Fired Gay Church Employee Writes Off-Broadway Play About His Story

Matthew LaBanca in “Communion”

A longtime pastoral musician and educator fired for marrying his same-gender partner wrote a one-person play based on his experience that was recently produced Off-Broadway.

The play, Communion, written by Matthew LaBanca, ran at Nancy Manocherian’s cell theater. At the time of his firing by the Diocese of Brooklyn in 2021, LaBanca refused a $20,000 non-disclosure settlement from the diocese. After his firing gained public notice, the musician said he received numerous supportive messages.

“So many people reached out sharing their stories, asking, ‘What do I do? I feel for you and I’m scared myself,'” LaBanca recently told the National Catholic Reporter.

According to New Ways Ministry, there have been over 100 public instances of LGBTQ+ church employees n the U.S. who were fired, forced to resigned, or had job offers rescinded since 2007.

Having worked for the church in one capacity or another since 2001, LaBanca was devastated by how the diocese treated him. He lost not only his day job and the benefits it entailed, but he also suffered the spiritual wounds of being excluded by his faith community. He told NCR:

“‘When an LGBTQ person of faith realizes that the church they’ve grown up in, that’s nurtured them, that’s called to them, is not only labeling them as intrinsically disordered but treating them in this way, it is deeply painful. I declined [the settlement] so that I could speak not just for myself but shine a light on what happened and the practice in the church.'”

These experiences, as well as the aforementioned messages from sympathizers and those in similar situations, inspired LaBanca’s one-man play. He hopes that Communion’s humor and candor will provide some hope or solace to others who’ve been ostracized by the church.

“If I could contribute to the healing of those excluded in the name of purity instead of accepted in the name of love,” LaBanca said, “then it is what I wanted to do.”

The play largely revolves around LaBanca’s time as music teacher at St. Joseph Catholic Academy in Queens. With a runtime of just over an hour. Communion sees LaBanca playing not only himself, but also his mother, a gay priest and the principal of St. Joseph’s, among other characters. Most characters have real-life counterparts, while others are amalgamations of people with whom LaBanca interacted.

The principal of St. Joseph  Academy was a staunch advocate for LaBanca, and the playwright dedicates a monologue in Communion to him.

In the show, LaBanca plays the piano and the glockenspiel, and the audience acts as a choir. Kim Simring, the play’s director , said she hopes the play achieves its intended goal of fostering communion between audience members. Simring said:

“‘The individualistic priority in our culture is, I think, very harmful. I want people attending to see themselves as part of a larger whole and not just as an individual out in the world, disconnected from other people and things.'”

Simring praises LaBanca’s tone throughout the play, which refrains from preaching a “reverse style of fire and brimstone against the Church.”

As LaBanca puts it, Communion is “a story of what happened through a human lens, through the lens of my experience — the humor and the nuance and the pain.”

Although LaBanca now teaches at a public school, and has stepped back from regular Mass attendance, he says his faith in God has not been shaken. He occasionally provides music at liturgies, and which helps him “plug into the universal truth of it all: You’re always Catholic; you have the beautiful mark on your soul, and it will always be a part of me.”

The play ends with LaBanca finally handing over the key to the school, which he’d been holding onto, thus symbolizing a new relationship with the institutional Church.

“I realize in the end the church isn’t God; God is in the people,” he said. “And they are the ones worth fighting for.”

—Jeromiah Taylor (he/him), New Ways Ministry, December 7, 2024