The Tricky Part: One Boy’s Fall from Trespass into Grace
by Martin Moran
Beacon Press. 285 pages, $23.95
“A FRYING-PAN of shameful loves sizzled loudly all around me,” writes a brilliant, sensitive man in his early forties, remembering the uncontrollable lusts of earlier years, “and theatrical shows seized hold of me.” The writer is not Martin Moran but St. Augustine, recalling his student days in Carthage in the Confessions. Yet, although Moran’s life has taken a very different trajectory from that of the saint, his own memoir of “shameful loves” and “theatrical shows” burns with the same spiritual intensity as Augustine’s work.
Moran speaks of his Catholic childhood in Denver, where he excelled in school, served as an altar boy, won spelling bees, practiced guitar with a singing nun, and so impressed his great-aunt (herself a cloistered, religious woman) that she saw in little Marty a future priest. But from the age of twelve, when an adult camp counselor named Bob maneuvered him into a sexual relationship, Marty began a hidden life of guilt, desire, and anxiety that no amount of scholastic success could dispel. He had already felt attractions to men and other boys, but the difficulties of growing up gay were compounded by the effects of Bob’s abuse, producing a mixture of self-hatred, secrecy, compulsive desire, and a conflict between wanting to end the relationship and yearning for it to continue: “I tried to resist [Bob’s] invitations, but the craving would rise up. … He knew that part of me, the part that craved sex. Pleasure.” Even after the relationship ended nearly three years later, Marty’s guilt and confusion about his sexuality deepened into despair, and twice he attempted suicide.
What saved him, in part, was his discovery of musical theatre. Cast in a high school production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Moran found a calling and “a new faith” that affirmed him in ways Catholicism had never done. “It was a cross between sports and choir, church and an unending party.” At first, trying out for musicals simply provided a temporary buffer against the inevitable: “If I were to get into the show, then I’d have to postpone killing myself for several weeks.” But the postponements continued into his freshman year of college, when he decided to embrace being gay and to study acting. Moving to New York, he met his lover Henry and slowly built a performing career. But for all his success in love and work, Moran was still haunted by the violation he had suffered as a boy, which now played itself out in compulsive sexual encounters with strangers. Only by coming to recognize the lasting impact of the long-ago trauma, and by forgiving himself for his part in the abusive relationship, could he begin to gain freedom, self-control, and wholeness.
The Tricky Part shares with Augustine’s Confessions, not only the drama of a struggle between spirit and flesh, but also a sense of underlying mystery: “I wonder how I can explain this feeling I have that somewhere in the middle of the whole tangled mess, the whole story, there has always been something sacred,” Moran writes. “Something good that was doing its best to grow.” Even though he turned away from the Church, which he came to see as “a dark and oppressive wall of silence, an impenetrable cultural monolith,” he supposes that he will always be Catholic. His book is imbued with religious language and concepts—grace, epiphany, salvation, forgiveness, sacrifice, prayer—as if, having rejected a narrow institutional faith, he is freed to recognize the signs of faith everywhere. On his first day at a public high school, after nine years of parochial education, he marvels at the diversity of dress, race, and manners: “Here was a catholic world.”
The Tricky Part is based on the one-man play for which Moran won an Obie Award last year. He describes acting as a form of storytelling, and his book shows that the reverse is true as well; its readability and its variety of mood and pacing owe much, no doubt, to the actor-playwright’s skill at catching and keeping an audience’s attention. His style is fresh and economical, and there is not a hackneyed line in the book: Moran has a gift for finding original ways to express his ideas. Describing a lifeguard in a swimming pool shower, he writes: “He dried his hair in a way that said he had no idea how nude he was.” His mother sits silently filing her nails, and when she finally speaks, Martin thinks, “It was her voice she’d been sharpening all this time.” He recounts a series of anonymous hookups with deliberately repetitious wording, but doesn’t overdo the device. Like a good actor, Moran uses stylistic technique not for its own sake, but in order to delineate a character and to tell that character’s story more effectively; and he tells his own with integrity, humility, and compassion.
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Stephen G. Kuehler is a research librarian in Cambridge, Mass.
