In the Closet of the Vatican

by Frédéric Martel

  ‘Who pays for the hotel?’

  ‘They do, of course,’ Christian replies, surprised by my question.

  Christian tells me about the dark side of the dark nights in Roma Termini. The lubriciousness of the clerics goes beyond the normal and into abuse, according to the statements I’ve collected.

  ‘I had a priest who wanted me to urinate on him. They want you to dress up as a woman, as a transvestite. Others practise rather unpleasant SM acts.’ (He spares me the details.) ‘One priest even wanted to have a naked boxing match with me.’

  ‘How do you know they’re priests?’

  ‘I’m a professional! I identify them straight away. Priests are among the most persistent clients. You can tell from their crosses when they undress.’

  ‘But don’t lots of people have crosses or baptismal medallions?’

  ‘No, not crosses like these. You can recognize them from miles away, even if they’re disguised as ordinary citizens. You can tell from their posture, which is a lot stiffer than that of the other customers. They’re not used to living …’

  ‘They’re unhappy,’ Christian goes on. ‘They’re not alive; they don’t love. Their way of approaching you, their little game, phone to their ears to make them look normal, as if they have a social life, when they’re not talking to anyone. I know it all by heart. And most importantly, I’ve got regulars. I know them. We talk a lot. They confess. I have a cross around my neck too, I’m a Christian. It creates a bond! They feel safer with an Orthodox Christian; it’s reassuring for them! I talk to them about John Paul II, whom I like a lot, as a Romanian; no one liked that pope more than I did. And an Italian hardly ever takes us to a hotel. The only ones who take us to hotels are priests, tourists and cops!’

  ‘Cops?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got regulars who are cops … But I prefer priests. When we go to the Vatican they pay us very well because they’re rich …’

  The boys of Roma Termini don’t know the names of the cardinals or bishops involved, but they remember those orgies at the Vatican. Several of them have talked to me about Friday-night ‘foursomes’ when ‘a chauffeur would turn up in a Mercedes in search of prostitutes and drive them to the Vatican’, but none of them have been taken to the holy see ‘by chauffeur’, and I have a sense that all that information is second-hand. The collective memory of the boys of Termini repeats this story, although it is impossible to know if it ever really happened.

  Christian does tell me that he went to the Vatican three times with a priest, and a Romanian friend, Razvan, who comes over and chats with us, went once.

  ‘If you go to the Vatican and come across a big fish, you’re much better paid. It’s not 50–60 euros, it’s more like 100–200. We all want to catch a big fish.’

  Christian goes on: ‘Most of the priests and the people in the Vatican want regulars. It’s less visible and less risky for them: it means they don’t have to come and find us here, Piazza della Repubblica, on foot or by car; they just send us a text!’

  Shrewd and battle-hardened, Christian shows me the contacts list on his phone, and displays the names and numbers of priests’ mobile phones. The list is infinite. When he talks about them, he calls them ‘my friends’, which makes Florin laugh: ‘“My friends”, for people you met two hours ago. So they’re your fast friends! A bit like fast food!’

  Some of Christian’s customers have probably given him fake names, but the numbers are genuine. And it occurred to me that if one were to publish this huge list of clerics’ mobile numbers, you’d set fire to the Italian bishops’ conference!

  How many escorted priests come regularly to Termini? How many ‘closeted’ prelates and ‘unstraight’ monsignori come here to warm themselves up with these sons of the Orient? Social workers and police suggest figures: ‘dozens’ every evening, ‘hundreds’ every month. Boastfully, the prostitutes themselves talk about ‘thousands’. But everyone under-estimates and over-estimates an inestimable market. And nobody really knows.

  Christian wants to stop.

  ‘I’m one of the old ones here. I don’t mean I’m old, I’m only 27, but I think I’m on the way out. Often the priests walk by; they greet me: “Buongiorno” … but they don’t pick me up. When a boy turns up in Termini, he’s brand-new. Everyone wants him. That’s the jackpot. He’s very much in demand. He can really make himself a lot of money. But it’s too late for me. I’m going back in September. I’m done.’

  With my researchers, Thalyson, Antonio, Daniele and Loïc, I do the tour of Termini’s hotels over a few evenings. It’s an amazing part of the city.

  In Roma Termini, we counted over a hundred small hotels around Via Principe Amedeo, Via Giovanni Amendola, Via Milazzo and Via Filippo Turati. Here the stars don’t mean much: a ‘two-star’ hotel can be quite run down; a ‘one-star’ hotel is somewhere you’d hardly want to step inside. Sometimes, I discover, the short-stay hotels even advertise on Airbnb to fill their rooms when they’re short of clients: privatization on the edge of legality … We questioned several hotel managers and receptionists about prostitution, and tried several times to rent rooms ‘by the hour’ to see their reaction.

  A Bangladeshi Muslim in his fifties who runs a small hotel on Via Principe Amedeo, thinks prostitution is the ‘scourge of the district’.

  ‘If they come and ask me for an hourly rate, I refuse them. But if they take a room for the night, I can’t throw them out. The law forbids it.’

  In the hotels of Roma Termini, including the filthiest of them, managers have sometimes been known to wage an actual war on male prostitutes without realizing that by doing so they’re also turning away a more respectable clientele: priests! They create digicodes, recruit intransigent night porters, install surveillance cameras in lobbies and corridors, even on emergency staircases, in internal courtyards, ‘which the rent boys sometimes use to bring their customers in without passing by the front desk’ (according to Fabio, a Roman born and bred, in his thirties, vaguely desocialized, who works off the books in one of the hotels). Those signs that say ‘Area Videosorvegliata’, which I’ve often seen in these small hotels, are principally there to scare off the clerics.

  Migrant prostitutes are often asked for their papers in a bid to get rid of them, or else the price of the room is multiplied by two (Italy is one of those archaic countries where you sometimes pay for the night according to the number of occupants). After trying everything to make this market dry up, the landlords are sometimes reduced to shouting insults, such as ‘Fanculo i froci!’, at people who have taken a client to their ‘single’ room.

  ‘We get everything at night,’ Fabio tells me. ‘A lot of prostitutes have no papers. So they fake them, they borrow them. I saw a white guy coming in with a black guy’s papers. Frankly, you don’t do that! But of course you shut your eyes and you let them get on with it.’

  According to Fabio, it isn’t uncommon for a manager to forbid prostitution in one of his hotels and encourage it in another. In that case he gives out the card of the alternative hotel and, dropping lots of hints, recommends a better address for this fleeting couple. Sometimes the manager is even worried about the client’s safety and possible dangers, so keeps the prostitute’s paper behind the front desk until he comes back down with his customer, to check that there hasn’t been a theft or violence. Vigilance that may well have avoided a few extra scandals at the Vatican!

  At Roma Termini, the passing tourist, the visitor, the ordinary Italian, untrained in these matters, doesn’t go beyond the surface of things: they will only see the Vespa-hirers and the reduced rates for tours on ‘Hop On, Hop Off’ double-decker buses. But behind those tantalizing posters telling you to visit the Palatine Hill, another life exists on the upper storeys of the little hotels at Roma Termini, which is no less tantalizing.

  At Piazza dei Cinquecento I observe the interplay between boys and their clients. The merry-go-round isn’t very subtle, and the clients are less than reputable. Many of them drive by in their cars,
window open, hesitate, turn round, come back, and finally take their young escorts in some unknown direction. Others are on foot, lacking confidence, and finish their biblical dialogue in one of the pitiful hotels in the district. Here’s one who’s a bit bolder and more sure of himself: he might be a missionary in Africa! And another gives me the impression, from the way he’s staring at the animals, that he’s on safari!

  I ask Florin, the Romanian prostitute whose name recalls the old coin of the popes in the days of Julian II, if he has visited the museums, the Pantheon, the Coliseum.

  ‘No, I’ve just visited the Vatican, with some of my clients. I haven’t got 12 euros to visit a … a normal museum.’

  Florin has a short, ‘three-day’ beard, which he keeps up because, he tells me, it is part of his ‘power of attraction’. He has blue eyes and his hair is perfectly combed and slicked ‘with Garnier gel’. He tells me that he wants to ‘get a tattoo of the Vatican on his arm, it’s so beautiful’.

  ‘Sometimes the priests pay for us to go on holiday,’ Florin explains to me. ‘I went away for three days with a priest. He paid for everything. Normal. There are also some clients,’ he adds, ‘who hire us regularly; every week, for example. They pay a kind of subscription. And they’re given a discount!’

  I ask Gaby, as I did with the others, what the clues are that tell him he’s dealing with priests.

  ‘They’re more discreet than the others. In sexual terms, they’re lone wolves. They’re afraid. They never use coarse language. And of course they always want to go to hotels, because they haven’t got a house: that’s the sign, that’s how you tell.’

  He adds: ‘Priests don’t want Italians. They’re more comfortable with people who don’t speak Italian. They want migrants because it’s easier, it’s more discreet. Have you ever heard of a migrant reporting a bishop to the police?’

  Gaby goes on: ‘I’ve got some priests who pay just to sleep with me. They talk about love, about love stories. They are insanely tender. They’re like teenage girls! They tell me off for kissing them badly, and the kisses seem important to them. There are also some who want “to save me”. Priests always want to help us, to “take us off the street” …’

  I have heard this remark often enough to think it’s based on real and repeated experiences. Priests fall instantly in love with their migrants, now whispering in their ear, ‘I luv you’ – a way of avoiding saying the word, the way people swear by saying ‘Oh my gosh’ rather than blaspheming by saying ‘Oh my God!’

  At any rate, they’re all hopelessly in love, even though they refuse to admit it. And the prostitutes are often startled by the excessive tenderness on the part of the priests: their voyage across the Mediterranean is certainly full of surprises!

  And, I wonder: do priests fall in love with their boys more than other men? Why do they try to ‘save’ the prostitutes they’re exploiting? Is there a remnant of Christian morality that makes them human at the very moment when they are betraying their vow of chastity?

  Florin asks me if men are allowed to marry in France. I say yes, marriage between people of the same sex is permitted. He hasn’t thought about it much, but it basically strikes him as ‘normal’.

  ‘Here in Italy it’s forbidden. Because of the Vatican, and because it’s a communist country.’

  Florin punctuates each of his sentences with the word ‘normal’, even though his life is anything but normal.

  What strikes me during my many interviews with Christian, Florin, Gaby, Mohammed, Pitbull, Shorty, and many others, is their lack of judgementalism about the priests they’re sleeping with. They don’t lumber themselves with morality or guilt. If an imam was gay, the Muslims would have been shocked; if an orthodox pope was homosexual the Romanians would have thought it was strange; but it strikes them as ‘normal’ for Catholic priests to indulge in prostitution. And in any case, it’s a windfall as far as they’re concerned. Sin doesn’t bother them. Mohammed insists that he is still ‘active’, which apparently is less of an offence against Islam.

  ‘Is a Muslim permitted to sleep with a Catholic priest? You can always ask the question if you have the choice,’ Mohammed adds. ‘But I don’t have the choice.’

  On another evening I meet up with Gaby in Agenzia Viaggi, a cybercafé on Via Manin (now closed). There are about thirty Romanian male prostitutes there, chatting on the internet with their friends and families who are still in Bucharest, Constanţa, Timişoara or Cluj. They are talking via Skype or WhatsApp, and updating their Facebook status. In Gaby’s online biography, while he’s talking to his mother, I see: ‘Life lover’, in English. And ‘Live in New York’.

  ‘I tell her about my life here. She’s happy to see that I’m visiting in Europe: Berlin, Rome, soon London. I have a sense that she envies me a little. She asks me a lot of questions and she’s really happy for me. It’s as if I were in a film as far as she’s concerned. Of course she doesn’t know what I do. I’ll never tell her.’ (Like the other boys, Gaby uses the word ‘prostitute’ as little as possible, and instead uses metaphors or images.)

  Mohammed tells me more or less the same thing. He goes to a cybercafé called Internet Phone, on Via Gioberti, and I go with him. Calling his mother via the internet, as he does several times a week, costs 50 cents for 15 minutes or 2 euros an hour. He calls his mother, in front of me, via Facebook. He talks to her in Arabic for about ten minutes.

  ‘Mostly I do Facebook. My mother is better at Facebook than Skyping. I just told her that everything’s going fine, that I’m working. She was so happy. Sometimes she tells me she’d like me to come back. To be there, even just for a few minutes. She tells me: “Come back for a minute, just a minute, so that I can see you.” She says to me: “You’re my whole life.”’

  Regularly, as if apologizing for his absence, Mohammed sends his mother a bit of money, by Western Union transfer (he complains about their extravagant commission costs; I recommend PayPal, but he hasn’t got a credit card).

  Mohammed dreams of going home ‘one day’. He remembers the old-fashioned TGM line, the little train that connects Tunis Marine with La Marsa, with its legendary stops that he lists out loud for me, remembering the name of each station in the right order: Le Bac, La Goulette, L’Aéroport, Le Kram, Carthage-Salammbô, Sidi Bousaïd, La Marsa.

  ‘I miss Tunisia. My mother often asks me if I’m not cold. I tell her I’ve got a hat, and also a hood. Because it’s incredibly cold here in winter. She suspects, but she has no idea how cold it is here.’

  In Mohammed’s Arab clique in Rome, not all of them have slipped into prostitution. Several of his friends prefer to sell hashish and cocaine (heroin, which is too expensive, doesn’t seem to feature locally, according to all the prostitutes I’ve interviewed, and MDMA is only a marginal presence).

  Drugs? Mohammed isn’t interested. His argument is irreproachable: ‘Drugs are illegal and they’re very risky. If I went to prison, my mother would discover everything. And she would never forgive me. What I’m doing in Italy is completely legal.’

  Above Giovanna Petrocca’s desk, two crucifixes hang on the wall. On a nearby table, photographs show her posing with John Paul II.

  ‘He’s my pope,’ she tells me with a smile.

  I’m in the central police station in Roma Termini, and Giovanna Petrocca runs this important police station. She’s a chief inspector; in Italian her title, as it appears on the door of her office, is ‘primo dirigente, commissariato di Polizia, Questura di Roma’.

  The meeting was officially organized by the press service of the central office of Italian police, and Giovanna Petrocca answers all my questions quite honestly. She is a real professional, who knows her subject inside out. It’s clear that prostitution in Roma Termini hasn’t escaped the attention of the police, who know everything down to the smallest details. Petrocca confirms most of my hypotheses and, most importantly, she corroborates what the prostitutes have said to me. (In this chapter I also use information from Lieutenant Colone
l Stefano Chirico, who runs the anti-discrimination office at the Direzione Centrale della Polizia Criminale, the headquarters of the national police in the south of Rome, which I visited.)

  ‘Roma Termini has a long history of prostitution,’ Inspector Giovanna Petrocca explains to me. ‘It comes in waves, following migrations, wars, poverty. Each nationality is grouped together by language, it’s quite spontaneous, a little wild. Italian law does not punish individual prostitution, so we just try to contain the phenomenon, to limit its expansion. And of course we make sure that it stays within limits: no obscenities or attacks on public morality in the street; no prostitution with minors; no drugs; and no pimping. That’s forbidden, and severely sanctioned.’

  With a law degree from La Sapienza University, Petrocca, having spent a long time working on the ground in an urban police patrol, joined a new specialist anti-prostitution unit of the criminal police, created in 2001, where she stayed for 13 years before being made one of the officers in charge of it. In the long term she was able to follow the demographic changes in prostitution: Albanian women prostituted by force by the mafia; the arrival of the Moldovans and Romanians and organized pimping; the wave of Nigerians, which she calls ‘medieval’, since the women prostitute themselves in response to tribal rules and voodoo precepts! She keeps an eye on massage apartments with ‘happy ending’ – a specialism of the Chinese – prostitution that is more difficult to control, because it happens in private houses. She knows the short-stay hotels around Roma Termini and, of course, in detail the male prostitution in the area.

  With the precision of a scientist, the chief inspector outlines recent cases, homicides, the cruising areas of the transvestites, which are different from those of the transsexuals. But Giovanna Petrocca, her words translated by Daniele Particelli, my Roman researcher, isn’t trying to dramatize the situation. Roma Termini, in her view, is a place of prostitution like any other, the same as all the areas around the big train stations in Italy, quite similar to Naples or Milan.