The Fancy Dancer

rattling.
    In the silence, the priest spoke the first words of the Mass.
    The line of dancers shifted softly to form six gay pairs—women together, men together. I felt a ripple of feeling go through the congregation. Probably many of them, like me, were seeing it for the first time.
    The pairs faced each other, placed hands gently on each other’s shoulders, and exchanged such prim and gentle kisses of peace that they might have been cardinals electing a new pope in the Sistine Chapel. Yet the bodies were there under the tight virginal leotards —young, bursting and sticky with strength and youth, like the red oozing buds of the cottonwood trees in the Rockies spring.
    As the priest and the congregation murmured their way through the opening section of the Mass, the clapper stayed silent. The dancers moved and twined through stately patterns—now in pairs, now in a group. They seemed to be celebrating their paired-off state as lovers.
    But as the priest started into the heart of the Mass, the Consecration, the clapper shattered the air again. Everyone else’s nerves shivered the way mine did. Abruptly the dancers shifted back into man-woman couples—all but one pair, the blond and his darkhaired partner.
    The straight couples marched again, almost goose-stepping. You could almost hear the clank of weapons down the centuries—armored knights, tanks. It was the march of a society armed against a way of feeling that it feared. They circled the lone pair of men, who held each other and turned slowly, as if trapped. Suddenly, in slow motion, they tore the pair apart. Five of the soldiers held the partner back, while the other five marched the blond away. He didn’t fight them, but went quietly.
    Suddenly, as the priest approached the Consecration, the blond man was thrust out alone and stiff, as if tied. Then it dawned on me that we were watching not just the passion of the gay lover but the Passion of
    Christ, superbly recreated as one event by some mad genius of a choreographer.
    The clapper beat with a frenzy.
    While the dark-haired partner watched in anguish, the marchers strutted past the tied prisoner. As each one passed him, she or he uncoiled in a whiplash motion, arms slashing against him like living cat-o’-nine tails. Suddenly we began to be very aware of the blond youth’s body, but not in a sexual way. All his muscles jerked, all his tendons strained. The sweat started to stain his leotard. His body language was so real that we could hear the crack of the whip, and see the skin and flesh tear, and the blood start to trickle down his arms and legs. He was being destroyed before our eyes. He was being executed. He was dying for our sins.
    I wanted to yell, "Stop! Don’t do that!”
    The clapper stopped. The priest was bending over the wafer of bread on the paten.
    “This is my body,” he said.
    With a rush, the soldier couples surrounded the blond youth. They seized him by the legs and raised him high on the writhing mountain of their own bodies. They formed a living Golgotha.
    As he was lifted toward the ceiling, he spread out his arms stiffly. His head was bent back, his hair streaming, his body tensed in agony, as if stretched on the rack.
    Nothing I had ever seen, in the movies, or in great religious paintings, or in my own imagination, stunned me with the reality of the Crucifixion as that gay kid raised by his partners. So often, during Lent, when I made stabs at meditation, I had tried to visualize how they killed Our Lord, so that hopefully I would appreciate Him more. But I had never succeeded, until now. I could feel the nails hammered through my own hands, feel the splintery wood against my back, and the heat of the Roman sun.
    All around me, the congregation were reacting in the same way. We watched wide-eyed, in a collective state of shock.
    The hall was dead silent. You could hear cars pass-173
    mg on the street outside. Slowly the priest raised the consecrated wafer high above his head, toward the lifted body. Then he lowered it back onto the paten.
    Then he bent over the chalice of wine. “This is my blood.”
    As he said the words, the stiffened dying body seemed to change before our eyes. The dancers still held it up by the legs, but the life went out of it—you could almost see it draining out, through that invisible wound in his side. His head fell forward, and he slumped slowly down. They caught him, their arms reaching up like a forest. They lowered him gently from that