The Fancy Dancer

to be priests or deacons. Why not? Celibacy. How in hell does celibacy qualify you to deal with souls? And you think of all the other sex issues, and you come back to the gay question. In New York City, the Catholic Church helped to defeat the gay rights bill. Even if being gay were a sin—does the Catholic Church deny jobs and housing to people who commit adultery? The logic is crazy.”
    ‘The way the Church sees it,” I said slowly, “gay people are called to celibacy. The way we see it, all that matters is whether love is real.”
    “That’s i it, exactly,” said Doric.
    “But that’s all Jesus cared about,” I said. “Real love.” “Isn’t that what a priest is supposed to be?” Doric asked. “Someone who helps other people leam how to love?” He walked on, scuffing at the yellowed leaves. “That’s why I decided to stay a priest. So when someone like you finally cracks up and cries, there’ll be someone there who has already done the crying.”
    He stopped scuffing, and stood looking at me with a strange defiance.
    It was funny how the old mesmeric appeal that Doric had had for me could still grab at me, a little. Even after all these years, and with the possibility of a relationship between us now past and over with.
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    When I got back to the professor’s house that afternoon, Vidal had gone out. I had no idea where he’d gone or what he’d been doing, but he’d left his shaving stuff in the bathroom, so he was sure to come back.
    I knew what he was doing. He was out catting around. That day, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, I discovered the pains of jealousy.
    There was a Dignity/Denver rap session that night, but I was too upset to go there and try to verbalize and relate to people with Vidal’s absence gnawing at my guts. So Doric left me with a packet of articles on homosexuality gathered from magazines all over the country, written from the liberal Catholic point of view. There was also a pre-publication “underground” copy of the study on homosexuality by some American theologians, in which they were beginning to say out loud some of the things about the Bible and the Church’s teachings that gay Catholics had been saying among themselves.
    The professor went off with Doric, and I was left alone in the house.
    In the cozy little guest room, I lay on the bed and tried hard to read. But not even that earthshaking report could get my attention. I kneeled by the bed and tried to pray. I even went in the living room and tried to watch TV.
    Shortly after eleven, the front door opened. I thought it was Doric and the professor coming back. But it was Vidal.
    He smelled of beer, and he was a little high, but not drunk. He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall.
    “I’m sorry about last night,” he said.
    “So am I,” I said.
    “I’m just so goddam impatient anymore,” he said.
    “Me and my hangups drive you straight across the creek, huh?”
    “I don’t know what it is,” he said.
    Suddenly he threw himself down across me and tried to get his arms around me. With a rush of relief, I hugged him.
    The good lovemakings, the ones that haunt you later on when it’s too late, don’t come at the beginning of a relationship, I found. They come toward the end. Something in that conversation with Doric earlier in the day had loosened me up a little, and I made love to Vidal in a way that I’d never quite had the courage to do before. Something, too, had been stirred by the fact that he’d left his prowling around the bars and come back to find me.
    For once he was not urging me on. For once I was abandoned. We had turned out the light, but I could see him clearly in the dark, writhing slowly on his back, his spine arched, his head straining back into the pillows, or tossing from side to side. His outflung hands were clenched in the sheet. Suddenly he gave a short sharp cry, almost as if he’d been hurt, and one of his hands, straining blindly, tore the sheet.
    It gave slowly, majestically, with a shuddering rip, as the temple veil must have done when Our Lord died.

a a a
    In Denver, that night, I started to have the dreams.
    The mere fact that I was having crazy dreams didn’t scare me. I’d studied enough primer psychology to realize that the shocks of coming out were finally getting down to my subconscious. My mind was turning over, the way lakes do in the late summer when the cold murky bottom waters come roiling to the top.
    Shortly after