James Finn
1 min readFeb 9, 2025

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Speaking of ministers and Grindr, I'm thinking of the Catholic priest Jeffrey Burrill who was General Secretary (top admin job) for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops at the same time they were lobbying Congress not to approve the National Suicide Hotline act, because the bill directed certain support specifically to suicidal queer folks. (A Catholic news agency run by Catholic lay people discovered and reported that astonishing cruelty. They were withering in their condemnation of the US bishops.)

A conservative Catholic group outed Burrill after data-mining publicly available ad tracking from Grindr. He'd been frequently (sometimes daily) using the app in his DC office before driving to residential addresses. He was also tracked to a Las Vegas spa and other locations around the US where gay men meet for sex. (Burrill filed a lawsuit against Grindr last July, incidentally.)

In his case, If queer people had outed him, I'd have been 100% behind the effort. It's hard for me to understand how a closeted queer man like him could actively participate in work to deny suicide-prevention intervention to queer people just because they're queer.

But then, he's still a working priest in a religion that labels people like him as literally depraved and disordered, so one wonders how his mind works. He must be sick with self loathing.

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James Finn
James Finn

Written by James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.

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