When I was 14 years old, I thought I’d heard the call.

I knew I was gay, and had been begging God to make me straight. I did it through daily 20-minute sessions of devoted prayer, each concluded with a test: I’d get the swimsuit section of the latest department store catalog and stare at the men’s and women’s pages side-by-side to see if this time I was miraculously drawn to the bikini-clad women instead of the men.

It never worked.

As I realized my situation’s hopelessness, I did what many gay Catholics do and wondered if homosexuality was God’s way of calling me to priesthood. Priests don’t need to get married (they can’t), and as one I could still be respected and influential. Randomly, one of my friends said she dreamed of me as a priest, white-robed with a green stole draped around my neck, welcoming parishioners to Mass.

It was a sign. I was chosen. My torturous secrets – my suffering – were, in consistency with Catholic philosophy, to teach me compassion, and would bring good to the world. God works in mysterious ways.

When I was young, I was a proud Catholic. We were the religion of the oppressed: Irish, Polish, Puerto Rican and Italian immigrants whose arrival by boat gave the Statue of Liberty its iconic symbolism. We came from poor railroad workers in the Rocky Mountains and Mexican crop pickers in Texas and California. I was told that Jesuits laid the intellectual foundation for the peace movement during the Vietnam War. My mother said she never met a Catholic Republican; she said the idea was absurd because Catholics care about poor people. My beliefs were as much an ethnic and cultural identity as a religious one.

And then it hit.

When 9/11 shook the country, my church’s youth pastor (a non-ordained, married man who worked for the parish under the authority of the priest and would be the ultimate foil to my faith) responded with a prayer that all the Muslims be converted to Christianity, leaving a sour taste in my mouth. (read the full article)

For me, it’s the question that’s always the most effective in firing like a black arrow into the heart of the Fundamentalist dragon, felling it down to earth in a cloud of ash and fire:

Why are there gay animals?

Confront even the most strident sexual absolutist with this lone, almost child-like question, and a look of confounded frustration will come over them. Clearly stymied, they’ll never be able to give me even a halfheartedly assured reason for homosexuality existing in the animal kingdom. There’ll be some hurried allusion to God creating Adam and Eve in his own image, then something arcane about man being the master of beings that fly or walk on all fours will be trotted out.

The only conclusion that I can reasonably reach from it all is that Man is held to a higher standard of sexual decency than other life forms by his Sky Daddy. Cain and his whoever-the-hell-she-was wife were special. Her improbable existence has been justified by everything from Adam’s and Eve’s genes being so ideal that they permitted him to a marry a sister without fear of inbred mutation, to Cain marryin’ up an ape-woman member of the early hominids and producing those beastly “other races” whose genealogies lie in the mating of a perfect Aryan with a lesser being. They had to keep it classy. So…ewww either way.

Bambi and Thumper, however, are apparently allowed to throw it around the forest any which way they please. (read the full article)

The current boy-rape scandal in the Catholic Church is shaping up to be a Vatican Watergate. Like President Nixon, Pope Joseph Ratzinger’s fingerprints are all over a worldwide cover-up of child abuse at the hands of priests.

Back in 2005, the first wave of scandals broke in the United States. The immediate impulse of Vatican officials was to change the subject, as the Pope is trying (unsuccessfully) to do now. Blame was laid on “social change” and “homosexuals,” as if priestly abuse began in 1960 and gay men were unknown in a church where the clergy are forbidden to marry. At the time, our Senior Editor John Calendo responded to the tarring of all gay priests with the following post. (read the full article)

By now you’ve probably heard of Constance McMillen, the 18-year-old senior at Mississippi’s Itawamba High. Barred by the school board from attending her senior prom with a female date while clad in a tuxedo, her “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” refusal to be shown the door ultimately lead the board to call the whole dance off.

Yes, it sounds like something along the lines of Footloose, and typically whenever a long-in-the-tooth council of elders decides to put otherwise good kids on a stranglehold of a short leash, there will be push back. A girl going to a dance with another girl? In pants? The next thing you know, these little tarts will want to ride horses with their legs spread, or not be traded away into sexual slavery by their families for six gourds of milk and a goat. Calamity! (read the full article)

Sexual harassment: it’s not always as bad as it sounds.

Sometimes it’s better than bad — it’s great! And you can’t spell “harassment” without “ass,” so there’s a Freudian tell for you.

I’m not talking the creepy, stalky, lawsuit-filing kind. I mean the ass-slapping “Uuuuh! Looking good, baby!” sort we all either have to keep ourselves from indulging in or secretly wish would happen to us. The Eric Massa scandal kind of started out rather cheeky and funny in several respects, but as it’s grown increasingly ugly, it’s clear how some things should stay grounded in the windmills of the mind and consequence-free porn plotting. If we lived in a world wherein all employers were hot as hell, sex carried no problematic implications, and there were no Bible-happy buzzkill co-workers, we wouldn’t need GLAAD or the ACLU because we’d all just gleefully fuck our way to the top. (read the full article)

Out of runway.

It’s a personal saying — not quite a mantra, not quite an idiom — that I regularly resort to when I’m wont to describe a certain feeling of dread finality that comes over me — that sinking realization that your back’s up against the wall, of feeling the house lights dim, of sensing the final curtain about to drop down.

Charlie Crist is officially out of runway.

The once-popular Florida Governor was riding high just a scant year ago, his Republican good ol’ boy cred in a conservative state deemed enough of a momentum to let him cross the finish line of his Senatorial bid in a comfortable jog. In 2008, he was in the top running to be John McCain’s VP prior to McCain opting to play the Penguin to Sarah Palin’s Catwoman in a campaign equivalent of a schlocky supervillain tag-team. Prior to that, he was Florida’s Attorney General under Jeb Bush.

A lot can happen in a year.

Crist’s campaign coffers are now so in the red that they might as well have a DNR. Teabagger rival Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles with a conspicuously ethnic “o” at the end of both of his names — proof positive that the Tea Party can’t even manage coherent consistency in reviling the very type of person it was organized to detest — has been bracingly outdistancing him in polls. (read the full article)

Representation.

It’s that pesky issue in politics, media, and athletics that daunts the minority figure; with visibility comes acceptance, and the lack of it only further ghettoizes difference. The military is in the spotlight currently, but it isn’t the only diffident macho setting that we give the collective side-eye to whenever a claim of being queer-free abounds.

I’ve personally never followed sports (when asked recently whether I would be tuning in for the Superbowl, I proceeded to hesitantly ask, “Now, that’s for baseball…right?”) because I can’t approximate grown men’s wide-eyed obsessions with the incredible ability to throw a ball through a hoop or a hit it with a stick.

Still, when it comes to the Winter Olympics, my only real interest is the speculation of who is, who isn’t, who’s in, who’s out, why it’s an issue, and why it shouldn’t be.

OutSports’ recent close-to-the-bone piece on the thorny path of the in-or-out gay Olympian has a myriad of salient points that casts the Athletic sector as the civilian equivalent of the military or the Boy Scouts: a “No Girls! No Fags!” club house that remains one of the last strongholds of little straight boys’ grown-up fantasy selves, the sort of Boys Own setting that would be somehow compromised if queers slipped in under the radar and showed they could compete in a real man’s world. Undercutting the cliche that with every token gay you get a defiant activist or an unruly upstart, the article — with its tellingly anonymous source — drives home how simply being an athlete without the G-modifier is just one more thing we can never simply take for granted. (read the full article)