As someone who has slept with a variety of Judeo-Christian religious figures over the years--including youth ministers, pastors, priests, deacons, and a rabbi or two--I find it amusing that some PC extremists would like to draw clear, distinct lines between homos (that's us) and certain Catholic priests recently in the news (that's them). Such folks like to base their distinctions on the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia--a distinction I understand and with which I generally agree. In this particular case, though, I think there's significant fuzzy area--and fuzzy area, unfortunately, is one thing PC/queer theory dullards can't seem to abide.
You see, my friends, in many, many of the aforementioned cases, priests were abusing kids in their teens--long after the elementary school androgyny that so turns on the pedophile had worn off. And when we're talking about men who fuck boys 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, I think it's a patently ludicrous political move to try to lump them all in with the pedophiles; obviously, a significant percentage of them are homosexual. Maybe they're homosexual pedophiles--who am I to say?--but after the kids sprout pubic hair, we're clearly moving into a different territory.
I don't understand why activists are so reluctant to acknowledge that Western gay culture has a thing for the teenage body. I mean, have these people never been to a circuit party and noticed that most of the homos there shave their chests to affect a pre-bar mitzvah look? Have they looked at gay porn sites recently? Of course they have! (I know because PC gay men are always-already pro-sex and pro-porn.) How can they not notice that every other smuty popup is flashing something about "barely legal" twinks? When it comes down to it, the majority of gay men are no different from the majority of straight men: most of 'em just want a young, tight ass to bang. Does that make them pedophiles? If so, you'd better ring up Morris Bart, 'cause we've got a nation full of child molesters to start prosecuting.
But enough polemics. All I'm saying here is that it's wrong to try to completely distance our community from the priests in question by saying they're not really homosexuals. Frankly, it's been my experience that many folks in religious positions are, in fact, closeted homos who have turned to religion because it's an answer to the moral ambiguity of secular life: if I'm a priest--so the thinking goes--I can't be gay because it's not allowed, so all this emotional/sexual anguish I'm feeling with simply go away. It should be no surprise that that kind of running from one's own psycho-sexual makeup isn't very effective.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I myself was sleeping with 30-, 40-, and 50-year-old men when I was 14, 15, 16, 17. (In my hometown, there were no kids my own age with whom I could fool around, and without these older guys, I would have killed myself or gone crazy--not necessarily in that order.) These men, though, weren't just having sex with me, they were sleeping with each other, too--other men their own age. So, I speak from experience when I say that just because someone's getting it on with a 14-year-old doesn't necessarily make him/her a pedophile.
Trust the tramps of the world, dearie. We sometimes know what we're talking about.
