The characters in Maurice tried to fight their gay “temptations,” and we all know how that turned out.

I kept waiting for this article to take an Onion-esque turn, but… no. I mean, WTF? Is it really considered newsworthy when a “religious gay man” promotes celibacy in an article that was posted to his personal blog after it was rejected for publication elsewhere? I don’t know what made my head hurt more, Ed Pacht’s blog post or Kilian Melloy’s regurgitation of it.

Here is a sampling of Pacht:

I have been strongly urged to forget my inhibitions and live the ‘gay’ lifestyle, and I have felt the rejection that arises when I admit what temptations it is that I experience, especially when I admit that, though I have never had improper dealing with a minor, my attraction is far stronger toward boys than toward men.

That’s major “oy vey” material right there, is it not?

And then with Melloy it’s all “Pacht describes,” “added Pacht,” “Pacht writes,” “Pacht wrote,” “wrote Pacht,” “declared the writer,” “continued Pacht,” blah, blah, blah. We get it! It’s all Pacht, all the time. (There’s also “Pacht went on to suggest,” “for his own part, Pacht wrote,” “Pacht went on to write,” “Pacht stated” and “summarized the writer.”) Except the guy’s not freakin’ Tolstoy, and he wrote nothing to merit all of that space.

There wasn’t even an attempt by Melloy to analyze any of the things Pacht wrote, described, declared, continued, suggested, stated, etc. No pithy asides or anything. You can’t let a guy tell gay Anglicans to stop sucking cock without at least attempting a pithy aside! I’d give it a go myself (the pithy aside thing, that is; the oral-sex-with-guys shebang is something I’ll leave to my gay male brethren just as God intended), but my own background is more of the Reform Judaism variety, which leaves me ill-equipped to deal with this sort of thing. Our religious leaders, despite their lingering obsession with foreskin, tend not to be so hung up on what we do with our genitals.