Suffering, Sadness, Loneliness
"The gay life is a very, very sad one."
Words spoken to me by my dear friend George Lissandrello, 1970, East Greenwich Village, of the community and lifestyle George had accepted. He died a few years later of AIDS.
These solemn words have stayed with me my entire life and given me the interpretive key to understanding this attraction and the entire "gay" project.
The attraction is a cross, a badge of honor when suffered patiently-soberly-generously, an affliction that is deep, complex, and multi-layered.
1. The first, most obvious layer is the social shame and stigma traditionally associated with it. A defining goal of the gay liberation movement is to bring freedom from such shame. This is a goal the Catholic can share. The demons of self-hatred, contempt, shame and fear that have culturally accompanied the attraction are to be renounced, firmly, and directed back to their source in hell.
But genuine liberation, for the Catholic, is a more profound and challenging thing: a lifestyle of sobriety, chastity, restraint, fidelity, and life-giving generosity. Same-sex intercourse is incoherent as it is neither unitive nor fruitful. In that sense "gay liberation" is an oxymoron, a contradiction as it affirms as liberational actions that are self-destructive and sad, not gay or happy.
What we see in social settings wherein homosexuality has become socially acceptable (Scandinavia, Greenwich Village, San Francisco) it that removal of social stigma leaves undiminished the extreme rates of substance abuse, depression, and suicide among those immersed in gay culture. The fashionable optimism of gay affirmation will become increasingly questioned in time as the underlying sadness becomes more pronounced in the now gay-friendly culture.
2. The truer, deeper loneliness of this attraction, when deep-seated, is loss of the normal path to a flourishing, purposeful life: spousal union and paternity/maternity. This loneliness increases with age, when ordinarily joy in ones offspring compensates for the diminishments of health, stamina, romance, career and sex. The "gay life" is doomed to despair.
By contrast, the homosexual Catholic will find in this attraction a charism, a vocation to share in the suffering of Jesus, including his celibacy/virginity, a suffering that borne in love bears fruit. We have always been blessed by uncles and aunts, priests and religious, who selflessly love in family and community, in quiet humility. Theirs is a special badge of honor. Entirely unrecognized.
3. Lastly, this attraction, when indulged in unchastity, draws one into the darkness of of sin: sterility, futility, and quiet despair. Lust and romantic covetousness are accompanied by colleague demons: low gender esteem, incapacity for paternity/maternity, difficulties with authority, histrionic narcissism, identity of victimhood, sexual compulsivity, promiscuity, jealousy, and resentment. This is not to suggest, of course, that all those who self-identify as "gay" fall into these patterns. But their prevalence in the gay way of life is obvious to anyone who has not invested faith in the gay project.
And so, compassion requires attention to the suffering of the attraction itself, but also to the deeper isolation and sadness of "gay identity." Gay affirmation is well-intended. The goal is to reduce suffering and enhance esteem and happiness. In reality, however, such affirmation is enabling of the one in error. It is not truth-in-love, but sentimentality. The problem is not in the will; it is in the intellect. It is a huge mistake. Neither the attraction nor the life are "gay" as happy. The word "gay" competes with "choice" and "reproductive rights" as the most vile, mendacious, delusional words out of the glossary from hell that grasped our society in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
A genuine love for our brothers and sisters who suffer this attraction and those who succumb to the deception requires, not the sentimentality of "gay affirmation," but empathy, reverence, and truth.
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