Travis and Sam are friends. Travis has been sick for weeks, and spends all day lying in bed. Sam is out of town. In Travis’ mind, he is staying inside because he’s sick; but he forgets that he only got sick after staying inside. After one week inside, he started to notice that he was…
I’ve been trying for months to write a post to answer a simple question: whether a man can fall in love with another man. After a lot of false starts, I found out that the only way to answer the question is to tell a couple of stories. That’s how the best questions usually work…
And now for something completely different. Have I never told you about the Grackle? Of course I’ve told you about the Grackle. The Grub Street Grackle is a literary magazine produced by the man below. He’s shrouded in mystery, but you can see him behind the mystery: The Grackle, as you can imagine, was meta…
Today I told my confessor that I’d rather not talk about homosexuality every single time I’m in the confessional. If I say I looked too long at an attractive person, he doesn’t need to ask whether it was a woman or a man. A sin is a sin, and the gay ones aren’t special. I…
I sin sometimes, but I’m not really a sinner. It’s true that I eat a lot — but eating a lot is not who I am. I don’t really consider food that important, honestly. My therapist says I have an oral fixation, so it’s not like I’m just eating for gratification. Anyway, I know spiritual…
The blog’s been going down periodically over the last couple of days, and I haven’t yet had time to figure out why. Anyway, it’s not you, it’s me. Maybe I’ve been hacked again, wouldn’t that be exciting? Update: I spent some time tweaking and, kineahora, it hasn’t crashed since last night. Hoping it stays that…
There are a lot of very screwed up gay Catholics out there. By “screwed up” I mean isolated, neurotic, guilt-ridden, anxious, depressed, tormented, narcissistic, and self-pitying. It’s impossible to say whether this is the effect of a regime of imposed celibacy. Because what we’re seeing is not just a generation of people who have grown…
A few weeks ago I headed down to Darkest Jersey to help record a series of video interviews and conversations for catholicsexuality.com‘s section on homosexuality. So I found myself in the august company of Eve Tushnet, Gabriel Blanchard, Joshua Gonnerman, Melinda Selmys, and Ron Belgau. It was fun! And a little exhausting, because we filmed for…
I had some unexpected news this morning that I’m still digesting. Not a tragedy, just a huge pain in the @$$ that is going to scramble some of my plans. Well, so it goes. But it means I didn’t get any writing done, because it scrambled my brain, too, and I had to spend a…
Note: Occasionally, as below, I lift a post from an email to a reader. I never do this without the reader’s explicit permission. Thank you for writing, B., and for being willing to share this. ★ Dear B., I know what you mean about depression. I think we always expect suffering to be different from…