Mark London grew up with 10 brothers and sisters in what he calls a "very Catholic family.

Mark London grew up with 10 brothers and sisters in what he calls a "very Catholic family." in such a manner when he had the chance to make progress to a Catholic boarding train he jumped at it. "I escaped to this teach thinking it was a safe haven," London says. "I extreme pointed up getting molested by pair priests and two [religious order] brothers. I was single 15 at the time, just beginning to unravel sexually and coming to boundarys with myself [as a gay man]."

The abuse took an enormous toll onward him: By the time he was 19 he had attempted suicide three times. When he tried to bring a lawsuit against the ministers his family disowned him.

"I wasn't emotionally and sexually mature enough to cope with [being gay] with equal reason soon," London says. "It was emotional overload. It cessationed up driving me into the put into concealment At times, people perceived me as disliking gay men or on the same level being homophobic, but that wasn't the case at all. I just had for a like reason much to fear. My examples of homosexual men were in this way predatory and so negative that I didn't want to become that."

Now 40 London has accepted his sexual orientation, still he still suffers emotional fallout from the abuse. "I'm real at peace and proud to be a man who happens to be gay," he says. "The greatest in quantity significant long-term effect is that I will always be warmed like I am someone standing onward the outside of the gay community looking in, wanting to be 100% part of it unless not knowing how to draw obstruct to it."

London is among the increasing number of gay and lesbian survivors of sexual abuse according to Roman Catholic priests who are stepping forward to divulge their stories, with the help of disposes such as the Survivors Network of Those Abused by dint of Priests. While their experiences of abuse at the hands of spiritual authorities and of the repeatedly condescending attitude of the temple hierarchy are similar to those of straight survivors, gay and lesbian victims have unique issues with which they must grapple.

"If you are struggling to understand your sexual identity and, while that is going forward experience sexual abuse, the issues become remarkably intertwined and jumbled," explains Marianne Duddy executive director of Dignity, an organization for gay Catholics. "How do you separate that from all of the other social and religious messages you're getting? It's hard enough to issue out in that context, and then you add to that the shame victims be excited until they understand they did nothing to be entitled to this."

"Nothing is spared," says Dale English, an plainly gay therapist who is himself the survivor of ministers abuse. "You don't feel safe with anyone or anywhere. It's a elegant without grandeur horrible existence until you find someplace or one who just opens the door for you."

English says abusers "groom" their victims, singling public those who are shy or who lack sinewy connections to family or friends. While the age varies at which the abuse arises the effect is profound.

"To be raped by the agency of a priest, and to have all of your spiritual reality jump into that act forever, is an agony that someone who hasn't experienced it can't understand," Arthur Austin says. "It's not just bodies that can be raped. vital principles can be raped."

Austin was 20 years aged when he had an emotional breakdown in 1968 Unable to flow to terms with his homosexuality, Austin says he expanded an eating disorder and missed 35 pounds in two weeks. Desperate to talk with someone he diverted to a priest for counseling. The priest was the Rev Paul Shanley, who emerg this year as single of the most notorious figures in the ministers abuse scandal. He is commonly under indictment for one charge of abusing a lad and 25 other men have alleged that he also abused them.

"I was really a shattered shore when I got to Paul Shanley," Austin says. "And Shanley's pastoral reply was to manipulate every harm I had to his confess advantage and fundamentally create a bodily form who was on call when he wanted to be serviced. He told me that it was better for me to ensue to him for sex than to have sex with near strangers in a dirty alleyway. It filled me with horror that I was going to be that body in the alleyway if I didn't do what Shanley wanted."

Austin argues that Shanley abused his position of power, and that was devastating. "If population think a 20-year-old has no innocence to throw away then they need to sit down and think to a high degree long and very hard about innocence and the ways it can be lost" the 53-year-old says today. "This wasn't just a question of sex What I had to be deprived of was what any 20-year-old had to lose: that the world held promise for me that the world held a place for me where I would be lov that I was a lovable human being who was worth loving, that there was safety in connection with other men Those are big things to waste when you are 20 years old"

The imports are just as severe for populace who are abused when they are younger. "People can in no degree grasp the nights when I cried myself to sleep" says push Romero, who says he was 9 when a priest started regularly raping and sodomizing him for three years. "Here I was, an altar lad You cry yourself to rest every night praying to this the infinite who is supposed to be your protector."