On Gay Catholicism (aka 'How Dramatic Can You Get In Church?')

Picture this: you’re eighteen and you just snuck out of your parents’ house.

In the midst of whatever teenage rebellion has an iron grip on your freshly-dropped balls, and in the desperation to be a cool kid before you’re forced to become a boring adult, you must find yourself somewhere that you wouldn’t want to be caught dead.

Like, for example, church.

The unfortunate reality of being eighteen and being gay is that you have to be eighteen and gay at the same time, which means that, by law, you have to be twice as dramatic. While this may not be an explanation for the better-adjusted members of ex-Catholic society, I am sure that there are at least a few of you nodding along like this is a group therapy session, because the sheer atmosphere of sitting in a church waiting to ask the Deacon if you are going to Hell is an affair understood only through experience, and replicable only through the sheer genius of Lil Nas X’s music videos.

But, dramatic as I am, I digress.

A few well-hidden Facebook messages between a repressed homosexual from Warrington and an official Church page led me to this exact moment. As the congregation flooded out of the church—like Noah’s ark if he’d invited two of every lavender-smelling old woman—I waited by the door, hesitant to step from the threshold of my repressed childhood into the sunshine of my potential damnation into Hell.

Sins today include:

1. Lying to my parents about where I was going (typical 18 year old behaviour).

2. Googling the calories in communion bread (typical mentally ill behaviour).

3. Existing, apparently (typical gay Catholic behaviour).

It felt as though everything in my life had led up to this moment—all of the thinking about tits and sloppy wine-drunk makeout sessions with my friends had Oscar Wilde-d me into a courtroom of my own making, and here I was, stood in front of the Deacon, ready to ask the most important question of my life.

“Does God hate me for being gay?” I wanted to say.

“Does God love everyone?”

It was one of those crucial little moments in life where the exact wording was necessary, and I had blown it harder than… well, harder than the exact thing I fantasised about doing to women that got me in this situation in the first place. As soon as the Deacon began to respond with the same clichés about God loving everybody that never helped me in the first place, I knew that my chance had gone, flying up to Heaven alongside my dignity and my letter of resignation to the angels.

There was no coming back from it. As I fumbled my way through the churchyard back to my obnoxiously blue car, I knew that I’d never be coming back here again—the place in which my parents married, in which I took my first communion, and in which I just sat through an hour of worship to ask a question that I didn’t even manage to ask.

But there was something final about it; something inside me that said I would never have been satisfied with whatever answer I got anyway. And maybe having faith in myself was always more important than having faith in a higher power who could strike me down simply for wanting to put my head between a woman’s thighs. Then again, maybe God was never real in the first place. Or maybe she was a woman who wanted her pussy eaten as much as I wanted to eat it. The only certainty was that I wasn’t going to find the answers between the pews of that old church any more than I was going to find them in the throes of teenage rebellion.

So long, St. Oswald’s. Thanks for all the wine.