Vintage Nell: The McCafferty Reader
A new book, Vintage Nell: The McCafferty Reader brings together the best of this trenchant journalist's 35-year oeuvre, tackling issues as diverse as contraception, abortion, divorce, gay rights and the war with Britain. Here, we have two extracts: about the joy of sex, Catholic-style; and the experience of coming home for Christmas as a gay person
BISHOP CASEY: AS SEXUAL AS ANYONE ELSE
In Dublin
June 1984
'I'm as sexual as anybody else and there are a thousand ways to express that sexuality." The person who said that is not Mae West. The words were not uttered by Sappho. Nope, it wasn't Oscar Wilde. Wrong; it wasn't Madonna. The Virgin Mary? You must be joking.
No, no, no, St Joseph never let the words pass his lips.
Listen here now, leave Oliver Flanagan and Charlie Haughey out of the discussion!
Yes, of course, you know a dozen people who've said the very words to you; it's par for the course; promises, promises, promises. We should be so lucky.
Give up?
Wanna try three more guesses?
You'll never guess.
The person who said those words was Bishop Eamon Casey in a Hot Press interview. He, you will remember, is the man who sold a hospital on condition that the doctors who bought it from him did not perform sterilisations. He is as sexual as anybody else and knows a thousand ways to express that sexuality.
He isn't a bit shy about it either. He gave a few examples of his personal theological Kama Sutra. For married couples he recommends "shaking hands". He was quite explicit about it, no humming and hawing and substituting four-letter words as gross euphemisms for coupling. "Shak-ing hands," he came right out with it, is a sexual act.
Bishops, as we know, seldom shake hands. They hold out one bejewelled finger and ask for a kiss on the ring.
Phew!
There are other steps to earthly heaven.
He recommends "an embrace, putting up with each other, listening, being silent, being tender".
So far, we've performed seven of the thousand acts he recommends. That leaves 993 to go. At which point – orgasm? Ejaculation? Perhaps. Consummation? Certainly not. At that point the bishop withdraws. "There's a thousand ways in which you express sexuality other than sexual union," he says. This is odd. The Catholic Church is quite explicit about consummation being an integral feature of the sexual act. Some time ago in England, the Church refused to solemnise the marriage of a paraplegic man and an active woman, on the grounds that the man would be unable to complete the sacramental act. Completion, said the Church, involved the penetration of the vagina by the penis and ejaculation into the vagina. The couple had a thousand ways of their own of giving sexual pleasure, but they admitted they couldn't achieve number 1,001.
No consummation, no sexual union, said the Church.
Foreplay, the Church dismissed the couple's bag of tricks.
Nothing wrong with foreplay, of course.
Very good for you.
Shaking hands is not an earth-shattering way to begin, but we have to take account of culture, locality, custom and tradition. The South Sea Islanders start by rubbing noses, after all. Can't see that catching on here. Can't picture Bishop Casey and Barry Desmond rubbing noses, particularly not after the hospital deal. Can't imagine the implications, anyhow. Can't imagine what to think, to tell you the truth, next time I see a picture of some bishop shaking somebody's hand. What, I shall ask myself, do we have here?
Nope.
Bishop Casey hasn't quite got the hang of sexuality. There's a lot more to it than shaking hands, saying nothing, and looking tender. A lot more.
It's rather more vigorous than he imagines.
It hardly bears imagining, to tell the truth.
In fact, it's quite ridiculous, the shapes people throw when they get down to it. There are few positions more ridiculous – to look at – than the positions people adopt when they get together. Limbs everywhere. Orifices gaping. Mucus pouring out and in. Sweat flying. Sheets wrecked. Animals and insects fleeing the scene when the going gets rough. Noise? My dear, the evacuation of Dunkirk in World War II was an intellectual discussion compared to it. Once in a while, of course, there's silence. Usually afterwards. It's called exhaustion.
You don't get exhausted shaking hands.
I mean to say, tell the truth, when's the last time you saw an exhausted bishop?
Nope, he hasn't quite got it right yet.
EVERY YEAR'S THE SAME
Out magazine
June 1986
There's no point in putting a gloss on it. Christmas ranks as the loneliest day in the year for the person who is gay, unknown to the rest of the family. All over the Western world on 25 December, hearts will beat homeward to the mammy and the daddy. Homage will be paid, extracted, volunteered and involuntarily wrung from the withers.
It is culturally irresistible. It has been bred into us. It has given us some of the happiest moments in our lives, Christmas Day, and the memory lingers on, stirred by the peeling carols, the bright shopfronts, the hint of frost, the smell of turkey and pudding. "I'm dreaming of..." we'll hum at the bus stop, and "Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright!" we'll sing in the pubs and the factories and the offices as the moment draws near, because they're both grand songs and who could stand aside from the impulse towards joy and good cheer that will pervade the meanest group amongst us.
And then will come the day, the one day of the year, when we're all obliged to play at happy families and will seize the chance to do so because the family was happy once, when we were children; and who among you would begrudge the pretence that it is still so, would burst the bubble and shout "Mammy, Daddy, I left my childhood behind years ago".
So in we will all troop, daughters and sons with our spouses and our children, and those of us with neither spouse nor child, but with a lover left behind in another townland, and those of us with neither spouse nor child nor lover, glad to get in out of the cold. And our mothers and fathers will watch and wonder and wait and pray that not today, not today, Baby Jesus, will the family front be breached.
They know, of course they know, that for the other 364 days of the year their children are not what they seem to be. Parents did not come down in the last shower; the relationship has not been thought or wrought that is unknown to them. But that does not mean that words have to be put on these things. They may never have put words on these things but they know; it's just that one day a year they prefer not to know, as we prefer not to remember that once there were shouts in this house, and tears, and cruel words.
That's life.
The 25th is not a day for life; it's a day for impossible dreams. It is a day for the most impossible dream of it all – that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were a normal unit. Impregnated by a ghost, what? Pregnant outside marriage in the eyes of her community, what? Gave birth in a stable among the animals, what? Never slept with her elderly husband, not once, what?
Put like that, and taken in the context of her time 2,000 ago, when women were stoned to death for adultery, when nobody believed in ghosts, and the unmarried mother of any Kerry baby would never have survived as far as the courts, there is some comfort for the gay person. Mary had it rough too. A lesser woman lying on straw would have told the Three Wise Men bearing baubles to fuck away off.
She didn't and we won't. Not on Christmas Day. We'll stay away or we'll keep quiet. There are 364 other days in which to win friends and enemies to a redefined notion of family; on this one day the mammy and the daddy would like a rest. Jaysus, they're entitled to it, sure they never meant us any harm, and they only wished the best for us.
Goodnight Jesus, goodnight Mary, goodnight Joseph. Happy Christmas, sisters and brothers. Who're ye tellin'?p