Coming Out

AS FAR BACK as Casey Hayes can remember, there was always a quiet, if sometimes uneasy, understanding between his Roman Catholicism and his homosexuality. He came out to his parents at age 9, and one of the first things they did was speak to their priest. Hayes was never expelled from his Catholic grade school, but on Fridays when his classmates were in Mass, Hayes was forced to sit in the school secretary’s office, where the nuns would entertain him by playing records. Years later, when the school cycled to a new priest for whom Hayes’s sexuality wasn’t an issue, he was welcomed back into the chapel.

As a student at Cathedral High School in the late 1970s—even as Pope John Paul II publicly lauded bishops for decreeing that “homosexual activity … is morally wrong”—Hayes says he faced little prejudice from his fellow students, faculty, or the local church. “I was as out as anybody was in those days,” he says. “Whether the school accepted that or chose not to talk about it, it was never an issue.”

In 1997, Hayes was forced to resign from a teaching post at a public high