To Kill a Cardinal

New York Times “111 Held in St. Patrick’s AIDS Protest” December 11, 1989 While some 4,500 people demonstrated outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral yesterday, several dozen disrupted the Mass at 10:15 A.M. to protest John Cardinal O’Connor’s recent statements on abortion, homosexuality and AIDS. Some of the protesters chained themselves to pews inside the cathedral, while others shouted or lay in aisles. The police said 111 people were arrested, including 43 inside the church. Many of the protesters were carried out on stretchers after refusing to stand up. Dozens of protesters blocked traffic on Fifth Avenue by lying in the street.

Michael Rumaker’s witty fable blends the marvelous and the murderous as it takes us on a grown-up children’s crusade across Manhattan. The object of their pilgrimage—to destroy the malefactors of the Church. The result—one grand surprise after another. The Canterbury Tales in reverse for the furious queer 80’s and 90’s.

Michael Rumaker was born in Philadelphia in 1932. He is a graduate of Black Mountain College (1955) and Columbia University (1970). His first book, The Butterfly, is a fictionalized memoir of his brief affair with a young Yoko Ono, published before Ono became famous. His short stories, Gringos and other stories, appeared in 1967. He began to write directly about his life as a gay man in the volumes A Day and a Night at the Baths (1979, Triton: 2010) and My First Satyrnalia (1981). The novel Pagan Days (1991, reprinted 2013 by Spuyten Duyvil) is told from the perspective of an eight-year old boy struggling to understand his gay self. Black Mountain Days, a memoir of his time at Black Mountain College, has a strong autobiographical element alongside portraits of many students, faculty, and visitors (especially the poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson) during its last years, 1952-1956.

Michele Madigan Somerville is the author of Wisegal (Ten Pell books, 2001) and Black Irish (Plain View Press, 2009). She lives in Brooklyn, NY.