We ended up hanging out with Giacomo quite a bit that week. It always amazed me the long lunch breaks he seemed at liberty to take, joining us for meandering flans in the middle of the workday, not to mention his ability to stay out drinking with us until last call. On one such night the three of us stumbled across the grand promenade leading to the Vatican, turned down a narrow side street, and descended a long flight of stairs into a gay bathhouse called Europa. After showering and wrapping white towels around ourselves we began exploring the dungeon-like maze. It was packed with men of all shapes, ages, and races, like some lost temple cult of the masculine. So as not to get lost the three of us had to keep close, shouting over the throbbing techno to hear one another.

“So this building?” Giacomo called to Clyde and I. “The Vatican owns it.”

“The Vatican owns Europa?” I shouted back.

“They don’t run the sauna, they’re just the landlords. They own lots of buildings in the city.” We walked a few more paces before he turned back with a grin: “The seminary students love it.”

Somehow, in that moment, it didn’t even strike me as particularly absurd that the Church should be the landlords of a massive gay sauna. There seemed to be no contradiction or hypocrisy the faith couldn’t hold. In fact, as I walked along the corridors bathed in red light, it felt utterly inevitable that I should be brushing shoulders with young seminarians and senior members of the curia with their pot-bellies and knobby dicks, all sons of someone, navigating their own journeys through God’s garden of earthly delights, all no doubt familiar with Dante and his Inferno and the tortures their faith suggested awaited them, and yet still submitting themselves to the labyrinth, perhaps rationalizing to themselves that all matters of the flesh were between them and their Creator and there was nothing, not even a furtive glory-hole blow job, that a few Hail Marys couldn’t cleanse them of. And what the prayers didn’t wash away, the shower stalls and steam rooms surely would.

I stroked my hard-on through my towel as we watched men in leather slings getting fisted, gang-banged, moaning and grunting, begging to be nameless whores, bodies without people, without pasts or futures, just receptacles for cocks, just a couple of holes to be passed around and filled with cum. Is the rectum a grave? literary theorist Leo Bersani once asked. I watched as Clyde positioned himself in wooden stocks and let man after man fuck him, like a stamen being swarmed by bees, until a stranger threaded his fingers through mine and led me into a black vinyl-clad booth.