When I say I’m an ex-Catholic, I kind of mean I’m a Catholic, because I am in some way. ((Catholic Action, History Of Spirituality)) It’s just like when I was in Ireland, I spent a week at a Benedictine monastery, and it’s deeply emotional. In Provincetown, I have friends who are not religious at all, but are musicians and they got a gig playing at — I think it was called Dignity. It was a gay Catholic group that has masses and so on. And actually at the height of the AIDS crisis, the Bishop of New York banned Dignity from meeting in Catholic churches, and it was very emotional and they did a big procession around one of the churches where they used to meet, like a candlelight procession.

It was devastating, and I realized that so much of my feeling of Catholicism is the feeling of having been driven out of my family for things that I am. And by that, I mean female and a lesbian, and queer. So, it’s just like my connection to Catholicism is really deep. I mean I pray. I have a spiritual life and it has to do with — it’s really important. But like the poet — I mean a poet I’m very close to is Fanny Howe, and I think like Fanny, but differently. I mean I don’t go to mass, but I have and I would, but it kind of squeaks into Buddhism a bit more than it stays Catholic.