What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, A Tale of Priest Abuse [Paperback]

Jack Fritscher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 26, 2002

"What They Did to the Kid" is a memoir spinning as a comic novel for general-fiction readers intrigued by boys' school tales, and baby boomers who "survived Catholic school." Ryan O'Hara, coming of age from 14 to 24, is the wise adolescent narrating readers' entry into the secret culture of 1950's altar boys who go to the seminary, meet priests, and must decide their own identities. The novel's interior ticking covers the clock and calendar of boys' emerging consciences and edgy consciousness. "The San Francisco Chronicle" says, "Jack Fritscher reads gloriously." Strong characters and snappy dialog propel the character-driven plot of male-dominant pecking order. At Misericordia Seminary (aptly nicknamed "Misery"), Ryan O'Hara exposes his own story. He's trapped for oxygen-with 500 other boys-by the imperial Rector Karg, the disciplinarian Father Gunn "of the USMC," the tart Father Polistina, and the rebel-priest Chris Dryden "who knows Fellini and JFK." The storytelling Irish-American author gives each ensemble character-hero or villain, student or priest, man or woman-a rich back story. Black civil rights of the 60's as well as three interesting women characters open this tale out of the suffocating seminary and on to the hot streets of Chicago's South Side and Old Town. The compelling psychological drama hinges on the very source and aspirations of priestly vocation versus self-esteem. "Is God calling me-and what about chastity? Or is it just the 'Bali Hai' of blind ambition and social climbing-and what about sex?" Fritscher makes deeper than usual sense of soulful coming-of-age material. The hearty supply of boarding school episodes cumulatively reveals the dueling dynamic between the boyish protagonist, Ryan O'Hara, and the callous ambition of the handsome bully, Tank Rimsky, as they fight toward the finish line of "manly men's" ordination to the priesthood. "The hardest thing to be in America today is a man." The novel is based on an under-reported story: the Catholic Church recruited 200,000 boys into seminaries in the 1950's. Only 20,000 were ordained. "Kid" details, in a nostalgic and not unkind take what happened to the missing 180,000 boys and the women and men in their families. Daring to step inside Catholic culture, without being parochial, this American story reveals the 1950's roots of 21st-century "recovering Catholic" panic and angst. The millions of post-Catholic baby boomers who have exited the Church will compare notes and laugh knowingly at the dead-on characterizations. Fashionably anti-Catholic campers will say, "but, of course!" Readers might catalog "Kid" in the genre of "Young Torless, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and "Lord of the Flies." Before now, no one of the surviving 180,000 ex-seminarians has dared reveal this insider confession on the secret milieu of the Catholic education of priests. From interviews with more than a hundred former seminarians, Jack Fritscher uniquely stages their true story arcs with wit, verve, and comedy. "What They Did to the Kid" is the fourth novel from Jack Fritscher whose twelve books have sold more than 100,000 copies. Jack Fritscher is a graduate of the prestigious Pontifical College Josephinum, a Roman Catholic seminary, located in Columbus, Ohio, and directly subject to the Vatican in Rome. He received his doctorate in American Literature from Loyola University, Chicago.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jack Fritscher is the deeply established author more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Some Dance to Remember, The Geography of Women: A Romantic Comedy, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera, Titanic: Forbidden Stories Hollywood Forgot, and Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories, featuring "Mrs. Dalloway Went That-A-Way." He has also written two produced plays and two current screenplays. His writing, which has sold more than 100,000 copies, has received many awards and grants, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant, University of California, Berkeley. At the national American Book Expo in New York, 2002, What They Did to the Kid won several awards including "Story Teller of the Year," "One of the Top 10 Books of the Year," and the ForeWord Award, "Best Fiction Finalist."

From 1953-1963, he was educated at the prestigious Pontifical College Josephinum which is the only Catholic seminary in North America directly subject to the Pope in Rome. He received his PhD from Loyola University, Chicago, where he wrote his dissertation, Love and Death in Tennessee Williams. He completed post-doctoral study at Oxford University, Christ Church College. At university, he has taught creative writing, journalism, literature, and film. He is a founding member of the American Popular Culture Association, whose press published his best-selling nonfiction book, Popular Witchcraft: Straight from the Witch?s Mouth. He serves also as literary advisor to the American Erotic Authors Association.

A prolific contributor to magazine culture, his writing and photographs have appeared in more than forty periodicals, journals, and newspapers. He is a working scholar of American popular culture, noted particularly for his controversial nonfiction memoir of art and Catholicism, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera.

He is the founding San Francisco editor of Drummer magazine and is currently writing and editing The Queering of America: EyeWitness Drummer, A Memoir of the Gay History, Pop Culture, and Literary Roots of the Best of Drummer Magazine.

Detailed information can be seen at his website which is Jack Fritscher spelled as one word followed by dot com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 375 pages
• Publisher: Palm Drive Publishing (August 26, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890834378
• ISBN-13: 978-1890834371
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,762,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jack Fritscher emerging from the gay past exists, both now and in the future, as a pioneer participant in gay culture and as a critic chronicling analytical witness to that history. He is the double-jointed author of literary fiction as well as of erotic fiction, including 4 novels, 5 fiction anthologies, 3 nonfiction books, and 2 produced plays. He is also the director and videographer of 170 feature videos. A Gemini, born June 20, 1939, he has balanced twin careers in literature and erotica--often recombinantly.

MID-CENTURY GAY WRITERS
A gay pioneer from the 1960s, he wrote the 1968 novel, "I Am Curious (Leather)," began before Stonewall his research on "Popular Witchcraft," befriended the legendary and elderly gay author Sam Steward (Phil Andros) in 1969, and became the founding San Francisco editor shaping the legendary "Drummer" magazine (1975) which published his features, fiction, and photographs for 25 years in more than 62 issues. Those writings and photographs, annotated with historical commentary by the author, are available free online at this site.

In 1953 at age 14, he came out into the closeted gay world by writing a "gladiator novel" while attending the Vatican's ultra-exclusive Catholic seminary, the Pontifical College Josephinum, where the bullies were not the jocks but the opera-and-liturgy queens. His short fiction was first published in 1958 in the Catholic press.

Also adolescents at this time, his American gay peers were John Rechy; William Carney; Rita Mae Brown; and Dorothy Allison; as well as Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White who founded their Violet Quill in late 1980.

These mid-century careers made possible the next generation: the fin de siecle writers who appeared after HIV in 1982. They rose during the late-80s invention of history's first viable small lesbigay book publishers whose anthologies took the place of the once-flourishing gay magazines which by the millennium had collapsed because of internet competition.

DIVERSITY, PERVERSITY. THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY
As a diverse wild card among his 20th-century contemporaries, Fritscher is the only Catholic writer, and the only actual holder of an earned PhD in literature. In addition, he is the only writer who also composes and creates as a photographer and videographer. In 1966, he wrote the world's first PhD dissertation on Tennessee Williams titled "Love and Death in Tennessee Williams: His Philosophy and Theology." Themes and rituals of Catholicism thread through his fiction and nonfiction from the incarnational "Some Dance to Remember" to the passion and death of "Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera." His formal training in philosophy, theology, literature, and criticism is the architecture of his sweeping historical work on witchcraft, the drama of Tennessee Williams, the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the popular culture of homosexuality. His photography is a succession of heroic and suffering images from the "Roman Martyrology of the Saints."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Schoolmate of Bernard Cardinal Law, April 24, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, A Tale of Priest Abuse (Hardcover)

The author is a schoolmate of Bernard Cardinal Law, and so am I. Consequently, I found Jack Fritscher's novel to be as much memoir as fiction, as I was also a student at the Pontifical College Josephinum with both Law and Fritscher, and found the fictive parallels to my memories to be evocative of how we as young seminarians were taught and trained "to be pure and avoid scandal at all costs." That, I suggest, is the innocent essence of the secrecy the media now calls "cover-up." Don't all groups--from firemen and cops to Marines--close ranks around their own?

If one is at all analytical, one thinks that this "scandal of priest sexual abuse and priest molestation"--driven by media terribly hungry to fill 24/7 programming--is just another part of the fundamentalist religious war to destroy Western Civilization: i.e. Christianity, and Christianity's oldest bastion, Roman Catholicism.

At any rate, Fritscher's novel, despite its media-juicy title, is a gentle, yet eye-popping read about the rigors of seminary life as lived by the thousands of young men recruited by the Catholic Church in the 1950's. His insight lights up the seminary culture that produced the priests of a certain age who now stand--rightly and wrongly--accused.

The story is human, engaging, and quite literary, and never exploitative or graphically embarrassing even when confronting a variety of behavior including a Jesuit spiritual director distributing prescription drugs--without a prescription--to depressed seminarians at the fictive "Misericordia Seminary."

Actually, the novel is a credit to both the PCJ and to Monsignor Leonard J. Fick who was, apparently, so much a mentor to Fritscher that he dedicates the book to Msgr. Fick. (Anyone conjecturing about the seminary culture of Bernard Law's life might well enjoy this parallax story.)

What a good writer! What an entertaining book! One suspects Fritscher kept notes hidden under his bed, because he remembers minutiae I had long ago forgotten, but--reminded by this wonderful book--remember, with nostalgia, as true.

I think a "novel" like this--better than can nonfiction--brings out a truth of how we young seminarians were trained, particularly by priests who, as returning veterans of World War II, set very high standards for priestly masculinity in the adolescent world of young seminarians. Those standards' inherent flaw froze many an adolescent emotional life at 14-years-of-age, perhaps later causing some of them to seek others also at 14-years-old. Author Fritscher even writes, "What happens to a boy when he is 14, marks him for life." If this novel, which is never about the obvious, is at all autobiographical in its experiences, what a wonderful life for an author to have led!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thanks I Needed That: A walk down memory lane, November 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, A Tale of Priest Abuse (Hardcover)

I am a former seminarian, not an ex-seminarian. Former seminarians got over the 1950's seminary experience. Ex-sems didn't. So as a former seminarian, I am eternally grateful for the seminary education I received. Even if I did not become a priest, the seminary experience put a permanent mark on my soul. So I truly enjoyed this well-tuned novel that brought back the emotions of my adolescence. The book made me cry a bit and laugh more identifying with its crises of spiritual life mixed with boarding school strife. Despite the rather provocative title, the book is not at all about what you'd think it's about. So anyone with an intellectual curiosity regarding what were the thought processes of boys who really believed they heard the voice of God calling them to a priestly vocation, this book is, frankly, a gem. Perhaps, finally, our generation, touched by angels, is beginning to express itself about our youth and how we got the way we were, and are, and forever will be. Amen.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For wives, & priests working with ex-priests & sems, July 2, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy, A Tale of Priest Abuse (Hardcover)

I saw this novel in the National Catholic Reporter and was skeptical that it might be tasteless. Actually, this memoir, thinly disguised as a novel, is in fact an exellent novel treating coming-of-age inside Catholicism of the 1950's and 1960's. Well done! Well written, at times funny and touching, this book gives insight into the boys and men who subjected themselves to the intensity of seminary life in the last years before Vatican II. The author knows whereof he speaks, and he writes exceedingly well--actually far better than one might expect in this coming-of-age genre. The book is entertaining on many levels. In short, as a seminarian who became a priest, and who remains a priest, I am glad to experience the (to me, pastoral)light this book throws onto a class of men (former seminarians and former priests)who to this day sit in our parishes, carrying still the echo of the vocations they once thought they had. This novel--memoir or not--sheds light on the SPEICAL NEEDS of men who for whatever reason did not follow (in some cases, their very real) vocations to the priesthood. What do we say about and to men like that? What can be said about their spiritual and psychological condition as they themselves age and leave their 50's for their 60's and 70's? What are these SENIOR Men supposed to think about their youth spent in rigorous seminary training? This book has as a MAIN THEME the recurring question of "what is a vocation supposed to be" as the hero of the book looks at his fellow-seminarians and wonders how so many boys could have so many kinds of motivations for vocations, including social mobility. This book can give an insight into why so many priests ordained before Vatican II burned out, left the priesthood, and married. In this theme, the book should also be of interest to any woman married to a former priest, or to relatives of former priests. In addition to these men who sit oftentimes unidentified in our pews, the book raises the spectre about the former priests and seminarians who actually fear going back into a Church. Whoever taught the author taught him well about psychology, spirituality, and written expression. I could see and feel the time, the place, the characters and their conversations. Well done, indeed!