Bishop Paul Moore: His Secret Sex Life

"The Bishop's Daughter,"
The New Yorker,
March 3, 2008, p. 48 Issue
Click here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/03/03/080303on_audio_moore

An Abstract from the upcoming book reveals Moore's secret sexual arrangement

PERSONAL HISTORY about the author's father, Bishop Paul Moore, Jr. Writer recalls her father's entrance at an Easter service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine... When she was a child, she accepted her father as a force of imagination that flared and coruscated, an instrument of transformation.

It took her decades to escape the enchantment of her father's priesthood... Writer describes visiting her father at his house on Bank Street in New York in the weeks before his death. She went to the hairdresser nearby and was told by one of the men there, "Oh, I know Paul." How did they know him?... Writer discusses her father's childhood in Morristown, New Jersey and his education at St. Paul's School and Yale. Tells about his early interest in theological questions.


After serving in the Marines during the Second World War, he entered seminary in New York. He had been married, a year earlier, to Jenny McKean, "a Boston socialite."

At seminary, he learned to withstand the ebbs and flows of his faith. Writer recalls her father at Evensong. She realized that he was in touch with something that couldn't be seen but that was also real. His first parish was in lower Jersey City. He had chosen to work with the poor. Tells about his involvement in political and social action on behalf of parishioners. Writer recalls her father's style of sermonizing, giving the example of the way he told the nativity story. Describes visiting the sacristy, where her father changed out of his day clothes. In the sacristy, he left being a father and a husband to become someone more like God. Writer recalls difficulties in her parents' marriage.

They had no language to explore what might have been wrong with their erotic life... Describes finding a book of photographs of nude men in her father's study. Tells about her father becoming the bishop of New York and describes his social activism in that post. Writer recalls her father's impassioned sermon at an AIDS memorial service.

In 2003, he was given a terminal diagnosis by an oncologist. As he became sicker, the writer spent more and more time with him. After his death, she was contacted by a man who said he had been a "very close" friend of her father's for thirty years.

The man, (called Andrew Verver in the story), told her about a trip he had taken with her father to the island of Patmos. "Did he talk to you about his sexual life?" the writer asked.

"I was his sexual life," Andrew said. Writer tells about going with Andrew to visit her father's grave on the first anniversary of his death. She learns that on the night her father gave his sermon at the AIDS memorial, he had mistakenly believed that Andrew was dead.

END