The Early Years

Like many Catholic boys, I had an early desire to be a priest. By the age of 15, this desire was stronger by the day. I couldn’t wait to enter an Order, but Mum and Dad were not keen on my entering until I finished high school, which I did in 1968 at Marist Brothers High School in Sydney (in Eastwood, not far from my home in Marsfield).

First, I wrote to the Servites in Western Australia and then to the Norbertines (also in Western Australia). I had got to know a Dutch Norbertine, Father Martin Coenen, from the Abbey of Berne-Heeswyk. He was one of the priests who acted as chaplains at our school. I remember seeing him in his white habit and white biretta and thinking “Hmm – interesting!”

I was vested as a novice at St. Norbet Abbey, De Pere, Wisconsin, USA in 1969, after a long postulancy in Sydney and in York, Western Australia.

I liked the history of the Norbertines, the Premonstratensian Canons Regular, and I liked Father Coenen. He lent me books about the history of the Order, also known as “White Canons”.

I was the only Australian novice at the time, and the fathers in York, W.A. decided to send me to the USA, not to Ballyjamesduff in County Cavan, Ireland, which was the Mother Abbey of the Australian Norbertine Priory. Father O’Reilly was our Prior.

In America the Order had radically changed its identity from a strictly regimented semi-enclosed community with parochial and education ministries, but still observing cloister and using the ancient Premonstratensian rite in Latin. Instead, the “formation team” consisting of Master of Novices and Master of Professed, with others, tried to bring formation into a new era of openness and “engagement with the world”. We were required to study Carl Rogers “On Becoming a Person” and Transactional Analysis (I’m OK, You’re OK) and we had encounter groups and were discouraged from wearing our habits outside the Abbey. We did a liberal arts degree at the Orders own college in De Pere. We mixed with others our own age. Our Community Mass was “experimental”. Habits became optional for most days except Sunday. We had guitar masses.

It was all very nice, but confusing. I was not at all mature. When sexual intimacy happened, I liked it and didn’t understand that it was not exactly acceptable. My partner in intimacy was uncomfortable, even guilt-ridden, but for me, the discovery of the pleasure of physical intimacy overwhelmed any concerns about whatever “chastity” actually meant. I also saw in the affection between couples in the community, that it seemed natural for them. Why not for me too?

However, the Novice Master thought otherwise, and decided I should go to a psychiatrist to “work out the problem”. Understandably, I was a bit of a pest to others I felt attracted to in the community. Bothering them for affection, and for wherever it could lead, I made a nuisance of myself. Poor people: pursued by a novice “on heat”!!

As a last attempt to rein in my out-of-control desires, I asked for a summer at a Priory in California where the Hungarian refugee Norbertines had established a house where the old Rule and Latin Mass were strictly adhered to.

It didn’t make any difference. I could see that a big CHOICE was looming. Also, before I went to California, I had a stint in a psychiatric ward in Green Bay, in St. Vincent Catholic Hospital. Group therapy there pointed, with the savvy experience of staff, to a CHOICE! Either/or but not both. Sex or celibacy. One or the other. Although there were lighter moments, such as when an older, kind, woman patient, suggested, in a group therapy session, that I should try drinking a glass of warm milk each night to “help with my problem of homosexuality”. The group supervisor said that they thought it might take more than that to solve the problem!

At first, I tried to remain in the USA, in Minneapolis, where a gay man I had met, Dana Kent Lepler, had offered to help me if ever I should leave the Abbey. He went to an Episcopalian church, and I was very impressed with their traditional liturgy and with the singing, as also with the devotion and piety of the parishioners. When I was told by the Roman Catholic parish administration where I was being considered for a leadership roll in youth work that it was not appropriate for me to be associating with the Episcopalian parish, I had another CHOICE. I chose the Episcopalians.

After returning to Australia, I continued trying to fit in to Catholic parish life, but with no welcome, not even to lay responsibility. The Anglicans on the other hand, were welcoming and enthusiastic.

In the meantime, I went to every denomination seeking an opportunity for seminary or theological training. I still wanted to be a priest. I went to interviews with the Anglicans in Sydney (Moore College: but you had to self-finance for the first 2 years), Methodists, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox ….

At the same time, my mental health was deteriorating, with bouts of depression, and I found myself as an outpatient in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney. Working in bars as a cocktail barman and a bar useful, I found a flat in Kings Cross and had an active gay life. After an experience of violence on a gay beat, and increasingly blaming by homosexuality, for all my problems, I chose to go to Professor McConaghy for Aversion therapy. This, I though, would annihilate by sexuality and I could return to any seminary or Order with no fear of sexuality becoming a problem again. A bad choice, but nevertheless, after the failure of the electric shock treatment to annihilate sexual drive, I felt I had done everything I could to escape from sex. I could live as a gay man now …. I had no further reason to escape from who I was. Also, thanks to Professor McConaghy’s referral to a psychologist, I could rebuild my mental health

I went back to study. I found a wonderful, small, friendly, funny parish at St. Luke’s and St. Augustine’s, Enmore with Stanmore, in the inner-west of Sydney. Plenty to do, choir, church sewing, a community, new friends, university gay groups, a boyfriend or two, good relationships with my parents and family, nieces and nephews to look after: all combined to make for a happier life all around.

My sister Victoria and her husband Michael, with nephew Jeremy and eventually niece Georgia, were my close family for several years. Support, acceptance and fun were to be found in their home in Newtown.

University provided friends and intellectual stimulation (not matched by a lot of intellectual effort from me!) and French, History and eventually a graduate diploma in Archives Administration lassoed a full-time job.

In the late 70’s, a small group of Anglicans formed to provide support to gay Anglicans in the hostile homophobic Sydney Diocese. Called AngGays, it got itself a reputation for activism and a good credibility in the gay liberation movement, still uncomfortable with church gays, who were often seen as collaborating with the homophobic Diocese. Nevertheless, we continued to identify publicly as both Anglican and as part of the Gay Liberation Movement. My membership in the Synod, elected by my fellow parishioners, proved very provocative when I put pro-gay motions on the agenda, and attempted to present petitions. Horrified by a “known homosexual” openly participating in the solemn activity of the Synod of the Diocese, the Diocesan conservatives were in a real flap. It was frightening to get up and speak in a 700-member body of mostly earnest evangelical persuasion, and hostile to change, but it was liberating too. After 9 years on Synod, my activism (always supported by AngGays members, and given shape and direction by them) ended. Conservative gay Anglicans in our parish did not want us/the parish to be continually linked with and associated with AngGays. They feared the Diocese would try to intrude in the parish’s life and independence.

AngGays chose to wind up its organisational life in 1990. Members wanted to put their energies into other, broader organisations or movements where some growth or life existed. The Diocese was, if anything, going backwards in terms of gay people and certainly in terms of the broader issue of Ordination of Women.

I chose to remain in the parish, in spite of attempts by conservative gay people to have me excluded.

In 1981, I met a member of the famous Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of men who adopted the habits of nuns and did challenging interventions into gay politics in San Francsico.

I was fascinated by them, although the fact that some wore beards while wearing habits was very shocking.

Secretly I had harboured the desire to “be a nun” – perhaps as an escape, yet another fantasy escape, from the fears I had about being gay. I imagined the quiet, protected cloister life in a convent of strict enclosure, where sex did not threaten, or promise, surrounded by women, not men.

At a gay society weekend away in the country, at Ourimbah. I asked the group if I could wear the habit I had made up, and they agreed. I remember feeling so happy, and liking how I looked in the reflection of an old glass door propped up outside the shed. These gay society weekends were probably meant to end up in sexual fun, but I was more interested in how peaceful and happy I felt in the white habit and wimple and veil. I just loved it.