Church and the Gay Question

In my continuing online exchange with Fr John Boyle [a gay-hating priest from Kent], he points out that we use the same mode of analysis. It’s curious how two people using the same approach can arrive at opposite conclusions. He treats homosexuality as sinful, as something that attracts our compassion but also our censure. I believe otherwise. It raises the question: how is it possible that two people can follow the same path and yet arrive at such divergent destinations? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that, however dispassionate and objective and analytical we try to be, nevertheless, lurking underneath everything is experience. While I cannot speak to Fr John’s experience and how that has shaped his thinking, it is clear to me that there is a strong link between encounters I had in my formative years and the views I have developed in mid–life.

Beginning when I was 12 and continuing through my teenage years, I studied piano with a musician named Alan Coffin. He coached me to my A.R.C.T. and also introduced me to the pipe organ. He was organist and choir director at Eastminster United Church in Toronto. Alan was gay. Alan wasn’t a closeted gay. He wasn’t just a teency bit gay. He was ultra–outré, over–the–top, complete–with–ermine–collared–cape gay. In Toronto’s first pride parade, there was Alan, conducting a twelve–voice choir. Once, he hired forty members of the TSO, complete with timpani, and held a massive choral concert in the sanctuary of Eastminster. There has never been such a concert there, before or after. He and his friends would bitch about their ACTRA dues, because they had landed a gig singing for Speedy Muffler commercials, but the dues were eating into their income. He was the self–styled impresario of gay Toronto in the late 70’s and early 80’s. It also happened that, with one exception, all my teachers at the Royal Conservatory of Music were gay in much the same way—including the couple who could sometimes be seen in wintertime strolling down Bloor Street in matching ground–length fur coats.

All of these men expressed a great deal of interest in me. All of them expressed their interest solely as the desire to nurture my musicianship. By the time I was old enough to understand that some adults worry about gays and pederasty, I knew well enough that such an idea is ridiculous. I also knew well enough that nobody was trying to encourage me to adopt a gay “lifestyle.” It strikes me as utterly misinformed to use the terms “gay” and “lifestyle” in the same sentence. I also learned that my parents are amazing people. In spite of cautions from well–meaning friends who were afraid that I might be turned to the dark side, they held to their instincts about Alan and defended him.

Alan had hoped I would study music at university, and maybe I disappointed him when, at the eleventh hour, I cancelled all my auditions and chose a different path. With university, I had less time to enjoy the Alan Coffin experience, the capacity he had to enjoy himself, the boundless creativity he brought to his living. In retrospect, I wish I had paid more attention to these other lessons he was teaching.

When Alan developed HIV/AIDS, death came quickly. There wasn’t time even to grow thin and waste away. From what I understand, the disease attacked his brain first and shut down his autonomic functions. And so, even as he lay dying, he remained larger than life—there was that huge frame stretched out on the hospital bed and the wild black mop of golliwog hair that had always made him look a little bit mad when he conducted. It was decided that Alan should stay in the hospital rather than go to Casey House. The hospice was meant more for people who had little help from the community and might otherwise die alone. But that didn’t describe Alan’s situation. The walls were plastered with hundreds upon hundreds of cards and letters from well–wishers, and there was a constant train of people passing through his room to see how he and his partner were doing. It seems that Alan’s effusiveness in life gave people permission to cross boundaries as he approached death.

At the same time, a cousin of mine lay dying of HIVAIDS in Toronto General Hospital. It was a horrible and lonely death. She was in the first group of North American women to be infected by bisexual men. She was the ideal candidate for a place like Casey House—but at that time, Casey House was restricted to men. She had come to the big city from a small town in Northern Ontario. I wonder if she had ever imagined that it was possible to take a lover who might also like sex with men. It probably never crossed her mind until her partner fell ill and the doctors told her she should start to worry about her own health.

When AIDS first became an issue in North America, bisexual men were universally vilified. Women hated them for the risk they posed. Gays hated them for being duplicitous. But I wonder if we shouldn’t also direct criticism at a repressive attitude that has arisen within our virulently hetero–normative world that refuses to educate itself about matters of sexuality. For example, there is a debate (with serious academic literature on both sides) about whether bisexuality is a distinctive identity, or merely a transitional phase as someone works from a (mistaken) heterosexuality to a true understanding of his or her sexual identity. It is a debate which may never be resolved, but so long as men and women are afraid to engage the issue, people like my cousin will continue to die because their partners live in fear of the consequences of honesty. Why tell the truth if it means being beaten up by both straights and gays? Better just to keep your mouth shut and go on infecting people.

When I return to the Church’s attitude, I find it difficult to understand an approach that is judgmental or would presume to know with certainty the nature of human sexuality. And this is all the more difficult when I call to mind the images of my mentor and of my cousin, dying on their hospital beds. Perhaps, particularly when we are denied perfect information, the most faithful approach is to think nothing, judge nothing, but merely to serve the need that lies before us.