Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir by Scott Pomfret Read Free Book Online Page B

government to which I belong.
    I try the greeting with “U.S.,” but it comes out “U.F.” I try just “S.E.C.,” but that comes out “F.E.C.” Stringing the whole thing together sans acronyms and using a diaphragm-stretching deepness of voice that I could barely sustain, I say, “Scott Pomfret, United States Securities and Exchange Commission.” I call Scott, play the greeting, and ask him what he thinks.
    “You sound like a nancy queen,” he says every time.
    My two consolations are, first, that I am actually gay. After all, I could have been straight and had a gay voice. Imagine the tragedy, the comic irony, the proof that God has a sense of humor. Second, I take consolation that I’m in reasonably good company. Numerous evangelicals and many of the horse-wranglers from the hate state of Texas, including President Bush II, share this affliction — a squeaky high-pitched whine like a loose telephone wire caught in a brisk wind. Listening to President Bush always gives me that acute sense of mortification you feel when hearing your own alien voice caught on digital audio.
    Father Abraham fixed his gaze on me and said in a loud baritone, “ As I used to teach young seminarians preparing to say their first Mass, the trick is to make me believe that yew believe. This should be true not just on the altar, but everywhere you go, eucharistic ministers and priests alike. You have personal responsibility with respect to the way you live your life. You must be a witness.”
    Easy for you to say , I thought bitterly. You could be James Earl Jones’s white brother
    Before I could chicken out, Father Abraham marched us to the second floor chapel for the dreaded practicum, in which we broadcast the voices God gave us — gay, straight, and anywhere in between. Father Abraham stood in the back row. We trainees huddled like shocked dogs under the glorious stained glass above the altar. The Cape Verdean queen went first. Her Highness rushed through the reading like she was in a race for the finish line.
    “Do you have some other place you need to be?” Abraham asked with mock politeness.
    “What?”
    “Slow down!” he boomed. Abraham had no need for amplification.
    Her Highness started the reading a second time. Abraham again interrupted. He noted how important em-PHAS-is was. “E-NUN-ci-ate,” he chided. “You must enunciate.”
    Abraham had once been a drama teacher — and I don’t mean that phrase as a euphemism for “gay.” He was a professor of homiletics — the art of giving homilies, which is what Catholics call sermons — and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to show off. With exaggerated diction, he spouted great chucks of scripture, with each character therein given a different voice.
    “Do that’s” Abraham commanded when he had exhausted himself He might as well have asked Her Highness to turn water into wine.
    “Um, OK,” she said, close to tears. He mercifully let her get through her text and then slink off to the pews to be alone with her shame and gold jewelry.
    One of the nylon windbreakers went next. In a cramped Irish voice that he swallowed whole, he said, “A readin’ from the first book —”
    “The first thing you need to keep in mind,” Abraham said, cutting the Irishman short, “is that the microphone is unkind. It amplifies everything: snuffles, labored breathing, nose wrinkling, gas. Even shyness. God may be forgiving, but the microphone is not.”
    Once Abraham had reduced the Irishman to a puddle of warm Guinness, I approached the ambo. The microphone radiated evil. Think of the smoking swastikas on the crate holding the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ar\ . Like the God of the Old Testament, that microphone could perform acts of great cruelty and vengeance. Just when you thought you’d made a covenant with it, the bitch turned on you. It would refuse to amplify a word you said until the moment when you cursed it under your breath; then it broadcast the