GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE JUNE 11, 1993

Leave

Business Organization and Planning Family Law Divorce

Wills Estate Planning⚫ Elder Law

it to Auto Accidents/Personal Injury DUI

Criminal Law Landlord/Tenant

Weaver Bankruptcy Corporations

Personalized Solutions

AIDS Discrimination

for all Weaver & Associates Legal Matters

216-621-7200

Bephyr

COFFEE FOOD

Susan M. Weaver, Atty at Law

1370 W. 6th Street #212 Cleveland, Ohio 44113-1308

106 West Main Street in Kent 678-4848

Invites you to Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner

Great Salads Vegetarian Cuisine Homemade Breads Fresh-Baked Desserts

Coffee Cappuccino & Espresso Low Prices Study-Smoking Lounge On 2nd Floor Evening Performances

Bring This Ad In For 50¢ Off Any Food Purchase

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.®

See me for car, home, life

and health insurance.

STATE FARM

Auto

Life

Fire

INSURANCE

Jean M. Jones (216) 864-8866

1653 Merriman Road, Suite 108 Akron, Ohio 44313

State Farm Insurance Companies Home Offices: Bloomington, Illinois

WHK Proudly Presents

THE

WHK 1420 AM

with Buck Harris

& News Commentator Karen Harrison

Friday Nights 9-11pm on WHK 1420AM Live Interviews, Call Ins, Provocative, Stimulating Conversation. Sometimes Serious, Sometimes Humorous...

But Never Straight Talk!

For reasonable advertising rates, call 961-5806

ENTERTAINMENT

Blessed are the children

Pagan Babies

by Greg Johnson Dutton, 312 p, hardcover, $20.

Reviewed by Joseph Morris

Let me offer a preamble to all those who were not children in Roman Catholic families. You see, to many gayand lesbianborn Catholics who have fallen away, this ubiquitous religion is a maze of tradition, sexual naivete, ritual, high ceremony and hypocrisy... and we're not even talking about the pretender popes, the Holy Wars, or the Inquisition. It's no longer a secret that the seminaries, convents, rectories and monasteries shelter gays in denial. Catholics have been taught to suppress their impure thoughts, lest they choose the shortcut to hell. Browbeaten into puritan timidity, their only sexual guidance is the belief that, quoting Monty Python, "Every sperm is sacred."

So, if you are a survivor of this mindset, you will more thoroughly appreciate the novel Pagan Babies; if you know little of Catholic history and teaching, this story will unfold like sadomasochistic fiction.

Pagan Babies is the journey of Clifford Bannon and Janice Rungren from third grade in the 1960s through adulthood in the late 1980s. It is a journey peppered with minute detail of two rebels struggling against the rigidity of religious schooling, while witnessing the incongruity of their broken home lives. Catholicism of the 1960s offered devout nuns, but no answers for the children of drunken fathers, depressed mothers and single-parent households.

The title refers to the arrogant practice of shaming parochial grade school children into donating their pocket change to the church; the offering enabling the child to "sponsor" a poor pagan baby who needs to be converted immediately by missionaries or risk going to hell. (Pressured into choosing the remaining girl or boy pagan, eightyear old Clifford selected Eduardo.)

Clifford and Janice are precocious, untameable and bored. Though baptized and receiving communion early on, they maneuver outside the church's influence, choosing to stay pagan babies themselves. Kindred spirits seeking to live on the edge, they form an uneasy alliance that at times repulses them and at other times forms a strong bond. The supporting characters in the book are shallow caricatures, merely prop devices to allow the thoughts and actions of the two rebels to flow. Somehow, through Catholic elementary, junior high and high schools in a small town several hours from Dallas, Texas, they find no peers to influence their lives. Nor do they attract any disciples.

Janice is a vixen from early on; she makes it her mission to goad the brooding, artistic Clifford, which he alternately re-

sents and depends on. They individually and collectively create rumor and scandal among the relatively pious population of St. Pius. Clifford most often becomes the willing victim to sexual advances from both Janice and the school janitor. By the end of the first part of the book, Clifford has left school, visited gay bars and, in a druginduced frenzy, abandoned the obligations Janice has placed on him.

The second half of the book picks up on the two a few years later. Clifford has moved to Atlanta as a gay man, occasionally seeing his estranged father and his Uncle Pete, a reserved older-generation queer. His life is now in order... and then Janice arrives. While interested in looking Clifford up, she is also wary of destroying the fragile semblance of routine she has created with mindless, nymphomaniac sex. They dance around each other, slowly realizing that they have matured, and the relationship stabilizes into friendship.

But all is not well in the modern age of sexual declaration and of AIDS. Clifford, often on a self-destruct path, sees friends die and faces his own sexual decisions. Janice finds the most wonderful man and plans marriage, while the fiance plans to seduce Clifford. The result is yet another adventure in the continuing story of Janice and Clifford.

Fast friends forever, always applying the litmus test of nun-inspired platitudes to their present lives, Janice and Clifford are a modern day affirmation of "everything I need to know I learned before I was 12."

Even with the depth of detail about the lead characters' lives, they are still unrealized. Janice, the outspoken and confused child, the adult of miscarriages and drugs, has solved all her problems after six months of therapy wedged between everything else. Clifford, the despondent artist with no observable social skills other than getting drunk and laid, seemingly has no problems and a very small circle of friends.

This is a mental ward with the inmates

proclaiming themselves grown up and cured, all the while remembering, reliving and recounting the early influences on their lives. The only character who grows during follows everyone's expectations by enterthe story is the timid, devout cousin who

ing a convent, and years later runs away in makeup and a halter top to make up for lost time.

Overall, the book seems more the author's catharsis of his grade school traumas and coming out process than a woven tale. You ride with Clifford and Janice as if in a carnival fun house, seeing a series of ersatz monsters and tantalizing possibilities that make their programmed movements and then get out of your way. For those gay Catholics who want to renew childhood memories, Johnson's book is your ticket to the past.

When Your Heart Has A Message ... CALL DOWNTOWN AKRON'S FULL SERVICE FLORIST

•Local/Worldwide Delivery

•Fresh ⚫Dried

•Silk Arrangements •Commercial Accts

AKRON

CITICENTER FLORIST

FIRST NATIONAL TOWER

106 S. MAIN ST AKRON OH 44308

253-3700

MON-FRI 9-5:30 PM

SAT 10-2 PM