Are gay priests to blame? David France, who wrote the definitive investigation of the Catholic Church's sex scandal, argues that the Vatican's homophobia drove many gay priests to abuse youths.

It's easy to dismiss the child abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church as having little to do with gay people, because pedophiles and mature gay men are hot the same thing. Right?

David France, the openly gay author of the just published Out Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal (Broadway Books), says it's not that easy. In his exhaustively reported and intensely emotional narrative, France reveals that many of the accused priests--numbering 4,392 since 1950, according to an independent report released in February-clearly are gay men.

True, he notes, a shocking number of the abusers are villains without a clear sexual orientation, like the giggling pedophile Father John Geoghan. But many are fallen heroes, like Father "Spags" Spagnolia, a social activist who briefly left the priesthood to run a guesthouse on Cape Cod, Mass., with his male partner, or Father John Shanley, a groundbreaking gay activist priest who France suggests may not be as black a villain as he's been painted.

The Advocate spoke to France just days before Showtime announced that it would make a cable-TV movie based on Our Fathers. That will be the second Showtime film inspired by France's reporting: The award-winning Soldier's Girl began as a New York Times Magazine article France wrote. After The Advocate ran a news brief on our Web site about the murder of convicted pedophile priest John Geoghan--who was killed in prison by a serial murderer of gay men--a reader wrote to caution us against buying into the negative stereotype that links pedophilia to gay men. How would you have responded to that? I would respond by overstating the thesis that this is all about sexuality-every aspect of the crisis has been about homosexuality. John Geoghan was killed [because his killer believed] he was gay. He was a pedophile, and pedophilia and homosexuality are not at all related--we know statistically that gay men are less likely to be pedophiles than straight men--but the sex crisis in the church hasn't been about pedophilia. Some 85% to 90% of all the cases of abusive priests had to do with teenagers, mostly boys.

Look, I think my knee-jerk reaction to the crisis bas been the same [as your reader's]: This has nothing to do with homosexuals. But we now know from talking to these priests [who molested teenagers]: They're gay. They are gay, and the right wing knows this, and if we don't own up to those of them who are gay who did this, then nobody's going to buy our argument that the pedophiles [are not gay]. And if they were gay men, we should ask ourselves why that was happening. What caused it?

What do you think caused it?

What I argue is that these guys represent homosexuality in pure and total repression. This is what successful repression looks like: men so alienated from their own sense of self that their sexual expressions come out in explosive ways.

Most priests I talked to who had abused kids described the abuse as though it came upon them with the same kind of sudden surprise that it came upon their victim. This one priest, Father Neil Conway, described waking up--that's the way he described it-waking up in the middle of the sexual fondling of these kids. He really believed that he was the victim somehow--even though you have to honestly see that he created the circumstances [that led to the abuse], that he courted these kids, that he flirted with them, that he really behaved as a predator. But he couldn't see it; he was so fractured in his psyche. That's repression in its purest form.

Homosexuality has been--at least since the late '60s--a target of grave concern by Rome. The Vatican began [imposing] newer and tighter restrictions on homosexual behavior and homosexual identity in the late '60s for the first rime in 400 years. As modern sexual ethics and morality began defining themselves in the '60s, the church moved in the other direction--and in moving the other direction it was really tearing at the psyche of its priests.

This one priest whose story I tell, Father George Spags Spagnolia--

Oh, he's the most interesting priest in the book.

He's so instructive to us on what human sexuality is all about. He joined the priesthood innocent of sexual issues. He was very young; he had never in his lire masturbated. His church told him not to, and so he didn't. The Saturday after his ordination--[priests are] 26 to 28 years old at this point--he heard confession for the first time. Father Spagnolia told me he had never heard such sexual pornography as he heard that day: things he had never thought of before, ideas that had never entered his mind. He was stunned and horrified to think that this was the way the rest of the human race was comforting itself.

But Spags went on to became a remarkable social activist--to the point that the church drove him out of the priesthood for being too radical. And at that point, when he's no longer a priest, that's when he figures out he's gay.

He fell in love. That struggle, that experimentation was really fascinating. But when he goes back to the priesthood he gets rid of all that other stuff. He gets rid of the memory of the relationship.

To the point that he goes on the record at a press conference saying that he's always been celibate which his ex-lover angrily denied.

There was no need for him to do that; he just offered it up. It was the truth as he then understood it. Repression, phase 2.

Representing the very opposite of repression is Paul Shanley, who had a long history in the '60s and '70s as essentially a gay activist.

Paul Shianley was a hero: the first Roman Catholic priest to say anything positive about gay people--not just once or twice; he male it his career. He was traveling across the country in the early '70s, organizing conferences, speaking at the founding conference for Dignity [the organization of gay Catholics]. He was the spirit of gay rebellion: a dashingly handsome priest with a sharp tongue and no patience whatsoever with anyone who would not accept his kind of completely liberationist view of homosexuality.

For many years, during the '70s, he also ran a kind of counseling service. He took out ads in gay papers in Boston. And kids would come to him and talk about heir struggles with homosexuality. His ads would say, "Gay? Bi? Confused? Call Father Paul." And these kids would come and they'd say, "I think I might be gay, and it's just destroying me because of what my church says." He'd go on and on about how they should forget the church [on that issue]. And invariably be would make a proposal: "Well, let's just try it and see if you like it." He saw himself as some sort of a self-styled sexual liberationist.

He appointed himself the Masters and Johnson of the Catholic Church--an early sex surrogate.

So he would have sex with these men--a kind of perfunctory sort of sex, which a lot of them are still angry about. I'm not arguing that what he was doing was any way right or good, but it wasn't pedophilia, and the boys he was having sex with were the age of consent and older. Now, were they consenting? Big question--we don't know. They argue in many of the suits that they weren't consenting at all. But I also include stories in file book of men who went to him for counseling and sex and were thankful for both in the end.

Then came these pedophilia charges. Three young men, now in their raid 20s, were all in the same education classes [when they were age 6 to 10]. Each of them has come to their memories of this abuse through very similar roots. They all say that they hadn't recalled the abuse [but] the details develop and clarify over time--it's a classic recovered memory. I think that in this case there's a lot to be suspicious of.

And all three of these boys the only three to accuse Shanley of pedophilia--are from the same very specific religious education class.

[The accusation is that] the priest came to the class every week and took them out in threes, scattered them around the school yard and the church, played strip poker with one here while the other one's in the bathroom, went and raped anally raped--the one in the bathroom, [then raped] the one he had stashed behind the altar, then gathered these kids up after these violent sexual violations and returned them to class-on a weekly basis. These are hour-long classes. The logistics seem illogical.

And none of the mothers who taught the class and supervised the children remember any of this.

None of the women who taught those classes recall it. And wouldn't the children be crying? Wouldn't the children come back in some traumatized state?

How long did this allegedly continue?

It began at [age] 6 and ended at 10. So four years of regular, often weekly sexual assault, often with groups. So they're going to have a lot to prove in that criminal case.

But the troubling part, the Achilles' heel in the Paul Shanley story, is always the North American Man/boy Love Association.

That he was [supposedly] at a meeting that somehow led to the formation of NAMBLA. That's always the glue that holds together the Paul Shanley who was the exploitative therapist with the Paul Shanley who's the accused pedophile. And it isn't true, and I spell this out in the book: NAMBLA was formed by a caucus of people meeting after a larger meeting that took place in Boston [which Shanley attended]. The larger meeting was about a specific legal problem in Boston that involved underage prostitutes, and there was a [smaller group] within this group that called for a caucus meeting after the conference was over. And it was [that] group of people, including Daniel Tsang, who were the founders of NAMBLA. Shanley didn't attend that side meeting.

He was quoted in a gay periodical at the time as being aggressively in defense of sexual expressions of young people. Always a dangerous line to take--it's dangerous now; it was dangerous then to suggest that just because you're underage doesn't mean you don't have sexual agency. We don't know whether he was quoted accurately; we do know the article was written by Daniel Tsang, who was a proponent of intergenerational sex. The quotes were shocking, but he wasn't advocating the molestation of children. He was advocating the sexual agency of children. But I think once you get the NAMBLA tag attached to you, there's no getting ad of it. There's no bigger stink than that, and he hasn't been able to shake it.

Did you talk to Shanley?

I'm not allowed to say.

The Vatican is now saying, "We wouldn't have had this problem if there hadn't been gay men in the priesthood." How is that different from what you're saying?

The presence of gay men didn't create the problem. The presence of homophobia created the problem. The frothy, hysterical escalation against homosexual expression and homosexuality and homosexual identity by the Catholic Church, beginning in the post-Stonewall era, is I think the sharpest description of homophobia we've seen in modern times. Get rid of homophobia, we wouldn't have this.

In describing your book to people, I keep comparing it to Randy Shilts's Conduct Unbecoming or And the Band Played On because it his the same quality of an enormous amount of reporting at the service of very human storytelling. How many priests did you talk to?

Scores. I talked and talked and talked. I spoke to a ton of priests and a ton of victims and a ton of lawyers in last about every part of the country, and I pared down my narrative to emotional themes. To follow [these priests] is to understand, I think, self-knowledge. Which, ff that's not a gay theme--'if that's not the gay theme I don't know what is.