ALTAR BOY
Image via Unsplash.
E.G.N. Lafleur is a lay Anglican and recusant Catholic.
Standing at the altar inducts you into a community, and it is mostly a community of men. It is easy to be a man among men if you hold lightly to being a woman in the first place. I feel both – the defiance of being the only queer, the only woman, the only deviant at the altar, repeating it obsessively to myself in my head, and at the same time to be just the same as the men in my cassock, which reshapes my body more effectively than a binder.
The day Benedict XVI died, I was manic with the need to think theologically about my place in the church in ways neither myself nor my seminarian friends are trained to do. I would need Aquinas; I would need to argue from first principles to get under Benedict’s contempt for women and queers. Then, not for the first time, I felt something more than solidarity for gay men. When Benedict talked of rooting out homosexual would-be priests, I felt he was talking about me – not in the similarly deviant category of women who claim vocation, but as a man among men.
Roman Catholic teaching classes same-sex desire as intrinsically disordered: against natural law. It tries to be pastoral towards women who feel a vocation but calls us deeply misguided. Vocation becomes a kind of queerness, like gender and sexuality. Catholics believe that ordination fundamentally reorders your being in the world, the very state of your self. It is like changing gender, and the Catholic arguments against the ordination of women are very similar to those against transition. Gender essentialism claims a person cannot ontologically be trans, and it makes a woman invalid matter for holy orders.
I have been an altar server since I was nine years old, but many Roman Catholic churches are wary of girl altar servers. Acolytes used to be thought of as a minor order of the church, below but on the same continuity as priests, deacons, and subdeacons. Altar serving can be used as a recruitment tool for the priesthood – the hope is that boys will get a taste for it and go to seminary. Girl altar servers don’t fit in this framework. If altar boys are future clergy, what are altar girls?
The summer I was sixteen, I would have given most things to go to Roman Catholic seminary. I realized I had a vocation to the priesthood before I understood myself as queer. My sense of vocation, which the church said couldn’t be real, broke my faith in the Magisterium. Then I was free to consider other possibilities; I realized I was bi and asexual. It was only in university, once I was settled as an Anglican, that I began to consider that I might not be cis. Four years of altar parties made up of women, trans, and queer people let me cling less tightly to being a woman at the altar. The more normal it seemed for the three sacred ministers to be women, the more I relaxed into an ambivalent transmasculinity. I don’t claim an identity other than queer woman, but there is a transmasc part of myself that I hold dear.
My college chaplain and parish priest changed that. I still remember the first time I met my chaplain, on a tour of my new college home. It was in the thirties (Celsius) and shockingly humid to a girl from the west coast. The student guide led us down limestone steps into the vast vertical space of the Anglican chapel, and she greeted us – steel grey hair, skirt, sandals, sleeveless clerical shirt. This was utterly different than any priest I had met before, but I was ready to believe in her legitimacy. And she showed me that there was a church I had a future in, where I could live and receive the sacraments. My parish priest was the first ordained woman who gave me communion. The day after a life and death experience, she took me up to the altar and let me serve. The period between that September and January was the longest I’ve gone without serving Mass since I was nine. It is in my body. When I watched our deacon be ordained, I almost cried when the bishop laid her hands on their head.
I owe my college chaplain part of the idea that a cassock is the ultimate drag – feminine on a man, masculine on a woman. In England and parts of the colony of Canada, wearing a cassock outside church was illegal until updates to the Catholic Relief Bill in 1926. This was supposed to suppress processions and other forms of public Catholicism, but it was also a kind of decency law, coming from the perception of a cassock as a dress on a man. Liturgical vestments, as in this Punch cartoon, were thought of as effeminate, but despite their connotations, vestments were men’s clothes. They’re drag for me as a butch woman, and for me as a feminine man.
Anglo Catholicism is historically the gender troubled arm of the Anglican Church. Its effeminacy – mocked as ‘gin, lace, and backbiting,’ stood in contrast to the evangelical masculinity that was the norm in the Victorian church. But its camp was, and to an extent still is, for men. The gorgeous vestments, the brocade, the silk, the lace, were all men-only until the ordination of women in the 1970s. A woman in a sandwich board chasuble is still unusual – this style is favoured by the most Rome-emulating arms of Anglo Catholicism. At the highest ceremonial, there are still altar parties consisting entirely of men. Some Anglo Catholic women hold doggedly that they are women and insist the tradition has space for them. I am more ambivalent about my identity. Masculinity in altar serving lets me express a part of myself that is otherwise almost impossible to explain – that I am not a trans man, but suspiciously empathetic.
Anglo Catholicism revived a celibate Anglican priesthood, giving a demographic of men access to a life outside heterosexual marriage. Clerical celibacy re-formed the possibilities for their family lives, the chores of housekeeping, their emotional and social connections. They sit in the world of homosocial silences, confirmed bachelors, and don’t ask don’t tell. Anglo Catholic clerical celibacy created space for men who might now identify as asexual, as well as gay. John Henry Newman, a hero for queer Roman Catholics because of his insistence on the importance of the conscience of the faithful in shaping church teaching, lived committedly with a fellow priest, Ambrose St. John. He described his grief at St. John’s death like a widower’s and asked to be buried beside him.
But when John Henry Newman was about to be beatified, his body was moved. He was exhumed from his resting place next to Ambrose St. John and reburied in Birmingham Oratory. Officially, this was to provide him a grander tomb. But some people wondered whether it was so pilgrims would not see two men buried together. In Benedict XVI’s newly hostile church, don’t ask don’t tell wasn’t enough. I found out about this as I was weighing whether I could stay in the Roman Catholic church. It seemed like a new, final cruelty. I think I could have lived in celibate silence if I was a cis gay man. But Benedict did not want cis gay men to be celibate. He wanted them out of the priesthood.
I think, sometimes, how I look next to my seminarian partner and how, God willing and the people consenting, I will be a priest’s wife. I watch priests’ spouses I admire and how each of them define their roles, from supportive detachment to parish community organizer, and I think about how that will shape my sense of self. I know we, bi ace queers, poofs, look straight to the unwary churchlady. We share an understanding of ourselves, a set of vintage English queer touchpoints that allows me to be in some way a gay man beside him. My complicated identities as a queer woman and an altar server are mostly in relation to myself, my churches, and their histories.
But I do think about what it would mean to serve at the altar next to a man with whom I have that double relationship, between priest and server, husband and wife. How new it is for a woman to take the role of a male server, and how old the form of men who serve the church living together is. The careful attention that the altar party pays to each other’s movements. The intimacy of giving and receiving the bread and the wine. I am reminded of Barbara Kruger’s collage “Untitled (You construct elaborate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men)” (1981). It is pseudo-monastic for men to live together, oriented towards the church, prayer, study, labour, and although we are very much a couple, it in some ways carries over to us, myself conditionally a man.
I am a feminist who doesn’t mind the Book of Common Prayer’s use of ‘man’ to mean person. I grew up with Vatican II’s gender-neutralized language, and it had little effect on the church’s practice of inequality. Conversely, if I am secure knowing that my parish affirms me, I don’t need the language to demonstrate. And this is a selfish thrill, but I like being part of ‘us men and our salvation.’ I look less butch now than I have in several years. That, again, is the feeling that I don’t need to fight so hard to be understood and respected. I am not performing gender to an audience. I don’t think many people in my new parish are looking to see what I am. They would not be hostile if they knew, only confused, accepting what I told them at face value rather than developing its richness with me. I miss my home parish. But I also don’t need to be seen.
When I vest, the inherent drag of Anglo Catholic history holds me. It gives me a double body, of a woman at the altar and of a queer, effeminate man. My masculinity is not only because I was an altar girl who wanted to be a male priest, but that informed it. It isn’t coincidence that there is one area of my life in which I feel it most strongly, that I slip easily and gratefully into the complexity Anglican altar serving offers me.
