The Fancy Dancer

thing.”
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    “You’re a priest, man. Everything should be your kind of thing.”
    “And Helena ... My God, that’s a place where a lot of people know me.”
    “Maybe they wouldn’t want you to know they’re there. Come on, Tom, leam to project your paranoia on other people too. We’ll dress up like everybody else. You can wear a mask if you want. I’m not gonna.”
    “You really want to come out, don’t you?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Any day now.”
    “We could go as the Lone Ranger and Tonto Vidal snorted. “That’s not a very original idea. I’ll bet you there’ll be' a dozen Lone Rangers and Ton-tos.”
    I smiled bitterly. “I could go in my cassock. Nobody would dream it was real. I could go as Father de Smet, and you could go as one of the Indians I converted.”
    For the next few days, I didn’t see too much of Vidal. He was so involved in his costume, and the way it must relate to some fantasy of his, that he didn’t seem very interested in making love. I wondered if he was already losing interest in me a little.
    After all, I probably wasn’t as sexy as he had fantasized me to be. I kept remembering the way he had described the first time he’d seen me walking down Main street. It was hard to relate it to the way I saw myself. . . . Looking so butch and so free, your skirt and your blond hair blowing in the breeze . . . Was that me? He had probably expected to get that cassock off me and find one of the hot sweaty studs immortalized in photos and prose in his gay magazines. Instead, he had found me, the Rev. Thomas A. Meeker, and I didn’t quite fit.
    One night I again smuggled some of his magazines back to the rectory and sat brooding over them late in my room. Father Vance would sure get a surprise if he searched my room and found them, so I would have to smuggle them out again tomorrow.
    As I sat on my bed in the glow of the lamp, flipping the pages, the images of those beautiful and unreal men rose up at me, like a sexual litany, from the personal ads where hustlers and lonely lovers advertised themselves:
    Rugged Viking stud Homy Aussie nude Black Diamond in the rough Hairy Levi model San Francisco Adonis Kentucky cowboy Young Texas lad Rugged New York jock Virginia gentleman Cowboy leather master San Diego moon child
    There were bodybuilders, blond blue-eyed surfers, muscular athletes, hip students, clean-cut outdoor types and strong cats without claws. They were heavy hung, handsome and homy, well endowed, uncut meat, raunchy, with bulging baskets and beautiful buns, have hands will travel, shoot your load, hot, wild and ready. They said they had dancer’s bodies, swimmer’s bodies, runner’s bodies. They were manly but sensuous, all man, young and ready for heavy action.
    None of them was me.
    On top of my religious guilts, I was beginning to feel another, more secular kind of guilt: that I couldn’t live up to these fantasies of Vidal’s. My sensuality was limited, or maybe it operated differently from his. Mine started with caring—his ended there.
    Impatiently I threw aside the magazines—the In Touch, the Mandate, the Entertainment West —and picked up the Advocate. I felt more comfortable with this national gay newspaper. It had raunchy personals too, but it carried a wealth of news and feature articles about my gay brothers and sisters out there beyond the isolation of Cottonwood.
    I scanned the paper hungrily. Every page told me that in other states, other churches, the battles between the hierarchy and the gays were sharpening. In Tennessee, a Methodist minister was expelled from his church because he openly said he was gay. In
    California, gay people picketed an Episcopal cathedral where the bishop had made antigay remarks in a sermon.
    Suddenly one headline riveted me. CATHOLIC ORGANIZATION EXPANDS.
    I read the article with feverish speed. There was actually a national Catholic coalition of gay priests, religious and laymen who were openly challenging the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. It was 'called Dignity. Its national headquarters was in Boston, but it also had a growing list of chapters in other cities across America. Avidly I scanned the list, wondering if there was a chapter in Montana.
    No, there wasn’t. But there was one in Denver. That was the closest one geographically. There were chapters in Seattle and Portland too.
    I let the newspaper slide aside and sat there in a state of nervous excitement, thinking. The thoughts formed