Reading Left: Part One

After working through college as a church sacristan, Dean applied to remain employed by this Catholic church at this Catholic university. Knowing the university and the Church's policy on homosexuality, he has simply opted to keep his sexual preference and his boyfriend to himself. I know Dean. Dean is not Dean's real name. He has everything to do with many of the literacy events in my young and slightly leftist life.



1.

Dean, let me reconstruct your face before I begin this. The reconstruction is a hard one, for one moment I look in your eyes and there is a sadness, another joy, and then there is the pride that is nearly as bad as the sycophancy. How to say the things I want to say to you. There's never been time. You see me in a church when you see me at all. My world is books. From the Bible to the Advocate the words I read have changed me, and as I change, so does what I read. This is the circle of literacy that makes the words from my mouth and the words out of my pen those of a leftist and a liberal.
Being born Black, Hispanic, Third World, female, gay or anything else that would be perceived as a minority, as something disenfranchised, does not make one an activist. That is my problem with you. I would expect that it would, that I am outraged and loud and longing because I am Black. Maybe not. Maybe it is because I am me. And I expect you to shout because you are what you are, because you showed me once and then never brought it up again. Does this make me naive or you weak? Or is there something in the middle?
I am holding to what Harold Washington said when he was mayor of Chicago, that Black people must be fairer than fair. That after a history of enforced bondage, rape, killings and misuse we, fortunately or not, have lost the right to carry this vengeance on anyone else. Because we've seen much misfortune, we are obliged to see it in others and stand up against it, as if it were our own. And so I could very well be a fool to think that I am angrier than you, though I open my mouth and say things out loud, and you sit on your hands and take it all in.

Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
(Catechism, 566)

I am angry when I write this and angry with you for sucking it up and plastering yourself to a wall. There used to be so much color in you, and now it is gone. Sometimes there is such a rage in me I think I will explode. But maybe my out loud rage is better. Maybe it's safer than what smolders in you, beneath quiet eyes.

The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy. It is the quest for the self, for the center of the self, which we women of color have come to think of as the "other"-the dark, the feminine. Didn't we start writing to recognize this other within us? We knew we were different, set apart, exiled from what is considered "normal" white-right. And as we internalized this, exiled we came to see the alien within us and too often, as a result, we split apart from ourselves and each other. Forever after we have been in search of that self, the "other" and each other.

(Anzaldua 169)


That is why I write, but that is why I speak as well. Why I act. I know you've made the trade off, to shut your mouth and have a very little. The church job is so comforting to you, what the Church says is good to you for the most part. When I say a thing I see how it shocks you. You're not the first to open your mouth and gape, to wonder why I didn't play the game, why I will not shut my mouth.