my all-male high school, where many students
played sports and no one was openly gay. Oddly
enough, Sean Cody and the boys I went to school
with agreed on one thing: the only real men were
straight men. I believed them both. For years, I
believed.
mr. c. wasn’t the only one to warn my class-
mates and me about the dangers of pornography.
My high school was a Catholic one, and our other
teachers told us porn encouraged impure thoughts
and actions. They were following the teachings
of the Church, which identifies pornography as
one of the sins “gravely contrary to chastity.”
The Church’s official doctrine—as published
in its Catechism of the Catholic Church—defines
pornography as something that “remov[es] real
or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the
partners, in order to display them deliberately to
third parties. It offends against chastity because it
perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of
spouses to each other.” In the Catechism, pornog-
raphy sounds less like a physical thing than an
action; it takes what the Church maintains should
be an essentially private experience and renders it
worryingly public; it shares what should be kept
secret.
Pornography is not the only sin identified as
“gravely contrary to chastity”: homosexuality
is another. Homosexual practices, the Catechism
explains, are “contrary to the natural law. They
close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do
not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual
complementarity. Under no circumstances can
they be approved.” And yet it goes on to say that
those with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies”