A Priest, a Reporter and His Boyfriend Walk Into a Gay Bar...
Reporter Brandon K. Thorp explains how his investigation into
the "lavender mob" running the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami
—published here earlier today—came to be, and why the existence
of a lively and hidden gay subculture within an institution
devoted in part to demonizing homosexuals is an untenable and
corrosive hypocrisy.  I first heard about the sodomy endemic in
the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami last November, when I was
drinking at a gay bar with my boyfriend, the journalist Penn
Bullock. The bar was Sidelines; a sporty little place on the
gayest street in Wilton Manors, Fla., which is maybe the gayest
little town in America. It's not the kind of place into which
heterosexuals wander by mistake.  There was a Catholic priest at
the bar.  His name was "Father John," and he worked at a famous
Catholic high school in nearby Fort Lauderdale. (That's him in
the photo above, hanging out at the Stonewall Street Festival in
Wilton Manors last mont