Dear Fr. Daly:
As a Catholic priest, you do a great disservice to all men and women trapped within the horror of the gay orientation. As you yourself state, your experience is limited to “Ozzie and Harriet” type gay couples; your references are anecdotal and superficially unique to the conservative, white, upper-middle clash parish that you describe. While there are a great range of personalities, personas, and lifestyles within the gay community, the one you depict makes up a very small minority. For myself, I came of age, and came out in the gay capital of the world - San Francisco California. For better or worse, San Francisco is often a microcosm of everything that gay culture has to offer: twinks, bears, leather daddies, queens, Saints, and perverts. I saw it all. What you describe in your essay was fleeting and rare. For, the gay male mind, which is still evident in the skyrocketing rates of AIDS (according to the CDC, 90% of young men in the US who are infected with HIV got it through gay sex) and various other sexual diseases, shows the pervasive discontent and restlessness that pervades the community. And, this has nothing to do with discrimination or the lack of national rights to marry the same sex; what it has to do with Father is that most gay men are very unhappy people.
In my experience of over 20 years in the gay lifestyle, some of that spent ministering to these men on a very basic level, is that they are all haunted by often buried trauma from the past: an unloving or uninvolved father, the specter of sexual abuse, or an early exposure to porn. Much of this was completely out of their control. Especially in today’s culture, they received no help either as children or young adults. Instead, they were told they were gay. Lacking any other alternative, like myself, they surrendered to something that was forced upon them; or, at least, suggested to them, a proposition that is loaded with all sorts of political and social motives. What they find in the gay community is a hyper-sexualized reality in which younger men are initiated and groomed into the ways of gay sex. For instance, I once knew a sweet and rather innocent guy who arrived in San Francisco from the Mid-West, honestly looking for love and companionship, and within six months was HIV positive. And, Father, most importantly, in our essay, you take little heed to the profound Truth which the Catholic Church upholds when she states that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.” From someone who had to wait in a proctologists’ office, crowded with other gay men, and then had to endure a series of humiliating, painful, and revolting surgeries, I will now testify that yes - gay sex is extremely disordered.
Father, what you are doing is reckless. You fault the Church for being “uncharitable,” when in reality the Church is being the height of charity: in telling gay men and women, even though its exactly what they do not want to hear, how to reach perfection: “Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.” By embracing someone’s disorder and their woundedness, you are taking that away from us all; and you are condemning them to death: according to The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), gay men are 160X more likely to contract HIV than heterosexual men; the rate of syphilis infection among gay men is 46X greater than in heterosexual men, and 71X greater than in women; the rate of gonorrhea is twice as high as in the heterosexual population, and the rate of chlamydia is nearly 6X greater than in heterosexuals; gay men “are also at greater risk for other health threats that often occur in conjunction with mental health problems; according to US research published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases - overall prevalence of anal HPV infection was 70%, and HPV 16 and/or HPV 18 – the HPV types most associated with anal cancer – were detected in 37% of study participants. Rates of anal cancer are higher among gay men than other groups. Father, for their sake, and for the sake of their lives, stop what you are doing. Tell them: “to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.”
You brother in Christ:
Joseph Sciambra
Read Fr. Daley's essay here: