“Until you’ve seen a priest calling you a pedophile…” What? I never figured out the punchline.
He explained, serious in his white priest collar, that books like mine were how pedophiles lure your children. I felt a heaviness like a forming bruise in my gut. It’s a cliché, to describe something like that, but it’s also accurate. It’s funny, right? And yet, it was a fist in the stomach. A priest walks into a city council meeting and calls you a pedophile. I really thought it would be funny when I hit play on the video. He accused me of a crime, and people nodded. Instead, there was priest, in a collar, and with a calm voice. Others in the video defended queer books, arguing for how needed they are in school libraries, the value of the books I’ve written for teens. At a meeting where I wasn’t asked to speak, given no voice to defend myself. What made me stop watching was the crowd around the priest as he said these things in his mannered, reasonable voice.
I thought, What do I care what these people think of me? I thought, “this is just going to be the same hateful stuff.” This was just a school board meeting on the other side of the country. I’ve dealt with homophobia before I’ve been called the f-word just for standing a certain way, even while growing up in NYC. I joke about it now: “Until you’ve seen a priest calling you a pedophile at a city council meeting…”īut when someone first sent me the video I couldn’t watch more than a few seconds of it.