Among the abused: gay men and lesbians are among the many who have been abused by Catholic priests--a fact church officials may be forgetting in their rush to scapegoat gay priests. (Religion).

Mark London grew up with 10 brothers and sisters in what he calls a "very Catholic family." So when he had the chance to go to a Catholic boarding school, he jumped at it. "I escaped to this school, thinking it was a safe haven," London says. "I ended up getting molested by two priests and two [religious order] brothers. I was only 15 at the time, just beginning to develop sexually and coming to terms with myself [as a gay man]."

The abuse took an enormous toll on him: By the time he was 19 he had attempted suicide three times. When he tried to bring a lawsuit against the clergy, his family disowned him.

"I wasn't emotionally and sexually mature enough to cope with [being gay] so soon," London says. "It was emotional overload. It ended up driving me into the closet. At times, people perceived me as disliking gay men or even being homophobic, but that wasn't the case at all. I just had so much to fear. My examples of homosexual men were so predatory and so negative that I didn't want to become that."

Now 40, London has accepted his sexual orientation, but he still suffers emotional fallout from the abuse. "I'm very at peace and proud to be a man who happens to be gay," he says. "The most significant long-term effect is that I will always feel like I am someone standing on the outside of the gay community looking in, wanting to be 100% part of it but not knowing how to draw close to it."

London is among the increasing number of gay and lesbian survivors of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests who are stepping forward to tell their stories, with the help of groups such as the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. While their experiences of abuse at the hands of spiritual authorities and of the often condescending attitude of the church hierarchy are similar to those of straight survivors, gay and lesbian victims have unique issues with which they must grapple.

"If you are struggling to understand your sexual identity and, while that is going on, experience sexual abuse, the issues become very intertwined and jumbled," explains Marianne Duddy, executive director of Dignity, an organization for gay Catholics. "How do you separate that from all of the other social and religious messages you're getting? It's hard enough to come out in that context, and then you add to that the shame victims feel until they understand they did nothing to deserve this."

"Nothing is spared," says Dale English, an openly gay therapist who is himself the survivor of clergy abuse. "You don't feel safe with anyone or anywhere. It's a pretty horrible existence until you find someplace or somebody who just opens the door for you."

English says abusers "groom" their victims, singling out those who are shy or who lack strong connections to family or friends. While the age varies at which the abuse occurs, the effect is profound.

"To be raped by a priest, and to have all of your spiritual reality bound into that act forever, is an agony that someone who hasn't experienced it can't understand," Arthur Austin says. "It's not just bodies that can be raped. Souls can be raped."

Austin was 20 years old when he had an emotional breakdown in 1968. Unable to come to terms with his homosexuality, Austin says he developed an eating disorder and lost 35 pounds in two weeks. Desperate to talk with someone, he turned to a priest for counseling. The priest was the Rev. Paul Shanley, who emerged this year as one of the most notorious figures in the clergy abuse scandal. He is currently under indictment for one charge of abusing a boy, and 25 other men have alleged that he also abused them.

"I was really a shattered guy when I got to Paul Shanley," Austin says. "And Shanley's pastoral response was to manipulate every wound I had to his own advantage and fundamentally create a person who was on call when he wanted to be serviced. He told me that it was better for me to come to him for sex than to have sex with some strangers in a dirty alleyway. It filled me with horror that I was going to be that person in the alleyway if I didn't do what Shanley wanted."

Austin contends that Shanley abused his position of power, and that was devastating. "If people think a 20-year-old has no innocence to lose, then they need to sit down and think very long and very hard about innocence and the ways it can be lost," the 53-year-old says today. "This wasn't just a question of sex. What I had to lose was what any 20-year-old had to lose: that the world held promise for me, that the world held a place for me where I would be loved, that I was a lovable human being who was worth loving, that there was safety in connection with other men. Those are big things to lose when you are 20 years old."

The effects are just as severe for people who are abused when they are younger. "People can never grasp the nights when I cried myself to sleep," says Chuck Romero, who says he was 9 when a priest started regularly raping and sodomizing him for three years. "Here I was, an altar boy. You cry yourself to sleep every night praying to this God who is supposed to be your protector."

Of course, not all the gay victims coming forward are men. Bridget Lyons says a priest who was a close friend of her mother abused her from the ages of 13 to 15 and abused her younger brother as well. "He led us to trust him," she says. The abuse only stopped because Lyons attempted suicide and was hospitalized for a month. "At that point he realized it would be good to stop connecting with us," she says.

Lyons now lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her partner and their two children, but she still takes antidepressants. "I'll never be the same," she says. "I recovered pretty well, but obviously it's something that stays with you the rest of your life."

Instead of facing up to the abuse, survivors often bury it and act out in self-destructive ways. "I can't tell you how many men I went to bed with that I didn't want to go to bed with and the things I did for them I did not want to do," Austin says. "But I knew I had to because I was no good. I was what Paul taught me I was."

Romero, who is now 43, says he became a sex addict and drug user in his early 20s, only to replace those behaviors by becoming a workaholic, and then only stopping when "I crashed and burned and said, `Help me.'"

This behavior is common among survivors, English says. "As long as you're emotionally numb, you can make it," he says. "But when you start to feel, if you don't get help at that point, your chances of dying are much greater."

English, who conducts workshops for the Washington, D.C.-based National Organization on Male Sexual Victimization, was sexually abused by a priest when he was 14. (He is now 53.) "Only in 1994, after I was falling apart emotionally and my life was crumbling all around me, did I realize that one of the ways I could get back on the road was to seek out the perpetrator." With the help of a sympathetic bishop, he was able to confront his abuser. The priest denied that the events happened.

Often the attempts at justice bring additional pain and insult, as church officials refuse to acknowledge the abuse or even reassign the perpetrator. "There is the whole issue of betrayal by the church--what they put my family through as far as depositions, how they tried to blame my family," Romero says. "They act like a Fortune 100 company. They're ruthless when it comes to attorneys. When the gay thing came up, they wanted to blame it on that, that I had enticed the priest because I was gay. I was 9 1/2 years old."

Lyons says it was her concern about having her sexual orientation become a legal target that led her to focus her energies on the lawsuit her younger brother brought against their abuser.

Roy Albert says he managed to move beyond the abuse from a priest that he endured as a 9-year-old at a Catholic orphanage in El Dorado, Kan.

But he was enraged years later when he found out that two of his brothers had been abused by the same priest and that his sister had given birth to a child by another priest.

"I didn't think anything of it then," says Albert, now 54. "I just went on. But when I found out the rest of my family was abused, that was too much." The stony treatment his family received front the church hierarchy made matters worse, Albert says. "People say it only happens once to you," he says. But when you confront them, "it rehappens, and they revictimize you."

For many, the revictimization carries a heavy spiritual price of its own. Austin says he struggled to remain an active Catholic until he decided to confront the Archdiocese of Boston about Shanley. An aide to Cardinal Bernard Law, who had been sympathetic to Austin, told him one day that he had to be careful in case "you're wanting from me what you wanted from Father Shanley."

"He was telling me that it's my fault, that I wanted it," Austin says. "In that one conversation, the intensity of the pain equaled everything I felt with Shanley. I grew up wanting to be a priest. I was an altar boy, I was a choir boy. I loved the church. It was my spiritual home. And then they told me I wanted Paul Shanley to do those things to me." Austin says he now considers the Catholic Church "a cesspool of evil. There is no way Christ can be in that institution."

Despite the tremendous suffering abuse can cause, many survivors have reclaimed their lives. "In a sense my revenge is that I'm a pretty happy, well-adjusted, healthy individual," Austin says. "I came out the other end of this whole ordeal still compassionate and still wanting to be someone who makes a positive difference. You can be a victim at times in your life, but you don't have to remain that way."

Gallagher is coauthor of Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s.