Escaping God's Closet

This fascinating memoir by a gay British priest begins in London in 1929, when Bernard Mayes emerged from his heavily sedated mother, and, according to the practice of the day, was sequestered by doctors for a month, returning to her sickly and fretful. By turns political, confessional, and spiritual, Mayes's tale is entertaining and well written. Coming of age during the rise of Nazism in Europe, he began having affairs with boyhood chums, then moved on to seminary where the "pad, pad, pad of feet and the rustle of cassocks down the ever-creaking corridors during the night was not always evidence of devoted meditations." A gay priest in a culture where love "is damnably suppressed, denied, and hidden ... to please intellectual tyrants claiming to speak for God," Mayes eventually helped found a small congregation of like-minded gay and lesbian Christians in the Castro district of San Francisco, in the years just before the outbreak of AIDS.