Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir by Scott Pomfret

the earthly Church raises up to Heaven under the impulse of the Holy Spirit .
    — Pope John Paul II, “Ecclesia Dei”
    Beheadings, Burnings, and Other Children’s Literature
    COME FROM A LONG LINE of drama queens. My father used to throw temper tantrums over the loss of the shavings catcher on a forty-nine-cent pencil sharpener. My paternal grandmother bullied us grandchildren into unwilling Rockettes for a home rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock.”
    Even the family dog was a drama queen. My sister, God bless her, used to dispose of her used female sanitary products in the bathroom wastebasket. Occasionally the dog would hunt these products down and pull them out for inspection. On one of these occasions, I tried to remove the Snausage substitute from his jaws. Rather than give up the bloody goods, the dog fled. I chased him down the hall, skidded the córner, and dived for his little dog ankles. When captured, he growled, snapped, whined, and promptly went into a week-long sulk. (Needless to say, wresting my sister’s tampon from Fido’s jaws marks the exact moment in which I lost any residual chance of being a straight man.)
    The first indication of my own drama queenliness was my obsession with Butler’s Lives of the Saints . I turned to martyrs the way other kids discovered the Hardy Boys or Judy Blume. The Lives contained nonstop hangings, burnings, stonings, spearings, beheadings, drownings, slashings, quarterings, scourgings, immersions in boiling oil, stretchings on racks, defacings (nose, ears, eyelids, and underlip cut off), beatings to a pulp, and being forced to watch your daughters die and to drink their blood. And that was just October!
Butler's  Lives of the Saints
Butler’s Lives of the Saints is a month-by-month, multivolume compendium that gives biographical information for virtually every saint ever canonized in graphic, uncompromising, and horrifically bloody terms, It was a must-read for Catholic kids before Harry Potter.
    My consumption of the Lives mirrored my sinfulness. Murdering a pet gerbil called for a half-dozen martyrs and three saints. Thoughts of naked boys cost me ten virgin saints, preferably female. Failure to pass the collection basket at home Mass meant a whole month’s worth of saints’ feast days. Had I made it two and a half times around that Irish chapel, I would have to have read all four volumes from cover to cover.
    I committed dozens of the lives to memory as faithfully as my father memorized the Baltimore Catechism. Even today I can tell you that, after being beheaded, Saint Justus picked up his severed head and went out to meet his brother. Saints Crispin and Crispinian — nearly as gack-inducing as Scott & Scott, don’t you think? — defied their tormentor’s attempts to boil and drown them, which so infuriated the tormentor that their persecutor jumped into the fire he had prepared to roast them alive. Step aside, X Games. Martyrdom was the extreme sport of the early Christian period.
    The influence of the Lives in my life became obvious. A messianic craving for martyrdom expressed itself in quixotic and self-destructive ways:
     
I chose Thomas a Becket as my patron saint. I ached for someone who had been fed to the lions or tortured to death by having his skin peeled off and eyes plucked out, but my pastor assured me that a sword through the skull was sufficient suffering for sacramental purposes.
Under the influence in New Orleans, I imagined myself to be the Great White Hope who was going to unite the black and white races. I marched down Canal Street with my arms spread wide, embracing black strangers. A guardian angel whisked me back to Bourbon Street before anyone embraced me in return with a baseball bat to the head.
I conceived of a program modeled on the Peace Corps called Homosexuals for the Heartland, in which armies of gay men would go to Iowa to impart faith, friendship, and fashion sense.
    Law school largely purged any messianic impulse. The only