SOURCE: Tilden, Norma. “Word Made Flesh: Richard Rodriguez's ‘Late Victorians’ as Nativity Story.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40, no. 4 (winter 1998): 442–59.

In the following essay, Tilden discusses Rodriguez's views on homosexuality and the role of the Catholic Church as both a censor and a solicitor in his essay “Late Victorians.”

In his 1982 autobiography Hunger of Memory Richard Rodriguez writes that for him as a child the Catholic Church “excited more sexual wonderment than it repressed”: “I would study pictures of martyrs—white-robed virgins fallen in death and the young, almost smiling, St. Sebastian, transfigured in pain. … At such moments, the Church touched alive some very private sexual excitement” (84). In the autobiographical essay “Late Victorians: San Francisco, AIDS, and the Homosexual Stereotype,” which appeared eight years later in Harper's, Rodriguez works out a discursive embodiment of this sexual and religious “wonderment,” now complicated by the pressures of a rich...