The talk, part 1

The following story happened to me late last night. It is not necessarily a true account of what happened or what was said; it is my interpretation of the drug-addled, sleepy memories of last night. It is not fiction; more an amalgamation of two hours’ worth of memory fragments, interpreted into narrative form.

The phone rang in the lounge room as Dan lay reading in his bed; he’d recently started a new novel and was finding it difficult to put down. He looked at his watch and read the time: half past one in the morning. He emerged from his room and hobbled to his parents’ room, knees aflame with pain, to check the call was not the herald of some horrible emergency. Sister joined him, sitting on his parents’ bed as their mother spoke on the phone. The call was for their father, who was away; a lady in the States who has miscalculated the time difference.

He returned to his room and resumed his novel. There was a small knock on the door.

“Yes...” he called out.

“Are you awake?” the knocker asked.

“Yeh, kinda.”

The door opened and Sister entered; her demeanour tentative and unsure. “Can we talk?”

“Umm...” Dan stalled, trying to decide if he wanted to talk to her at this late hour. He glanced at his watch and saw it was nearly two o’clock. “Fuck it, what’s on your mind?”

“I’m worried about you,” she stated, sitting on the edge of his bed. “I’m worried about you and I want to talk to you about it. We have been avoiding this for nearly a year now and I really think we should discuss it.”

“Is this a gay thing?” he asked wearily, “It’s two in the morning.”

“Yes,” she answered with a nervous laugh.

Dan sighed. “Ok then, shoot,” he said as he tried to get his knees comfortable. He took some pain killers and waited for her to continue. His mind was reeling. He’d been waiting for this conversation for ten months, rehearsing it in his head. He had done reading, formed arguments.

After years of internal turmoil they all fled his head in the wake of the advancing attack.

“Well,” she began, choosing her words carefully, “I guess I’m worried about you reading those novels and watching movies and TV shows that show homosexuality as normal. I’m afraid that it’s going to normalise it for you and that you’re going to ultimately end up unhappy.”

“Right. Tell me, what do you think of it? How do you think homosexuality, or any non-hetero sexuality for that matter, fits into reality?”

She exhaled. “I think that man and woman were created by God to marry, have children etc...” She took a breath. “I don’t like the word ‘gay’ anyway—”

“Well ‘gay’ is a political distinction, I’ll give you that, it’s more than attraction or orientation... it’s an affirmation of identity.”

“That’s what worries me about you. You’re reading these books and seeing it as normal, identifying as ‘gay’ and I don’t want you lead down the wrong path. I don’t think that being gay will ultimately make you happy and I don’t want you to end up unhappy.”

“It is normal, Sister.”

“But it’s not. Same sex attraction, which I think is a better term for it, it’s...” she thought for a second, “it’s intrinsically disordered. That’s what the Church teaches.”

His heart sank.

She explained her reasoning. Catholic teaching holds that having desires for the same sex is ‘disordered’, but that the simple fact of them isn’t sinful or morally wrong. Acting on them, on the other hand, is. He listened, trying to formulate a rebuttal, but the late night and the pain killers were wreaking their havoc on his ability to form a convincing argument. He lay there, nodding, as she spoke. When she finished there was a silence.

“It’s easy for you, Sister, to tell me that same sex attraction and being gay, or not being straight for that matter, is intrinsically disordered. You’ve never lived it. You’ve never thought you were dirty or sinful or wrong or disordered.” He took a breath and steadied his voice. “All I’m saying is that it’s easy for you to right me off as disordered and accept the Church’s prevailing wisdom in this area, but let me tell you about my life growing up...”

“Ok.”

“When I was five, I remember having a crush on the male school captain. It was a childish crush, it wasn’t overly sexual but I remember looking at boys and being attracted to them.”

“Yeh, but—”

“Please let me get this out in one go. It’s not easy to talk about so I just want to get it said.” She nodded and he continued. He explained that at age five, he didn’t think it was wrong (he used air quotes around the word) or right for that matter, it just was. By the time he was in upper primary school, everyone said he was gay and they were merciless in their taunting and bullying. He was called horrible names on a daily basis and it began to chip away at his self esteem. By the time he was in high school he was still being called a faggot on the playground. She winced at the word faggot but after all these years of being called faggot, the word didn’t phase him at all.

“I didn’t realise it was that bad.” She said, quietly.

He continued that in eighth grade he had a crush on a girl and his world of internal turmoil plunged further into chaos. Then he got sick. At the time, he thought it was some divine punishment for not being ‘normal’. All this time he never could admit the possibility of being gay... but deep down he knew he wasn’t normal, not like everyone else. He went to the Church youth group camp and his health went downhill really really quickly. He didn’t understand why he felt closer to God yet got sicker and sicker, and these feelings about boys didn’t go away. He got very depressed. It started out just a black depression, like nothing mattered and nothing would ever be fixed again. He developed a crush on a friend of his, a guy, and that confused him even more. He didn’t see it as a crush at the time but the benefit of hindsight is 20/20 vision, isn’t it?

The depression deepened until he just wanted to die. Death was so much more desirable than the confusing life he found himself stuck in...abused on the outside by people at school, and on the inside by himself. It got to the point where he cut his wrists and arms to bleed the sin and dirtiness out of himself. He didn’t want to bring up these things, they are not something he enjoys discussing, but he wanted her to know how desperate he was back then...to know that he thinks about these times every time he showers and sees his scars. Her calling same sex attraction ‘intrinsically disordered’ did not affect him, but others were saying it to him at the time, and he didn’t want her to be one of these other people to someone else.

He summed up by saying that by the age of twenty-one he realised it wasn’t sinful, nor dirty, and that God loved him... he had been desperate for God’s love and acceptance throughout his teenage years and had finally gained it.

“Yes but just because God loves you doesn’t mean that everything you do is acceptable.”

“I agree.” He said. “My point is, Sister, that it’s easy for you to tell me that my sexuality is intrinsically disordered because you’ve never had to deal with discovering the hard way that it isn’t.”

At this point in the proceedings, he explained his stance: that sexuality is a God given gift to us all, that homosexuality and bisexuality are natural permutations of human sexuality (and as such are not ‘disordered’), that just because something is not the norm does not mean it is not normal, that Jesus never said anything against homosexuality in the gospels, that the Church’s teaching is damaging to so many souls and that it has fed hatemongers’ discriminations and vile actions, that love between two men or two women has the potential to be just as deep and fulfilling as that between a man and a woman, that love and commitment make a marriage not the genders of the participants.

They argued the points in terms of the Church’s doctrines; he was tired and couldn’t form very convincing arguments to counter her points.

“Look Sister, it’s late. I have a better explanation than ‘it feels good therefore it’s ok but you’re going to have to wait until I am more awake, ok?”

She agreed and changed tack.

There is more to this story, but I am exhausted. Emotionally and physically, so it will have to wait for tomorrow.