A Queen in Exile:
Saintly Aspirations
Growing up in the severest corner of severe Appalachia, we were convinced we were the only homosexual in the county. Well, there was, allegedly, one other, but the charges were never proven, and in our adolescent heart we dearly hoped he was not of our august kith. Faced with the prospect of growing up to be like him or like the godless sodomites of San Francisco, we vowed to be neither. We would be our own person, whatever that meant.
Mr X—for there is no reason to out him—taught history in our high school. That any man should teach anything besides shop or basketball in our school system at once made him suspect of sodomy, but Mr X was an old money Presbyterian, so no one challenged him on that point. He must have been looking at sixty in the rear-view mirror when he taught me, but the heavy henna he painted over his few strands of hair kept everyone wondering about his true age. And, again, because of the old Presbyterian money, no one made unkind comments about Miss Clairol in his presence. Beyond old money and membership in the Presbyterian Kirk, there were many reasons he might inspire awe. He truly commanded his subject, so that even the most disobedient of his students did not risk his basilisk stare, and he had a wicked sense of humour that could be aimed with withering consequence.
In our youth we did not seek out role models; such, in our opinion, were necessary only for children who were very dull or unimaginative. Mind, in many respects we were as dull as the wheat paste that congealed on our unfinished papier-mâché masterpieces; but no teacher, mentor, or relative ever felt that we lacked imagination. Indeed, some concerned individuals felt we may have suffered from an excess of it. The unkinder elements among our peers, who, we feel certain, have all been hanged or imprisoned by now, used to compare us to Mr X, contending we were either his son (Mr X did not reproduce) or his pet (we cringed if ever he touched our royal person). Such comparisons we found extremely disconcerting.
Mr X was unmarried and lived with his sister. We feared the same fate awaited us and we had four sisters to provide a domicile for an old bachelor. Mr X and his sister occupied their ancestral manse in the middle of town, whence he walked to the school to give us our daily instruction. He was a tall, lanky figure. His trousers did not quite come to the tops of his shoes, which enhanced his general altitude while filling one with the dread of a coming flood. Fashion and Mr X were unacquainted.
Whilst beginning our studies with Mr X, we became aware of a flamboyant gay rights movement on the west coast. To our staunch Protestant eyes, this movement seemed all skin and cross-dressing; whatever gay was, we certainly weren’t that. But then we did not desire to follow the trail Mr X had blazed for us either. Weighing all the options, we elected to take the third way. We would be a saint.
Raised in the Southern Baptist Church, we were not altogether sure what sainthood entailed. That one could not be canonised until one was dead, something we had learnt when Mr X introduced us to the Middle Ages, seemed only a minor obstacle. The point was to be saccharinely good and all-around beneficent until finally shuffling off the mortal coil. Given that people really are despicable, even downright unpleasant, we resolved that the safest route to sanctity was to enter holy orders. And not just any holy order. We needed one that put us securely behind stone walls. After reading about the various monastic options, we decided to be a Franciscan.
We developed a penchant for beige clothes, particularly ones with hoods. We studied Latin. We received the Bible award. We even tried our hand at calligraphy. Unfortunately, our hand was the left one, which meant that we bore down too hard on the pen and dragged our beige sleeve through the ink. Accounts of our virtuous life, it seemed, would have to be written by another. No problem there. All the best saints had independent biographers.
In the midst of our aspiration to a saintly life, we were forced to take a horrid little class entitled introduction to vocations. It was taught by a basketball coach with no detectable pulse. Still, the word vocation commanded our attention, almost as if God had called us into that stale classroom behind the cafeteria. While our colleagues vowed they would be architects, gossip columnists, and cosmetologists, we quietly pursued a different career path. Our instructor was distressed to find us noncommittal as to our future job; he believed, solidly, we should sell insurance or open a car dealership. Had it not been for our higher calling, our true vocation, we should have, under this teacher’s bleak influence, surely have opened a vein.
But then, in the middle of this darkest and dankest of classrooms, the voice of God spoke. We had to take a test, an amusing thing, as we recall, that involved sticking pins into some sort of graph. The whole thing was designed, based on one’s preferences, to show what sort of career one should seek. Instead of architecture, for example, the test suggested Herbert Biernacki should attempt flower arranging. Florence McBride, with her heart set on becoming the next Rona Barrett, was better suited to work less reliant on her particularly grating prose. And Lisa Grange, who at a slumber party had single-handedly plucked the eyebrows of no less than fourteen of her pajamaed companions, was destined for a job with the military or in law enforcement. But our own results surprised the otherwise implacable basketball coach. Having taken the auspices several times to ensure that there were no mistakes, he proclaimed that our calling was in social work, something for the benefit of humanity. Deciding that insurance and automobiles were no longer for us, he suggested we enter the ministry. Smiling at him, beatifically, we said we would consider it, knowing full well that our ambition lay somewhat higher than an ordinary pulpit. Verily, we would go out among the poor and contract leprosy.
When the winter came on and as our corpus of Gregorian chants had waxed monotonously, Mr X guided our studies from the Renaissance to the Reformation. Mr X loved the Reformation, particularly when it gave him the opportunity to point out the deficiencies of Mr Luther’s teachings when compared to those of Mr Calvin. Mr X felt strongly about the separation of church and state and never preached from his lectern, but his deductive method left little doubt that, if one wanted to obtain heaven, one needed to embrace the theology of John Calvin, especially as interpreted by the Presbyterian Kirk.
Armed with his ubiquitous pocket-pointer, Mr X revealed that Martin Luther’s real motivation in starting the Reformation was that he could not handle those three little requirements of a religious order: poverty, chastity, and obedience. Mr X repeated these three terms several times, so that we were quite certain that one could not enter holy orders without accepting all three conditions. Of the three, chastity was the most appealing and then only because it afforded solitude.
In hagiological terms, we now found ourselves in a dilemma. We were arguing with the Holy Trinity, attempting to ameliorate the harsh demands of poverty, chastity, and obedience through compromise. We would be poor in that we would not be ostentatious about our wealth. Certainly we would not go hungry, for of what use is an emaciated saint? Obedient, yes, but to our conscience. That would inevitably lead to conflict with papal authority, but one must, when saintly, ultimately obey God alone. Or one’s conscience. Then there was the matter of being chaste. In that particularly severe corner of severest Appalachia, chastity, for one homosexually inclined, was not a major hindrance. Still, were we to find the right man, could we not just be unchaste with him?
Our zeal for sainthood splintered faster than the church door under Marin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. We grew tired of beige and calligraphy. Our Latin studies turned toward more secular literature. We left Appalachia and the tutelage of Mr X; the wide world opened before us. We travelled far, both within and without. We read Siddhartha. And we saw the movie. We journeyed to the Pacific Ocean and sojourned long in that city named for St Francis, where the godless sodomites arranged hair and revelled in interior decoration. It was there, in the shadow of the Basilica Dolores—you know, where Jimmy Stewart followed Kim Novak in Vertigo—that we had our apocalypse.
Steady are the drumbeats down the corridors of time. We saw back, back to that dark, dank classroom behind the cafeteria and recalled the basketball coach’s metronomic cadence. Something for the benefit of humanity. It was there, there in that galaxy of pin-pricks on a test paper in our introduction to vocations class, that we saw the trail that plotted out our true calling. We were not to be some poor, obedient, and chaste saint. The firmament is full of them. We should never find work there. No, no, God and the universe called us for a different purpose. We were, for the benefit of humanity, to be Queen. And fabulous.
When the stresses of being poor, obedient, and chaste—or just plain fabulous—aren’t upon her, her Majesty is inclined to answer e-mail sent to her at HRMQueenJames@aol.com.
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