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SEC Lawyer by Day, Gay Eroticist by Night
Enforcement attorneys at the Securities and Exchange Commission are known for being straight up, but lawyer Scott D. Pomfret's second job gives that notion a whole other meaning. When he's not chasing down securities fraud, he's at his keyboard, pounding out gay erotic fiction. "I like to think of myself as a Boston-based Gay-Catholic fiction-writing lawyer-eroticist," he explains on his Web site. Or as a newspaper profile put it, Pomfret is both a button-downed lawyer and an expert in unbuttoning.
Pomfret's second career got started in 2003, when he and his partner Scott Whittier decided that romance novels need not be written only for women. They set up a publishing company, Romentics, and began writing and publishing romance fiction for gay men. (The Boston Globe profiled their work in a 2004 article.) In the years since, Pomfret branched out into writing gay erotica, winning a string of writing awards with names such as "Best Gay Erotica," "Hot Gay Erotica" and "Best Gay Love Stories."
There is no indication that anyone at Pomfret's day job at the SEC ever as much as raised an eyebrow over his second career. But the same cannot be said for the St. Anthony Shrine in Boston where Pomfret served as a lay lector and member of its Worship Advisory Board. In June, Pomfret published his latest book, Since My Last Confession, in which he writes about his experiences as a gay Catholic. Among the real-life characters he writes about are "the Franciscan friars who came to me for news about the local gay dance club" and "Father Bear Daddy the gay priest with the hot gay.com account."
This was too much for officials at St. Anthony, as Pomfret recounts on his blog. Last week, one of the shrine's friars told him he would have to step down from his duties as a lector. "There were people who felt it was incompatible for someone to stand up publicly and say, 'I'm a pornographer, and I'm a lector at St. Anthony Shrine,' " the shrine's executive director, the Rev. David Convertino, told The Boston Globe. "There's a public stance that he's taking, and it seems that most of this is to sell the book." Pomfret has no doubt his writing played a role in his dismissal from the church, but he told the Boston newspaper Bay Windows that he believes another factor was his portrayal of the St. Anthony Shrine as gay-friendly. "I think they regard that as a lighting rod for criticism," he said.
Well, at least he'll always be secure in his day job.
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on September 26, 2008 at 03:35 PM | Permalink
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