GEAR

Gay view of papal visit

By Brian McNaught

Some Catholic observers are suggesting there will be a major increase in the number of young men who decide to enter the priesthood and in the number of people attending regular Sunday worship services because of the Pope's visit to the United States. I predict there will also be a rise in guilt among a number of gay Christians and even an escalation in the number of lesbians and gay men who attempt to live their lives without sexual expression.

Some people will be shocked by that assessment, just as they are flabbergasted to read about the numbers of homosexuals who desperately seek out the help of people like Anita Bryant and Kent Philpott, "Born Again" Christians who wish to help us terminate our sexual activity in exchange for a sense of belonging.

We don't need government reports to tell us how depresssed the American people are. We can sense the helplessness and hopelessness in our own homes. Nor do I need to remind myself about the sense of despair experienced by large numbers of lesbians and gay men who struggle

against odds to feel good about cheering in the rain a man whose themselves.

In a world dominated by cynicism and in a ghetto permeated with self-hate, many gay men and lesbians I have encountered find the struggle for selfaffirmation, the battle for wholeness, almost too much to bear. For those who have been ostracized by family and friends, jilted by lovers and who find no refuge in their worshipping community, the siren song of Anita Bryant and Kent Philpott is a last hope; a final step.

Anita and Kent tell us they love us. They tell us they want us to meet Jesus whose love is a soothing balm for the wounds which riddle our bodies. They promise they won't try to make us heterosexuals; they just want to love us enough that we won't be homosexuals. For some gay brothers and sisters, that promise of love is enough of an incentive; they will try anything.

While the music played by Bryant and Philpott is a funeral dirge to my ears, I did weep as I watched Pope John Paul travel through the streets of Boston and celebrate Mass in the Common. Home, alone, in front of my television, I wept without shame as I saw a million of my neighbors

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face of gentle strength and whose message of compassion has mesmerized the world. I wept because I hunger for hope. I wept because I too want my burdens lifted; because perhaps this man who has suffered so will caress me with his love and stand between me and my foes. I wept because I knew he wouldn't.

"Faced with problems and disappointments," the Pope told his audience, “many people will try to escape from their responsibil-

ity; escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure..." To whom is he speaking. I wondered. Surely there are gay men and lesbians in that audience who want to believe in him as much as I do; brothers and sisters who ache for the embrace of acceptance and love. Will they think he is talking about them when he says "selfishness..sexual pleasure"? Will they lose ground in their struggle for self-love because the Church which oppresses them with formal decrees and blatant discrimi-

HIGH GEAR Page 15

nation seems inseparable from this gentle and dynamic pilgrim of the Gospel? Will they walk home feeling that the cheers of the listening audience were cheers against thern as much as they were for the Pope? I think some did because I struggled with it.

The message of the Gospel is one of salvation; it is a promise of love. It speaks most clearly to the oppressed. It says that we shall

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