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Ironically, it isn't a gay thing so much as it is a power and secrecy thing which has brewed for centuries, if not over a thousand years.

Think about what conditions had to be like during the Reformation - probably many, many times worse than history ascribes for a church peopled by largely unsophisticated peasants who didn't have access to information to be so riven. The theology and the rules were largely created in the image of the disinherited sons of the nobility - boys sent to the Church while they were sexually immature. In time, the clerical ranks became the repository for those young men who didn't exactly mesh with women as well.

Here is the really interesting part - in the 40s and 50s, gays were known of and identifiable. Parents wouldn't have trusted their children to the outwardly effeminate, but they would have trusted the guy who seemed all man. Meanwhile, the masculine priest could operate quite handily with a lot of trust if he had an interest in teenagers.

In time, the clerical ranks became the repository for those young men who didn't exactly mesh with women as well.

And I want to dig deeper and know why they didn't mesh with women. Is there something about the way morality was taught that to be attracted to a female in one's adolescence was not only sinful but abnormal? And the Virgin Mary was always held up as an example? What was left for young men other than psychological castration to THINK about their sexual urges which could not be suppressed despite the efforts of zealot spiritual masters to do so?

This is merely suppositioning. Other cultural groups don't seem to have this sexual dichotomy or they hide it better. And yet they have, through the centuries, maintained good standards of sexual morality for their sons and daughters. . . or did they really? Why have Jews, as a whole, had fewer breaches of basic morality than Christians (historically and disregarding the last 50 or so years where everybody in the west went more or less haywire about sex)?

In none of this do I deny that it is sinful to engage in innapropriate sexual relationships.

How did homosexuality gain such a foothold in the west? It is rampant in England, as well, within the context of their Anglian heritage.

The above is intended more as questioning than a personal opinion.