ARTS

IMAGINED INTIMACIES

temporality, motion, and sensuality of life, an illusion that approaches reality in an asymptote. But it will never quite meet it. In the shot, the water falls into an unseen abyss, returning only upward plumes of gently dissipating mist and spray, transforming into a figurative and evocative portrait of loss—of love and its potentiality slipping away, returning only the immaterial, ephemeral mist, an unsteady, wavering image or screen that disappears as quickly as it appears.

Together, Happy Together and Your Name Engraved Herein seem to share a common understanding of the ambivalent and conflicted operation of queer cinema. On one hand, it is a means to beautifully and evocatively materialize that which is forbidden. In moving images, inexpressible desires, taboo fantasies, and suppressed queer romances are given beautiful, artful form. On the other hand, the impermanent nature of the cinematic image painfully acknowledges the difficulty of actualising such idealistic images of intimacy and love in societies in which non-normative relationships remain taboo and are subject to oppression by cis-heteronormative structures of power. But in its ending, Your Name Engraved Herein chooses to reject this pessimistic and bitter dissolution of the filmic image. It chooses to let A-Han and Birdy step back into that world of fantasy together once more. Film is not merely conceptualised as an escape, a brief distraction from reality, but rather something that does work to reality, that reckons and grapples with it while also imagining a better version of it: a space for healing, and for hope. At the end of the film, in Canada, A-Han unexpectedly bumps into Birdy—who has also come to Canada to pay his respects to Father Oliver—for the first time since high school. From the moment that they meet, the last ten minutes of the film consist of two long shots that track A-Han and Birdy together as they walk through the empty streets in the hours before dawn, awkwardly talking and rediscovering one another, so many years distanced from that initial love, that initial pain. In those long, contemplative shots, they are not separated into different frames, different gazes, different images of one another—they share the space of the frame, share this image, in which they are bound together by mutual gazes, mutual understandings. They finally arrive at A-Han’s hotel, and part ways—but as Birdy turns to leave, alone, A-Han bounds back down the stairs and breathlessly meets him. 我再陪你走一段好了。

I’ll walk with you again, for a while more. The walk will end, the credits will roll, and the film will fade to darkness, but then again, films don’t have to obey the same kind of temporality that we do. In the filmic image, temporary moments that come and go, like a mist of water ascending to the sky, are immortalized in beauty, preserved in the mind’s eye forever, even as they have also passed from sight. In films, the inevitabilities of time can be reversed, and the past can be re-lived, again, for a while more. At this moment, Birdy and A-Han abruptly stop and turn, both hearing something, and the camera swivels, following their gaze, only to see, on the empty streets, their younger high school selves, sauntering together, singing the song that A-Han would sing to Birdy years later, only now singing it together, singing it to one another. It’s a moment of the past that could never have happened, an impossible, beautiful vision. But it’s an image that they are both creating together, sharing in the eye of their mind, within the space of the cinematic image. This final shot also transcends a different kind of time, stitching together a history of Birdy, Happy Together, and now, Your Name Engraved Herein. It calls on us to re-examine those films, to challenge the assumption that Birdy’s escape and the Iguazu Falls can only ever be escapist fantasies of impossible realities that are unchangeable parts of the past. Through the very artistic gesture that it enacts—building on these past films to create something new—Your Name Engraved Herein suggests that cinematic images can proffer resolutions toward the past in order to project, into the future, new possibilities. These images have yet to materialize into reality. But it is exactly this immaterial, ephemeral nature that fills these images with powerful potentiality, with the excitement and desire of a fantasy. As the two young lovers sing, laughing at one another, the unspoken hurt and pain of their past is replaced by declarations of love. Through song, they confess their deepest, unspoken feelings. From a history that didn’t allow this relationship to exist, the two boys draw together the pieces and rebuild a world of love together. And as the wounds of the past are healed, the future of Birdy and A-Han is opened up, built on this vision of what could have been, what still, now, could be.

CHONG JING GAN B’23 wishes he could engrave all those names in his heart.

IN THE CONFESSIONAL

Behind a wooden screen

I want to go back to the beginning to make a full account, to detail the scope of the sin, and when I finish speaking I hope to have explained myself in my entirety with the hope of self-clarity, if not forgiveness. I know full well that the question of forgiveness is dependent on my own repentance, a repentance which I suspect, if I do feel it, will only be at the very end of my confession, when I myself have confronted the full facts, the depth of my deepest sin, told to you, my peer, a fellow priest, a stranger behind a wooden screen, in a hushed tone so that whoever waiting to confess, not ten feet away, not compelled to keep my confession secret, cannot hear it—my quiet tale of pain. When I had just taken Holy Orders and begun as junior pastor at St. Therese of Lisieux, the senior pastor, Michael Donovan, received an invitation from Bishop Immot to attend a multi-faith conference in Chicago. It was April, and the conference was in early July. If you know Father Donovan, you will recall moments of restrained hostility toward the more ecumenical aspects of Vatican II, a comment or two about “that liberal, Paul VI.” It was because of this prejudice that I was surprised at his own enthusiasm for attending the conference. One day, after assisting in a Mass that Father Donovan gave, I approached him in the sacristy and asked, as he took off his chasuble, why he was so excited to attend. In a very polite manner, I expressed my surprise concerning the conflict between such a Nostra Aetate-style exercise and his own pre-Vatican II beliefs. Behind a pair of very thick glasses, Father Donovan’s watery eyes peered back at me. “Yes, I understand your confusion. At your age, the loneliness of the priest’s life was not totally clear to me either. I do have views that I cannot shake, though I certainly no longer include them in my homilies, and those views have not, do not, and will not bring me comfort as speaking to my peers does. Even you, John, though I enjoy your company, I must treat as a mentee. In short, I want to go to that conference so that I may speak to people not as a priest, but as myself.” Three days after my conversation with Father Donovan, the police named him as a person of interest in a sex trafficking case. Not allowed to leave town, he instructed me to take his place at the conference. He was eventually acquitted, but from then on I always saw a touch of remorse in those pale blue eyes. For the victims, for himself, for me—I do not know. So, in July of 2009 I drove with two Dominican friars and another parish priest up to Chicago and spent five days attending lectures, panels, and discussions with ministers, rabbis, imams, Hindu leaders, Buddhist monks, and Baha’i assembly members. I met Adam at a talk he gave on postcolonial views of Zionism in the United States. I approached him afterwards, told him I lived in St. Louis as well, and asked about his own experience, as a rabbi and professor at a state university nearby, of what college students think of the subject. Later that night, I ran into him again at a bar close to my hotel. My travel partners and I went as a group and saw him there with another rabbi, so we invited them over to our booth. I sometimes think, in odd moments, about how it looked, these clergymen all together in a booth, drinking and talking about our parishes and temples, their quirks and characters, money problems, personnel issues, and so on. We were conspicuous enough certainly; only the rabbis and Brother Rhinehardt, one of the Dominican friars, had remembered to bring casual clothes. Adam had brought a yarmulke in his backpack and put it on so we wouldn’t feel self-conscious. He was attractive: tall, thin, curly black hair, ocean blue eyes. Of course neither of us made any indication of that fact or the fact that he thought I was attractive. In any case, we all as a group made an agreement to meet at the same bar the next two nights. Those were my first encounters with Adam. As a group, there was nothing out of place. Special friendships are of course discouraged among clergy and seminarians, but a rabbi friend is a connection between faiths, something to be celebrated in our modern age. To have coffee then is not suspicious, and in leisure hours we would meet and talk, always a fun sight to see in the coffeeshop, the priest and the rabbi talking and laughing. Our flirtations were always kept small. As clergy, we’re expected to keep ourselves to ourselves, so the smallest family anecdote or mention of an old hobby is amplified to the listener. Our love language consisted of banal personal details, every tidbit a brick in the tower of the other’s self. Perhaps not a love language, actually—perhaps a game. A game to avoid any impropriety, to fall in love without the other noticing. Together, at the coffee shop, or later at my parsonage, or his house, in public or in private, it didn’t matter, wearing our priest and rabbi costumes, we would act together—a beautiful improv show—that we were simply a priest and a rabbi discussing theological matters, two souls in pure intellectual congress. At one point we were walking in a park, five years after I’d become senior pastor at St. Therese of Lisieux, and I remarked that I was a synecdoche. Adam didn’t say anything until, stopping beside the park pathway, he asked, “How do you mean?” I said I meant that I, for my parishioners, was an extension of the Catholic Church, had transcended otherness, that when they speak to me they see only the Church and not the man, a duality even Jesus did not have. I said lately there were times when I myself couldn’t see the difference. It was a moment of total nakedness. Looking ahead out over the park’s small pond, Adam quietly responded, “I was thinking that what you and I are is representative of our sin.” I said I did not differentiate the two, my own self only as real as the sin was. And that was how the game ended. At that point the sin, our attraction, was acknowledged. What was left was commission, five years delayed, so we finished our turn around the park, got in Adam’s car, and drove to my parsonage. We had been there together before, so there was nothing to act suspicious about. It was daylight and the neighborhood knew us to be friends. Adam parked the car on the street, and we made love as an act of creation. Four more weekends we did this precisely. Two weeks ago was our sixth meeting; we met in the evening. I picked him up a few blocks from his house, and he lay down in the back seat, smelling of lavender, as we headed into my neighborhood. I parked in the garage. I’d bought a bottle of wine and the ingredients for pasta primavera and chocolate mousse, and we ate and talked. Our speech came more formally than usual, not quite able to get away from seriousness, and after dessert, having finished the bottle of wine, sitting across from each other at my plain wood table, my leg shaking despite being full and slightly intoxicated, through a tight mouth, my elbows on the table, my fists together almost as if praying, my chin on my fists, I told Adam that I loved him. He said, “I love you, too.” At that moment the weight of the decision that had to be made, that I had to make, collapsed on me: to leave or to stay. To leave the church and stay with Adam or leave Adam and remain a priest, the only life I am trained for, the only life I’ve had for five years at St. Therese of Lisieux, a life I planned on living since I first entered seminary as an acne-ridden 18-year-old. The weight is still on me. I still have not decided, and to my knowledge neither has he. Our hand was almost forced that night, actually, when Adam and I went to sleep. At one thirty I was woken by footsteps downstairs. Adam wasn’t in bed, so I figured it was him and went down to check. He was in the living room, nude, shuffling slowly around the couch, mumbling, eyes half open, sleepwalking—the blinds up, in full view from the street, a new moon but harsh yellow streetlights. I hurried to close the blinds and waited for him to return to bed or stop sleepwalking, checking other blinds to make sure we were unseen then tailing behind him, he my sleeping human pantomime, he my lavender-smelling rabbi, he my beloved. I wish someone had seen. I wish I had been defrocked, just to get it over with. But now I am here in this confessional. Of course I have prayed about my sin. I have desired to be contrite and to be able to call Adam and tell him I would never see him again. I also desired to be blasphemous and leave the church. I have prayed for the former, and I have prayed for the latter. In return I received nothing, no guidance, not an echo. Largely I feel both contrite and blasphemous. Across town, in his own lonely apartment, Adam has done the same, the same endless moral caroming, having spoken to me with no other purpose than to know the other was doing the same, understanding that, with neither of us decided, there was no automatic decision. If Adam remains a rabbi then I, having no other option, remain a priest. The question was to remain a personal one. But now I am here, asking for forgiveness from a Church which has destroyed me, in this confessional, this confessional which has made me murmur my spiritual anguish in low tones to avoid being overheard, across from you, you who can through God absolve me of my sin, loving anyone but the Church, this sin which I may choose to become my life, my current life a life of lust and deception and love, a love which is two, two which are fighting, the fighting which will not stop until I have made a decision, this decision which I alone can make, this decision which I cannot possible hope to make, I being unreal, yet who still is now begging for forgiveness, because I am still the synecdoche, the Church, the corpse filled with sin, dogma, and loneliness!

DRAKE REBMAN B’22 is not thinking about becoming a priest.