David France, the openly gay author of the just published Out Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal (Broadway Books), says it's not that easy. In his exhaustively reported and intensely emotional narrative, France reveals that many of the accused priests--numbering 4,392 since 1950, according to an independent report released in February-clearly are gay men.

True, he notes, a shocking number of the abusers are villains without a clear sexual orientation, like the giggling pedophile Father John Geoghan. But many are fallen heroes, like Father "Spags" Spagnolia, a social activist who briefly left the priesthood to run a guesthouse on Cape Cod, Mass., with his male partner, or Father John Shanley, a groundbreaking gay activist priest who France suggests may not be as black a villain as he's been painted.

The Advocate spoke to France just days before Showtime announced that it would make a cable-TV movie based on Our Fathers. That will be the second Showtime film inspired by France's reporting: The award-winning Soldier's Girl began as a New York Times Magazine article France wrote. After The Advocate ran a news brief on our Web site about the murder of convicted pedophile priest John Geoghan--who was killed in prison by a serial murderer of gay men--a reader wrote to caution us against buying into the negative stereotype that links pedophilia to gay men. How would you have responded to that? I would respond by overstating the thesis that this is all about sexuality-every aspect of the crisis has been about homosexuality. John Geoghan was killed [because his killer believed] he was gay. He was a pedophile, and pedophilia and homosexuality are not at all related--we know statistically that gay men are less likely to be pedophiles than straight men--but the sex crisis in the church hasn't been about pedophilia. Some 85% to 90% of all the cases of abusive priests had to do with teenagers, mostly boys.