The Confessions of Scott Pomfret

TNG is taking a much needed break from Dec 19-Jan 4. TNG will return with new content on Jan 5. Until then, please enjoy this post from the past year. Original publish date: 8/19/08

Author Scott Pomfret will be appearing in D.C. this Thursday, 8/21 at 8 p.m. at Artfully Chocolate (1529C 14th Street NW, the corner of 14th and Q) to read from and answer questions about his new book, Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir as part of the Outwrite gay reading series. Now living in Boston, Pomfret used to reside in D.C. while attending graduate school at George Washington University. He also used to coach football at Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland, one year taking them all the way to the state championship game. Scott graciously took a few minutes to talk with TNG about Since My Last Confession:

The New Gay/Philip: You’re known as a writer of the Romentics gay romance novels. What caused you to break the genre boundary and write this memoir?

Scott Pomfret: First, it’s easy to get fixed in a particular genre, so I’m always trying to keep some different pots boiling at the same time as I’m writing romance, such as writing short stories or some book reviews. But public events in Massachusetts made this book necessary, when the Catholic Church decided to take on gay marriage advocates. I could not not write Confession.

TNG: Your quest in Since My Last Confession is to get Archbishop Sean O’Malley to have a more generous and Christian view of gay people. Why was this so important to you?

SP: From a purely political standpoint, I wanted to take the archdiocese of Boston out of the dialogue, the political debate about whether to amend the Massachusetts constitution to ban gay marriage, because otherwise sympathetic people would say to me, “I wish I could support you, but this goes against what the archbishop is telling me to do.” I wanted the church hierarchy to be delivering a different message. Second, from the perspective of gay people in the church, it would make a difference to those who have been told that their lives are sinful and for whom the Church is seen rightly as faith-destroying if Cardinal O’Malley said something even slightly affirming – like, I don’t know, pink’s not such a bad color, or something. Third, when he first came to Boston, I thought that O’Malley seemed more approachable [laughter]…which obviously turned out not to be the case.

TNG: What was your purpose in writing the book?

SP: This isn’t a book aimed at keeping gay people in the Catholic Church. It’s aimed to make people laugh, number one. Number two, [it’s] to keep gay people from rejecting their own gay spirituality, just because their experience with organized religion was bad. In other words, you shouldn’t throw out the spiritual baby with the Roman Catholic bathwater.

TNG: Was it difficult to write a funny book, to come up with jokes and one-liners, about such a personal matter?

SP: God, no, it was a relief! I think that the only way to survive a Roman Catholic upbringing is to laugh – often and ruefully.

TNG: Near the end of the book, you imagine Archbishop Sean asking you, “How can a porn-writing sodomite consider himself a real Catholic?” How would you respond to this?

SP: I would say that for me, what’s Catholic is the commandments that deal with love, what I consider the Gospel acts of goodness: feeding the poor (or, from my own personal experience, giving a lawyer to the lawyer-less). Doing that in the context of the Gospels is my version of Catholicism. O’Malley’s Catholicism is a perversion of the gospels. His makes a priority out of sex rules, mine makes a priority out of gospel values. Plus, my version’s more fun.

TNG: Some gay men, reading Since My Last Confession, might accuse you of self-hatred—or at least masochism—for sticking so devoutly with the Catholic Church in the face of institutional hatred. What would your response be to this characterization?

SP: Nothing wrong with a little masochism. My view is that gay people buy into the teachings of the Vatican, and they see “the Church” as the Pope or the Vatican. I see “the Church” as a collection of grass-roots churches, with goodhearted Catholics inside them. And that’s to me what makes up Catholicism—not the hierarchy, but the individuals inside the churches.

TNG: Do you foresee any softening in the Catholic Church’s attitudes toward gay men and lesbians?

SP: Only if you’re looking ahead 500 years. Actually, I see a hardening.

TNG: Is that because of [Pope] Benedict [XVI]?

SP: That’s because of Benedict and, of course, John Paul II, who have installed a set of bishops for whom obedience is the number one virtue and who take a sex rules-centered approach to spiritual life.

TNG: You express both a lot of anger and a lot of love toward the Church. What’s your current feeling about it in the wake of writing Since My Last Confession?

SP: Ambivalent. I hoped that writing the book would tip the scales permanently toward love, but that hasn’t happened. In fact, it taught me new negative things about the Church that I hadn’t thought about before. But it also brought me into contact with a bunch of heroes, and a bunch of survivors, and a bunch of holy people. Some day I might leave, but it won’t be today. Maybe it’ll be tomorrow. Who knows?

TNG: What negative things did writing the book cause you to think about that hadn’t necessarily occurred to you before?

SP: I guess it’s more when you hear people tell stories about loss of faith, when they can point to a time, a particular incident that they regard as the point that their faith evaporated. It’s one thing to know in the abstract that supposedly holy people, priests can treat children badly and poison their spiritual life. It’s another to hear in agonizing detail about the time when a particular person’s spiritual life was destroyed.

TNG: So it was a difficult process to research and write this book?

SP: You know, it was a challenge to confront my faith in the light of these negative stories about the actions of the Church. But it had to happen. Whether I wrote a book about it is another story, but I had to confront my faith. I feel that more people from inside the Church should be confronting the Church and calling them on their wrongs – not just to bash it, but to change its course. And call me foolish, but I’m guessing God would trade a little suffering piety in favor of more belly laughs.

TNG: You say that many of the “characters” in the book are “composites drawn from real people.” Have any of the real people behind the composites contacted you or reacted to the book?

SP: They have [laughter]. People who are inside the gay/lesbian [spirituality] group have guessed at their own identity or the identity of others from details in the book. One makes fun of me for being a conservative because I don’t like liturgical dance [a Christian use of bodily movement in prayer]. The priests have largely not spoken to me about it, except to ask generally how the book is going, and I don’t know what that means. One priest is worried that he’ll somehow be exposed, which tells you a lot about the climate of fear inside the Church.

TNG: What does he fear will happen to him if he’s exposed?

SP: I think he’s afraid he’ll be reassigned, he’ll be called in front of the archbishop and lectured, that he’ll be put out on the street without any skills, without any retirement, without any source of income. I don’t know how real that fear is, given the shortage of priests. I don’t think the Church can afford to put the few men they have out to pasture. That said, there’s a Maryknoll priest [Roy Bourgeois] who just last week was summoned to his bishop’s office because he attended an ordination of womenpriests. [Roman Catholic Womenpriests—RCWP—is an organization supporting the ordination of women as priests within the Catholic Church.] To me, one of the beauties of the powerlessness of the Church in modern times is, what does it mean to be excommunicated? I mean, who cares? If you refuse to accept the excommunication, what affect does it really have on daily spiritual life? That’s what the womenpriests have discovered since their excommunication: spiritual life goes on. They aren’t going to hell just because Benedict says they are.

TNG: Have your roles in the church—as lector, as a member of the gay and lesbian spirituality group, as a worker on your church’s human services committee—been affected by the writing or the publication of the book?

SP: Not at all. Not a word out of the archdiocese of Boston. I sent a copy to Archbishop O’Malley for his birthday, June 29th. But I haven’t yet gotten a thank-you note.