The things you find behind closed doors

WHY is the senior management of the international institution most determined to resist the advance of gay rights massively dominated by gay men?

That’s the arresting question that drove Frédéric Martel to write In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy. It is often whispered that the bitter infighting raging in the Vatican between stiff-necked conservatives and wobbly liberals is best imagined as an “intra-closet war”. Martel takes us deep inside both campaign headquarters.

Martel is a beguiling 51-year-old French sociologist whom no one seems able to resist talking to. He is the author of several books grounded in extensive travel and research, most recently Global Gay, an exuberant tour d’horizon of gay experience around the world. For his Vatican exposé he spent months living in Rome and conducted hundreds of interviews, from sex-workers to cardinals, many of them in a discreet café just off the Borgo Pio, a stone’s throw from St Peter’s.