold of fresh condom wrappers, I plucked a copy of The Problem of Pain from my backpack. By His grace alone, and without any knowledge of Michael’s religious predilections, Lewis’s explanation for why a good God permits humanity to suffer just happened to be among my current stack of to-be-read books.
    Michael’s eyes lit up like a slot machine: jackpot! My interest in Lewis was — ironically — a definite turn-on. Unfortunately, mutual mental masturbation was the day’s high point. After some awkward and unsatisfying physical fumbling, we gave up getting it on and lay around naked in Michael’s bed talking about his desire to convert to Catholicism, who might be the perfect mentor, and what local parishes might embrace gay men.
    Michael, a journalist, had nominated the Jesuit Urban Center at the Church of the Immaculate Conception as the “Best Non-Bar Venue to Pick Up Gay Men” for Boston magazine’s Best of Boston annual picks. Known for its gay-friendliness and a theology focused on social justice, Immaculate Conception hosted an after-Mass doughnut social every Sunday, where, according to