00066 The LGBT Alternative Ch. 01

Don Bobore Tramatza is a Catholic priest who's been sent to a remote town in Sardinia to inspect Don Zuseppe Mendula's parish, as the latter feels guilty of squandering the religious capital of the town.

Don Bobore questions Don Zuseppe: "Zuseppe, I don't understand what are you complaining about. The last vendetta was carried out forty years ago, well before your tenure; during your tenure there have been no murder and no theft; only prepubescent children gossip, the local schoolchildren have the highest marks in the region and in the nation; the main street in town is as clean as the operating theatres in the provincial hospital ..."

Don Zuseppe: "Have you spoken with the pharmacist?"

Don Bobore: "No. What should she tell me?"

Don Zuseppe: "No contraceptives are bought here, no abortive pills are sold here, but nobody catches any STD, and the number of children per woman is well below the national average."

Don Bobore: "Do you fear that illegal abortions are being carried out?"

Don Zuseppe: "No. Nobody does anything like that. Apparently, every married woman uses 'natural contraceptive methods' ..."

Don Bobore: "You mean, she abstains from sex with her husband when she knows that he may get her pregrant."

Don Zuseppe: "Yes, but the efficacy of the method is nearing 100%. That every woman can reliably predict her fertile days is strange, and that she is never having sex with her husband during them is incredible."

Don Bobore: "I still don't see anything you should feel guilty over."

Don Zuseppe: "You know, Sardinia is the European Union region in which most women are on the pill. Anthropologists think that it's a relic of the ancient times in which Sardinians didn't believe in Christ, but in a female aquatic godhead."

Don Bobore: "There are three sacred wells within the town boundaries -- dating back to about 1,200 BC. Since Sardinians loathe moving, most women in town must be descendants of the ancient worshippers of the well deities."

Don Zuseppe: "Right. As I began my tenure, I felt it was abnormal -- our God is male, not female, and women are his creatures, not his creators."

Don Bobore: "You forget that Our Lord has been born by a woman. You shouldn't despise women."

Don Zuseppe: "You forget what Apostle Paul has said about them. By the way, you know that one of the reasons the Catholic Church supports 'natural contraceptive methods' is that they require cooperation between the spouses, while a woman can take the pill stealthily."

Don Bobore: "Sardinian women are too proud to act stealthily."

Don Zuseppe: "Anyway, I preached against the pill and urged them to adopt these methods. For years I had no success, and a parishioner game me the right idea: to create a prayer group for wives adopting natural contraception."

Don Bobore: "Prayer is always helpful."

Don Zuseppe: "The leader was a woman named Rut coming back from China. She'd studied Chinese there and came back after graduation. She now teaches English in a high school, and spends her free time with the women of the prayer group."

Don Bobore: "Is Rut married?"

Don Zuseppe: "No. It's strange that she has had so much success with married women who are less learned than her."

Don Bobore: "And she has persuaded them to replace the pill with natural contraception, hasn't she?"

Don Zuseppe: "Yes, and I don't know how."

The next day Don Bobore meets all the women in the group led by Rut, and he has a strange sensation: before becoming a priest, Don Bobore had a lively homosexual life, and even though his 'gaydar' is now somewhat rusty, he's positive that all the women in the group are actually lesbians.

They dress and behave like ordinary Sardinian women -- only an expert could detect their lesbianism; most of them are also mothers, so Don Bobore assumes that they can have sex with their husbands nonetheless -- but he wonders, "Who has taught lesbianism to them? Most lesbians can't even come out to themselves."

The woman who arouses most suspicions is obviously Rut. Don Bobore talks to her and thinks that she's a learned and smart woman, but she is also a covert "butch". He casually asks her, "What was the subject of your degree dissertation?"

"Marriage-resistance sisterhoods in Ninteenth Century Guangdong -- from an anthropological and gender-theoretical viewpoint," she answers.

"What you mean?" Don Bobore asks.

"A French feminist, Adrienne Rich, has written at length about female associations across the centuries -- as examples of female self-determination. I wanted to compare Chinese and Sardinian experiences in that regard," Rut replies.

"Adrienne Rich?" Don Bobore wonders. Don Zuseppe, who was a widower before becoming a priest, and couldn't conceive any other family beside the Sacred Family, didn't know her; but Don Bobore knew that Rich was more a lesbian than a feminist theorist, and phoned the Diocese librarian asking him to get hold of a copy of Rut's dissertation.

The dissertation was available online, at two websites, one belonging to Rut's university, the other to a lesbian association -- et pour cause: these Chinese sororities also provided for sexual relations among the associated women. Rich's concept of "Lesbian Continuum" applied equally well to the fraternities in China and to the Beguines in Christian Europe.

"The prayer group must be disbanded," Don Bobore told himself, "but I wonder -- why don't their husbands complain about the dearth of sex inflicted by their wives?"

He discreetly asks some husbands about their marital life, and one of them, Gonariu, is candid enough to answer, "Dear Don Bobore, I've little to complain about. When my wife Michela was on the pill, we never set aside time for sex; now we have a lot of it in the infertile days of her menstrual cycle."

"And during the fertile days?" the mistrustful Don Bobore asks.

"Once I went to the bar to drink beer and play cards; then I stopped drinking beer, and the mayor Cristina ..."

"The pharmacist?"

"Yes, the pharmacist. She has set up a theatrical group, and the energy we would otherwise spend in bed or drown in alcohol are used to play."

"Which plays do you perform?"

"We began with Shakespeare, and we're now performing Sophocles. As in ancient times, female roles are played by young males."

"Wonderful!" Don Bobore thinks, "After a prayer group rife with lesbianism we have now a theatrical group reeking of male homoeroticism. Don Zuseppe's insistence on natural contraception has been turning the parish into a branch of Arcigay [the foremost Italian LGBT association]!"

Don Bobore then asks Gonariu: "What does your wife do in her fertile days, or better, nights?"

"She doesn't love theater -- she usually cooks bread and weaves textiles with her closest girlfriends during these nights."

"Cooks and weaves? What do you mean?"

"Ah, you live in a big city and you may not know that most homes here have an oven to cook bread and cakes, and a loom to weave traditional fabric. Our wives cook a month's worth of bread during these nights, and weave carpets, curtains, and the like."

"But ... do you really think that your wives spend all their time kneading, weaving, baking and seaming?"

"They sleep together from time to time. They work hard, they need such rest."

"Candid but naïve," Don Bobore thinks, "His wife gives him whatever he likes in her infertile days, and thus buys his neglect of what she does in her fertile ones."

"My last question," Don Bobore asks, "Is your wife's menstrual cycle as regular as clockwork?"

"Since she's stopped eating meat and turned to a vegan diet, yes."

"You don't eat meat, do you?"

"No. The best seller drug in our pharmacy is brewer's yeast, to prevent vitamin B12 deficiency."

"Really?"

"We have a bank, a post office, a Carabinieri [military police] station, a public library here, but the butcher's has long been turned into a lingerie shop."

"It's strange. I've read that a vegan diet increases the likelihood of menstrual cycle disturbances."

"The old studies you may have read were rife with confounders. Once you compare non-vegan women with vegan ones, of similar health condition and lifestyle, you find that vegan women's menstrual cycle is stabler, once they've adjusted to the vegan diet."

"So you kinda live in the Garden of Eden," Don Bobore says.

"Yes! Ah, I have to thank the Catholic Church for a small thing."

"What thing?"

"You don't allow laymen to drink Holy Communion wine. Our wives have discovered that alcohol, tobacco and coffee make menstrual cycle unstable."

"Not to speak of firearms!" Don Bobore giggled.

"We only use them for self-defense. Meat increases aggressiveness, and as we stopped eating it we only regarded our rifles as weapons of last resort."

"What should we do?" Don Bobore wonders, "We've unwittingly created a community of saints, but apparently bisexual saints. Should we praise it, and tolerate the female lesbianism and male homoeroticism, or should we suppress it at the cost of increasing alcohol, tobacco, coffee consumption, the town's carbon footprint (as its inhabitants revert to meat-eating), and possible armed strife? What is wrong in what I've been taught?"