Can anyone live happily ever after as a gay man within the Christian faith? Edmund White puts the question as an exasperated accusation: "I never thought I'd live to see the day when gays would be begging to be let back in to the Christian church, which is clearly our enemy." Unfortunately, we could speak the same accusations at most of our major institutions, which have at best been explicitly homophobic until the last decades. Why participate in the churches? Indeed, why participate in the universities or the publishing houses or the major newspapers?

The alternative to participating is not Bohemianism, but barbarism. Thinking about how one can be gay and a member of some Christian community is just a form of a question that ever homosexual faces: How can I make a place for myself in what has been and mostly continues to be a homophobic culture?

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I do not mean to suggest that questions about staying in the church should be dismissed as silly. Compelling cases can be made that identifying as a Catholic (or Christian) at this moment in American life can only be a form of collaboration with homosexuality's most dangerous enemies. As I have already hinted, we have a great deal to learn about homosexuality from modern Catholicism, even if we never were or will not long remain Catholic. So, too, we have a lot to learn from modern homosexuality about Catholicism, perhaps especially if we are interested in continuing to conceive ourselves as somehow Catholic.

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Who am I to say such things? Any Catholic has been taught to practice self-examination and even self-abasement before daring to voice criticism, especially against the church. Self-examination can be an important antidote to pride or anger or vanity. It can also be an effective means for enforcing silence about Catholic homosexuality. It can function as one of a series of constraints, of double binds, that contrive to make it impossible for anyone to speak — except for the "competent authorities" in the Vatican.

If I were a former priest or member of a religious order, my criticisms would be dismissed at the bitter fruit of a failure to live up to my vows. I am neither a former priest nor a former religious, so they can be dismissed as uninformed.

If I were an accredited moral theologian teaching at a pontifical faculty, my criticisms would be dismissed as defection. I am not such a moral theologian, so they can be dismissed at the rant of an amateur.

If I were not "out," my criticisms would be dismissed as evidence of closeted gayness. I am "out," so they can be dismissed as my own agenda.

These double binds are constructive to prevent anyone from talking about Catholic homosexuality except in the approved ways. The only people who are permitted to speak about it are those who are guaranteed never to speak about it honestly. The only people who are authorized to speak about it are the silencing authorities themselves.

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Better scraps of speech than silence. If we let the ambiguity of our position or the diversity of the evidence frighten us away from speaking, we surrender speech to its abusers. There are, of course, any number of prominent Catholics who are content to speak endlessly about homosexuality. They are the broadcasters of the official teachings, and they are curiously unconstrained by historical evidence or by the diversity of present experience. To be bound up in silence by the fear of overgeneralizing would be to allow the most aggressive programs of generalization to go forward without dissent.

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Other contradictions bind you, my reader. Many of you who have the greatest familiarity with my topics will also have the greatest stake in denying what I say. I am not thinking in the first instance of church-employed experts in history and theology. I refer instead to closeted clergymen whose hatred of their own desire has become strict "orthodoxy" — I mean, homophobic rage.

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According to an etymology that goes back in the Latin tradition at least to St. Jerome, patron of Catholic Bible translators, the place-name "Sodom" in Genesis 18-19 means "mute" or "silent beast." Various explanations of this etymology are supplied by later theologians. Sodomites are rendered animal-like by their addiction to physical pleasure. Or sodomites lose rationality by acting against nature. Or the activity of sodomites is to be shrouded in silence among Christians. Sodomy is, after all, the "nameless" sin or crime — according to another misreading of the Scriptures (Ephesians 5:3). So Catholic confessors and preachers are warned against speaking about the sin with any clarity. They are not to inquire after it or preach against it for fear of inciting the laity to deeds not yet discovered. But the deepest sodomite silence come from priestly texts written for priestly audiences. The same texts insist that sodomy is typically a priestly sin.

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Over the last millennium, Catholic writers have exercised themselves in painting pictures of the sodomitic soul -- of the soul of the sinner given over to the practice of sodomy. They always depict the soul from outside, from far away, because of course they have never seen it up close. They show it as a Sodom in miniature — a city of anguished secrecy, of perpetual exile, of deserved death, over which fiery clouds always rain cinders. They project every vice into this city. They compare its inhabitants with the worst of history's criminals.

If these garish pictures seem to be projections of fantasy, they still capture something real. Instead of depicting the souls of average Catholics who love members of their own sex, they show the hellishly intertwined lives of closeted members of church institutions and their pharisaical persecutors. There is indeed a silent Sodom. It is housed within the structures of churchly power. Its silence must be disturbed before there can be mature Catholic teachings on "homosexuality" — or mature criticisms of how "homosexuality" itself fails to describe gay Catholic lives. The silence of Sodom envelopes a Catholic science of sodomy, of homosexuality, about which we must now speak.