A PRINCE OF A BOY
How One Gay Catholic Helped Change the World
by Brian McNaught
Cascade Books. 216 pages, $24
IN THE YEARS after Stonewall, as gay liberation spread to every part of the country, great significance was attached to two simple words: “coming out.” For women and men who had been hiding their sexuality, this was the frightening first step to living authentically. Coming out took place everywhere: in families, in small towns, in big cities, on college campuses—and in churches. Because traditional religion condemned homosexuality, few spaces seemed more unwelcoming to gay men and women than places of worship. The Catholic Church, with its celibate male priests, many of whom were homosexual, was among the most unwelcoming. In 1974, Brian McNaught set out to change this.
Born into a well-off Irish Catholic family in Detroit in 1948, McNaught describes his childhood as idyllic. He was popular, good-looking, and he dated girls. In other words, he could pass as straight, which spared him the anxieties that plague many gay youths. The teenage McNaught was so well-behaved that one of the nuns who taught him declared him “a prince of a boy.” He took his faith seriously and states without irony that the words of the Beatitudes that he memorized in high school would guide him for the rest of his life. McNaught majored in journalism at Marquette University, a Jesuit institution where he briefly considered becoming a priest and where he had his first, unsatisfactory sexual experience with another man. A conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, McNaught performed his alternative service writing a column for The Michigan Catholic, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Detroit. The stage was set for his very public coming out.
McNaught was an anomaly in the early days of gay liberation, when many gay men pursued sexual experiences with abandon. At times he felt like an outsider in the gay community. He was a romantic, wanting sex to take place within the framework of a committed relationship with a man who shared his religious beliefs. This led him to join Dignity, a national organization for gay Catholics, founded in 1969, with chapters in many cities. McNaught agreed to be interviewed by a newspaper reporter for a story about Dignity Detroit. When the interview appeared, his column in The Michigan Catholic was abruptly dropped. McNaught exposed the discrimination he was facing from the Catholic Church because of his homosexuality in a television interview. Despite hate mail and rejection by his family, there was no going back. He next went on a hunger strike to bring attention to the plight of gay Catholics. It lasted 21 days and garnered national attention. In his early twenties, McNaught had become a national figure for gay Catholics.
The account of the heady days when McNaught took on the Catholic Church and got two Detroit bishops to agree to work to root out discrimination against “the homosexual as a person” is the best part of this book. In the early 1970s gay Catholics were demanding the right to be visible in their churches. McNaught was at the center of this movement and worked with other national leaders. He spoke at college campuses, attended landmark gay Catholic conferences, and wrote articles about being gay and Catholic for the gay newspapers that then existed in many large cities. In 1981, some of these articles were collected in his first book, A Disturbed Peace. One of them, “Dear Anita,” a letter addressed to Anita Bryant in 1978, is still worth reading.
McNaught acknowledges that in his career as a public speaker he served primarily as an ambassador to straight people. He told his story of coming out and living openly as a gay man. Conservative in appearance and thinking, McNaught was an unthreatening gay role model. He wanted his mostly straight audience to like him and thus be open to accepting other gay people. By the late 1980s, when college students had become accustomed to gay people in their midst, McNaught switched to speaking about gay issues in the workforce for large corporations around the world. The chapters on this phase of his life focus on how he prepared and presented workshops and are less interesting than the earlier parts of the book. McNaught, who tends to find himself irresistible, will have us believe he never met a person or an audience he couldn’t charm.
In our current political climate, workshops on diversity training and gay issues in the workplace are a relic of the past. Still, the later chapters of A Prince of a Boy are rewarding for the story they tell of the author’s spiritual evolution. Eventually, McNaught “walked backward out of the Church of Rome” and ceased to waste his time on religious conservatives. He considers himself a friend of Buddha and can imagine Jesus as a homosexual. But the once devout altar boy never wavered in the essentials: his belief in his inherent worthiness, his adherence to the Beatitudes, and his conviction that God used his talents to change the world for gay people. This memoir secures Brian McNaught’s place as a pioneer in the Catholic LGBT movement.
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Daniel A. Burr, a frequent G&LR contributor, lives in Covington, KY.
