The Fancy Dancer

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    As the days went by, I started to realize exactly why the Church was so stubborn about celibacy for its priests. It was a kind of flesh-hating manichaeism that shrank from the idea of my hands touching the Body of Christ after having touched the body of a human being.
    The strange thing was that my guilt was making me more cautious, sensitive and skillful in dealing with people’s problems. It was burning out of me the last shreds of first-year brashness and seminary bookishness.
    I began to wonder about other gay people like Vidal who had gone through the terror and anguish of seeking a sexual identity out there in the rural reaches of America.
    Vidal’s only touch now with the gay scene outside the state was the magazines he got in the mail. They came discreetly wrapped, to his post-office box, looking no different from Backpacker or the Montana Livestock Reporter. He had piles of them in his closet There was the nationwide gay newspaper Advocate, a few glossies like Mandate, and the Canadian think magazine Esprit.
    I started sneaking them into the rectory in my briefcase and reading them late at night when Father Vance was asleep, and they made me realize there was a whole homosexual universe in America. It existed in the same place and time as the heterosexual universe, and in opposition to it—something like the universe of antimatter that the physicists like to imagine.
    This search for identity was tough enough in the urban areas, where the gay man or lesbian could find companionship and help. There were not only gay bars and baths, but private clubs, theaters, church groups, stores, consciousness-raising groups—even gay travel agencies and insurance companies. And there were gay switchboards if you wanted a shoulder to cry on, or someone to talk you out of committing suicide. But if you were gay in Browning or Cottonwood, or any one of a million other small towns on the American map, you had to “hang and rattle,” as the cowmen said.
    I started to be curious about these hidden, lonely people, crying out in their small-town wilderness.
    “I know just about every faggot in the state,” said Vidal. “They’re pretty amazing people, some of them. They went through the whole crock without any help from anybody. Talk about moral courage.”
    “I wish I could meet some of them,” I said. “Except that people might find out about me.”
    So now and then, on July afternoons when I could arrange to be free, Vidal and I would take off on some crazy lightning trip. Even Father Vance was getting worried that I was overworked, so he grudgingly let me take a breather now and then. He was a realist—if I conked out on him, he’d have to do more work himself.
    Our cover was backpacking. I had done a lot of it when I was in high school and college, and now rescued the old packs and boots from my parents’ attic in Helena. Vidal got himself some cheap second-hand equipment too. We’d roar out of town quite publicly on Vidal’s bike or in my car. When we came back, we had to be prepared with convincing stories about the two grizzlies we’d seen in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, or the awful way hikers left litter in the Swan River National Forest.
    It was strange—our relationship had begun with the fiction that I was the confessor and Vidal the penitent.
    But now he led me. Vidal was my Virgil, talcing me deep into the landscape of a Commedia said to be undivine.
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    One day he said to me, “Remember I mentioned those friends of mine who raise horses? They’re getting that horse ready for the Helena-Cottonwood endurance race. I think you ought to meet them.”
    It was a hot clear afternoon in mid-July. We roared north up the Interstate with the radio blaring Crosby, Stills and Nash. Our hair whipped in the breeze. For a little while my guilt and fear were sucked right out the window like a piece of paper. I loved these , trips, out on the road with him—free, going somewhere, anywhere.
    At Drummond, we took the exit off the Interstate. On the other side of that little cowtown, we took a gravel county road.
    It wound up through dry empty hills dotted with lonely junipers and cedars. A few grade cattle grazed here and there. On top, we came out on a bench like the one east of Cottonwood. This one, however, was all native pasture—a sweep of dry grass. In the distance, at the end of a lane, was a cluster of ranch buildings.
    The lane was lined with young cottonwood trees. Since cottonwoods