Could Guerilla Queer Church work in Australia?

Guerilla Queer Church: a response to Pope Benedict

Re: “Gay Catholics to protest pope’s visit” (news, April 11)

The nation’s straightest bars are no longer safe for beer farts, fantasy football, pleated khakis and other hallmarks of heterosexual waterholes.

The first Friday of every month, for example, Boston Guerilla Queer Bar (BGQB) organizers target an unsuspecting traditional straight bar. They notify 1,000 Facebook “friends” from all over eastern Massachusetts of the designated hetero-venue. At the appointed hour, gay and lesbian masses pack the bar rail and dance floor and transform an establishment heretofore notorious for testosterone into an instant queer club.

Although the takeover yields a space where it’s safe to exhibit a non-straight sensibility, the participants typically don’t stage protests or drape themselves in the rainbow flag. They just dance, flirt, ogle, dish, drink, laugh, tip well, and at closing head home. If they’re lucky, they have company.

Each month, BGQB targets a different straight bar. Washington, Detroit, San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle and other American cities have been doing this for years. “We want to fully inhabit the city we live in,” explained a San Francisco Guerilla Queer Bar organizer.

The imminent arrival of Pope Benedict XVI gives us a chance to expand the concept. Benedict, of course, is famously hostile to gays. Not only has he condemned homosexual activity and made prohibiting gay celibates from entering the seminary a priority of his papacy, but he also demands that the civil law conform to Catholic doctrine. He frequently fulminates against gay marriage, gay adoption and even laws protecting gay people from being fired because of their orientation. Before he became pope, then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that, “Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil” and that letting same-sex couples adopt children “would actually mean doing violence to these children.” Some observers expect him to highlight these themes during his U.S. visit.

And gays are not his only targets. Benedict heads the Church of Exclusion: the divorced and married men and women with a call to priesthood are similarly marginalized.

In light of these papal sentiments, it’s no surprise that meetings with openly gay Catholic leaders and female priests are not on the pope’s agenda. So I make this modest proposal: Let’s skip the papal Mass in Nationals Park and instead kick-start the Guerilla Queer Church. Here’s how it will work:

We’ll post a Facebook page for each American diocese. One Sunday per month, we’ll target a particular “traditional” parish in the diocese and a particular Mass. Notified by e-mail, the gay Catholics will descend en masse and take over the front pews.

We’ll sing, we’ll worship, we’ll be indistinguishable from our straight friends in the pews, except perhaps for the ferocity of our love, our same-sex kiss of peace and the fact that we would leave petitions in the collection basket in lieu of dollars to avoid contributing to a corrupt hierarchy. Members of the gay Catholic group DignityUSA will be invited. So will the Romancatholic Womenpriests, and members of the group Corpus, an organization of married priests. We’ll bring our families, however constituted, and our partners and cherished spouses.

Guerilla Queer Church won’t be an act of civil disobedience or profanation (depending on your view) similar to the protests staged by the advocacy and awareness group ACT-UP in the 1980s in which Mass was disrupted and the sacred Holy Eucharist spilled on the floor of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Rather, Guerilla Queer Church will be a celebration, an exercise in ordinary inclusive worship with all its glorious earnestness, awkwardness, false starts, distractions, simplicity, ritual, incense, adoration, amazement and radical transformation. Catholics are called to build the church. But we queer Catholics, gay and otherwise, should also feel free to take back what is ours and fully inhabit the religion we live in.

SCOTT D. POMFRET
Boston

Editors’ note: The writer is the author of the forthcoming “Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir.”