The Secret Gay Life of the Vatican: Inside a Hidden Netherworld of the Catholic
Church
By Vanity Fair
10/31/31
10/31/31
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.”
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