Philadelphia's CasinoNO activists: latter day prohibitionists

In 1901, Carry A. Nation, with her swinging Crandall hammer, set about smashing saloons to show her disapproval of alcoholic beverages and her support for prohibition. Although vilified by many, Nation had many supporters, some of whom even sent her hatchets and other weapons with which to smash new saloons. Today, Carry A. Nation is regarded as a symbol of obsessive overreaction to the consumption of alcohol.

In our own time, and in our own city, the tactics of Casino-Free Philadelphia (CFP) might be said to be a symbol of obsessive overreaction to legalized gambling. Why? Because CFP seems to be adopting the methods of Carry A. Nation. On June 6, 2009, a contingent from CFP went inside Harrah's Casino in Chester, Pennsylvania, and put on a demonstration meant to show slots users how they are being "used and controlled" by the casino industry. In short, the CFP raiders (called 'Beat the House') broadcast the message that the industry survives on the backs of hapless gamblers. The idea behind the message: casinos use gamblers like doctors used medical leeches on patients in the 19th century. The poor retirees, housewives and one day-trippers at Harrah's were trying to have a good time, when along comes the Carry A. Nation New Prohibitionists with a demonstration. While some may dismiss CFP's antics as harmless, what will tomorrow bring? An army of hatchets? The stated mission of CFP, after all, is "…to stop casinos from coming to Philadelphia and close any that open."

Excuse me, but does "close any that open" mean shutting down casinos that the majority of people approve of? Isn't this a form of tyranny? After all, what gives these self proclaimed addiction fighters, these self appointed messiahs, the right to save people from themselves? It's one thing to fight for a casino not to be built, another thing entirely to go into a casino and plan to close it. Carry A. Nation didn't care whether people actually wanted to drink alcohol. In her mind, all alcohol was evil because it led to "the destruction of families." Nation had no concept of drinking in moderation. A glass of wine with dinner was just as evil to her as the man who downs 20 beers and then goes home and beats his wife. By a not- so- strange coincidence, CFP's motto is the same as Nation's: that casinos (gambling) destroys families. Funny how prohibitionists of every strip use that old slogan, isn't it? Compulsive gambling and compulsive drinking may destroy families, but so does compulsive sex, compulsive Game Stop video watching, or a compulsive sports addiction.

As a society, do we really need to determine the morality of pleasurable activities based on whether a minority of genetically predisposed folks become addicted to it? Most of the gamblers who head to Atlantic City or Chester, Pennsylvania, are day trippers, not addicts out of Russian novelist Dostoevsky's novella on gambling addiction, "The Gambler."

Philadelphia's sister city, Pittsburgh, just opened a beautiful new casino, Rivers Casino, on the North Shore Riverfront. While Pittsburgh's own Carry A. Nation faction was active in protesting Rivers, they were not successful in delaying the project as has been the case in Philadelphia. The $780 million Rivers Casino has become the source of thousands of job opportunities, unlike what is happening in Philadelphia, where the only "job opportunity" for unemployed neighborhood residents seems to be the acquisition of an Access card. "While just about every economic indicator plummets, the glass, brick and steel walls of Pittsburgh's casino continues to rise," said The Tribune Review. "For the most part, the North Shore riverfront seemed to be an instant hit. If visitors weren't playing, they appeared to be eating, crowding several of the casino's restaurants, including its all-you-can-eat buffet," chimed The Pittsburg Post-Gazette, on August 9, 2009, the casino's opening day.Elmer Smith of the Daily News offered, "They [River Casino] won't drop enough coins to offset Pennsylvania's cavernous $3 billion budget gap this year. But they could keep the lights on in Harrisburg."

Pittsburgh seems happy with the way things are, but guess who was in town protesting the opening of Rivers, Carry A. Nation style? CFP. Never mind that River Casino made a $300,000 commitment to the Northside neighborhoods in the form of a $600,000 matching federal grant to support Northside small businesses; never mind that the city of Pittsburgh will stand to gain tens of millions of dollars in new tax revenues. Never mind that Pittsburgh and Allegheny County will each receive 2 percent of the casino's revenue as host fee.With that said, will Philadelphia ever get its act together?It will, good people, once we bury the Carry A. Nation hatchet!

Catholic Worker Karen Lenz: a tribute

There are small, unsung purveyors of hope in Philadelphia, and some of them are right here in the neighborhood.
One unsung hero is the Sister Peter Claver Catholic Worker House at 430 W. Jefferson Street. As a house it is not much. It’s filled with books, arts and crafts for children, holy pictures, a crooked, narrow staircase, and a kitchen that has fed thousands of needy and destitute people throughout the years.
My first contact with the Jefferson Street CW occurred several years ago when I was assigned to do a story on the place and interview the overseer, Karen B. Lenz. Karen, who was confined to a wheelchair for many years prior to her death on August 6, 2009, became a sort of friend after that first meeting. We discovered that liked the same Catholic authors, mainly Thomas Merton and Flannery O’Connor; that we shared similar beliefs regarding the treatment of the poor—especially in the area of health care, where private insurance companies make health care coverage an impossibility for low income people. We also shared a fascination for the history of the Catholic Worker movement, how founder Dorothy Day, a one time Marxist/Greenwich Village bohemian/ atheist, converted to Catholicism, and founded the Catholic Worker, a movement devoted to peace and justice and equality for the financially underprivileged.
We got along so well that Karen invited me to the community potluck dinner that evening, where I met Peaches and Jackie, two women who lived in the CW house because they had no place to go. That first night a number of other dinner guests arrived: a woman from the affluent Main Line with bags of donated clothing, and another woman deeply involved in the women’s ordination movement.
I’d make many visits to the CW house over the next few years. A convert from Lutheranism, Karen was an avid, but not uncritical Catholic with a deep spirituality. For Karen, the Eucharist was the sacred core of Catholicism, not the actions and edicts from the hierarchy, with whom she had issues. These issues included women’s ordination as well as peace and justice concerns, notably the war in Iraq. Another subject that concerned Karen was the way the Vatican behaved during the priest abuse scandal. She objected to the Vatican’s efforts to link homosexuality and sex with minors in the minds of people. “This is a pernicious and false connection,” she wrote in Equal wRights, a Catholic feminist newsletter that she also edited. “Indeed, most pedophilia and ephebophilia is heterosexual and most same sex love is healthy, good, natural, and holy…”
Karen exuded a Mother’s love; there was something about her that made you—or me, anyway—want to wrap my arms around her and hold her for a time. Her great heart, lively intelligence and sense of humor kept even the drollest conversation percolating throughout a cold February evening. Thursday’s were potluck dinner night, and when I’d visit to say the liturgy I’d bring a Stock’s bakery vanilla pound cake. Potluck dinner guests changed from week to week, so you never knew who you were going to meet. Karen knew everybody, from canonical hermits, to nuns, to baby-cheeked students from nearby colleges, so dinners were a feast of new people and stories, maybe a shared bottle of wine, and talk that made the hands of the clock race ahead so that we were always saying, “Gee, it’s time to go home already?”
During dinner there’d almost always be knocks on the door. Sometimes it would be a woman wanting food to feed her children, or somebody dropping off a donation. There were also times when addicts or the homeless would knock for something to eat.
Throughout the evening Karen’s Rabelaisian sense of humor had us pounding our forks on the table in good natured howls. Karen may have been saintly in many ways, but she was not made of plaster.
While Karen was passionate about women’s ordination issues, I tended to be lukewarm. Karen liked the liturgical changes in Catholicism since Vatican II whereas I believed that the so called “new” Mass was about as awe-inspiring as a political stump speech, or an Info-commercial on the Fox network. Despite these differences we managed to agree to disagree, so our friendship remained intact.
When we came and went we always gave one another a kiss. Her face, like that of a great lioness, would lean out towards mine, as I’d stoop over the wheelchair and tell her, “Thank you.”
Why thank you? Because Karen B. Lenz gave and gave…. a lot….

Thom Nickels

The Life of Edmund White

Keys to the Kingdom of Edmund
by Thom Nickels

My Lives: An Autobiographyby Edmund WhiteEcco (HarperCollins). 356 pages, $25.

THE CELEBRATED “FATHER” of modern gay literature had Christian Science roots so entrenched that when he was a grown man he had developed an uncanny habit of forgetting to take his medicine. Still, Edmund White doesn’t forget much in this tell-all autobiography that begins by ripping into the heart of his parents, his lovers of both sexes, and the therapists who led him astray. “In the mid-1950s, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I told my mother I was homosexual: that was the word, back then, homosexual, in its full satanic majesty, cloaked in ether fumes, a combination of evil and sickness.”White’s mother, a psychologist barely five feet tall, was not shocked by the revelation. White writes that she was “almost gleeful when she told me I was a ‘borderline psychotic with strong schizophrenic tendencies’” after testing him with the popular Rorschach inkblot test. As a result of the “blotched spots,” he grew up thinking he was mentally ill, though that didn’t stop him from writing and starring in plays, or from cultivating his childhood fantasy of wanting to be a king.Kings do anything they want, and King Edmund, barely out of the precocious toddler stage, had an early lust for life: he confesses to how he became adept at auto-fellatio at summer camp (“throwing my legs over my head in the first stage of a backward somersault”); how, soon after these gymnastics, he “tasted the first penis that wasn’t my own.” That first taste unearthed a yearning for more. The author of A Boy’s Own Story, Forgetting Elena, and The Farewell Symphony began life as jailbait (“I was afire with sexual longing”) who “haunted the toilets at the Howard Street elevated station, the one that marked the frontier between Chicago and Evanston.”Sex and lots of it is the theme of this memoir, which is populated by familiar figures from the literary, artistic, and musical worlds. We read how Michel Foucault overdosed on LSD at the baths and how Edmund came and rescued him (he confesses that he considered himself to be Foucault’s dumb friend—“but I thought hey, we all need one”); how Edmund cracked the rumor that Genet had once danced for the Black Panthers when Angela Davis confirmed for him that “Genet was the original gender-bender. He’d get high on Nembutal and dance for the Panthers in a pink negligee”; how he, Edmund, has no sense of style: “I used to be careful about my looks, but now I have to remind myself to have my hair cut monthly or my teeth cleaned every six months. I wear the same sturdy, waterproof shoes every day.”At various points in the long narrative he injects recent events. There’s the portrait of his sex master in New York, a former literary fan, who comes to dominate his life for years. Details of the affair, drawn out in explicit erotic detail, call to mind Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses: degradation, humiliation, and shame in fact rule these passionate encounters, and Edmund is literally a slave, lacking only a dog collar. The reader gets very used to sentences like this: “In an instant the head of his dick would be poking up stickily over the elastic waistband. When I’d peel down the jock and release it, it would be hard as wood and smell at once sweet like sperm and bitter like urine.”In “My Women” he recounts affairs or friendships with the women in his life. In these portraits, when the relationships were sexual, he withholds erotic detail. Scant mention is made of Susan Sontag, with whom he had a long friendship in Europe and New York but with whom he had a contentious parting of the ways over his portrayal of her in Caracole. Perhaps his reminiscences of Sontag were written before her death and he feared additional censure or retribution. He does recount how Sontag’s son, David Rieff, came after him with a bullwhip at a party for Caracole (1985) but was “apprehended” before he could lash out. His views on love are cynical yet realistic:Love puzzles me so much I can scarcely say whether I think it’s good or bad. It’s good (and bad) because passion-love, unlike esteem-love, is transformative, obsessional, impractical. It can’t be fitted in with a job, errands, and homework. It pushes friendship aside and upstages family attachments. It crowds out every mild or disinterested pleasure; in fact, it has little to do with pleasure of any sort except at the very beginning of its trajectory when the poor lover still imagines he might live happily ever after with the beloved.In “My Shrinks,” White sets the stage for his youthful obsession with Freudian analysis, a system he found “too devoid of comfort to serve as a substitute for religion” with its “narrow, normative view of humanity.” White came to reject this absolutist view in his early thirties, replacing it with “an interest in groups rather than individuals.” He credits psychoanalysis with leaving him with a few convictions, notably “that everyone is worthy of years and years of intense scrutiny—not a bad credo for a novelist.” He confesses that he began to feel a compulsion to betray his sexual partners, an observation that calls to mind Jean Genet’s betrayal of his lovers in The Thief’s Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers. While this identification with Genet is not specifically drawn out, Genet’s name is mentioned enough for the reader to draw parallels, fusing a kinship that places White and Genet in the same “bad boy” camp. For White, letting an older boy at summer camp “hypnotize me and press my mouth down on his penis” meant going to Mother, who was the camp psychologist, and spilling the beans. These were the Eisenhower years, when enrolling in a military school was seen as an all-purpose solution when it came to boys’ problems. White was the sort of kid who over-analyzed everything. At age fifteen, like a youthful Dr. Peabody, he confessed to a friend’s mother: “I’m very worried. I don’t seem to be moving out of the normal homosexual stage of development.”Coming out for White was anything but a polite society dance. He’d head over to Kentucky from Cincinnati and spy on the young men in white T-shirts and beltless, low-riding jeans, nursing cigarettes. “How convenient that these young Kentucky men, smelling of beer and Camels, their bodies so lean they had no hips, a T-shirt sleeve swollen because it was folded back over a cigarette pack above a tattoo—how convenient they were for hire.” He writes that he was “in a fever of desire for these hillbilly boys perched on the Fountain Square railing.” He’d cash his weekly paycheck from his job at his father’s Addressograph machine company and head over to where the boys were hanging out. “I wore nerdy Steve Allen black glasses and had a longish brush cut. I was skinny and given to tics—my neck was always stiff and bobbing and I nodded it in little spasms that were so noticeable that I hated to sit in front of anyone at the movies.” In these instances he was usually so flustered that he would go with the first man who spoke to him. During one cruising foray he encountered an out gay boy who called himself “Miss Thing,” who observed: “Mary, the joint is hopping tonight!” Not his type: the young White’s idea was to capture “a real man,” a heterosexual man. “A real man had to be primitive, angry, not too intelligent and, in conversation, a bit ludicrous, whereas we queens were clever but as sterile as eunuchs.”Years later, when living in New York and writing A Boy’s Own Story, he would call escort services (“Bottoms were a dime a dozen; real money was spent only on tops”) or pick up street kids. He was writing college textbooks at the time. Far from demanding perfection in his boys, he writes that he liked flaws, “a wound which acted as an opening to the communion of shared humanity.” He wrote A Boy’s Own Story in one of the back cubicles in the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU after nights of hard S&M play with a parade of escorts. “The heat and my hangover tempted me to put my head down on my desk and fall asleep. I was so sleepy I would write portmanteau words, which collapsed the syllables of two or three words I’d already sounded in my head. I even started to spell phonetically.”Although he never waxes sentimental, of all the portraits in the book the ones of his parents are the most powerful. His mother (“Like me she was prone to malapropisms.”) wore a Merry Widow girdle that Edmund had to help her get out of. Mother admired rich people but had a pantheistic view of God that young Ed found “unconvincing.” “I never liked God in any form, even at his most universal. To me he was like Santa Claus—a grown-up conspiracy perpetrated on children to humiliate them. Too good to be true.”Readers expecting a pristine, tasteful portrait of the author will be shaken out of their teacups. This reviewer loved its sometimes upsetting honesty, its self-effacing humor and its sensuality. There’s the story of French writer Gilles Barbedette, for instance, who wanted to translate Nocturnes for the King of Naples into French while still a skinny kid and whom White met when he was a “young-looking, chain-smoking, heavy-drinking New York sex addict of forty.” “As we talked about books I sat on the floor beside him and kept touching his leg,” White writes. “He always loved to tell the story of how he, a very young man, had approached me on a serious artistic and professional mission and I was, within minutes, kneeling on the floor before him and unzipping his fly, calling him ‘Master.’”Thom Nickels is the author of two recently published books: Out in History and Philadelphia Architecture.

From Europe to Eurabia (The truth is never easy to Digest)

This week marks the eighth anniversary of September eleventh. Eight years is a long time in a culture like ours. While all of us can recount where we were when the twin towers in New York went up in smoke, the passage of time--and the fact that there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since 2001--has lulled many of us into a sense that everything is okay--for now. But no matter how relatively peaceful those eight years have been, this is no time to forget what occurred on that fateful day, and what might occur again on a day as beautiful as that fall day in 2001.

You might remind yourself this week to remember those who lost their lives in the Towers, the Pentagon, and in a field in western Pennsylvania. The men and women who had to jump from the upper floors of the towers to avoid being burned alive--the falling men, their neckties whirling in the wind, the dozens of co-workers who jumped holding hands, the constant “thump, thump” sound of bodies hitting the ground that the news media eventually had to “black out.” The victims of 9/11 did not know why the towers were falling down around them. They may have known of a hit by a “random airplane” but they knew nothing or an organized terrorist attack. They went to their deaths not realizing that this first major attack on American soil also had a side component: the slow buildup of a radical Islamic powerbase throughout western Europe.

This buildup began in the 1970s when much of Europe agreed to trade crude oil with Arab countries in exchange for promises of “free form” immigration (Strasbourg Resolution 492, 1971). Overnight all over Europe there was a flood of immigrants camping in the streets, selling pencils and chewing gum in cathedral squares.

These were the years that Europe slept, the years when the governments of Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and the Netherlands, permitted unfiltered, free-for-all immigration of radical Muslim immigrants from Morocco, North Africa and the Middle East. I say ’free-for-all’ because this was no immigration on a case by case basis but a careless open door policy that eventually led to a population explosion, or radical Muslim enclaves in which the new citizens refused to assimilate into the host country (read: they rejected the host country’s values and social mores). Rather than bow to the laws and customs of the host country, these new immigrants proposed imposing their own view of life, Sharia Law or God‘s Law, into the secular society. Today we see examples of this all over Europe (or Eurabia), where radical Muslims in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and France stone or kill their daughters or wives for offenses against God (offenses such as not wearing the burka or chador, going to the hairdresser’s, or adultery). Meanwhile, the men are free to take more than one wife although polygamy is officially banned in the host countries. Despite this ban, these politically correct governments, afraid to prosecute the law breakers, turn the other cheek, and the result is the formation of a country within a country.

Here, then, is another form of terrorism, meaning: a form of conquest from within, and it is happening all over Europe, in heretofore progressive cities like Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Oslo, Rome, Paris and Frankfurt. Europe is doing very little to stem the tide of this new brand of terrorism. In the politically correct name of multiculturalism, Europe is exempting the new citizens from obeying laws everybody else has to obey.

Why?

For some hours on September 11,2001 I wasn’t so sure that Philadelphia would escape the terrorist’s wrath. The September 11th scenario could have unfolded in any number of ways. Today, I live in a good neighborhood, have a nice house, and have the freedom to believe in God or not believe in God, to dress as I want and love whom I want. But if Sharia law were in place, I’d be counted among the dead. (And so would you, noble reader).
On this September 11th I will thank God that in America we have a democracy and not a theocracy, where there is freedom for all religions, and where regardless of the tenets of a church or sect, if those practices (like polygamy or stoning) go against national laws, then that religion must suffer the consequences.

Sadly, I feel for our European brothers and sisters, who today struggle with an insidious 2009 version of terrorism that includes massive attempts at changing Europe from the inside out..
This week I will remember the words of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, “…This new war does not aim at the conquest of our territory maybe, but certainly aims at the conquest of our souls and at the disappearance of our freedom.

Review: A Gay Catholic Memoir by Scott Pomfret

Since My Last Confession (a gay catholic memoir) by Scott Pomfret
Arcade Publishing, New York $26.00 288 pages


Vatican II brought radical changes to the (western rite) Catholic Church. Not only was the Latin mass changed to the vernacular but the nuances of the liturgy were streamlined or in some cases, “protestantized.” One of the intentions of Vatican II was to make the Catholic Mass “accessible” to mainstream Protestant religious bodies like the Lutherans and Methodists. The idea was to set the groundwork for Christian unity, to make Catholicism “ecumenically friendly.”
To the chagrin of Catholic traditionalists, the design of the “new” Mass was orchestrated by six Protestant clergymen. At the end of Vatican II, change for the sake of change in the Church became the order of the day. The concept of the Mass as a “meal’ rather than a “sacrifice” heralded the new position of the priest facing the people rather than east (or the altar). After that came the removal or deconstruction of the high altar itself. In Catholic churches around the world plastic or wooden tables replaced centuries-old altars. (Traditionalists derogatorily refer to these plastic tables as “Julia Child’s table—without the Cornish Hen”).
Other changes in the Church continued with the fever pitch of a Donna Summer song.
The tabernacle, once the immovable focal point of the high altar, was removed to a side table. Sacred iconography went the way of all flesh: statues and icons in some cases were removed and replaced with burlap banners decorated with Biblical quotations. Highly stylized Church crucifixes were replaced by a tacky looking resurrected Christ (arms outstretched) or in some cases bare plus signs. Altar rails, some of them hundreds of years old, were demolished and turned into parking lot slabs. The overall architectural design of Catholic churches changed as well. New churches came to resemble secular meeting halls or interdemonitional spaces.
“Is this a Catholic church or a Protestant church?” became the common refrain of the day.
In many ways the Catholic Church of the post-Vatican II era was a different Catholic Church than its predecessor. The 1970s saw folk masses, jazz masses, basketball masses, Halloween masses, hand clapping and other Protestant evangelical trappings. Gregorian chant flew out the window; in its place pedestrian “hymns” like “On Eagles Wings” became signature liturgical music.
Change even affected the religious habits of some orders of Catholic nuns. The “modern” nun, fashionably coiffed in short hair and long earrings, came to resemble the nice lesbian feminist next door. Sadly, the Audrey Hepburn nun of The Nun’s Story became a fossilized antique.
But if proponents of Catholic theological change thought that Vatican II would alter or modify Catholic doctrine, they were mistaken. The truth is, Vatican II was more style then substance. The Council took much of the fun out of Catholic worship (the smells and bells) but left more important areas like birth control or human sexuality, untouched.
Scott Pomfret’s memoir deals mostly with the “new” church (called the Novus Ordo by traditionalists), the church of “On Eagles Wings” and “cool” masses that get down (or up) like bad Broadway shows.
Mr. Pomfret, a Boston trial attorney and a lay minister, is a committed gay Catholic. He writes of his experiences as an involved parishioner with the satirical sagacity of a latter-day Art Buchwald. This highly enjoyable memoir touches on every aspect of parish life, from eccentric fellow parishioners to the anti-gay edicts of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, whom Mr. Pomfret refers to as “Sean.”
Jonathan Swift once wrote, “Nothing is above satire.” Mr. Pomfret would seem to agree. Here, for instance, is his take on a local Boston Dignity service:
“Dignity’s liturgical procedures mandated such strict gender equality. They hailed the Holy Spirit with all three pronouns, alternating among he, she, and it. Wherever possible, the liturgy used the word God instead of masculine pronouns and nouns, but the gender-neutral construction often caused blips in the rhythm of the prayers: ‘Our Father and Our Mother, who art in Heaven….’”
“Dignitarians’ capacity for egalitarianism,” Mr. Pomfret continues, “had outstripped my imagination. [During Mass] the entire assembly participated fully in Prayers of the Faithful. They appealed to the predilections and causes of so many splinter groups that it completely undermined the communal nature of the experience.”
Writing about the Dignity-style Kiss of Peace, or the greeting that Mass goers are supposed to extend to their neighbor, Mr. Pomfret reports that “the dyke sitting next to me gave me a kiss on the mouth,” as “everyone in the room had to be hugged—some of them twice.” In conclusion, he says that the average friar at his Boston parish church, the Shrine of Saint Anthony, “could have crammed two Masses into the span of time it took the Dignitarians to exchange peace.”
The author goes to great lengths to understand Cardinal Sean, whom he describes as “personally broken,” after the Massachusetts Catholic Church failed to stop the legalization of same sex marriage there. So devastated was the Cardinal, Mr. Pomfret writes, that he wouldn’t even look the opposition in the eye when it came time to shake hands at conferences or religious roundtable discussions.
“People who encountered [the Cardinal] reported a stunned, deer-in-the-headlights look,” he writes. The marriage victory in Massachusetts, Mr. Pomfret adds, was embarrassing for the Archdiocese of Boston where the state legislature is 70 percent Catholic.

“The Church, limping, haggard, once a moral contender, had weakened to a shadow of its former strength. A different Church, one that retained a speck of moral authority, might still have articulated Gospel imperatives that really did bear repeating: poverty, capital punishment, war, goldfish murder, the ubiquitous frat boy uniform of khaki pants and braided belts, and other objective evils,” Mr. Pomfret writes.
There’s hardly a niche or crevice in American Catholicism that Mr. Pomfret doesn’t cover.
When he visits a Courage meeting (a gay Catholic group committed to celibacy), he observes: “Their alienation from their sexual identity was compelling—but also obscene, like watching a little girl with a box knife cut herself.”
Surprisingly tolerant when he writes about Courage, Mr. Pomfret does manage to include a few Courage quotes.
“People who have successfully integrated homosexual desires with their personalities…are rare indeed.”
“It is therefore easy to see how the homosexual relation fails as a totally human relationship.”
The Boston Courage chaplain is described as a “hunk.” “…Father John was a man’s man—forty years old, movie star handsome, a strong handshake, and a tough South Boston accent. A lot of the celibate boys surely developed serious crushes on him,” Mr. Pomfret writes. Although Courage’s celibate boys are only about ten in number, the author wonders, “The Church really is determined to torture these guys. They couldn’t have chosen a little ninety-year-old eunuch as chaplain? Instead they assign this virile stud?”
As to why he remains a Catholic in the impossibly rigid doctrinaire atmosphere of Pope Benedict XVI (or B16), Mr. Pomfret says, “I can no more shed my Catholicism than my gayness.”

Thom Nickels is the author of eight published books, including Philadelphia Architecture and Out in History. He is also the architecture critic at The Philadelphia Bulletin. He can be reached at ThomNickels1@aol.com.

SORE, metaphysical science fiction

The cover of my new book, due out in early 2010. I wasn't sure about this cover at first. I used to write erotic fiction in the 1990s. I no longer do that. My friends generally approve of this cover, although a few said it smacks of
tacky eroticism. SPORE is hardly a pornographic novel, however. Once again, I will have to take my chances. When 'The Boy on the Bicycle' was published in 1992-93,
The Philadelphia Inquirer refused to review it because of the cover.

An Argument over spilled beer leads to Murder

The Three [Philadelphia] Stooges—Charles Bowers, James Groves and Francis Kirchner-- who (allegedly) beat to death 22 year-old Lansdale-native, David Sale, over spilled beer, now face the possibility of life in prison.
They’d gone to McFadden’s bar in the Phillies ballpark on a beer road trip with other patrons from one of the sleazier bars in Fishtown. Their intention, I would assume, was to have a good time but that’s not what happened.
Whatever problems these men had before this incident are nothing when compared to what lies ahead for them. Ten years from now, perhaps, (if they are convicted of killing David Sale) they may wake up in a cell in Graterford Prison to participate in a Mural Arts prison Project. At that point they may think back to the stupidest night of their life, when they choose to let lose the ‘dragon within’ rather than talk things out, or walk away.
Walking away from impossible, alcohol-fuelled situations takes strength of character; there’s nothing cowardly about it.
If there ever was a lesson in controlling one’s temper before over reacting, this is it. Imagine having to spend a lifetime in jail because, under the influence of alcohol, you allowed violent, drunken impulses to possess you for the better part of 30 minutes?
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, when commenting on the Sale killing, said, “There’s a lot of violence out there.”
Psychologists, of course, have a lot of theories about why some men are violent. Violence can stem from a dysfunctional, abuse-filled childhood. It can stem from anger from unfulfilled personal desires (that which we seek to repress builds up stem, eventually producing a “volcano”). Violence can occur when lives are perceived as meaningless, when life itself is thought to be worth little. Nihilism may have its place in existentialist philosophy, but it rarely translates well to troubled individuals for whom life then becomes just as meaningless for everyone.
Sometime ago I wrote about vigilant violence, but ‘dog pack’ violence, when large groups that hang out, drink and do stupid things together, is a close cousin to roaming the streets and taking justice into your own hands.
Group dynamics, when mixed with alcohol, can have different effects. It’s unlikely that ten women having Martinis at a Union League luncheon will get into a barroom brawl, though their breeding might instigate conversational warfare should there be a breakdown in communications. Ditto for Knights of Columbus members who decide to share a brew at a local pub, say, and then get into an argument. Chances are the end result of that ‘fight’ would be a slammed drink on the bar, and a quick “disciplined” exit.
In movies there are lots of examples of barroom scenes in which a drink is thrown in someone’s face, and then a handkerchief offered to clean it up. Woman in those old films might even blow smoke in a man’s face and even get away with a slap or two before they walk out the door. Only in gangster films and western melodrama do we have examples of what happened in McFadden’s sports bar.
The testosterone-filled, crowded sports bar must be the direct descendent of the rowdy, western bar where cowboys used to shoot one another. Sports bars are “ripe” for public brawls because you can’t even maneuver the simple act of sipping (a drink) in such places without your elbow hitting your neighbor.
Sports bars are like little Roman coliseums: the wild laughter and good times always seem to threaten to turn into violence. Sports bars are places where just one drunk in the group may attempt to influence the pack, whether out of a sense of bravado or showing off in games of one-upmanship. Group drunks can turn into sloppy, dangerous affairs at the flip of a coin because the individual antics of just one member can cajole, encourage and otherwise instigate collective stupidities. This is what happened at McFadden’s bar, where police reported large numbers of people from “both sides” rumbling outside in small groups.
We may never know for sure how the fight at McFadden’s began in the first place. One thing is certain: alcohol almost certainly distorted the perceptions of what was only, on the surface, a simple beer spill. “Something” was read into the spill, and for that somebody had to die.
It’s one thing to die for one’s country, for someone or something that one loves, for work, family, religion, friends, etc., but “trading” a life for spilled beer just doesn’t make the grade.
Thom Nickels