tumultuous years 1972-89, and a major voice for progressive causes in the City. (He died in 2003 at age 83; I was among the thousands at his funeral.) It's a quite lovely memoir, moving and well-crafted. But the title - "The Bishop's Daughter: A father, a faith, and a secret" - has me worried.(If you have a New Yorker handy, read it before reading on in this post.)
The secret, it quickly becomes clear, is that Bishop Moore, while twice married, may have loved men (or loved men, too). But the piece is not muckraking, not shocked or scandalized. Rather, Honor Moore describes hearing from a man who had been the only unfamiliar name in her late father's will, and when she learns that he and her father had been intimate for thirty years, the feeling is not shock but a kind of relief or even joy. It all hinges on the way she has constructed the essay, in which this revelation turns out to be the missing piece which makes her father whole for her. Although it may help explain the failure of his first marriage, it doesn't undermine anything positive she has told us about him - his remarkable inspiring presence, his love for the church and his great contributions to it. Instead, it deepens them, complements them.
I started reading the article with much trepidation, fearing some kind of explicit or implicit revenge on a distant father who betrayed you (an all too common genre these days, alas, and a great way to sell books), and fearful that it would somehow undermine his posthumous reputation (as it would if we found out that, say, Cardinal O'Connor, had had a lover). But it won me over, and by the end of it I was grateful to Honor for having written it. But not everyone I know feels this way. (Discussion of this has only just begun, I'm sure.) One person thinks it was "sad and unnecessary"; Bishop Moore never talked about this, and his daughter shouldn't either. Yes. In general I'm opposed to outing people. But Honor's way of disclosing this hidden part of her late father's life isn't an angry outing but a joyful one. She doesn't see this as secret sin or hypocrisy, but something more like the true heart of the man she loved but never fully knew. It's a sad, yes. Perhaps even tragic. But this might make a posthumous outing sad and necessary.
My worry is that people won't bother to read the essay, or won't read it carefully, and will assume that she must be making some familiar argument about the church: the hypocrisy of its leaders, or its oppressiveness. These are familiar religion-and-sexuality topics from the news (including The New Yorker), and at a time when the Episcopal church is fracturing over gay bishops (among other things), I worry that few people will see Honor Moore's essay for what it is: a celebration of the contribution of Paul Moore and the sources of his being, and an argument for openness. Had he been born thirty or forty years later, he might not have had to lead a double life.
It will be interesting to see how Honor Moore's essay (and the forthcoming book from which it is excerpted) are received.
