A Catholic Sex Manual

Growing up Catholic in the 60s, it was a given that at some point in my life I would want to become a priest. Well I did, but being the neophyte homo that I was, my idea of the priesthood was a little scrambled. I was surprisingly progressive back then; I also wanted to be a nun. So mix the two together and I was in fag heaven. My favorite childhood dress-up game was saying mass dressed as a nun. A white t-shirt served as the wimple; with my face framed by the neck hole of the t-shirt and the arm sleeves tied together in the back, a light blue towel finished off the headdress nicely.

I was disappointed though that I didn’t have a tunic or dress to complete my “habit”. I tried all sorts of different ideas but nothing really worked until one day, while rummaging through a box of old fabric that was stored in an upstairs closet, I pulled out two things that changed disappointment into heart-thumping glee. The first was a fabulous blood-red, silk floor-length house-dress with a lighter toned red velvet collar. It was perfect for my habit!

Of course, once I put it on, along with a new wimple and veil (also found in the box of fabric) I wasn’t exactly sure if I was a nun, a priest or a cardinal. I ended up with another “scramble idea" and settled for popessa! I had fun with that habit for a year before my mother caught me in it. Although I explained that I was simply playing the role of a priest (the wimple and veil were unexplainable) the beautiful red silk house-dress disappeared into her closet. Later that week, she actually burned it in the backyard burn barrel. I watched her from my upstairs bedroom window. That was the end of my first home-made religious habit but it certainly wasn’t the last.

The second thing that I found in that stash of old cloth and house-dresses, was a book. As soon as I pulled it out, I rushed it to my favorite hiding place in my bedroom and left it there until I went to bed that night. With a flashlight illuminating the pages under my bed covers, I started to read what turned out to be a “how-to” sex manual written specifically for Catholics. I can’t remember the title of the book, but I can still remember it was a thick volume with a heavy brown cover. There were no illustrations and the writing was very matter-of-fact but it had chapters on “The Genitalia” and “A Woman’s Role in the Marriage” and “Talking with Children about their Bodies.”

It was this last chapter that ended up scaring me enough that I finally snuck the book back into the box where I found it and left it there. I can clearly remember how the author(s) advised parents to be forthright and clear about describing the body and the functions of the penis and vagina. They illustrated the dangers of being oblique with children by telling the story of a young pubescent girl watching his mother bathe her new-borne baby boy. When the girl child saw her brother’s penis, she was naturally curious as to what it was and what it was for. The mother, as mothers are prone to do, panicked and quickly told her daughter to never touch it, that it was bad and would hurt the baby. That night, while her parents slept, the young girl crept back into her baby brother’s nursery with a pair of scissors and snipped off the dangerous little appendage that threatened to hurt her new little brother… This little anecdote scared the living bejesus out of me (I was all of 11 or 12) and that ugly little book was one of the very few that I ever dropped from my personal library. I did replace it many years later with The Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein and Filce Picano.