EPISODE 624: SING OUT LOUISE

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Sep 13, 2021

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Hi!

I’ve been thinking about a couple things a lot lately.

First, saints: Last week a big part of the 9/11 coverage that I was focusing on was about Fr. Mychal Judge, the Franciscan friar and FDNY chaplain who was killed at Ground Zero. Whether you’re a Catholic or not you’ve almost certainly seen a picture of his body being carried away from the scene by some of the people he served.

After his death it came out that Judge was also gay. He’d in fact set up one of the first ministries in New York City for people with HIV+ or AIDS and walked in the city’s Gay Pride Parade in 1993.

This year there’s been a move to have Judge declared a saint. (You can find out more about this, and about him, here and many other places.) Sadly, the Franciscans themselves are not supporting this move, which is very very strange. It’s almost certainly not an act of humility on the Franciscans’ part, but some kind of anxiety connected to Judge’s sexuality, like for instance a fear that it might come out that at some point Judge had been unfaithful to his vow of celibacy — which, yeah, sure that could happen, just like it could for anyone being considered a saint. Even in the case of Mother Teresa, they’d ask the question.

And here’s the thing: if research found something, they certainly wouldn’t publicize it. Or they shouldn’t, anyway. That’s not how these things work. If it did come out, it would beg a lot of questions about why that would happen for him and not others.

To my mind breaking his vow wouldn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t be a saint, either. (Although to be clear, everyone who knew him said he was actually very faithful to his vows.) St. Augustine had a baby out of wedlock. Dorothy Day had an abortion. No one knows what the heck St. Ignatius was up to before his conversion, but he sure seems to imply he was not chaste.

People could argue, well, those people and others like them did that stuff before their conversions. But Judge had a conversion of his own; he went into recovery for alcoholism in 1978.

To me, the whole conversation is really about can a queer person be declared a saint? Theologically speaking, the answer must be an emphatic yes. As Catholics we believe that everyone is beloved by God and capable of becoming a way that others come to know God. Even the most homophobic church leaders, men and women (but let’s be honest, mostly men) who spend the majority of their time trying to find ways to demonize and dehumanize queer people, are also forced to say the words that God loves them, because that’s the teaching of the church.

If we believe queer people are children of God and able to help others know God, there has to be a place for them in the community of saints. And the fact we have no queer saints is actually a huge problem, a sign that we’re not being consistent with our faith.

It’s also a problem pastorally, and that’s I think where the Franciscans’ hesitation is hitting me the hardest. As a gay man I can look to many people for images of sainthood. They don’t have to be queer. But I and every queer person should be able to find some people like us in the canon of saints, too.

And the Church should want queer Catholics and queer priests to be able to have models like that to look to, precisely because those women and men and non-binary people will help us to live our best lives, they will inspire us and give us strength.

And more than that, the presence of queer saints is a clear statement that we are a part of the story of salvation and of the history of the Church. It’s horribly lonely being a queer Catholic, in a way. Even if we see one another in the pews and Catholic groups, (and not all of us have that), we never see ourselves represented in the broader history of the Church.

In point of fact we are all over it that history. But so far our people and their contributions have been hidden or rewritten to take out this fundamental part of who they are. We’re the parts of the story that have been censored, and we’re all so used to that censoring that most of us—even most of us who are queer--don’t even see the pages ripped out, the black marks in the text any more. We are quietly taught that we just didn’t exist back then. It’s a brutal part of our existence.

I’ve started to realize that coming out is something that happens many times in a gay man’s life--or mine anyway. Even the sense of coming out to yourself — or maybe I mean accepting yourself as gay — seems to keep happening in different ways.

One such moment for me happened when I picked up Oliver Sacks’ final book, a memoir called On the Move. We’ve all heard so much about Sacks’ work, perhaps especially from the movie Awakenings. But what I didn’t know is that he was gay.

Finding that out and hearing him talk about the loves of his life amidst everything else he was doing, it was like this little moment of freedom for me, and release. That might sound like a funny way to describe it. For me it was like discovering that you’ve been in captivity yourself without knowing it. Seeing someone else break free--what’s that line from Job, the thing that the people who come to report on his family tragedies keep saying, “and I alone escaped to tell thee” — it reveals that you’re in a cage, too, and you don’t have to be. That there is life and joy in being open about who you are and insisting that you are a part of this story, too.

I hate to say it as a priest, but maybe that’s why the Church doesn’t have any openly queer saints--because the institution doesn’t want us to see the cage and claim our place. We so often domesticate saints into cuddly or pious icons that we can hang on the walls of cathedrals. But in fact most of them were like John Lewis, all about causing the Good Trouble. And theologically that’s what we want saints to inspire, a holy boldness. A freedom that is generative.

Maybe Judge won’t meet the qualifications (although as far as I’m concerned he certainly seems to). But the bigger issue remains: queer Catholics are part of this church, we always have been, we have contributed to the Church’s mission in inspiring and holy ways and it’s long past time that that was evident in the way the Church tells its story and imagines our communion.

The other thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is kind of related. I grew up around music—my mom loves to sing (and her voice, truly, it’s like buttah). Even now if I’m visiting at some point I’m bound to hear her up in the piano room working on a song she’s going to sing for a funeral or something else.

In high school I was in a couple musicals and I loved it. That introduced me to the work of Stephen Sondheim, and the rest is history.

During the height of the pandemic when we in the States were all locked away I would watch this live feed of different performers from a New York City piano bar called Marie’s Crisis. I loved it a lot (as I’ve written about in the context of other things!).

Since then I’ve been listening to a lot of show tunes and singing along my fair share too. I’m currently about halfway through listening to everything Kander & Ebb ever wrote–they’re the guys who did Chicago, Cabaret and MANY Liza Minnelli vehicles. (If you want a treat, check out Flora the Red Menace (esp. “All I Need,” “A Quiet Thing” and “Sing Happy”. Beautiful stuff.)

And as I listen and sing I’ve been having this very meta question of what is it we are doing when we’re singing a song written and performed by someone else? Why is that a thing we do? And what is happening when I am doing it?

For me, in part I’m trying to recreate the experience I had listening to it. I sing Sweeney Todd to bring that story’s specific experience of pain and delight back into my life. Or maybe a specific experience of Len Cariou (yespleasemoreplease).

It’s the same with a song like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. I think for most of us who love that song there’s some sort of touchstone experience we’ve had with it at some point that we’re trying to enter into again. We want to be a part of what that moment was for us the first time, or the first time it was special.

So singing in these circumstances is like a kind of invocation, a calling of spirits.

Then there are the songs that seem to capture something I’ve experienced, or that help me make sense of what I’m feeling. Being in love. Heartbreak. Living in New York. A friend played me “Another Hundred People” from Company when I first moved back to the city. It’s a song I’ve heard a million times, but suddenly it is absolutely capturing a part of the experience of life here, the ways we see, connect and miss each other. (So many songs from Company help me figure out life.)

But lately I’ve been wondering if singing isn’t a kind of project that I’m about. Some of the songs that you sing are more aspirational. They’re who you want to be. And by singing them it’s like you’re trying to slowly break your way through the unseen chrysalis around you. Like the singing is itself a part of the act of becoming.

There’s something very magick-y about this way of talking, song as spell of a sort. But it’s also liturgical—in the Catholic tradition, we think about Mass as actually opening ourselves to an experience or encounter with God. And song is a big part of that.

What I know is every time I sing a song like “I Am What I Am” from La Cage Aux Folles, it seems to be taking me somewhere. I don’t know quite know where that is, but it seems to be a place filled with life.

We’re in that Pause For Inhale just before the start of a new television season. Looks like it’ll be a pretty full season too, “back to normal”. A couple things are already on, but the real wave of programming is still to come.

A couple things you might keep your eyes on:

1) Y: The Last Man – One day every man in the whole world dies, except for an escape artist by the name of Yorick. It’s a wild premise that was a very popular and groundbreaking comic book. Everything I hear suggests the show could be even more thoughtful in its examinations of gender roles.

2) Time – Sean Bean stars as a schoolteacher who goes to jail for killing a man while drunk driving. It’s a three part series that has beautiful vignettes of a lot of different inmates. I liked it so much I wrote about it for America. It’s on BritBox, which I realize may seem a bit niche. But you can get a week free trial—and while you’re there, check out Broken, which is one of the best presentations of the Catholic priesthood and parish life I’ve ever seen. (Also it co-stars Paula Malcolmson as a mom with a gambling addiction, and she is just the greatest.)

3) The Morning Show – This was Apple TV’s first big show, a sort of rehash of the Matt Lauer/Today Show fiasco. I just finished the first season; it’s kind of a mess in some ways. My life for a show that doesn’t feel like it has to have the main two characters fighting the whole time.

But it’s also as far as I know the first show to think about sexual harassment and violence in the workplace as a cultural issue that many people participate in, rather than just the result of one or two bad eggs. And it allowed for a variety of forms of participation, too, from active assistance and enabling to a more tacit acceptance that people might not even be aware of doing because it’s so essential to the culture. The 8th of the episode is a flashback to a weekend in the life of Steve Carell’s Matt Lauer Monster character, and it is a deep dive into exactly how longterm abuse in the workplace occurs, the ways people participate in it (even at the expense of themselves), and how the perpetrators are able to argue they did nothing wrong.

No idea what the new season might bring, but it has some great people coming aboard and seems to be focusing on race. Billy Crudup is also riveting every single moment he’s onscreen.

If you’re looking for more pop culture content from me, here’s something from me on Lost, Lord of the Rings, The Goldfinch, The Leftovers, Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos and 9/11.

I also loved this interview with Frank Oz.

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