When Praying the Gay Away Didn’t Work, He Turned to Activism

When I was in eighth grade, I went to the downtown library and quietly looked up “homosexuality” in the card catalog. “Gay” wasn’t a term people used to describe themselves back then, and homosexuality was a word that turned stomachs. Following the call number on the card, I went up to the second floor. Like a spy in the movies, I was convinced I was being followed. I checked, double-checked, and triple-checked behind and ahead to make sure the coast was clear, and with my heart beating as loud as a drum, I found the book that matched the card. I was a teenage child, scared to death, and trying to find what I needed to keep me from being attracted to boys. Just as I suspected, I learned that day that I had a mental illness! 

Even decades later, the pain still feels all too real. There was only one conclusion: I needed to make a plan. In the fall, I would attend St. Augustine, the premier Catholic boys’ school in our community. If my mind was broken, a correction would be needed to allow me to fit in. Being a ho-mo-sex-ual meant dying and burning in hell. I may not have been too worldly yet, but I knew there were people eager to damn those sinners to keep them from infecting anyone else. Like The Scarlet Letter or The Crucible, being outed meant losing friends, expulsion from school, and ejection from society. Whole lives were rightly destroyed as payment for perversion. 

The church was the center of my life and my family’s life, interwoven into our upbringing and education. I had been an altar boy for five of the eight years I was in elementary school. Since entering high school as a homosexual was unacceptable, I had no choice but to pray really, really hard as I prepared for confirmation—a coming-of-age ceremony for young Catholic boys akin to becoming a man through a bar mitzvah. In preparation for the event—which the archbishop himself would attend—I did the Stations of the Cross over and over again, and at each of the 14 stations of Jesus’s passion, I begged the Lord with a personal, impassioned plea to cleanse me of my attraction to boys. 

I had actually looked forward to confirmation, for I knew that when I approached the altar, the Holy Spirit himself would appear to wash away all my sins. My dreams of holding men close in my arms would be replaced with a different, a better kind of love. And so the moment arrived. With Archbishop Rummel present, I was anointed with the oil and received a holy tap on the face. And that was it. That was it. Nothing had changed. Trembling, I returned to my pew in the church, crying because those feelings remained, and if the Holy Spirit couldn’t intervene, my problem was mine alone to fix. 

Sexual exploration of any kind, with boys, with girls, was still no doubt sinful and wrong. That meant I was sinful. That meant I was wrong. I was wasting the gift of life and needed to torture my guilt away.

Desperate to see a psychiatrist, I worked for two summers to save money. The priests at St. Augustine had me paint windows, clean bathrooms, run the bookstore, and hawk Purple Knight backpacks, calendars, and key chains. By my sophomore year, I had saved enough money to see a psychiatrist on St. Charles Avenue, the grandest street in the city. There I was, aged 16, handing over the price of a month’s mortgage. The doctor carefully counted out the $238, and once the money was in the cash box he had just the answer: shock therapy. 

The Holy Spirit was certainly in no hurry, but now it was right on time. It arrived inside of me as a well of anger and came out with a yelp: “You can stick that shock treatment up your ass!” I’m still surprised I really said that. The Spirit was there that day to make sure I wasn’t going to allow anyone to destroy my brain, and that same Spirit walks with me every day, to this day. Through the Holy Spirit, I know the difference between right and wrong. 

With a much lighter wallet, I got back on the streetcar to ride downtown from the doctor’s office. At the end of the route, on Canal Street, I noticed a picket line protesting in front of the Maison Blanche department store for discriminating against Black people. That was the day of my awakening, my first participation in a public demonstration. I tapped a protester on the shoulder and asked, “Want to take a break?” I was happy to carry the sign myself and proceeded to picket up and down Canal Street. 

We certainly caught the attention of the shopping crowds. A Black woman admonished me not to rock the boat and put Black jobs in jeopardy: “Nothing! You ain’t nothing, troublemaker!” At least she respected the picket line. Many white families ignored us and continued to shop like normal. A much older white woman hocked a wad of spit on me. She let me know I was “poor white trash!” With my light skin, she didn’t even bother to insult me correctly! 

In my child’s mind, I thought the barriers to freedom for Black and gay people were as simple to knock down as bowling pins. Surely, the faster we could achieve equality for people of color, the faster we could move on to gay equality. With the wisdom of a 16-year-old, I knew the race problem would be an easy fix, so I joined the protest. Piece of cake, right? 

Even if the Declaration of Independence and its preamble are just words written by flawed men, I’ve always loved those words and still somehow believe in equality, justice, and all the principles that America is supposed to uphold. The work is never over, but I look back fondly at that first naive day as a great introduction to the task of making a better world.