So, a gay porn writer walked into a Boston Catholic church.
This may sound like the setup for a bad joke, but it's not. Gay erotica author Scott Pomfret, a lifelong Catholic, decided to tackle the Roman Catholic Church in his hilarious and heartbreaking new book, Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir.
Pomfret is an enforcement attorney who once helped challenge Massachusetts' sodomy laws. He writes gay-romance stories with his diehard atheist partner when he's not busy being a lector at his local Catholic church. One day, Pomfret attempted to confront his nemesis, Cardinal Sean O'Malley. His experience inspired him to share his journey and to take on the wide spectrum of the gay Catholic experience with humor and wit.
In Since My Last Confession, he shares his personal struggles as a gay Catholic, as well as his method of survival: laughter. He doesn't attempt to bash Catholicism. He doesn't try to persuade LGBT folks to stay in the Catholic Church, either. His overall mission—besides making people giggle—is to encourage readers to embrace their gay spirituality.
The result is a book that people of any faith—or lack thereof—can enjoy.
Windy City Times spoke with Pomfret, who will be appearing at Women & Children First Bookstore, 5233 N. Clark, on Sunday, Sept. 21, at 4:30 p.m.
Windy City Times: I feel like the LGBT community has been talking about faith a lot more, and its refreshing to see a more humorous take on this topic.
Scott Pomfret: I always thought people would be more willing to talk about faith if there are a couple of jokes dispersed throughout.
WCT: I think it makes it easier to talk about.
SP: Absolutely. I'm hoping, given Chicago's background, to start some discussions of those involved in the Catholic community out there.
WCT: What initially inspired you to write Since My Last Confession?
SP: Once Cardinal O'Malley started talking about same-sex marriage, I had this notion of a book. At the time, it was going to be where I took each of the readings over a course of a year and kind of riffed on them from a contemporary, gay Catholic perspective. That turned out to be dull, dull, dull and dry. I shelved that, but still had in my mind, how am I going to counteract this cardinal? It happens there was a public meeting nearly a block from my workplace. I kind of ran out there to publicly pose some of the questions to him that I wanted to pose. I totally chickened out! It was then that I was like, okay, I screwed up this time, but here is the narrative. I am going to change this guy's mind. Of course, I knew it was hopeless, and knew the absurdity or futility of it. But, that made me think this could be funny, too.
WCT: Exactly. This is a different genre for you. You've done romance and gay erotica. So, was this a challenge to sit down and write in this format?
SP: My partner Scott and I had written The Q Guide to Wine and Cocktails, and that came out in 2007. That's filled with charts and jokes and things. I had just come off finishing that manuscript, and thought, wow, that could definitely work here. I thought with the Ten Commandments and the seven deadly sins, well, I could make a list and make it funny. So, that's where that came from.
WCT: In the book, you question whether or not you are the right person for the job and whether you should be the one to carry this out. You also mentioned that no one else was stepping up to the plate. Do you still feel that way?
SP: I feel that there are some gay people of infallible character, where, if they wrote this book, it wouldn't have somebody saying, 'Well, but you write gay porn.' One person I can think of is Gregory McGuire, who wrote Wicked. He's a married man in Massachusetts, and he and his partner have three little children who are among the most well-behaved children I've met in my life. Would it be better if Gregory McGuire wrote this book? Probably. But, I certainly had fun doing it.
WCT: Because you write gay porn, what has been the reaction to your book? Has it been mostly positive, or have you gotten some of that negative feedback where people try to throw that aspect of your life in your face?
SP: I've actually gotten a great deal of positive feedback. On that note, in particular, I think that makes me more accessible to many gay Catholics who are sort of on the edge. You know, you might still have some faith, but they are just not in the church as much, but it makes it feel a little more accessible to them. I've had a number of people say, 'You know what? I'm going to give it another try. I'm going to go as an out, gay man, and I'm going to give it another try.'
WCT: You are showing that there is a wide spectrum of people who do have faith and who do go to church. I think a lot of people sometimes don't realize that.
SP: I think that it's very easy to draw a caricature of people of faith, in particular, in a very American Gothic sort of way. In fact, there is a range of the faith, even within the Church—put aside all other faith communities—and you will meet charismatic Catholics. I had someone come up to me in a meeting in New York and [ she ] told me her friends were 'punk anarcho Catholics.' [ Laughs ] I have no idea what that is, but that is just great! I think it's good for people to see that they don't have close themselves off to the experience of spirituality because the models they are looking at are the Pope and Pat Roberson or something.
WCT: I think one of the parts that stood out to me was a checklist in the middle of the book, and it said one of the reasons for staying is that if you leave, you are participating in your own exile. I thought that was really profound.
SP: My message is not to come join the Catholic Church, but don't throw out your gay spirituality with the Roman Catholic bathwater. Do not help them accomplish what they set up to do, which is alienate you from your faith.
WCT: Is that the core message you hope people, in particular from our community, take away, whether or not they are Catholic? There are other churches that are not exactly gay-friendly.
SP: Absolutely. I have heard from Jewish people and from a lot of Southern Baptists with the same message that they find something in the book, even though its not their faith tradition. What they find is, again, an accessibility to God and faith, notwithstanding their own personal negative experience with organized religion. I hope it helps Southern Baptists address their faith with humor—a radically new concept. [ Laughs ] I think it's a universal message for what many of our people have undergone.
WCT: When is the first time that you sat down and asked yourself the same question your partner asked you early on in the book: Why do I stay with a church that kind of hates me? When was the first time you asked yourself that question?
SP: Before I started writing the book, I kind of bracketed that question. It kind of loomed above me. I was shielding my eyes and looking in the other direction. It was in writing the book that I confronted the question, and quite frankly, I believe that Cardinal O'Malley and the Vatican forced the question on me. With everything that has gone in the past decade, starting with same-sex marriage and gay adoptions here in Boston, where they shut down doing any adoptions through Catholic charities rather than be forced to do gay adoption. Asking that absurd question: Are children better of with a married man and woman? Well, that ain't the question! The option is no parents or gay parents, not straight parents or gay parents. I have been in the same place I think a lot of gay Catholics find themselves to be in. You go to church, do your religious business, hold your hands over your ears and scoot out again, and delight in the fact that nobody recognizes you for the gay person that you are. I think that is a radically wrong approach. One of my friends at a group said, 'I used to check my parts at the door,' but now she is able to worship with her whole body and every part of her identity.
WCT: Your relationship with the church is of both love and anger. What is the core reason you stay with the church? Is it a lot of little things, or is there one big reason?
SP: This is a discussion I have with a lot of Catholics. Catholicism is really the language I speak, but it's really more than that. It's a metaphor for the way I understand faith. It's ritual. I find in there—not always—a kind of grace or spirit that I recognize as God. It's the tiny aspects of the ritual. It doesn't happen always, but I can't seem to shake it. It's something that's more than intellectual for me. Trying to shed the Catholic thing is like trying to shed the gay thing. I think that's true for many faith traditions, especially for ones that are very ritual. Something like Catholicism or Anglicanism, where ritual is a large part of it. A lot of people would say it's just a gay man enjoying a Broadway show. It's partially true—they have costumes and everything! There's probably something to that, but I believe it's more than that.
WCT: How challenging was it to confront your faith for this book, or was it something you had mostly worked out before putting it down on paper?
SP: It's something I don't think is ever done. It's constant. In some ways, writing the book made it more difficult, in part, because I got more first-hand stories of some of the soul destroying experiences people have had, in particular, with priests and parents. It's one thing to know about those intellectually, and know there are priests yelling at people that they are going to hell or that there are parents disowning their kids. It's another to hear that person on the receiving end relay their personal story. The accumulation of those terrible, personal stores has made it much more difficult. … Someone asked me, wouldn't you be better off just to leave entirely? Well, that's something I ask myself every morning! So far, the answer has been no, but some day, that answer might be yes.
WCT: Did working on this book give you any hope that it might bet better in years ahead, or did you realize it might get harder before it gets better?
SP: I think it depends upon what you mean by 'church.' I think one of the things people who are angry with Catholicism do is buy into the idea that the Vatican is the church. They are a very small piece of the church. The church is the people. The church is the collection of theologians. When you think of church in the bigger sense, I think a lot of great stuff is going on. There are these Catholic women priests who are forming their own faith community and are hugely involved in social justice. There are priests who left to get married, but play a role in doing reform work. There are folks who started their own American Catholic churches all over the place, with the message that all are welcome—a very different message. And there are Roman Catholic people, like my friars, who acknowledge what the Vatican is teaching, but follow their consciences and act absolutely with love. There are a lot of things going on at that level. At the same time, no doubt about it, the white-knuckled grip from above is only getting tighter. Expect excommunications to be on the rise.
WCT: But it's churches like yours, St. Anthony Shrine, and others that make it easy because they are welcoming.
SP: And they are under the umbrella. I'm actually going down to Hartford, Conn., [ which ] has another Franciscan community … and supposedly an incredibly strong gay and lesbian group, beyond ours. There's stuff going on in small cities all over the place.
One of the things are the women priests, in particular. They just got excommunicated a couple of months ago. Their response, and I think the right one, was, 'We don't accept that.' On the other hand, it's kind of a relief for them, because its like, that's the worst they could do? It doesn't affect my spiritual life on a day-to-day level. I think that's going to happen—the Vatican is going to squeeze so tight that its just going to slip out from their grip, and people are going to continue on with their spiritual lives.
WCT: That's what you have to do.
SP: I think that's triumphant! We should embrace that. It's cause for celebration.
WCT: When having discussions about our community and faith with either opponents or fence-sitters, what do you believe is one of the key things to bring with you to that discussion?
SP: I think this is true, whether you are talking to people inside or outside our community, and that is you bring the witness of your action. You can have the best theological argument, the best philosophical argument, the best scientific argument, but what's really going to make headway with people is to live out your faith. In your words, you are treating them with respect, even if they are drastically adverse to yours.
If you are forgiving the slights and acting with strength, it intensifies that it is born of and a part of my faith. I always think that in our civil-rights movement, up until now, it's been, at times, very aggressive and in-your-face. All of those things are in the right time, but one of the componants missing is what the racial civil-rights folks had, which was a faith movement. To me, it made all the difference here in Massachusetts. They had a huge group of clergy walking across Boston Common to the capital building, singing 'We Shall Overcome' and literally parting our opponents. … It was, I think, the most moving moments of my experience there. It didn't get everything done, but added one more layer of complexity to that issue of civil rights.
