Paul Rudnick has one of the funniest essays I’ve ever read in this week’s New Yorker. He takes on the role of a Christian pastor struggling, Ted Haagard-like, with the gay thing.
The money quotes…
On struggling with his feelings early on:
I had agonizing doubts: was I just experiencing a completely normal phase of adolescent uncertainty, or were Jimmy Wiggins’s firm, high buttocks really a calling card from Satan?
On dating a woman:
We’d sit in her sorority’s front parlor reading Scripture together. “I think that St. Francis and St. Michael are my favorite holy men,” Mary Ann said one evening. “You’re right about Francis,” I said. “He’s to die for, but Michael should work on his calf muscles.” “Stan,” Mary Ann asked me, “is there something you’d like to tell me?”
And the best one, his first encounter with a guy:
Brad asked me out to dinner. “But just as friends and Christian study buddies,” he assured me. “I have absolutely no intention of allowing our eyes to lock over the bread basket, because that would only lead to the surprisingly roomy back seat of my Toyota Celica, where we’d be forced to grapple with each other’s moist, engorged man areas.”