As rumors of a powerful “gay lobby” within the Vatican make headlines and a new Pope promises reform, Vanity Fair contributing
editor Michael Joseph Gross interviews dozens of current and former
priests, gay monks, veteran Vatican journalists, Italian aristocrats,
and gay men at Roman gyms, bars, nightclubs, sex clubs, and restaurants
and finds that “to be gay in the Vatican is no guarantee of success,
mark of belonging, or shortcut to erotic intrigue.
Most basically it is a
sentence of isolation,” a life “in a closet that has no door.”
According to Gross’s piece in the December issue of Vanity Fair
(on stands today), a significant number of gay clerics at the Vatican
are in positions of great authority, but they inhabit a secretive
netherworld because homosexuality is officially condemned.
The principal
requirement of their power and priesthood is silence about who they
really are—at least in public. According to Gross, “Clerics inhabit this
silence in a variety of ways.
A few keep their sexuality entirely
private and adhere to the vow of celibacy.
Many others quietly let
themselves be known as gay to a limited degree … sometimes they remain
celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least
common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life.
Gross goes on to describe the codes and signals by
which gay priests navigate life in the Vatican. “Camp is perhaps the
most powerful and pervasive” code, with ironic, effeminate self-mockery
allowing priests to “exercise some limited rebellion against their own
isolation and invisibility.” One former gay priest describes clerical
camp to Gross as “a natural way of expressing [gay identity] while
celibate.”
Yet in the Church, as in Italian society, Gross writes, “the
right appearance—la bella figura—is all.... Parties celebrating
appointment to the Vatican and other high Church offices can be lavish …
with many clerics in attendance being ‘gay men wearing everything
handmade, perfect, queer as it comes,’” as a prominent figure in the
Roman art world tells Gross.
Still, Gross finds an every-man-for-himself
dynamic in Rome’s gay clerical culture: gay clerics often fail to help
one another, says a gay former seminarian who was robbed one night in a
park while numerous men stood by, because solidarity entails the risk of
being outed.
For clerics who break the vow of celibacy, gay
saunas are good places to meet other gay priests and monks (though some
gay celibate clerics use the saunas not for sex but to experience a
sense of fellowship with others like themselves), according to Gross.
If a gay clergy member makes a connection, it’s
possible to use your monastery cell for sexual assignations, as long as
you don’t make much noise.
“You can sneak people in, no problem,” one
gay monk tells Gross, “but try to avoid consistent patterns of
movement.”
That said, a former monk tells Gross that “no one has sex”
with other residents of his own monastery, “because it is like a Big Brother house. Everyone knows everything.”