Requiem Aeternam

An old friend died this week—more of an acquaintance, really, of whom I was very fond, and whom I wish I’d known better—ten days after a catastrophic stroke left him without hope of recovery, and two days after he was taken off the machines in accordance with his end-of-life wishes.

I noticed Brian years before we met. How could I not? He was the omnipresent, fey-butch, scruffily bearded undergraduate who waxed a little zaftig as the months went on, at the other side of the first gay bar I frequented nearly forty years ago, a basement hangout full of university types trying bravely not to look or act as nerdy as we were. Later he morphed into the svelte swimmer at the athletics complex, who parlayed his cruising experiences there into his first book, a study of gay men and their relation to sport.

Eventually we ended up colleagues at the University of Toronto. At least once over the years we ran into each other at the baths. I don’t remember how or exactly when we transitioned from pleasantries to deeper engagement. I do remember, vividly, a first dinner with him, his partner, and their two dogs, and a conversation that ranged across the writing of novels, the travails of trying to get them published, Gregorian chant, and monastic retreats.

Brian and I shared a deep but ambivalent fascination with the life of men living together under a Rule. We compared our visits to the same Benedictine house in Michigan. For each of us, the woodland trails adjacent to the abbey were a welcome diversion when we’d had enough of chanting the Psalms. He recounted delightedly a session of spiritual direction with the guest master, one afternoon when he found himself “stuck”—an experience not too uncommon on silent retreats. Helpfully, the guest master had suggested that Brian try visualizing having sex with Jesus.

Our kind of monk, we agreed over dessert.

Toggle forward as I sit writing this in the common room of another monastic guesthouse, nearly fifteen years later, thinking about the barely submerged undercurrent of homoeroticism that flows through much of male monasticism’s homosocial world. (And, I have it on good authority, the world of women’s religious communities as well.) Thinking of monastic celibacy not as a denial of sexuality, but as a very conscious fashioning of the erotic self, a channelling of one's sexual energy into a singularity of desire for a man whose lean, nearly nude body is a ubiquitous spectacle and object of Christian devotion. A sexuality that in some sense is as queer as it gets--just as Brian, may light perpetual shine upon him, was as queer as they come.