Read Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir for Free Online

Michael, you could score if you’d been unlucky Saturday night.
    A day or two later, Michael e-mailed me. Among other things, he described his coming-out. The first time Michael had walked into a room full of gay men, the burden of his self-consciousness had fallen away from him, and the air seemed to change colors.
    “Not I,” I wrote back. “No way. Gay men make me acutely self-conscious. When in a room of heteros, I go thankfully ignored. With gay men, my thoughts race, my gaze flickers, and I am acutely conscious of not wearing this year’s ‘it’ shoes. Or last year’s. Or any year’s.”
    When I finally forced myself to attend Mass at the Jesuit Urban Center, I understood immediately why the Church of the Immaculate Conception attracted the aesthetically supercharged. The church was a hundred-fifty-year-old soaring edifice of white New Hampshire marble, its architecture precisely calculated to produce shocked dogs and cowering jellies. It had no permanent pews; the entire floor of the sanctuary was open. Were you to feel especially butch, you could have held a game of touch football between the holy water font and the altar.
    The palpable gayness of the place knocked me off my feet. It felt as if my skin was sloughing off in great waves. A cluster of Scottie dogs was tied to the railing outside the front door. The seats were brimming with sophisticated men thin as a pair of folding spectacles. Bearded bears served as acolytes. Rainbow banners streamed from the ceiling. The preferred sign of peace was a same-sex kiss.
    It made me panic. And it was hard to concentrate on worship while counting gay men like sheep before bedtime. I ran out without taking advantage of a single cruller.
    Doing My Religious Business
    Blame my beloved, erudite grandfather. When it comes to religion, my tastes run to the Gothic, not the gay — hence the pew, The Problem of Pain , the learned helplessness, and the atheist boyfriend. Modernized biblical language and Unitarian ecumenism leave me cold and unsatisfied. Give me hoary nineteenth-century cathedrals, goblins and gargoyles, Latin benedictions, heavy arches, hidden naves, and unforgiving priests wearing white stoles decorated with the five wounds of Christ smiting the faithful. Therein lies the good stuff. I’m talking spiritual nipple clamps and an electrified floor.
    As frequently happens in relationships and religion, fantasy gives way to convenience. Rather than locate the ecclesiastical dungeon of my dreams, I settled on Saint Anthony Shrine as my church of choice.
    I found the Shrine the old-fashioned way: on Ash Wednesday, 1999, I followed a trail of forehead smudges. They were streaming from a dull, Cold War-era building that had no bell or steeple. A bank and the Boston Stock Exchange anchored one end of the block. A CVS Pharmacy and a Macy’s guarded the other. Stuck in the middle, the Shrine, too, looked like another place of commerce. A half-dozen glass department-store doors listed its hours, as if the friars might someday hold a white sale on altar linens.
    Even the two-story hammered-bronze crucifix over the front door seemed circumspect, as if Christ’s final agony was just a minor discomfort. Only when approached from the subway entrance across the street did the crucifix take on a menacing aspect, as if you had wrongfully escaped from hell, and Jesus was going to extend a hammered-bronze leg and boot you back where you belonged.
    Saint Anthony Shrine is known as the Worker’s Chapel, because its downtown location is accessible to thousands who sneak out from their day jobs. The Shrine’s two sanctuaries alternately crank out masses every half hour, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Statues of Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint Clare, and the Holy Virgin receive nonstop devotion, and there’s a steady traffic in votive candles. Outside the ground floor chapel, a great silver font contained enough holy water to drown a cat.
    On that particular Ash Wednesday,