Tag Archives: Donald Boisvert

Diocese of Montreal: “respectful and dignified” objections to the ordination of partnered homosexuals

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From here:

In this case, the bishop said during some brief introductory remarks in French that he had received a letter objecting to the ordination of Alain Brosseau as a deacon and Donald Boisvert as a priest and appreciated the respectful and dignified tone of the objection but did not agree with the arguments and was proceeding with the ordinations.(the letter is similar to ones the same six clergy – Rev. Nick Brotherwood, Rev. Linda Faith Chalk, Rev. Michelle Eason, Rev. Chris Barrigar, Rev. Canon Bruce Glencross and Rev. Tim Wiebe – have presented on similar occasions in the past, saying the signers believe sexually active same-gender relationships are incompatible with scripture and, if civil marriages, with church law and traditions.)

I vaguely remember Norman Mailer writing (or perhaps it was in an interview) that if one believes something strongly enough, then the only defence of that belief that has integrity is one that goes in swinging – he was an amateur boxer. I’m not sure that that would work in a cathedral but, on the other hand, a “respectful and dignified” objection that everyone knows will be ignored seems to me to be worse than a waste of time: it is little more than a ritual conscience absolver.

If only the newly consecrated Donald Boisvert were as reticent in his panegyric to phallic worship in homoerotic and sadomasochistic sex. From his book, “Holy Sex” [Correction: “Holy Sex” is actually a section from Boisvert’s book Out on Holy Ground: Meditations on Gay Men’s Spirituality):

Anyone who has ever publicly cruised other men, or participated in some of the more arcane rituals associated with S/M sex, for example, will understand the powerful, almost overwhelming pull of the masculine and the unspoken codes with which we surround and protect it. Masculinity represents many things for gay men: potency, dominion, authority, abandonment, protection. As the dominant masculine symbol, the phallus acquires many characteristics of the holy. This is not a particularly modern interpretation. Phallic worship is as old as human civilization, and perhaps as controversial today as it was in the past. It has always been transgressive, associated with disorder and excess, with rioutous freedom and wanton sex. …. I call gay sex “holy sex” because it is centred on one of the primal symbols of the natural world, that of male regenerative power. The rites of gay sex call forth and celebrate this power, particularly in its unknown and unknowable anonymity. Gay men are the worshippers paying homage to the god who stands erect and omnific, ever silent and distant.

Diocese of Montreal ordains two men, both married to other men

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Rev. Robert Camara and Donald Boisvert were ordained by Bishop Barry Clarke in June, Camara as a priest and Boisvert as a deacon; both Camara and Boisvert  are married – to men.

Anyone still labouring under the misapprehension that the Anglican Church of Canada is not being consumed by an obsession with homoerotic sex, need look no further for illumination than to the preoccupations of those whom it is ordaining. Here is an extract from “Holy Sex” by Deacon Boisvert:

Anyone who has ever publicly cruised other men, or participated in some of the more arcane rituals associated with S/M sex, for example, will understand the powerful, almost overwhelming pull of the masculine and the unspoken codes with which we surround and protect it. Masculinity represents many things for gay men: potency, dominion, authority, abandonment, protection. As the dominant masculine symbol, the phallus acquires many characteristics of the holy. This is not a particularly modern interpretation. Phallic worship is as old as human civilization, and perhaps as controversial today as it was in the past. It has always been transgressive, associated with disorder and excess, with rioutous freedom and wanton sex. …. I call gay sex “holy sex” because it is centred on one of the primal symbols of the natural world, that of male regenerative power. The rites of gay sex call forth and celebrate this power, particularly in its unknown and unknowable anonymity. Gay men are the worshippers paying homage to the god who stands erect and omnific, ever silent and distant.

Just what the doctor ordered for ailing Canadian Anglicanism: phallic worship.

Here, in his book “Sacred Space”, Boisvert describes his life’s most “spiritual moments” in – where else – gay bars and bath-houses:

Because I am a gay man, my first time in a gay bar, my first visit to the baths, and most poignantly, the first time I stepped into the Stonewall Inn in New York City have also been uplifting, spiritual moments in my life.

I am looking forward to the gradual transformation of Christ Church Cathedral into a “Sacred Space”; my bet is that it will be a gay bathhouse – once the baptismal font has been enlarged.

Boisvert used to be a Roman Catholic, an affiliation that proved unsympathetic to his yearning to worship penises. Unsurprisingly, he has received a warm welcome in the Anglican Church of Canada as it sinks inexorably into Boisvert’s murky world of cruising other men looking for a spot of “Holy Sex”.

From here (page 4):

To say that Donald Boisvert has come out as a gay man would be an understatement. You could almost say he wrote the book (or books).
His ordination as an Anglican deacon by Bishop Barry Clarke June 3 is another event in his distinguished and public career as a scholar and activist concerned particularly with sexuality and the relation between sexuality and religion.
In a note for The Montreal Anglican in 2009, on the occasion of his being received into the Anglican Church by Bishop Barry Clarke, he wrote:
“I was raised a Roman Catholic; I studied for the Catholic priesthood; and I am a scholar of Catholic religious culture. I have a great deal of affection for the Catholic Church, in large part because it marks my cultural heritage and it guided me through my youth, but also because it still has a great deal to offer. But I am gay, and I have more and more difficulty with the Vatican’s archaic teachings on human sexuality, including its position on women and their place within Catholicism.
More broadly, however, the Catholic Church remains a deeply entrenched patriarchal institution, with an authoritarian and rigid governing structure.

It is difficult to refrain from speculating on why Bishop Barry Clarke would ordain someone whose chief interests lie in the exploration of the ritualistic aspects of sadomasochism and the holiness of male genitals. Is the bishop a witless lunatic, a closet adorer of phalluses, a neophyte practitioner of wanton sex looking for instruction?

Who can say – perhaps he just picked up Boisvert in a bathhouse.

Note: I’ve updated this article since Robert Camara and Donald Boisvert, while married to other men, are not married to each other as I had previously stated.

Diocese of Montreal gains new staff member: author of “Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints”

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From here (page 12):

A scholar who once served as dean of students at Concordia University is joined the staff of St. Matthias’ Church in Westmount, effective September 19. Don Boisvert is in his final year of study at the Montreal Diocesan Theological College and is completing his “in-ministry” requirement for graduation. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Ottawa and two books and several scholarly articles to his credit.

Born in the United States of French-Canadian parents, he studied for several years at a Roman Catholic seminary and is still on the faculty at Concordia. He specializes in the history of Christianity, religion and sexuality and religion in Canada. He was received into the Anglican Church of Canada last year and is married to Gaston Lamontagne, his partner for 34 years.

“Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints” is Boisvert’s attempt to see the traditional saints through a haze of homoeroticism:

he constructs an image of a perfectly shaped, highly eroticized male body ascribed to each of the saints. This imagined saintly body is repeatedly described as “beautiful,” “erotic,” “titillating,” “handsome,” “bare-chested,” “naked” or “semi-naked,” “muscular,” “glorious,” “ragged” and endowed with “perfection,” “virile masculinity,” “masculine strength,” etc. More often than not, the saints of old appear in a body conforming to the modern norm for gay beauty.

And we mustn’t leave out his homoerotic fantasies of Jesus:

Though Boisvert imagines Jesus to be a “handsome man,” “caring and attentive, sensitive yet principled” and working “bare-chested in the burning sun” (p. 180), he is attracted also to the “broken body” of Christ. The crucified Jesus (a “handsomely glorious body of Jesus [hanging] from the cross” (p. 171)) “elicits strong feelings of comfort and passive submission, the male docile and compliant body.” Yet, this submissiveness is immediately complemented by the symbol of the “lion” with its “brute aggressive force, the male as dominant energy and the definite top” (p. 170). Not surprisingly, the “fully male, genitally endowed” sculpture of Michelangelo’s Risen Christ, with its “muscular arms, thighs and buttocks” (p. 177), commands Boisvert’s admiration.

Just what the Anglican Church of Canada needs on staff: a homosexual, “married” to a man, who is so immersed in his twisted little world of gay sex that, when he writes a book about Jesus and the saints, he cannot see beyond the end of his genitals.