Women and the Kingdom
In July of 1974, before he was engaged to Brenda and before we fought about his grandmother’s rug, my father, traveling in Venice, received a telephone call from his old friend Bob DeWitt, the bishop of Pennsylvania. Eleven women were to be “irregularly” ordained priests the next morning in Philadelphia by three retired bishops. The news reached me in Kent when, outside the market in a newspaper rack, I saw what I remember as front-page headlines of the New York Times, the Daily News, and the Hartford Courant announcing the event, and, on the front page of at least one paper, a photograph, a woman priest vested, kneeling, bishops bent over her. Shaking with excitement and barely able to hold back tears, I bought the newspapers and raced home.
Days later in the Adirondacks, my father just back from Venice, we began to talk about the ordination. I was surprised by the power of my reaction, I told him. It felt as if the earth had shifted on its axis. But he could barely listen. He was “damn mad.” With DeWitt and a few of the women who had been ordained, he told me, he had been working toward bringing the issue of women’s ordination to the floor of the General Convention of the church two years hence. Working within the legislative processes of the church, he believed, would make the acceptance of women priests easier; before breaking for the summer, the group had rejected a militant action such as this ordination. My father felt betrayed. It wasn’t ego, he said—he genuinely believed those opposed to women priests would overreact and that the conflict would ultimately set back the cause. “I cursed Bob DeWitt,” he told me later, “and called him a sonofabitch and God knows what.” His old friend said simply, “I know how you feel, Paul. We just wanted you to know.” Now, in preparation for an imminent emergency session of the House of Bishops, my father was working at damage control.
“We’re fighting two thousand years of tradition!” he argued at the supper table.
“I know that, Pop, for God’s sake!” Feminism had long since dissolved my childhood disdain for the women of the altar guild, at the submissive posture of the nuns in Jersey City. In 1971, I had been part of a service at St. Clement’s at which each woman had read, then burned a biblical or theological statement of women’s subjugation; when I saw the ordination photographs in the newspapers, my reaction had been visceral. How differently I would have seen the world if I’d grown up with women priests! These Anglican amazons were my sisters, the bishops who ordained them heroes. I remembered my mother at the dinner table in Washington: The church is just second-rate. I wondered what she would make of these women who had dared translate their anger into action. “Jesus was a revolutionary,” I argued, appropriating my father’s rhetoric. “Surely he would have been in favor of women’s ordination!”
“I have six daughters!” my father shouted back. “Of course I’m in favor of women’s ordination!”
“But these women did it without your permission!”
“The church moves slowly,” he insisted. He and others had been working “for years” on this issue.
“Oh, Pop,” I said, “what if Martin Luther King had waited?”
The next morning my father left for the emergency meeting of the House of Bishops, all 153 bishops summoned to a small meeting room in a motel at O’Hare Airport. It was the last weekend in August, the Chicago day was hot and humid, and the motel, as my father later described it, was “depressing.” The bishops were angry—some at having their vacations cut short, others dead set against women ever becoming priests. The debate was rancorous, old friends on opposite sides maintaining courtesy. There was the apostolic succession to consider! If Jesus had wanted women apostles, the twelve would not have been all male! But, my father argued, Jesus had spoken of the priesthood of all believers: one could argue, he maintained, that all worshipers are priests.
At this meeting, though, the task was not to settle the argument about women priests, but to decide whether the Philadelphia ordinations should stand and if the offending bishops should be censured. In the end, when the question was called, the rebel bishops were merely scolded, but the measure to invalidate the ordinations carried and a committee was appointed to study the situation; my father was in the minority that refused to nullify the ordination. Whatever he felt about taking such an action outside of canon law, he said later, “the Holy Spirit” had certainly been present in Philadelphia. That’s more like it, I thought to myself.
Within hours of the vote, Charles Willie, a Harvard professor of sociology and education and the highest-ranking black man in the Episcopal Church, made a public statement, drawing parallels between how the church had treated black people before the civil rights movement and what the House of Bishops had now done to women. “And I hereby resign my office as Vice-President of the House of Deputies,” he said to a bank of microphones, “and all other positions I hold in the national church.” I got a telephone call from Ms. magazine, then in its second year of publication. They planned to put the Philadelphia ordination on their December cover. Would I interview Charles Willie? My article appeared in the December 1974 issue—“When you’re fighting oppression,” Willie had told me, “the time is now.”
The first time I’d heard the phrase “women’s liberation” was in the spring of 1969, before I left Yale, and so, when I moved to New York that fall, I was in search of feminism. In the spring of 1970, I joined a consciousness-raising group which came out of the Left, and then in 1972, started the group with Radcliffe friends, actresses, filmmakers, and writers. We talked about Sylvia Plath as having broken barricades against speaking as a woman in poetry, as having paid with her life when she couldn’t change her situation. Now I was reading Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and Diane Wakoski, and when I became involved with a poetry series at the old Manhattan Theatre Club on East Seventy-third Street, Sonia Sanchez and Rich were the first poets I invited to read. Downtown, women were convening readings for women poets, and at the first, at the Loeb Student Center at NYU in December 1971, I took my turn, reading my poems to a roomful of women, except for Venable. By 1974, when I was writing Mourning Pictures, I was part of a community, a cultural movement of women.
Sometime that spring, I went to a reading by Judy Grahn, a radical lesbian poet from California, at Westbeth, the artists’ residence in the Village. I had been given her first chapbook, Edward the Dyke and Other Poems, by a Harvard friend, Andrew Wylie, who had a tiny bookstore on Jones Street. In person, Grahn was small and pale, dressed in tattered jeans and a leather jacket. To a hushed room of barely fifty women, she read the urgent, furious, devastating epic poem “A Woman Is Talking to Death,” in which the lesbian poet’s witnessing on the Bay Bridge of a late night accident in which a young white man on a motorcycle is killed by a black man driving a car becomes an opportunity for a meditation on the marginality of the lives of women, particularly the lives of lesbians. Afterward, trembling not only from the power of the poem and the reading but because of the company, I joined a group at Mother Courage, a feminist restaurant nearby. There I was introduced to Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie, two young women who had resigned as junior faculty at Columbia and were assembling The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook, a sequel to their best-selling The New Woman’s Survival Catalogue, for which they had traveled the country, documenting the new world women were making—women’s centers, rape crisis centers, women’s publishing houses and music companies, bookstores and restaurants, credit unions and academic programs. A month later, they invited me to a party—the first I’d been to announced as “for women only”—to introduce the women of New York to the founders of the Woman’s Building, a cultural center for women in Los Angeles.
Alone and timid, I climbed the stairs to their Bowery loft, a harmonic rumble of women’s voices growing louder as I approached the open door. In two enormous rooms, one giving onto the next, were easily a hundred women, some of whom I’d only seen from a distance at readings or never at all: Adrienne Rich was there, the poets Audre Lorde, Robin Morgan, and Susan Griffin, and the playwright Megan Terry, who put her arm around me and said hello with an inviting smile. The culmination of the evening was a presentation by Arlene Raven and Ruth Iskin, art historians who had started the Feminist Studio Workshop, the art school for women housed at the Woman’s Building, and by Judy Chicago, who showed slides of her work and described the process of “making art” with “a form language” integral to her identity as a woman. She had changed her surname to mark her departure from “the dominant culture,” she told us, though she remained married to her husband, also an artist, who was “very supportive.”
It was not enough, she explained, to make abstract images, as she had in a series called Reincarnation Triptych that hung on Susan and Kirsten’s walls, giant radiant pinwheel-bursts of color representing three great women—Madame de Staël, George Sand, and Virginia Woolf. The lives of these women had to be reconfigured, the women themselves “reincarnated” to take their places as avatars of the new consciousness women were now creating. Bordering the image for Virginia Woolf were the words “Virginia Woolf—first woman to forge a female form language in literature. Conscious to the point of agony, she controlled her anger, yet did not emerge undamaged from her struggle to balance the excesses of masculine culture with female values.”
What I heard that night thrilled me. I was attempting that very kind of reframing as I wrote Mourning Pictures, I thought to myself. In my play, the autobiographical character participates in the action as a daughter, but she comments on it as a woman poet, shifting the emphasis of the narrative so that the story told is a new, woman-centered version of the relationship between mother and daughter. After the party, I wrote in my journal that the evening had “made me feel that, rather than being an effluence of diseased narcissism, my poems could be meaningful to women.”
I found it reassuring that Judy Chicago was married. In 1974, in New York City, every woman my age whom I knew, whether she lived with a man or not, had either slept with a woman, was considering sleeping with a woman, or was definitely not going to sleep with a woman. All of us, in other words, had addressed the issue. It made sense: we were in consciousness-raising groups together, forming theater groups, editing magazines and newspapers, making music together, writing poems in which the newly powerful “I” was female. For some, living with men had become an impossible contradiction—sleeping with “the oppressor.” Others simply fell in love: “In those years, all the young women began to sleep together,” the novelist June Arnold, a lesbian, remarked once to me, “like puppies.” Some believed that instruments of female vanity like makeup and brassieres were marks of women’s servitude and dressed plainly, eschewing skirts, even pants cut for women. Others theatricalized their lesbianism, affecting the sapphism of Vita Sackville-West, Natalie Barney, or Romaine Brooks by wearing black velvet, high heels, long black capes, rings on every finger. I began to alter my style. I would be a sapphist in my imagination, but in life, a political and philosophical lesbian, what we called a “woman-identified woman” who continued to live with a man, Venable.
I remembered the first lesbian I ever met. I was nineteen, and she was older. She came to our table to say hello to one of the men I was with at a small bar near Boston University. As she slid in to sit with us, I took note of her self-possession, which I observed in silent fascination. Later, when she left, the man who knew her spoke of her using the word “lesbian.” This woman—I never saw her again or learned her name—was not what I then expected a lesbian to be: a woman who looked like a man. She was elegant, her gestures were casual, and she seemed more powerful than any of us, as she spoke of the theater, of Bertolt Brecht and the alienation effect, laughing, her eyes green, or maybe brown, her lashes dark and long. I remember she was wearing forest green, almost black. She could not have been older than twenty-two or -three, brushing a lock of dark opulent hair from an olive cheek, throwing back her big head and laughing, contralto, lush, her conversation a combination of warmth and sophistication. In her presence, I felt callow. She was a woman; I was a girl.
I met Sonia, the first lesbian I really knew, when I was at drama school. We had been friends for months when one afternoon she called and asked if she could come over, as if she were making an unusual request, which was strange since we often talked on the phone or met casually for lunch or supper or drinks after class. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “I just need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“Of course,” I said, and when she buzzed from the lobby, which was also unusual, I said, “Come up. Come up!” meaning to be reassuring. When she arrived, she wouldn’t sit down or take off her butter yellow car coat, and she didn’t look at me as she began to speak.
“I never want to see you again,” she announced. She was standing in the middle of the room. I was still sitting.
“What’s wrong?”
“I find you very attractive and I never want to see you again,” she repeated. My eyes filled as I tried to take in what she was telling me. I’d had no idea.
“Sit down, Sonia.”
“I don’t want to sit down,” she said firmly. “You’re too good. I won’t do this to you.” And then she lifted her hand in a half salute, smiled with half her thin mouth, turned, and left.
Grasping to make sense of something I was too naïve to understand, I realized that our conversations had never been the usual girl talk about boys but discussion about ideas, or about the play she was directing that I was producing. She had been an unusual friend because of her seriousness, and now I had lost her because of something she felt about me. At first I felt sorry for her, sorry that she had this—what? affliction? deformity?—but also I was self-conscious. What was it about me that she had seen? And angry. What she had said seemed a strange way of expressing love, or attraction. She hadn’t even given me a chance to respond, though I had no idea what I would have said if she had.
The next day I sought out a friend of hers. Had I done something wrong? I asked him. Of course not, he said, and he told me to respect what Sonia had said, and so I took her at her word, avoided her at school, tore up without reading them the love poems she left in my mailbox. Hadn’t she said she didn’t want to “do this” to me? From a distance, I watched as she talked to others in the greenroom, scrutinizing her to detect evidence of this new identity she’d presented. There was something unforgiving in how her bangs were cut, in how she moved her hands, an awkwardness I had first ascribed to intelligence but which now, with the cruelty of fear, I associated with her desire for her own sex, for me. She was nothing like the gay men I had come to know and love at the drama school. Nor like the woman in the restaurant booth that night in Boston, the woman with the beautiful big head she threw back, laughing. Or the girls in my teenage bed for whom I’d stretched my body until it curved like a bone, rubbing against them until the night tilted and banged, altering the texture of the darkness.
Now, in 1974, I found myself in a dream realm of women, which I imagined superimposed on, or interspersed with, real-life Manhattan, a gossamer Isle of Lesbos whose residents recognized each other in code, in gestures that had one meaning in the real life, another in this domain I now found myself part of. Now I understood Sonia’s awkwardness and regretted my ignorant response. What she had discovered about herself in a hidden world now seemed the revelation of many of the women I was coming to know. We found each other everywhere, introduced ourselves to each other with solemn respect. Our friendships were alliances, our encounters significant. We were changing the world. Toward the end of the decade, glamorous French feminists began to cross the Atlantic. Having read Monique Wittig’s apocalyptic Les Guérillères, I watched with fascination as, wearing a brown slouchy hat, a creamy shirt open at the neck, and riding boots, Wittig mounted a platform at a conference to give a paper. Now established poets like June Jordan and Carolyn Kizer were joining our NYU women’s readings. I would read “My Mother’s Moustache,” wearing black, and Fran Winant would read her droll, marvelous epics, “Christopher Street Liberation Day, June 28, 1970” and “Dyke Jacket,” and when the glamorous Rita Mae Brown, then of the Washington, D.C., collective the Furies, declaimed a poem that culminated with the line, “an army of lovers shall not fail,” we ululated like the women in The Battle of Algiers, rocking the room with applause.
It worried me that there didn’t seem a place in those readings for love poems to Venable, but in any case, I couldn’t seem to write one. Instead I wrote a poem about an encounter with a sexist sales clerk called “Conversation in the Eighth Street Bookstore,” and a poem that began, “This is the poem to say Write Poems Women, / because I want to read them,” which, in order to dodge accusations of propagandizing, I titled “Polemic #1.” Was it that my relationship with Venable lacked the passion these young women celebrated in love poems to each other, or was it that I was falling out of love? When I tried to talk about my lack of sexual excitement, Venable, with the wisdom of a man in his forties, argued that intensity came and went. But I was restless. What were we together for? Venable would not consider marriage or having a child with me—his daughter was close to my age. I considered marriage a patriarchal institution oppressive to women, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to have a baby, but I felt his refusal to consider either constituted a limitation on his feeling for me, which I increasingly thought had more to do with his need for security than with love. “We have beautiful places to live and work,” he would say. “What more do you want?”
In my journal, I wrote of frustration about my writing, but not of the terror of being alone, which I tried to deny. One night when Venable was late coming home, I stood at the window watching for him; after an hour I was so tense I could hardly breathe. What was I afraid of? I was horrified at the power of this terror and embarrassed by my weeping when he returned. Neither his reassurances nor my tears got at the root of my anxiety. We began to have fights about the financial imbalance between us. I was too young and too privileged to understand the impact of his continuing inability to get screenwriting work, and I found his rages at those he considered more successful than he was overwhelming. In the fall of 1976, we took a trip to Russia, and there was something about the landscape that “opened me up,” as I put it then. I began to have a new ambition which I called “the romance of alone.” If I was to live a writer’s life, the life of an artist, I couldn’t be standing at the window weeping when my lover was an hour late. The poets I admired, like Adrienne Rich and Judy Grahn, seemed to face down their fear. What kind of poems would I write if I were “alone.” I was accepted at the MacDowell Colony for a month; the week I left, I noted in my journal my fear of upsetting the relationship with Venable, which had reached, with the successful publication of his biography of James Dean, a new calm.
At the first breakfast at the colony, I noticed a man, an American painter who lived in Paris. Daniel, pronounced the French way, had also lived in Moscow, I found out. He was fluent in Russian, knowledgeable about Russia’s history, and had made documentary films in the Soviet Union. I told him about the trip Venable and I had taken and described how powerfully Russia had affected me. Daniel understood: “Yes! Yes!” he said, waving his arms, looking down at me in the snowy dark. As we walked the frigid New Hampshire forests, he told me of his Uzbek wife, whom he had gotten out of the Soviet Union, and when I described Leningrad, the brilliant gold domes, buildings that looked like French palaces painted yellow, green and orangey pink and reflected in canals that crisscrossed the city, the dark of Dostoevsky’s apartment, the paneled elegance of Pushkin’s, and how, after sunset, the darkness seemed to rise from the ground, he would turn to me and say, “You! You understand Russia!” Then he told me he had fallen in love with me, and very soon his passion, his extreme physical beauty, and his romantic manliness swept me up. I imagined traveling with him to the Greek island where he had a house with a blue door on a narrow street and baking bread in bare feet. My writing? I wasn’t sure. “I want to get you pregnant,” he said, kissing me and lifting me from the snowy forest path. He left the colony before I did, and as I stood shivering on the platform, watching the train grow smaller and disappear, a sickle moon hung orange in the sky.
At home, no viable writing done during my month away, I closed the door of my skylit studio and read Daniel’s letters, watched the telephone, willing it to ring, conjuring my lover calling from Paris. Have Daniel’s child? Bake bread barefoot in a tiny house in Greece, the Aegean sparkling below? I no longer took tea breaks with Venable. “When you left for MacDowell, you were one person,” he finally said after days of stilted silence, and burst into tears. Horrified at what I had done and that I had hurt him, I tried to tell myself that Daniel was a passing fancy. Venable really did love me, but when he asked what had happened, I couldn’t tell him. “You can do whatever you want, Wonz,” he said as I cried, too, holding him tight. A month later, Venable asking no questions, I met my paramour in the south of France. His wife was having another child, he told me, and went out alone to the film production meetings he’d promised to take me to, leaving me in the hotel. “I don’t want any gossip,” he said. In bed, he turned away from me—the great romance, such as it was, was apparently over. Chastened, devastated, embarrassed, I went home to Venable. Downstairs in our bedroom, I was desperate to get back what we’d once had; upstairs in my studio I wrote poems, an epic inspired by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End” in which a line of mine played with one of hers: Did you think love was just a chat at a small table?
I was looking for ways to get Mourning Pictures produced elsewhere, and I’d heard of a woman director who’d done an extraordinary evening of Sylvia Plath in Los Angeles. We began to talk on the telephone. She would be very interested in directing my play, she said after reading it. Victoria Rue was her name, and she and her lover, Jeremy, also a woman director, had both left Roman Catholic convents for the theater—Victoria had been a novice, Jeremy a nun. Based on a combination of her low voice and the look of the nuns I had known in Jersey City, I formed an image of Victoria as a mousy, dowdy character; that spring, I traveled West to meet her. My first night in Los Angeles I was taken to a performance by prison inmates that Victoria and Jeremy had directed. Standing in the courtyard before the play, I saw, across the crowd, a tall woman with black hair and a blazing smile. “Is Victoria here?” I asked the friend who’d brought me. “There she is,” she said, pointing at the woman with the black hair. Again, I went home to Venable, but I was haunted by my two-hour meeting with Victoria, the vividness of her intelligence, the silkiness of her hair, blacker than my mother’s, the glancing fun in her dark brown eyes.
Nothing happened with Victoria’s plans to revive Mourning Pictures in Los Angeles, but six months later I heard that she and Jeremy had broken up, and that spring when she visited New York, I invited her to stay at Twenty-second Street. “Have you ever had a relationship with a woman?” she asked one afternoon as we sat talking, sitting at opposite ends of the bed in the guest room. “No,” I said firmly, and launched into the story of Daniel, the snowy woods, the south of France, and, half lying, told her that Venable and I had managed to repair our relationship, and that we were very happy. That fall, 1977, Victoria moved to New York to pursue her career in the theater, and she came to visit Venable and me in Kent.
All weekend, I looked at her, trying to imagine what it might be like to go to bed with her, not being able to imagine it, so palpable still was the dream of Daniel, whose letters from Paris now only fitfully arrived, bringing back the athletic hardness of his body, a rebuke to Venable’s warm softness. But Victoria’s question, asked playfully, in her low, velvety voice, reverberated. One night I took her to a women’s dancing party in Brooklyn to introduce her to some of my lesbian friends. In Adrienne Rich’s poems now, and in the lives of many of the young women who read her, the monster in the sky was finding herself transformed in the face of her woman lover. Victoria and I danced, and when she danced with another woman, I found myself jealous, Not long after, in a loft bed in her sublet on Waverly Place, we made love. Very late that night I went home to Venable, but the feeling of Victoria’s body, a woman’s body as strange, unknown terrain, had illuminated a new dimension of my imagination.
In the days that followed, I met Victoria when I could, feeling exhilarated as we walked the city. What could be wrong with this? I asked myself. Why shouldn’t I be able to freely love whomever I wanted to, I wondered as, climbing the stairs of the Fifty-third Street subway station, I boldly put my arm around Victoria, kissing her as she turned to me with that smile. I wasn’t sure I would love another woman aside from Victoria, but I knew I had to tell Venable what had happened, and I began to know I would leave the life we had together.
Ms. had another assignment for me: Would I write about what it was like to have a father whose loyalties were divided between the church and his family? Certainly, I said. It was November 1977; this would be the first conversation I’d have with my father since our battle over the Chinese carpet. The interview, in his office, took place a week after Victoria and I became lovers, and, in a coincidence I took as a sign, the most recent controversy to surround my father involved a lesbian. A year before, in 1976, as he’d predicted, the issue of women’s ordination had come up before the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, and two favorable resolutions had overwhelmingly passed—one reinstating the validity of the irregular Philadelphia ordinations, the other clarifying canon law to allow women to be ordained priests and consecrated bishops.
My father’s first ordination of a woman to the priesthood took place on January 9, 1977, at the cathedral and passed without controversy, but on January 10, at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Chelsea, he ordained two more women, one of whom had been honest about her lesbian orientation. I was not at the ordination, but I read the prominent newspaper coverage—the diocese had not publicized the event, but a right-wing priest who’d left the church in the 1960s over the issue of integration sent out a press release.
Nothing my father had ever done had caused so much controversy. Ellen Marie Barrett was honest about her orientation, but not actively gay. My father, as bishop, and the standing committee, a quasi-judiciary panel of four clergy and four laypeople elected by the diocese which had to approve candidates for the priesthood, had found her “spiritually, morally, and intellectually qualified.” Many gay people who kept their orientations secret had been ordained. Why should a candidate be punished for being honest? But no matter how many times my father declared that Ellen Barrett had been selected in accordance with canon law, opposition to her ordination continued to build. My father returned to the standing committee and asked if they wanted to withdraw their approval, but the chair was outraged even at the suggestion. The ordination was to go forward. “I have never felt that it was the responsibility of a pastor to protect his people from the confusion that comes to them from the World and the Church,” my father wrote in Take a Bishop Like Me, the book he published about the controversy. His responsibility was, he continued, “rather to give them strength and wisdom and compassion to deal with that confusion. Compared to the hurt and confusion of homosexual Christians over the years, the quandary of a few insecure and respectable people seems minor.”
By the time he and Brenda traveled to Florida for the annual meeting of the House of Bishops eight months after Barrett’s ordination, talk was mounting that my father would be censured for ordaining her, an action that could lead to his being stripped of his orders. His opponents accused him of breaking faith; the bishops had laid out a timetable to discuss the ordination of gay people. My father stood by his argument: Why should a person honest about her orientation be penalized? He and Kim Myers, now bishop of California, were in despair as to what to do when Brenda wondered aloud what on earth had happened to the courageous radicals she’d heard so much about. That night, with her help, my father drafted a defense. “I have broken no canon law,” he proclaimed, reminding his fellow bishops that Ellen Barrett had been found qualified for the priesthood.
Please carefully listen to the possible consequences of this proposed action. Aspirants for holy orders who sense a vocation within themselves will be encouraged to lie to their psychiatrist, Standing Committee, Ministries Commissions, and bishop. Ordained clergy of the church who have declared themselves to be gay will be left wondering when charges of deposition will be brought against them. The Episcopal Church may become the scene of a McCarthy-like purge, rife with gossip, charges, and counter-charges . . . There has been much talk here about freedom of conscience . . . Given this principle . . . do you then proceed to censure or deplore a Bishop and Standing Committee acting with full canonical scrupulosity in ordaining someone whom they believed qualified and whom most of you have never met? I think such an action is outrageous . . .
My sisters and I, together for a weekend in Washington, heard that our father was in danger of being defrocked, and sent a telegram of support. He called to tell us he had received a long ovation and that the resolution to censure him had been voted down, but the controversy about inclusion of openly gay people in the ministries of the Episcopal Church was just beginning.
When I sat down in his office two months after the Florida meeting, my father was still putting out fires stoked by the ordination. I was looking forward to hearing about his adventures, but I had also prepared a list of questions. The editor at Ms. had assumed conflict between us, but now, for the first time since the end of my parents’ marriage, we seemed to have no differences; there seemed to be no gap at all between the father I desired and the father I had. Our talk was an interview, but it was also a reunion and a reconciliation. Listening to the old cassette thirty years later, I hear first our formality—he declares himself “very proud” of me “professionally” and I respond in kind. Since Ms. wanted to know about my relationship to a bishop-father, I first asked what he felt about the fact that none of his children had a relationship to the church. It had disappointed him, he said, that none of us were active Christians, but he’d come to realize that what was more important was that each of us had serious vocations—mine, for instance, poetry, but also social action as a feminist. “It would have been fun, though, if one of you had been in the clergy,” he said wistfully.
When he began to talk about Ellen Barrett’s ordination, the formality gave way to the familiar pleasure of hearing my father tell a story. He and Brenda had arrived at Holy Apostles to find the Chelsea street mobbed with television cameras and were led through a back entrance. He told me about the simple power of the service itself; the thousand letters that had poured into his office, two-thirds of them against what he had done; the parishes that threatened to withhold their contributions to diocesan work. When I asked how he’d managed to bear up, he described his visit to the Church of the Ascension three days after the ordination to preach for Integrity, the organization of gay Episcopalians. Seeing the church full, he presumed for another service, he found the parish hall empty, and panicked that he had the night wrong. “We’re expecting you, Bishop,” said a man who suddenly appeared and led him into a church packed to capacity.
Some of the protest had been so vicious my father was gun-shy: he’d requested no publicity and had expected a small, easy group. “Don’t worry, Bishop,” he was told. Word had spread that he was coming and that Ellen Barrett would be there. The congregation was gay people and their families and supporters of all faiths, Roman Catholic priests, rabbis, women and men and their companions, children, old men with, he said, “years of anguish” on their faces. Wanting to steer clear of controversy, he preached about love and suffering, how close the two are, concluding, as he often did, by reminding his listeners of the Resurrection, of “the new life that follows after redeemed pain, how the Church would be filled with new life when we were finally able to love everyone as he or she was made.” His voice filled with the wonder I remembered from childhood as he described the sacred feeling of the Eucharist that night, how people took their time receiving communion, how his purpose as a bishop and pastor came back to him in the midst of the love he felt, and in what people said to him afterward. One man pulled him aside. “Until now,” he said, “the church has only offered to ‘help’ us. That is the very worst insult of all. We don’t want to be bundled off to a psychiatrist. Now someone in the church, a bishop, our bishop, has ordained one of us. It’s beautiful, man, beautiful.”
I asked him about his first knowledge of homosexuality, and he talked about being a late bloomer at St. Paul’s, and a terrible athlete. “It was agony.” And the panic when two boys were discovered having sexual contact. “The worst thing you could be called was a sissy,” he said. “Which, of course, I realize now, had to do with fear of homosexuality. And, of course,” he added, “there was Fred Bartrop. You answered the telephone . . .”
Immediately I knew the call he meant. “That was Fred Bartrop?”
I was five or six, and it was Sunday, after mass, in Jersey City, the cocktail hour at home after the coffee hour in the parish hall. “Hello?” A twisted, barking voice. “Is Father Moore there?” I ran to my father. I was used to these phone calls—he got them from people who wanted money, from people whose houses had burned down, women whose husbands had gone to jail, from people who were hungry or sad or drunk. He went immediately to the phone, sat down, turned toward the window, the receiver to one ear, a finger in his other, all the grownups drinking sherry. My mother was there and Freddie Bradlee and Joanna Smith, who wore wide belts and full skirts and was acting the lead in the church play. When we sat down for lunch, my father was still on the telephone. Roast chicken, let’s say. The grownups were laughing, doing what my parents called “setting up gags.” A couple of seminarians, some old friends from New York. When my father finally hung up, he slipped into his chair at the head of the table and rejoined the conversation.
Now my father told me the voice had been Fred Bartrop and that he had been drunk. I could hardly believe it. The Fred I knew was courtly, silver-haired, always beautifully dressed, a gold watch on a chain in his waistcoat I played with as he balanced me on his knee; he looked right at me and spoke carefully, the way people who love language do. I knew he had been my father’s teacher. I did not know then that he had once been a priest, the chaplain who encouraged my father to make his first confession, to whom he first confided his conversion; that he had been a teacher my father was so close to he called him “Bear.” Now my father was telling me that Fred Bartrop had been defrocked, court-martialed, and kicked out of the army. On an evening walk, he had reached out, “in loneliness and love,” my father said, and the soldier had reported him. To my father, then twenty-four, homosexuality was a moral failing, like drunkenness. “People shouldn’t despise, but pity,” he had written my mother about Bartrop in 1943. “When he took holy orders, he was taking on a tremendous fight, bravely, because he knew the strength of his temptations . . . I can never repay him, none of us can—for the thing on which we will live our whole lives. That stuff is dynamite.”
I had my father back. I was stunned and moved as I walked up Amsterdam Avenue after the interview to meet Victoria for Greek food at the Symposium. I told her everything he had told me, how he now believed he’d been wrong about the Philadelphia ordinations, that he now felt the action had been a good thing because there had been time for deep discussion before the convention vote. I told her, too, because it was the most powerful thing he said that night, how he believed that in the human psyche, religious emotion and sexual feeling come from “the same mysterious, undifferentiated source,” how “the human life of love and the divine life of love,” as he wrote later, “are not separate, but part of the scope of God’s love that sweeps through His creation. The love of a man for a woman, of a parent for a child, of a man for a man, a woman for a woman . . .” Victoria knew exactly what I was talking about. She’d left the convent when she was forbidden to go home for her grandmother’s funeral. Decades later, as a dissident Roman Catholic, she would integrate her lesbian activism and theater work with worship. In 2005, she would become a “womanpriest,” ordained on a ship in the international waters of the St. Lawrence Seaway by women bishops from Germany and Austria who had been consecrated in secret by rebel Catholic bishops in Europe who believed the ordination of women should be in the hands of women.
At home that night, I wrote in my journal: “Quite wonderful interview with Pop. Felt really warm after. Think it’s really extraordinary how open he is: he said he wouldn’t have any negative reaction that he knows of if one of his daughters were a lesbian.”
I still hadn’t told my father about my new life when he went to India in February to preach at the Maramon Convention, an annual gathering in the province of Kerala. These were Mar Thoma Christians, whose tradition is that Doubting Thomas, one of the apostles, had traveled to India to found a church fifty years after the death of Christ. My father was to preach a series of sermons on Christianity and social justice. Beginning weeks in advance, canopies of bright-colored silk and cotton were erected in a dry riverbed, and as the opening day approached, hundreds of thousands gathered, camping at the site, dressed in hot pinks, blues, and reds and greens, bearded, veiled, chanting hymns, and every morning before the sun got too hot, my father preached. Bob Potter, my father’s longtime friend and the chancellor, or lawyer, of the Diocese of New York, and his wife accompanied my father and Brenda on the trip, and one day at lunch “Potter,” as my father called him, leaned toward my father and said, “Hey, Paul, did you know that Honor has a girlfriend?” His goddaughter whom I knew slightly had heard the news and passed it on, and when he got home from India, my father had asked my sister Rosemary if it was true.
But he never asked me. I had been waiting to tell him. Waiting until I was sure. Waiting until Venable and I decided what to do. But now we had made our decision. I never had a serious conversation with my father about this great change in my life, and because of that, the new sense of connection between us dissolved. Venable and I split the apartment. I moved upstairs into my studio and the adjoining guest room, and Venable stayed downstairs. About a year later, I moved again, and it was in that new place that I introduced my father to Victoria and there that he and I came to an accommodation about his grandmother’s rug. I’d bought a renovated loft in Tribeca, the only requirement in the search a space large enough for my magic carpet, 141⁄2 by 22 feet. We sat on my inherited Victorian furniture which I had reupholstered sea blue velvet, and I served cookies and espresso in delicate antique cups given to me by my mother. When I passed the tray to Brenda, she knocked her cup from its gold-edged plate, shattering it on the rug. We all laughed, Brenda quickly gathering up even the tiniest shards and promising to have it repaired. It took two years, but she returned the cup, cracks invisible, virtually like new.
Now, living alone, I had an enormous room of my own where light spilled through huge warehouse windows onto a creamy ground where indigo and cerulean grapevines and flowers spiraled and intertwined. I had both solitude and my beautiful black-haired lover with whom I spent most nights. Here, in a pioneering neighborhood close to the world of artists, to which I carted groceries from blocks away, I would renew my writing life. I would make more serious poems, and, to inure myself and other women against the costs of the bold life on which I and many of my friends were now embarked, I would write the life of my mother’s mother, an artist who had gone mad when she stopped painting, a woman who had had many lovers, of both sexes, a woman I had always been said to resemble.
“Are you sure you’re not making this place for someone else’s approval?” Venable asked when he visited and we sat on Aunt Lily Hanna’s Victorian settee, which with its companion chairs looked quite odd in the enormous space. Perhaps he knew me better than I knew myself. There were tasks at hand beyond the ones I acknowledged: to mourn the loss of a man I had loved but with whom I no longer wanted to live, and, at the same time, to establish myself in a new sexuality. I all but ignored them as I set forth on my “romance of alone.” In the years that followed, as my new world of women deepened and evolved, fractured and split, and as I wrote the life of Margarett Sargent, I created, in spite of my loneliness and my desire to find an ideal love, a way of living on my own.