“It will encourage dishonesty, fuel homophobia and lead to Vatican sex spies snooping on trainee priests. If these rules had existed in the past, many existing archbishops and cardinals would have never been allowed to enter the priesthood. Given the high proportion of gay clergy in senior positions in the Vatican, this new policy is rank hypocrisy.”

“Most homos I know … have picked up a bunch of nasty habits on their quest for true love. True love refuses to come, so we look for a temporary fix from a strange bedfellow whose crotch provides us with a brief form of validation, self-worth, recognition, affection and all the good shit that we associate with someone true. It tastes good at first, but the bitter aftertaste lingers.”

“I saw a very attractive man, we started to talk, and we knew immediately that that was that. Our internal worlds were identical. We read the same books. We saw the same films. We spoke in a similar way. I was 37. I had had earlier relationships, so I could compare, but he was only 25, and in any case he had something adult [about him], and he saw he was like me. We went to bed on the first night, which I didn’t always do, and I don’t recommend that everyone have sex on the first night, but in our case it was the correct thing to do. Since then, essentially, we haven’t been apart.”