What I liked most about church was that it was our thing together, mine and my mom’s; my dad golfed on Sundays and my brother, Gerry, who was 11 years older than me, didn’t like Catholicism or the lecturing priests. Later at home, my brother would crack Mom and me up by imitating the priests delivering sermons about “the sins of the flesh” and other allusions to sex or bad behavior. I imagined Mom saw these priests as she’d seen Mother Bourke all those years ago: rigid, humorless, out of touch with the ways regular people lived their lives.
But Christmas morning was special. All four of us got dressed up and went to church together. My brother would make jokes under his breath throughout Mass about the prissy-looking choir. My parents couldn’t contain their laughter. I loved it, too, but I was also the most serious of the four of us, even as a kid, and I always felt bad during the gospel story when Mary and Joseph got the cold shoulder at the inn.
As a teenager, I slowly stopped going to church. I was becoming a little more withdrawn, preferring to be alone, watching television, writing plays and short stories. I had started developing little crushes on boys my age; I would prank call the same boy in my grade every few days, hanging up the phone when I heard his voice. I felt bad about myself. My dad had told me stories about a man who tried to molest him at a movie when he was a boy, and in my house there were a lot of jokes and put-downs about “fags” and “fairies.” My mother once spotted me standing with my wrists pressing into my hips, my hands flared back, and said, “Only sissies stand like that.” I was nervous for a long time that they might send me back to the adoption agency if they found out I had crushes on boys, so I kept it to myself.
My parents enrolled me in an all-boys Catholic high school in Boston, and if I was never the cool rebel Mom was, I found my own great friends like she did. Cynthia and Mary had shown me how friendship can be the best thing in life; Mom often spoke about how they’d seen her through hard times, when she was trying to carry other babies to term after my brother. The only acting out I did was weirder and darker than what Mom did, like when I once sneaked into St. Frances and up to the altar and ate some of the communion wafers from a chalice. I got used to keeping secrets about my feelings. Mom and Gerry were cool; I saw myself, some of the time, as just bad.
The priests were no help. In classes and assemblies some would say there were “no homosexual boys” at our high school. I started trying to ignore my attraction to boys and focused on dating girls — preoccupied with the idea of marrying someday and having my own children. I knew this was Mom’s wish for me; she missed having a big family, and talked about getting grandchildren someday. If she sensed that I might never marry a woman, she never said it to me. But years later, my godmother Cynthia told me that when I was a teenager, she told Mom she thought I might be gay. They fought about it, until Mom said, “How would you feel if your son was gay?” Then they ended the call. They didn’t speak for months after that, Cynthia said.