A gay Catholic from San Francisco

Dear Catholic,

I sympathize with your discomfort, but I envy your propinquity to the fabled Sisters, whom I've never seen in person but revere from a transcontinental distance. How I long to belong to their troupe, which seems to have a commedia dell'arte flair. When I vamped satirically around Greenwich Village with drag queen Glennda Orgasm (Glenn Belverio) for our joint film in 1993, I'm sure the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were in the back of my mind.

But you're quite right that it's open season on Catholics among a jejune brand of gay activist whom I loathe. If the sacrilegious disruption in St. Patrick's Cathedral -- where an Act-Up protestor threw the Communion host on the floor during Mass -- had occurred in a synagogue, the outcry from the major media about bigotry and hate crimes would have been deafening. As a lapsed Catholic who grew up under the gigantic bat-wings of the Legion of Decency (America's anti-Hollywood Inquisition), I yield to no one in my resistance to authoritarian surveillance and intrusion. But current gay life is culturally so shallow that old-style Catholicism looks better and better every year.

It's interesting that the persona of the imperialistic nun has lingered with such imaginative strength, since real-life nuns, committed to self-effacing social work, have largely abandoned their full, flowing regalia and repressive, disciplinary stance. Nuns seem to be mainly media creatures now -- from flitty Sister Wendy and grumpy Mother Angelica on TV to lounge singer Whoopi Goldberg hiding out in a convent in "Sister Act" (1992). The pop shift of nuns into comedy was probably heralded by Sally Field in "The Flying Nun," the ABC program (1967-70) that oddly ran concurrently with NBC's "I Dream of Jeannie" (1965-70) -- two polarized visions of female levitational magic, the winsome, candied angel versus the pliable, prankish odalisque.

Successful lampoons need taboos to transgress. Since I haven't observed the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in action, I can't critique their humor. But perhaps today, when divas of the thunderous dimensions of Marlene Dietrich and Bette Davis aren't available for parody, nuns are a vestige of the Bitch Goddess Triumphant. I mean, just how many laughs can you wring out of a Mariah Carey or a Celine Dion, once you get past their Oscars fashion howlers? Drag queens aping nuns may be obscurely miming a myth of the Bad Mother, the sour or impacted mammary whose plumbing has gone dry. What a metaphor for our sexually dyspeptic culture!

Images of nuns used to be powerful, even menacing, rather than buffoonish -- for example, the rustling pack of Furies who haunt the edges of Giulietta Masina's consciousness in Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965). And Audrey Hepburn's brilliantly focused performance in "The Nun's Story" (1959) gave my adolescent psyche quite a zap, let me tell you. I didn't see Deborah Kerr as a glamorous Himalayan nun in "Black Narcissus" (1947) until much later, but the sensual Anna Karina as Diderot's drafted nun in "La Religieuse" (1965) certainly transfixed me (the film's decadent, party-till-you-drop convent was of course my special favorite).

In a way, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969), in which Maggie Smith plays a mesmerizingly flirtatious but frigid Scottish schoolteacher, is also a kind of nun's story. Should I be concerned that two of the major women in my romantic history are obsessed with this film? Well, as Scarlett O'Hara says, I'll think about that tomorrow -- tomorrow is another day!

Note: A letter signed "Longing for Honesty," which I received too late to include in last week's discussion of the recent report on discrimination against women faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is so compellingly argued that a central excerpt simply must be seen. I agree with every word of it:

"The premise of the report is that since women compose only a tiny fraction of MIT's math and science faculty, then there must be discrimination of some kind. I find it hard to believe the report's unstated assumption that there are women scientists doing brilliant (or at least competent) work who are passed over for hiring and promotion because they are women. Affirmative action programs and civil rights laws place enormous pressure on universities to hire minorities and women. The reason that MIT has hired and tenured few female scientists is that so few of them exist. Very few blacks and women earn even bachelor's degrees in math, science and engineering, let alone go on to become research professionals.

"Affirmative action programs have been far less successful at putting more minorities and women in academic jobs in math and science than they have been in the humanities and the social sciences because math and science have fairly objective criteria for deciding who's competent and who's not. Math has right and wrong answers. If an engineer builds a bridge that collapses, people are unimpressed by claims that the concrete was sexist or Eurocentric. In contrast, the humanities and social sciences have more subjective standards. This makes it easier to declare by bureaucratic fiat that someone is competent to be admitted, graduated, hired and tenured. Consequently, universities cannot find qualified blacks and women to hire in their science departments and tend to 'make up' for this dearth by hiring even more blacks and women in disciplines like English and Sociology, where black and female PhDs abound -- putting white men at a real disadvantage for getting jobs in those fields.

"When will it not jeopardize an academic career to publicly acknowledge that in part of America's black subculture, scholarly erudition is viewed as effeminate and 'white,' so that young black men who show an interest in scholarship risk being branded by their peers as emasculated traitors to their race?"

Postscript: For its May issue, London-based Harper's & Queen magazine asked me for a commentary on Madonna's portfolio of Japanese-style photographs (which appeared in the United States in the February Harper's Bazaar). This is the first article I've written on Madonna since 1993. And yes, despite many stresses and strains, I'm still a fan!
salon.com | April 14, 1999

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