Category Archives: Reflections

My "Sex-Priest" friend Father Robert Cromey

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During my San Francisco years (1982-95), “Time” once began its report on an election there with this sentence: “San Francisco is a tree-house for adult delinquents.” 

I believe that story reported the November 1982 election that listed one candidate for the city’s Board of Supervisors as Sister Boom-Boom, with the explanatory addendum one line lower “Nun of the above.”  Sister Boom-Boom belonged to a highly visible, almost hyper-active group of transvestite political activists called “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”  Sister Boom-Boom actually polled 23,124 votes – assuredly nothing to sneeze at.  Even the most case-hardened bird-watcher has always found San Francisco something special, truly in a class to itself.

I would never think of calling my esteemed San Francisco friend Father Robert Cromey an adult delinquent, but neither does he fit the mold of what most people think of as even an Episcopal clergyman.  Soon after I settled there, I’d heard so much about his Trinity Church that sheer curiosity impelled my first visit.  New and solitary in that weird city, attempting a wrenching adjustment after 32 years in Europe, I filled out the visitors’ card in the hymnal rack before me – and it startled me to get a telephone call only a day or so later from Father Cromey himself, inviting me to come in for a personal chat.  I found a big, strapping, athletic-looking, handsome man who radiated unforced friendliness.  I told him right off the bat that I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea, but I considered myself – the direct result of my Mississippi-born parents’ having force-fed me the strait-laced puritanical doctrines of the Southern Baptist Convention until I left home at 16 for Juilliard – an open-minded agnostic.  (Linguistic punctilio stopped me short of out-and-out atheism, which to my way of thinking implies proven certainty that God does not exist.)  My new friend gave me an even bigger smile and said: “Think of Trinity as a cafeteria – take what you want, leave what you don’t.”  It didn’t take long for Robert and his (previously Mormon) wife Ann to become dear and especially esteemed friends of mine.

This past March, the “San Francisco Examiner” published this letter over Robert Cromey’s name:

“Pornography has a positive side.  Psychologist Bill Perry (SF Examiner 3-6-07) says porno is bad for people.  I am a California Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Priest of the Episcopal Church and have found sexually explicit films and videos helpful for people who are sexually dysfunctional.  I and other therapists have suggested viewing porn films as helpful in re-stimulating sexual awareness in gay and straight couples.

“Studies of the effects of pornography on adults and even children are not absolutely clear that such viewing is harmful.  Porn is a billion-dollar industry indicating millions of Americans buy and watch porn.  Few of them can be called ill or criminal.

“Furthermore, images of nude men and women can be very aesthetically pleasing; porn is one way for people to enjoy the human body.”

Yup, I said to myself, that’s my Robert.  (Earlier this month, incidentally, “The New York Times” reported that according to the trade publication “AVN” sales and rentals of pornographic videos in 2005 came to $4,280,000,000 – that’s not millions but billions – and $3,620,000,000 the year following, as only a part of “the overall $13,000,000,000 sex-related entertainment market.”)

I’ve always admired Robert for a number of things, among them his repeatedly proven readiness to act as well as speak and write.  To cite only one instance, perhaps the most impressive, in 1968, with many Americans all over the country outraged over a particularly brutal racist murder in Selma, Alabama, Robert travelled there to join Martin Luther King in what became known as the Freedom March from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital.

Remember?  ”On Sunday March 7, 1965, about six hundred people began a fifty-four mile march from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery.  They were demonstrating for African American voting rights and to commemorate the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot three weeks earlier by a state trooper while trying to protect his mother at a civil-rights demonstration.  On the outskirts of Selma, after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers, in plain sight of photographers and journalists, were brutally assaulted by heavily armed state troopers and deputies.

“One hundred years after the Civil War, in many parts of the nation, the 15th Amendment had been nullified by discriminatory laws, ordinances, intimidation, violence, and fear which kept a majority of African Americans from the polls.  The situation was particularly egregious in the city of Selma, in Dallas County, Alabama, where African Americans made up more than half the population yet comprised only about 2% of the registered voters. . . .”

In San Francisco, needless to say, Robert has long since become a familiar figure in public demonstrations of all kinds, with his letters frequently published in the daily “Chronicle” and “Examiner”.  Acting on a tip, I went to one Sunday-morning service at Trinity featuring Robert’s bishop William Swing as guest preacher.  Leading off, Bishop Swing mentioned that this exchange took place (as I recall) annually, when sweetness and light prevailed – temporarily: “the rest of the time we drive each other mad.”  Regulars in the congregation around me smiled and nodded knowingly.

Only once have Robert and I ever come even close to locking horns over a religious issue.  Religion – the various world religions – completely to one side, I regard as irrefutable perhaps the most famous quotation from that fire-breathing militant old professional atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair: “Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea” – not Christianity, not Islam, not any individual religion, but the fundamental concept of religion itself.  Robert had kind words for Ms. O’Hair as a person, but not for her out-and-out atheism.

So all in all it came as no surprise to me when a book Robert published two years ago bore the defiantly provocative title “Sex Priest”.  Perusing it provides numerous little zingers, but for the moment I’ll let one suffice:

“God is love.

“Love is sex.

“Therefore, God is sex.”

(I believe I can quote verbatim from memory one of Woody Allen’s better aphorisms, on which Robert as I know him would probably see eye to eye with him: “Sex is the answer.  What is the question?”)

One review of Robert’s book led off with this:

“With his new memoir, Sex Priest, Robert Cromey has done the churches a great service.  He has opened up the private and personal life of a priest (his own) with unflinching honesty.  He has neither minced words nor glossed over events in describing his own sexual experience.”

One characteristic excerpt:

“Priests are sexual creatures.  We masturbate, have intercourse, anal and oral sex, same-gender sex, commit adultery, bestiality, incest, fornicate, enjoy bondage, abuse children, and commit any and all forms of sex known to human beings.  We spend most of our time in ministry but we are sexual beings, too.  Most priests, bishops, deacons, ministers, mullahs, and rabbis in the world religions are sex-positive in their outlook. We  enjoy ecstasy, orgasm, pleasure, and joy in our sexuality.  We love to kiss, fondle, and embrace.  We enjoy fucking, sucking, and licking. 

“We teach others to enjoy their sexuality, too.  Joy and pleasure are not the first thing one thinks of about Christian clergy.  The pious priest and puritan parson railing against the adulterer, masturbator, and single mother are familiar.  Many scream against abortion and birth control.  But they are a minority with a good press.  Recently, Roman Catholic priests have given sex a bad name by being accused and often convicted of child molestation with altar boys and teen-age girls and women under their pastoral care.  Celibacy, a lonely bachelor life and poor training in human relations have caused this blight on the Christian ministry.  Sadly most Christian clergy do not speak or teach publicly their sex-positive views. We  hint and smirk but fail to be open about our sexuality. . . .”

That passage reminds me of a conversation I recorded in his San Francisco Institute with Wardell Pomeroy, Ph. D., one of Dr. Alfred C.  Kinsey’s closest co-workers, while doing research for a paper I published in the German psychoanalytic journal “Psyche”.  I quote from my verbatim transcript of that tape-recording when we got around to the etiology of homosexuality:

“‘You’re asking the wrong question.  The real question is: ‘Why isn’t everybody bisexual?’  Discussion of that question elicited from Dr. Pomeroy a casual but categorical statement which may well stun and scandalize most Americans.  In the best of all possible worlds, with everybody, free of neurotic complications and social taboos, just doing what comes naturally, he said, ‘I think most people would be [Kinsey] twos’ – bisexual, but more hetero- than homosexual.’  Nota bene: he did not say ones – almost but not quite exclusively heterosexual.  ‘If you look at other mammals, particularly the higher mammals, you find exactly that.  Homosexuality is rampant and available, but they end up procreating and having young.  So, mostly twos.  I think that’s the way it would be with the human animal.’”

As you’d expect, Robert has his own blog - and here you’ll find more information about his book “Sex Priest”.

Robert and Ann Cromey plan to visit Berlin this September.  I look forward to that treat enormously.

http://www.aldaily.com/ – for me the homepage of homepages

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ald01 With Berlin’s mercury at 88 degrees (Fahrenheit) and forecast to stay up there through Monday, don’t expect much energy-expenditure from me today, sitting here buck-nekkid and still sweating, but I’ve just made an important discovery about what’s struck me for years as the website of all websites, and I urge you to poke around into its remotest cranny and nook, for it truly does offer a veritable fountain of wisdom, on a six-days-a-week basis – and totally free of charge!

Its generous provider explains these riches: a journal rather intimidatingly called “The Chronicle of Higher Education” – but don’t expect some dry publication you might well prefer to avoid, especially on a hot summer day.  It would take too much time and space here for me to list all the goodies ready and waiting for you there, but six times a week it judiciously picks out individual articles its editors regard as especially valuable to the kind of person that curmudgeonly critic B. H. Haggin aimed at years ago when he published a book he entitled “Music for the Man [sic] Who Enjoys ‘Hamlet’”.

I’ve long paid reasonably close attention to its bountiful array of Anglophone newspapers and magazines, but just now – after years of having http//www.aldaily.com (the A and L stand for Arts and Letters) installed as my homepage – I’ve discovered a staggering array of individual columnists it also permits you to tap into at will.  I chanced across this particular peripheral bonanza while snooping around to see what one of my favorite anti-Dubya dissidents, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s polymathic Prof. Noam Chomsky, might have cut loose with recently.  Not only did I find him there, I also found an entire gamut of opinion ranging from leftist-liberal Chomsky all the way to that reactionary but intellectually brilliant son of a bitch W*ll**m B*ckl*y.

They continue to list one of my all-time favorite fellow Texans, the late but immortal Molly Ivins (who even during Bush II’s pre-Presidential sway as Governor of the GREAT state of Texas invented two undying monikers for him: Shrub and Dubya), with a touching tribute to Miz Molly that appeared soon after her death.

I hope this endorsement will suffice for you to make tracks to http://www.aldaily.com/ and instal it as your homepage – permanently.

And kindly remember who put you up to that, okay?

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Black in today’s Georgia

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All my long life, probably nothing has so consistently galvanized me as injustice, of whatever kind.  As the son of two almost lifelong Mississippians (with, to cite only example, a first cousin - a high-school Principal – who once, when I mentioned the Supreme Court’s decision against racial segregation, summed up his sentiments in these six words: “The Supreme Court kiss my foot!”), I have a particular allergy in connection with racial bigotry or any other variety deriving from anything innate.

From a sort of book review earlier this week I quote the four opening paragraphs:

“In 1986, Carlton Gary, a black man, was convicted of the 1979 rape and strangulation murders of seven elderly white women in the small but prosperous (for some) town of Columbus GA.  Some of these women had ties to an exclusive group of wealthy and influential white families called The Big Eddy Club.  Since then, Gary has been sitting on death row.  He now waits for his final appeal.

“Those initial crimes were horrific.  But, the criminal justice system failings that followed were equally deplorable: Forced to produce and convict a killer, a frustrated and increasingly embarrassed set of local law enforcers, detectives and prosecutors subjugated crucial defense funds and evidence.  Also eviscerated was the ‘due process’ clause of the 14th Amendment that states, ‘nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’

“With elegant prose and striking narrative, award-winning journalist David Rose investigates the deprivation of that due process and recounts the human and systemic toll of this crime within a crime in his book ‘The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice.’  The book is a vivid and thoroughly captivating exploration of the American criminal justice system. It is also impossible to put down.

“‘The Big Eddy Club’ is as much about Gary’s clash with the Southern justice system as it is a condemnation of the system’s racial and economic bias — a particularly cruel reality when it’s not merely one’s liberty, but one’s life, at risk. . . .”

The legally sophisticated – or merely curious - can read the March 8th, 2005 “Plea Agreement” in the original document of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Raleigh Division.

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Dr. Seuss, German humor, and kindred matters

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The man who became world-famous as plain Dr. Seuss, fundamentally a melancholy man who like most “humorists” took an essentially baleful view of the human condition, entered this vale of tears with the resoundingly German name Theodor Seuss Geisel in Springfield, Massachusetts.  Both father and grandfather, obviously of German origin, had worked in Springfield as brewmasters.  He himself pronounced his eventual nom de plume German-fashion to rhyme with choice.  He became best known for his quirky rhymes, perhaps most famous of all for his children’s classic “The Cat in the Hat.”

When newly invented talk-shows became all the rage on U.S. television, Germany’s exceptionally fine national TV did its damnedest to emulate their pattern – to negligible, sometimes downright depressing effect.  (Today, thanks to extensive trial and error, they flourish.)  At one point the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the most affluent of all Germany’s regional radio/television set-ups, imported Dick Cavett in person in order to pick his teeming Yale-educated brains.  During his visit I caught a live interview he did with WDR’s television chief Werner Höfer, where he blithely let loose this hardly tactful utterance: “In America we say the thinnest book in the world has the title ‘The Best of German Humor.’” 

I take strong issue with that: Cavett obviously had no familiarity with what Germans call politisches Kabarett (closely related to Parisian chansonniers in that it concentrates on the news of the moment), which has enriched my life with some of the sharpest and psychologically subtlest examples of satire ever to come to my attention.  One characteristic zinger from immediately after World War II ended: “The Nazi Party had 8,500,000 members.  When de-Nazification began in 1945, every Nazi Party member had a sworn affidavit [a so-called Persilschein, or "Persil paper", referring to a soap powder that claimed to wash anything clean] to substantiate his claim to have saved at least one Jew’s life.  Therefore the conquering Allies’ claim that Germany gassed six million Jews is a typical Jewish lie.” 

Another, hinged on Germans’ legendary love of dogs: “How would the German nation have reacted if it had known the Nazis had set about exterminating dogs?”)

So what now reminds me of Dr. Seuss?  This little gem he wrote about “The Golden Years”:

I cannot see

I cannot pee

I cannot chew
Oh, my God, what can I do?

My memory shrinks

My hearing stinks

No sense of smell

I look like Hell

My mood is bad – can you tell?

My body is drooping

Have trouble pooping

The Golden Years have come at last

The Golden Years can kiss my ass

* * * * *

Dr. Seuss, who entered this vale of tears in 1904, toughed it out for 86 years.  He beat me into it by twenty years.  In my case the actuarial tables allot me seven more, which I contemplate with decidedly mixed feelings.

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