The Unhappy Truth of the "Gay" Life

My cousin Tommy died of AIDS in about 1985.  I can’t remember the year exactly. I was nowhere near him at the time and I did not see him at the end of his life.  My relatives who did say he was unrecognizable, very thin, pale, almost ghostlike.  He was about 36 years old.   

Growing up, we enjoyed fun times together in the small town where his parents lived.  They owned a business on the town square in Center, Texas, which is similar to many small towns across America with the county court house in the middle and stores and offices around the four sides of a square. 

Court House in the middle of the town square 

Center, Texas

There was a movie theater and a post office, and a drug store, of course, but the place everyone for miles around knew about was Shepherd’s Café, owned and operated by my aunt and uncle, because that’s where people went after church on Sunday for the best Sunday dinner around and the most amazing pie you ever put in your mouth. 

Center, Texas, where Tommy grew up

For a teenager like I was then, staying a week during the summer at my aunt and uncle’s house was something I looked forward to because I knew Tommy and I would have such fun, riding around at night, stopping at the Dairy Queen to see who was there, dropping in on the Youth Center to find out the latest high school gossip.  He was three years older than I was.  He knew everybody and they knew him.  Small towns are like that. 

After high school, he started college but dropped out almost immediately and went to a school for beauticians.  When he graduated, he moved to Houston and found a new set of friends.  Life went downhill from there.  In a few years he went to San Francisco, a place he didn’t prefer to talk about much.  He told me once one of his return visits to Texas, where I saw him last, that he was glad to know I was happily married and that my life was so normal.  Unlike his own, I suppose.  I asked him what San Francisco was like, to be polite,  and he said, “Honey, trust me, you don’t want to know.  I’ve seen and done stuff you wouldn't believe."  

As naïve as I was at the time, I took him at his word and assumed it must be very naughty and taboo, but never could I have then imagined the kind of wickedness to which he no doubt referred.  People too often want to think what goes on in the bedroom of other people is no stranger than what happens in their own.  Out of respect for the other’s privacy we even make an effort to not think about it.  It is our “not thinking about it” that has most people convinced that gay sex is as peaceful and loving as what happens in a marriage bed.

Most people want to believe that gay people have the same kind of long term committed relationships that normal people have, that they are faithful to their partners, that they are just like the rest of us.  They will tell you, My hairdresser is gay, or my officemate is gay, so what?  Love is love."  Statistics tell a very different story. 

In the book, Vatican II, Homosexuality and Pedophilia, by Atila Sinke Guimaraes there is this horrifying revelation: 

“Regarding the percentage of priests who have died of AIDS, …..The Kansas City Star published a series of articles on the topic that began in January 2000.  The newspaper based its report on a survey sent to 3,013 priests; among these 801 (27%) responded.  From this response and from parallel investigations, the Kansas City Star projected that 300 priests had died of AIDS since the mid-1980’s.  That translates into an annual AIDS-related death rate of about 4 per 10,000 priests, which is four times higher than the general population rate.  This estimate is considered conservative.

The same report soon elicited higher figures from other sources.  Sociologist Richard Sipe, a former priest who has spent 30 years studying sexual issues in the Catholic Church, said that he figured about 750 priests nationwide had died of AIDS in the same period from the mid-1980’s to 1999.

Joseph Barone, a New Jersey psychiatrist and AIDS expert estimated the number of US priests who have died at 1,000.  Barone directed an AIDS ministry from 1983-1993 at the North American College in Rome.”

These statistics were compiled in the years BEFORE drugs to keep those with AIDS alive longer were available, so the number of deaths may have dropped, but we would be fooling ourselves to imagine the infection rate is any less than it was three decades ago. 

These are priests we are talking about, not the general population.  People who shouldn’t be having sex at all!  Imagine how promiscuous the general population of gays is if even the clergy is rampantly passing disease from one to the next to the next.  Does that sound like "faithful to one only" loving relationship to you? 

Before he died, my cousin Tommy confided to his older sister, whom he adored, that there wasn’t a minute of the day when he wasn’t thinking of sex and where he could get it, obsessed with the thought of his next hook up, his next encounter with another stranger and the next and the next.  Does that sound like married love to you?  There is no reason to think just because they wear a collar that the sodomite priests in our own parishes are having only “nice sex, committed sex, long term relationship acceptable sex.”  In all likelihood, it is more like the kind we have recently read about in the files of Cardinal Mc Carrick.  Vulgar, filthy, aggressive, violence against another person sex for a momentary thrill and control over another’s future.

"Uncle Teddy" as he likes to be called

Gay sex is not gay, nor happy, nor fulfilling in any shape or form.  It is time we began to think about it, disgusting as it is, and start to realize that the sodomites in the Church are not “just like the rest of us.”