In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  Mohammed, who is part of this huge wave of refugees, perhaps the last still to believe in the ‘European dream’, did not travel with the pope. On the contrary, he was exploited in an unexpected way that he himself couldn’t have imagined when he left Tunis for Naples, via Sicily. Because while this 21-year-old man is heterosexual, he’s condemned to prostitute himself with men every evening near Roma Termini station just to survive. Mohammed is a ‘sex worker’; to me he calls himself an ‘escort’, which is a better visiting card. And even more extraordinarily, this Muslim’s clients are essentially Catholic priests and prelates connected to the churches of Rome or the Vatican.

  To investigate the unnatural relations between the Muslim rent boys of Roma Termini and the Catholic priests of the Vatican, over a period of three years I interviewed about sixty migrant prostitutes in Rome (in most cases I was accompanied on these interviews by a translator or a ‘researcher’).

  Let’s say from the outset that the prostitutes’ ‘timetables’ suited me very well: in the early morning and during the day I met priests, bishops and cardinals in the Vatican, who never offer appointments after 6.00 p.m. In the evening, on the other hand, I interviewed male prostitutes, who rarely get to work before 7.00 p.m. My interviews with the prelates took place when the prostitutes were still asleep; and my conversations with escorts when the priests had already gone to bed. So during my weeks in Rome, my diary was divided up ideally: cardinals and prelates by day, migrants in the evening. I gradually worked out that these two worlds – these two kinds of sexual poverty – were intrinsically interwoven. That the timetables of the two groups overlapped.

  To explore the night-life of Roma Termini I had to work in several languages – Romanian, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, as well as French, English and Italian – so I appealed to friends, ‘scouts’ and sometimes professional translators. I investigated the streets around Roma Termini with my researchers Thalyson, a Brazilian architecture student, Antonio Martínez Velázquez, a gay Latino journalist from Mexico, and Loïc Fel, an activist who knows the sex workers and drug addicts, who had come from Paris.

  Apart from these precious friends, I identified, over the course of the evenings spent around Roma Termini, a number of ‘scouts’. Generally escorts, like Mohammed, they became indispensable ‘informers’ and ‘pathfinders’, agreeing to bring me information about prostitution in the area in return for a drink or lunch. I chose three regular places for our meetings, so that I could guarantee a certain discretion: the café in the garden of the Hôtel Quirinale; the bar of the hotel NH Collection on Piazza dei Cinquecento; and the second floor of the restaurant Eataly, which, only a few years ago, was a McDonald’s. Outside these, the paid encounters of Rome were played out.

  Mohammed tells me about crossing the Mediterranean.

  ‘It cost me 3,000 Tunisian dinars (900 euros), he informs me. I worked like a lunatic for months to get that sum together. And my family also contributed to help me. I didn’t care; I had no idea of the risks. The fishing boat wasn’t very stable; I could easily have drowned.’

  Two of his friends, Billal and Sami, left as he did from Tunisia for Sicily, and also became prostitutes in Roma Termini. We talk in a ‘halal pizzeria’ on Via Manin, over an unappetizing four-euro kebab. Billal, in an Adidas polo shirt, with his hair shaved at the side, arrived in 2011 after crossing in a small boat, a kind of motorized raft. Sami, auburn hair, tanned, landed in 2009. He took a bigger boat, with 190 people on board, and it cost 2,000 dinars: more expensive than a low-cost flight.

  Why did they come?

  ‘For an opportunity,’ Mohammed says to me, using a strange phrase.

  And Sami adds: ‘We have to leave because of the lack of possibilities.’

  In Roma Termini we find them engaging in illicit commerce with the priests of the churches of Rome and the prelates of the Vatican. Do they have a pimp? Apparently they don’t have a protector, or very rarely.

  On another day I have lunch with Mohammed at Il Pomodoro in San Lorenzo, in the area of Via Tiburtina, the restaurant that gained its notoriety from the fact that Pasolini dined there with his favourite actor, Ninetto Davoli, on the evening of his murder. He was due to meet – under the arcades of Roma Termini – the 17-year-old gigolo, Giuseppe Pelosi, who would kill him. As in Al Biondo Tevere, where the two men went later, victim and killer mixed up in collective memory, Italy commemorates these ‘last suppers’ of Pasolini. At the entrance to the restaurant, the original cheque for the meal, signed by Pasolini – and not cashed – is displayed, a strange sepulchral trophy, behind a pane of glass. If Pelosi embodied the ‘ragazzo di vita’ and the Pasolini-type – jacket, tight jeans, low forehead, curly hair and a mysterious ring decorated with a red stone, with the inscription ‘United States’ – Mohammed, on the other hand, is the quintessence of Arab beauty. He is harder, more male, more brown; his forehead is high, his hair short. He has the blue eyes of the Berber; he barely smiles. No ring – that would be too feminine. In his way he embodies the Arab myth that ‘orientalist’ writers racked by male desires have liked so much.

  This Arabic style, which brings with it something of the memory of Carthage and Flaubert’s Salammbô, is highly prized in the Vatican today. It’s a fact: the ‘homosexual priests’ adore Arabs and ‘orientals’. They love this migrant sub-proletariat, as Pasolini loved the poor young men of the ‘borgate’, the Roman suburbs. The same accidental lives; the same enchantments. Each one abandons part of himself when he comes to Roma Termini: the ‘ragazzo’ abandons his Roman dialect: the migrant his mother tongue. Both need to speak the Italian of the arcades. The Arab boy fresh off the boat is the new Pasolinian model.

  The relationship between Mohammed and the priests is already a long story. A strange trade, incidentally, abnormal, irrational, and that, on both the Catholic and the Muslim side, is not simply ‘unnatural’ but also sacrilegious. I soon understood that the presence of priests in search of male prostitutes in Roma Termini is a well-established business – a small industry. It involves hundreds of prelates and even some bishops and cardinals from the Roman Curia whose names we know. These relationships follow a remarkable sociological rule, the eighth in The Closet: In prostitution in Rome between priests and Arab escorts, two sexual poverties come together: the profound sexual frustration of Catholic priests is echoed in the constraints of Islam, which make heterosexual acts outside of marriage difficult for a young Muslim.

  ‘With the priests, we get along quite naturally,’ Mohammed says to me in a frightening phrase.

  Mohammed very quickly understood that sex was the ‘major issue’ and ‘the only true passion’ – in a temporal sense – for most of the priests that he meets. And he was enchanted by this discovery, by its strangeness, its animality, the role-playing it suggests, but also, of course, because it became the key to his economic model.

  Mohammed insists that he works on his own. His start-up does not depend on the presence of a pimp.

  ‘I would be ashamed, because it would mean becoming part of a system. I don’t want to become a prostitute,’ he assures me very seriously.

  Like all the rent boys in Roma Termini, Mohammed loves his regulars. He loves to ‘make relationships’ as he says, with his clients’ mobile phones in order to ‘build something long-lasting’. From his own observation, priests are among his most ‘loyal’ customers; they ‘instinctively’ latch on to prostitutes that they like and want to see again. Mohammed appreciates this regularity, which, apart from the financial benefits that it offers, seems to raise his social status.

  ‘An escort is someone with regulars. He’s not a prostitute,’ the young Tunisian insists.

  ‘Bună ziua.’

  ‘Ce faci?’

  ‘Bine! Foarte bine!’

  I’m talking to Gaby in his own language, and my rudimentary Romanian, which surprised him at first, now seems to reassure him. I once lived in Bucharest for a year and I still have a few basic expressions from those days. Gaby, 25, works i
n the area ‘reserved’ for Romanians.

  Unlike Mohammed, Gaby is a legal immigrant in Italy, because Romania is part of the European Union. He found himself in Rome rather by chance; the two main migration routes, the one called ‘the Balkans’ – rooted in central Europe and, beyond that, in Syria and Iraq – and the ‘Mediterranean’ route taken by most of the migrants from Africa and the Maghreb, pass through Roma Termini, the big central station of the Italian capital. In the literal sense of the term, it is the ‘terminus’ of many migration routes. So everyone stops there.

  Always in transit, like most prostitutes, Gaby is already thinking of leaving again. While he waits, he’s looking for a little ‘normal’ job in Rome. Without any real training or a profession, few opportunities are open to him: unwillingly, he started selling his body.

  Some journalist friends from Bucharest had already alerted me to this disconcerting phenomenon: Romania was exporting its prostitutes. Certain newspapers, like Evenimentul zilei, carried out the investigation, writing ironically about this Romanian ‘record’: becoming the first European country to export sex workers. According to Tampep, a Dutch charity worker, almost half of the prostitutes in Europe, men and women, are migrants; one prostitute in eight is said to be Romanian.

  Gaby comes from Iași in Romania. First he crossed Germany where, not understanding the language, and knowing nobody, he decided not to stay. After a ‘very disappointing’ time in the Netherlands, he turned up in Rome without any money, but with the address of a Romanian friend. This boy, himself a prostitute, put him up and initiated him into the ‘trade’. He gave him the secret code: the best clients are the priests!

  As a rule, Gaby starts his night’s work in Roma Termini at about 8.00 p.m. and, depending on the number of customers, he stays there until 6.00 in the morning.

  ‘Prime time is between 8.00 and 11.00 p.m. We leave the afternoon to the Africans. The Romanians come in the evening. The best clients prefer the white boys,’ he tells me with a certain pride. Summer is better than winter, when there aren’t so many clients, but August isn’t good because the priests are on holiday and the Vatican is almost empty.

  The ideal evening, according to Gaby, is Friday. The priests come out ‘in plain clothes’ – meaning without their dog-collars. Sunday afternoon is another promising time of day, according to Mohammed, who hardly has any time off on that day. No rest on the seventh day! Sunday boredom means that the area around Roma Termini is always busy, before and after vespers.

  At first I barely paid attention to these discreetly exchanged glances, all the movement around Via Giovanni Giolitti, Via Gioberti and Via delle Terme di Diocleziano, but thanks to Mohammed and Gaby I can decode the signs now.

  ‘Most of the time I tell the punters I’m Hungarian, because they aren’t too keen on Romanians. They get us confused with gypsies,’ Gaby explains, and I sense that the lie is a burden, since like many Romanians he hates the Hungarian neighbour and traditional enemy.

  All the local rent boys invent lies and fantasies for themselves. One of them tells me he is Spanish, when I can tell by his accent that he is from Latin America. A bearded youth, with the physique of a gypsy, who likes to be called Pitbull, generally presents himself as a Bulgarian, when he is in fact a Romanian from Craiova. Another, smaller one, who refuses to tell me his first name – let’s call him Shorty – explains that he’s there because he’s missed his train; but I’ll bump into him again the next day.

  The customers lie too, and invent lives for themselves.

  ‘They say they’re passing through, or travelling on business, but we’re not idiots and we spot them straight away; you can see the priests coming from a long way off,’ Gaby remarks.

  When accosting a boy, the priests use a formula that’s very threadbare but still seems to work.

  ‘They ask us for a cigarette even when they don’t smoke! They don’t generally wait for us to answer. As soon as you’ve swapped glances, the code has been understood, and they suddenly say, very quickly, “Andiamo”.’

  Mohammed, Gaby, Pitbull and Shorty acknowledge that they sometimes take the first step, particularly when the priests pass in front of them with ‘lecherous expressions’ but don’t dare to approach them.

  ‘Then I help them,’ Mohammed says to me, ‘and I ask them if they want to do coffee.’

  ‘Faire café’ – it’s a lovely phrase in French, and part of the approximate vocabulary of the Arabs who are still finding their words.

  During the first two years of my investigation, I lived in the area around Termini in Rome. One week a month on average, I rented a little flat on Airbnb, either from S, an architect, whose studio near the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore I have always loved, or, if it was booked, in the Airbnbs on Via Marsala or Via Montebello north of Termini Station.

  The edges of the Esquilino, one of the seven hills of the city, have long been filthy, that’s a fact; but Termini is in the middle of a process of ‘gentrificazione’, as the locals say, using an Italianized Anglicism. The Romans advised me to live in Trastevere, around the Pantheon, in the Borgo, or even in Prati, to be closer to the Vatican. But I stayed loyal to Termini: it’s a question of habit. When you travel, you very quickly try to create a new routine, to find some landmarks. In Roma Termini I’m right next to the express train, known as the Leonardo express, that leads to Rome’s international airport; the underground trains and the buses stop there; I have my little laundry, Lavasciuga, on Via Montebello, and, most importantly, the Feltrinelli international bookshop near Piazza della Repubblica, where I supplied myself with books and notebooks for my interviews. Literature is the best travelling companion. And since I’ve always thought that there are three things you should never skimp on in life – books, travel and cafés for meeting friends – I took pleasure in remaining loyal to that rule in Italy.

  I finally ‘moved away’ from Termini in 2017, when I was given permission to live in the official residences of the Vatican, thanks to a very well-connected monsignore, Battista Ricca, and Archbishop François Bacqué. Living at the time in the very official Casa del Clero, an ‘extraterritorial’ place near the Piazza Navona, or in other residences of the holy see and even several months inside the Vatican a few dozen metres from the pope’s apartment, thanks to important prelates and cardinals, I was sorry to leave Termini.

  It took me several months of careful observation and meetings to understand the subtle nocturnal geography of the boys of Roma Termini. Each group of prostitutes has its patch, its marked territory. It’s a division that reflects racial hierarchies and a whole range of prices. So the Africans are usually sitting on the guardrail by the south-western entrance to the station; the Maghrebis, sometimes the Egyptians, tend to stay around Via Giovanni Giolitti, at the crossing with the Rue Manin or under the arcades on Piazza dei Cinquecento; the Romanians are close to Piazza della Repubblica, beside the naked sea-nymphs of the Naiad Fountain or around the Dogali Obelisk; the ‘Latinos’, last of all, cluster more towards the north of the square, on Viale Enrico de Nicola or Via Marsala. Sometimes there are territorial wars between groups, and fists fly.

  This geography isn’t stable; it changes with the years, the seasons or the waves of migrants. There have been ‘Kurdish’, ‘Yugoslav’, ‘Eritrean’ periods; more recently a wave of Syrians and Iraqis, and now we see Nigerians, Argentinians and Venezuelans arriving at Roma Termini. But there is one fairly constant element: there are few Italians on Piazza dei Cinquecento.

  The legalization of homosexuality, the proliferation of bars and saunas, mobile apps, laws on same-sex marriage, and the socialization of gays tend, everywhere in Europe, to dry up the market in male street prostitution. With one exception: Rome. There’s quite a simple explanation: the priests help to keep this market alive, even though it’s increasingly anachronistic in the time of the internet. And for reasons of anonymity, they seek out migrants.

  There’s no fixed price for ‘tricks’ in Roma Termini. In the market of good
s and services, the rate for the sexual act is currently at its lowest. There are too many available Romanians, too many undocumented Africans, too many Latino transvestites for inflation to be possible. Mohammed brings in an average of 70 euros a trick; Shorty asks for 50 euros, on condition that the punter pays for the room himself; Gaby and Pitbull rarely discuss the price in advance, partly for fear of plain-clothes policemen and partly as a sign of their poverty and economic dependence.

  ‘When it’s over, I ask for 50 euros if they don’t suggest anything; if they offer 40, I ask for 10 more; and sometimes I’ll take 20 if the punter is stingy. Most importantly, I don’t want problems, because I come here every evening,’ Gaby says to me.

  He doesn’t tell me that he has ‘his reputation’ to think about, but I get the idea.

  ‘Having a regular customer is what everybody wants around here, but not everyone’s that lucky,’ says Florin, a Romanian prostitute who comes from Transylvania and speaks fluent English.

  I met Florin and Christian in Rome in August 2016, with my researcher Thalyson. They’re both 27 and live together, they tell me, in a makeshift little flat, in a suburb a long way out of the city.

  ‘I grew up in Braşov,’ Christian tells me. ‘I’m married and I have a child. I have to feed him! I told my parents and my wife that I’m a bartender in Rome.’

  Florin told his parents that he was working ‘in construction’, and he tells me that he is able to ‘make in 15 minutes what he would make in 10 hours on a building site’.

  ‘We work around the Piazza della Repubblica. It’s a square for people from the Vatican. Everyone here knows that. The priests take us by car. They take us home or, more often, to a hotel,’ Christian says.

  Unlike other prostitutes I’ve interviewed, Christian doesn’t say he has difficulties renting a room.

  ‘I never have a problem. We pay. They can’t refuse us. We have ID, we’re in order. And even if the hotel people aren’t happy about two men taking a room for an hour, there’s nothing they can do.’