Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties by John D’Emilio

Abstract

Reviewed by: Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties by John D’Emilio Mary Ellen O’Donnell Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties. By John D’Emilio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. 208pp. $29.95. Renowned LGBTQ scholar John D’Emilio describes the worlds that shaped him as a thinker, activist, and historian in his memoir Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties. Readers will know his trailblazing work in LGBTQ studies, but in this intimate story, they discover the private moments of an insular Italian-American Catholic childhood, a world-widening Jesuit education, and the personal impact of the culturally destabilizing 1960s. With the acumen of a careful historian, D’Emilio provides access to a crucial time in American history through the lens of one Catholic New Yorker struggling with his sexual identity. Divided into three parts, the book opens with his early childhood in an Italian working-class family, whose abundant love provides for an idyllic upbringing in a 1950s Bronx neighborhood, where deep friendships were forged on the streets and playgrounds. Trips to his grandfather’s Italian food store and grandma’s weekly Sunday dinner convey a characteristically ethnic Catholic experience of mid-twentieth century New York. His parochial school education includes a range of teachers, from kind and nurturing to strict and punishing. Like most Catholic school students reared during this historical period, he was learning to read and write at the same time he was learning the reality of sin and threat of hell. Part Two depicts his unlikely move to Manhattan’s selective Jesuit Regis High School. Emerging from a family with little interest in reading, as he describes it, D’Emilio fulfills his mother’s hopes for him to break that mold by earning a spot at the prestigious school. There he discovers the thrill of intellectual engagement in his classrooms and the competitive field of speech and debate. He also encounters the cosmopolitan universe of Manhattan and establishes a newfound family of friends. As he discovers life apart from the confines of his family’s housing project, he stumbles upon a world of sexual encounters that [End Page 89] leads to a dual life. Struggling between the Catholic sensibility that stresses the sinfulness of his sexual urges and the daily subway rides to school that provided access to a gay subculture in 1960s New York, D’Emilio encounters the personal conflict at the heart of the book. In the last section, readers follow the author into his college years, which bring a new level of challenge. He explains, “My faith, my intellect, my sense of who I was in the world: all were in constant turmoil almost from the moment I set foot on campus” (121). As a first-generation college student bucking the trend of fellow Regis alums, D’Emilio lands not at a Catholic institution, but at Columbia University. Just as he is trying to come to terms with his sexual identity in the 1960s, he must not only rise to the academic challenge of his courses, but he must also discern his place among civil rights activists and Vietnam War protestors. These life-altering factors place irreparable strain on his faith. Part One tends toward the nostalgic, painting a rosy picture of life in the Parkchester project. In this, D’Emilio’s memoir reflects broader patterns of American Catholic pre-Vatican II mid-twentieth century remembrance. But the narrative gains personal power as D’Emilio expresses vulnerability in his sexual self-discovery. He offers a textured understanding of life as a closeted gay adolescent and young adult during this time in New York City. Yet as he narrates this emerging sexual identity, he does not connect it to the Catholicism that so imprinted his childhood. Apart from a shame-inducing rant by Sister Perpetua in first grade for kissing a little girl, D’Emilio shares little about what Catholic authorities taught about sex. Reflecting on his early teenage experimentation with girls, he acknowledges a problem but leaves it there: “. . . kissing Arlene only made me more interested in playing with myself in the...