Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man by Vincent Norah

Author:Vincent, Norah [Vincent, Norah]
Language: eng
Format: azw, mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2007-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

This I hadn’t expected. I hadn’t thought that I could really become Ned so fully as to feel embarrassed by the conjectures of monks, or to smart under the sting of their disapproval. Yet it was precisely that experience, the immediacy of it, that led me to see and understand the dynamic of fraternal acceptance and rejection that underlay the community and defined the emotional well-being of its members.

Feeling it at work in myself, I began to see it at work in the others, too, though in them it was much more skillfully disguised than it would ever be in me.

Even with years of practiced stoicism behind him, hardened Vergil hadn’t quite been able to hide from inferior Ned how much he needed the approval of his peers. One day toward the end of my stay, he received the news that he was to be allowed to take solemn vows. He came to my room electrified with pride. He’d been distant for days, but now he wanted me to share in his joy. Not the joy of his impending profession, but, as he emphasized, the joy of his inclusion. He had been voted in by his brothers. They had accepted him as one of their own. These men, with whom he had lived for three years, had deemed him worthy enough to spend the rest of his life with them. The vows he was taking were in a certain symbolic sense collective nuptial vows, not so much to God, but to this band of brothers who lived together in sickness and in health and buried each other south of the church.

This I felt sure was closely connected to these men’s decisions not only to take the vow of chastity, but to enter the monastic way of life instead of becoming diocesan priests. It was an entirely legitimate way for men to marry other men—to cultivate the lifelong company of their own sex—and this held true for both hetero-and homosexuals. It was the one thing all the monks appeared to share in common, a deep desire for fraternal and paternal approval and support, an almost inconsolable need for a bonded male family.

Homosexuals found it convenient presumably because they could thereby avoid committing the grave sin of sodomy—in theory, at least—while at the same time enjoying all-male domestic arrangements and avoiding the dreaded expectations of “normal” heterosexual existence—intimacy with a woman.

Heterosexuals, too, saw the appeal of marrying other men. Several of the monks with whom I spoke about chastity gave me the impression that women weren’t creatures they could handle on any level. These guys weren’t gay. They just didn’t want the emotional demands and constant struggles of navigating the opposite sex. They were Henry Higgins types, confirmed old bachelors. They wanted to be among their own kind, to be understood and left mostly alone to go about their business without a hectoring wife bearing down on them. But, and this was crucial, they didn’t want to be lonely. One monk told me, “I tried that [living alone] and it didn’t work.

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