Catholic, Gay, and Married?

Just for the record, my wife and I have two children.  Daniel is almost eighteen; Gabriel, almost sixteen.  Neither of them is gay--though one of Gabe's best friends is gay.

Now, what would *you* do if  Zach O'Connor were *your* son?  Tell him that he should be celibate for the rest of his life?  Who is Zach O'Connor?  Read on:

New York Times
April 1, 2007

Accepting Gay Identity, and Gaining Strength

By MICHAEL WINERIP

MADISON, Conn.

ONE month before Zach O’Connor, a seventh grader at Brown Middle School here, came out about being gay, he was in such turmoil that he stood up in homeroom and, in a voice everyone could hear, asked a girl out on a date. It was Valentine’s Day 2003, and Zach was 13.

“I was doing this to survive,” he says. “This is what other guys were doing, getting girlfriends. I should get one, too.”

He feared his parents knew the truth about him. He knew that his father had typed in a Google search starting with “g,” and several other recent “g” searches had popped up, including “gay.”

“They asked me, ‘Do you know what being gay is?’ ” he recalls. “They tried to explain there’s nothing wrong with it. I put my hands over my ears. I yelled: ‘I don’t want to hear it! I’m not, I’m not gay!’ ”

Cindy and Dan O’Connor were very worried about Zach. Though bright, he was doing poorly at school. At home, he would pick fights, slam doors, explode for no reason. They wondered how their two children could be so different; Matt, a year and a half younger, was easygoing and happy. Zach was miserable.

The O’Connors had hunches. Mr. O’Connor is a director of business development for American Express, Ms. O’Connor a senior vice president of a bank, and they have had gay colleagues, gay bosses, classmates who came out after college. From the time Zach was little, they knew he was not a run-of-the-mill boy. His friends were girls or timid boys.

“Zach had no interest in throwing a football,” Mr. O’Connor says. But their real worry was his anger, his unhappiness, his low self-esteem. “He’d say: ‘I’m not smart. I’m not like other kids,’ ” says Ms. O’Connor. The middle-school psychologist started seeing him daily.

The misery Zach caused was minor compared with the misery he felt. He says he knew he was different by kindergarten, but he had no name for it, so he would stay to himself. He tried sports, but, he says, “It didn’t work out well.” He couldn’t remember the rules. In fifth grade, when boys at recess were talking about girls they had crushes on, Zach did not have someone to name.

By sixth grade, he knew what “gay” meant, but didn’t associate it with himself. That year, he says: “I had a crush on one particular eighth-grade boy, a very straight jock. I knew whatever I was feeling I shouldn’t talk about it.” He considered himself a broken version of a human being. “I did think about suicide,” he says.

Then, for reasons he can’t wholly explain beyond pure desperation, a month after his Valentine “date” — “We never actually went out, just walked around school together” — in the midst of math class, he told a female friend. By day’s end it was all over school. The psychologist called him in. “I burst into tears,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Yes, it’s true.’ Every piece of depression came pouring out. It was such a mess.”

That night, when his mother got home from work, she stuck her head in his room to say hi. “I said, ‘Ma, I need to talk to you about something, I’m gay.’ She said, ‘O.K., anything else?’ ‘No, but I just told you I’m gay.’ ‘O.K., that’s fine, we still love you.’ I said, ‘That’s it?’ I was preparing for this really dramatic moment.”

Ms. O’Connor recalls, “He said, ‘Mom, aren’t you going to freak out?’ I said: ‘It’s up to you to decide who to love. I have your father, and you have to figure out what’s best for you.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’ ”

“Of course I told him,”  Ms. O’Connor says.

“With all our faults,”   Mr. O’Connor says, “we’re in this together.”

Having a son come out so young was a lot of work for the parents. They found him a therapist who is gay 20 miles away in New Haven. The therapist helped them find a gay youth group, OutSpoken, a 50-minute drive away in Norwalk.

Dan Woog, a writer and longtime soccer coach at Staples High in Westport, helped found OutSpoken in 1993. He says for the first 10 years, the typical member was 17 to 22 years old. “They’d come in saying: ‘I’m gay. My life is over,’ ” Mr. Woog says. “One literally hyperventilated walking through the door.”

But in recent years, he says, the kids are 14 to 17 and more confident. “They say: ‘Hi, I’m gay. How do I meet people?’ ” 

For the first 10 years, Mr. Woog never saw a parent; meetings were from 4 to 6 p.m. Sunday, so members could get out of the house without arousing suspicion. Now, he says, parents often bring the child to the first meeting.

He believes teenagers are coming out sooner because the Internet makes them feel less isolated and they’re seeing positive role models in the media. Indeed, Zach says he spent his first therapy session talking about the gay characters on the TV show “Will and Grace” as a way to test the therapist’s attitudes before talking about himself.

Still, seventh grade was not easy. “We heard kids across the street yelling ‘homo’ as he waited for the school bus,” Mr. O’Connor says. Zach says classmates tossed pencils at him and constantly mocked him. “One kid followed me class to class calling me ‘faggot,’ ” he says. “After a month I turned and punched him in the face. He got quiet and walked away. I said, ‘You got beat up by a faggot.’ ”

The O’Connors say middle-school officials were terrific, and by eighth grade the tide turned. Zach was let out 15 minutes early and walked across the football field to Daniel Hand High School to attend the gay-straight club. Knowing who he was, he could envision a future and felt a sense of purpose. His grades went up. He had friends. For an assignment about heroes, a girl in his class wrote about him, and Zach used her paper to come out to his Aunt Kathy.

He still wasn’t athletic, but to the family’s surprise, coming out let out a beautiful voice. He won the middle school’s top vocal award.

His father took him to a gay-lesbian conference at Central Connecticut State in New Britain, and Zach was thrilled to see so many gay people in one place. His therapist took him to a Gay Bingo Night at St. Paul’s Church on the Green in Norwalk that raises money for AIDS   care.  Zach became a regular and within a few months was named Miss Congeniality.

“They crowned me with a tiara and sash, and I walked around the room waving,” he recalls. “I was still this shy 14-year-old in braces. I hadn’t reached my socialness yet, and everyone was cheering.

“I was the future. Most of the men were middle-aged or older, and to see this 14-year-old out, they loved it. They were so happy.”

Now, as a 17-year-old 11th grader, Zach has passed through phases that many gay men of previous generations didn’t get to until their 20s, 30s, even 40s. “Eighth grade was kind of his militant time,” Mr. O’Connor says.

“Everything was a rainbow,” says Ms. O’Connor.

These days, Zach is so busy, he rarely has time for the gay-straight club. He’s in several singing and drama groups and is taking an SAT prep course.

“I’ve been out so long, I don’t really need the club as a resource,” he says. “I’m not going to say I’m popular, but I’m friendly with nearly everybody. Sophomore year, my social life skyrocketed.”

In music groups he made male friends for the first time. “They weren’t afraid of me,” he says. “They like me.”

His brother, Matt, says sometimes kids come up to him and ask what it’s like to have a gay brother. “I say it’s normal to me, I don’t think of it anymore.”

As for his  parents, they’re   happy that Zach’s happy.

“Coming out was the best thing for him,” Ms. O’Connor says. “We ask him, ‘Why didn’t you come out in fifth grade?’ ”
________________________________________________________________________________________

Again, what would you do if Zach O'Connor were your son--tell him that he should be celibate for the rest of his life?

Read on:

National Catholic Reporter
March 23, 2007

Gay, Catholic and parents of three

By CHUCK COLBERT

Boston

The challenges of raising three children in the Maguire-Newman home are much the same as those faced in suburban America across the country. The Catholic household, two parents with three school-age children, springs to life at 7 a.m. on most days. While one parent makes breakfast and packs lunches, the other makes beds and monitors homework assignments.

"My observation is that children are a lot more receptive to work and instruction in the first 90 minutes before they have enough energy to be resistant," says Gregory Maguire, a celebrated author of children's literature. He is best known for the widely popular novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a bestseller written for adults that has been adapted into a Tony Award-winning hit musical.

Maguire is quick to explain, "It's not because we want them to be superstars" nor do they have "serious learning problems." Rather, he said, it's a matter of "keeping up in a highly functioning school system in which we find ourselves."

All three children -- two boys and a girl, ages 5, 6 and 9 -- were adopted from countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia. They are by Maguire's account "noisy, smart and obedient within a range," having settled comfortably into an all-American way of life, with interests varying from ballet and piano to soccer and computer games. They are well-liked by their friends, Maguire said, adding, "We have yet to hear or face in nine years living in Concord any resistance to us as a gay couple with a family."

Maguire and his partner, artist Andy Newman, are not only a gay couple raising children, but they are legally married under a new law in Massachusetts, the only state with equal marriage rights for lesbians and gay men.

Maguire was scheduled speak about his story as a gay parent and a sacramental church at New Ways Ministry's Sixth National Symposium on Catholicism and Homosexuality March 16-18 in Minneapolis. New Ways Ministry describes itself as "a gay-positive ministry of advocacy and justice for lesbian and gay Catholics."

The Maguire and Newman clan is part of a changing landscape of contemporary American family life. More than 8,500 same-sex couples have married in Massachusetts since May 2004, including many with children. Nationwide, estimates of lesbian and gay parents range from 2 million to 8 million.

But a political battle to roll back civil-marriage rights for gays looms. Massachusetts state lawmakers have voted to send a proposed constitutional same-sex marriage ban to voters. If the legislature approves the measure again, this year or next, voters would have the final say in November 2008.

The local church has been an active player, with the Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley and other local bishops lobbying lawmakers to restore a traditional definition of marriage.

Maguire and Newman are doing their part to prevent that from happening. Last year they testified at legislative hearings against the ban. This year they will host a fundraiser for MassE quality.org, a statewide organization dedicated to protecting same-sex marriage. The couple has joined thousands of others across the state who have signed an online statement for Roman Catholics supporting the civil marriage rights of same-sex couples.

Despite pronouncements from Rome and Boston, Maguire, a cradle Catholic, remains devout. Newman is a convert. Together, they are instilling in their children the basics of Catholicism. All three have been christened. The oldest has received first Communion. The family begins every meal by saying grace. The children know the Our Father, Hail Mary and the rosary. A cross hangs by the front door. "We are a Catholic family," Maguire said. "We go to church on a regular basis, are respected in our parish, and are healthy contributors financially and morally."

In an interview with NCR, Maguire extended an invitation for Pope Benedict XVI to share a meal and meet the family. He would like the pope to see "we're teaching by example how we must take care of each other, love each other," he said. "That is the heart of the Christian message."

Locally, many gay Catholics, as well as supportive clergy, hope for dialogue. A group of more than 700 interfaith clergy, the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry, has asked for a meeting to discuss a civil marriage with O'Malley. The clergy wish to explain more fully a key distinction between civil and religious marriage and how a gay-marriage ban will discriminate against the religious liberties of gay people. But so far the chancery has not responded to the request.

"The hope is that the conversation occurs among the people in the pews," Maguire said. "If we can't get the message to the clergy that discrimination will not be tolerated, the people will go around" the leadership, and the "clergy will play catch-up."

A recent poll from Decision Research shows that a majority of Catholics in Massachusetts -- 53 percent -- favor same-sex civil marriage.

Raised in an orphanage by priests and nuns, as well as by a Catholic family, Maguire attended parochial schools in upstate New York. "The fact that I grew up as a Catholic, part of my system of thinking -- the grammar of how I frame the moral questions is Catholic grammar," Maguire said. "I have the great blessing and good fortune of finding myself during formative years in a very progressive church that was always eager to ask the next question rather than provide the next answer." And Maguire explained, "A parent's first obligation is to speak to his children with the most authentic language he has. For me, that is Catholicism."

His "intellectual and spiritual training" to "question, but not necessarily conclude," he considers a "birthright" and "inheritance."

"So I don't feel as much of a disjuncture as many people do," he said, "because when I sit in the pew and hear a letter from a bishop, or an injunction even from the pope about gay parents doing damage to children, I just say: Well, he has not asked the right question -- hasn't asked Andy and me, 'Why are you making so many sacrifices to take care of these orphans?' "

At New Ways Ministry's national symposium, Maguire plans to tell his story, leading a focused discussion on gay parenting in a sacramental church. "It means far less to them [his children] that they have two dads than two parents who are there when they go off to school and when they return," he said.

The tangible benefits and social status of marriage -- its legal, public and moral commitments -- also helps, Maguire explained. "We are able to say to our children honorably that we are married." Among all the differences they embody, "being brown-skinned, adopted and from foreign countries, at least they don't have to deal with that difference. Their parents are as married as any others."

Nonetheless, remaining in the church, Maguire acknowledges, is a struggle. "I run the great risk of being misunderstood or dismissed," he said. A declaration from the Vatican in 2003 that gay parents do "violence" by raising children caused us "grave distress," Maguire added.

But he explained, to "leave the church over what it's saying, I would have to pluck out my eyes because I don't like what I am seeing." For Maguire, that action would be tantamount to spiritual suicide, he said. "I would far rather be brave and sit in the pew" and "with a fair amount of respect, be the Rosa Parks of the situation. I am not moving. I didn't move before, and I'm not moving now. I am going to be buried from this church."