Called Out of Darkness Page 0,38

classical styles I so much admired. This included not only the statues and pictures in church, but the poetry we read and the prayers we recited with their elegant use of "thee" and "thou." There was a great continuity to our beliefs, to our life, our life within our Catholic city of New Orleans - and our life beyond it - a continuity to our art, our poetry, and our liturgy and our devotions and our prayers. It was a universe, this world in which I grew up Catholic. And the experiences of art and literature and music that penetrated it were interwoven with its values. It was a realm unto itself.

Pope Pius XII was the head of the Roman Catholic Church. And Pope Pius XII, as far as I knew, had been pope all my life.

There was criticism in our realm of the world beyond, but this seemed logical and inevitable. The priests railed against divorce and remarriage from the pulpit. They declared in so many terms that we would "not come down off the cross" on this issue no matter what other religions did.

We also prayed for the death of Stalin. We prayed, I think, for an end to Soviet Communism and Soviet Russia which constituted a threat to the whole world.

In New Orleans, there had been criticism of television when it was first invented, dire warnings of how it would ruin the imagination of children who watched it, or how soap commercial jingles would replace revered family songs.

Our family held out against television for years. In our chaotic old house, furnished haphazardly with old bits and pieces of furniture, a materialistic and profane thing like television was regarded with deep suspicion.

Finally someone gave us a television, a monstrous table model of a wooden box with a tiny six-inch screen. At last we discovered what the rest of the world already took for granted. What a revelation it was to see Liberace, after hearing about him at school for years, and to find out who Sid Caesar really was.

We sat on straight-back chairs in the dining room to watch television. Old foreign films came on at night, passable English fare, it seemed. And my father watched the boxing matches, and I enjoyed watching them with him. All my life I've been a boxing fan.

My mother who had patiently endured all the clamor against television for many years pronounced it as the most wonderful entertainment one could bring into one's home.

But we all knew our mother loved film, and sometimes it was said that up until she married, she'd seen every film ever made.

Television certainly didn't change our values.

Frequently in my house, people were denounced as "rank materialists" and there was ongoing discussion about the real dangers of Communism and how Communism might and could take over the United States. Families who limited the number of their children were spoken of as ruining America.

Conformity was ruining America. But Communism was the greatest of all threats.

Senator Joe McCarthy was a hero to Catholics I knew.

The only magazine ever delivered to our house was the American Legion magazine.

But I didn't care much about any of this. I didn't read the papers, any more than I read anything else. I knew nothing at all about recent history, and I had no interest in politics whatsoever. I moved in and out of enchanting periods of history in my passions and hobbies. I dreamed of being a bohemian; I dreamed of traveling to all the countries of the world.

Television certainly didn't make a mindless slave of me.

Even the new suburbs of Dallas, Texas, where I found myself for the last year of high school, did not make me a conformist, though it was rather dazzling to be in the America I had glimpsed on TV.

I headed towards college, filled with a sense of personal power. I could become a great writer. And we had a multitude of great Catholic writers. Their books had been all over our house as I grew up.

Yet within a short time, it was the modern world wanting to know the great incidents and heroes and heroines of the world - more than sexuality - that eventually caused me to leave the church.
Chapter Six
As I have mentioned , I came out of childhood with no sense of being a particular gender, and no sense of being handicapped by being a woman because I didn't believe I was a woman or a man.

Let me say briefly, because it's too painful to