Things That Make Me Go Hhmmm: Pope Leo and the Gays

September 21, 2025
HANK ORSO

Dear religiously-inclined gays: He's just not that into you.

I mean the pope. The friggin' pope. I've never understood why every time there's a new pope, the queer community goes into a tizzy trying to dissect past quotes, stated positions, and examined actions to figure out if "he'll finally be the one." The one what? The one who will finally state unequivocally that LGBTQ+ folks are accepted, loved, and will be afforded all the same rights and privileges given to every other Catholic.

And why in Cthulu's name, while we're on the subject, do non-practicing Catholics, Protestants, atheists, and everyone else seem to care? The last guy, Francis, people gushed over because they detected a smidgen of pro-gay sentiment. but they should all be taken with a grain of salt. Or a pillar of salt, if you will. Because the same guy who said in 2013 of gay priests, "If they accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them? They shouldn't be marginalized," also used the Italian slur "frociaggine" to describe gay men who wanted to join the seminary. (Google it.) Because there were "too many of them." And the same guy who gave some tentative guidance on blessing same-sex couples also thought trans and gender issues were a threat. And when he said,"The family is threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life," he basically erased the importance of the tens of thousands of children of queer parents.

And that brings us to our current pontiff, Pope Leo. Chicago-grounded Leo. Regular guy Leo. American Leo. Complicated, double-speak, just as religious as the rest of them, Leo. This guy hit the scene, and once again, we had the same earnest hand-wringing and desperate hopefulness as before. "Oh, maybe he'll be the one! The one who'll love me and accept me for who I am, for sure!" Cue the record scratch sound effect, cuz...huh-uh.

As reported recently in The Advocate, "Pope Leo is continuing his predecessor's decision to bless same-sex couples — so long as they don't look too much like a wedding." In other words, "we respect your right to exist. Just don't exist too much like us normies."

I’ve already spoken about marriage, as did Pope Francis when he was pope, about a family being a man and a woman in solemn commitment, blessed in the sacrament of marriage....In Northern Europe they are already publishing rituals of blessing ‘people who love one another,' is the way they express it, which goes specifically against the document that Pope Francis approved, Fiducia Supplicans, which basically says, of course we can bless all people, but it doesn’t look for a way of ritualizing some kind of blessing because that’s not what the Church teaches. (Pope Leo in an interview with Crux.)

In that interview, he also states the hoary old standby that our sexuality is a "choice." His word.

So while we want him to always be this:

He's more likely at heart, more like this:

Sure, we loved it when Pope Leo kinda snubbed JD Vance and preaches about compassion and acceptance, but let's face it. He's towing the line when it comes to marriage equality or the ordination of women. In 2012, he complained to a meeting of bishops about the Western influence fueling "sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel, and last May, as reported by the Associated Press, that the family "is founded upon the stable union between a man and a woman."

So queers, do yourself a favor, and take to heart the simple, reassuring wisdom, as Miranda did, in the simple truth that "he's just not that into you." And move on.