Gitolite suffers from being well documented for an open source project yet still very hard to understand from a standing start - it's just not a very intuitive setup. I wrote a post on setting it up just to help me wrap my head around it.

http://www.exratione.com/2011/03/setting-up-an-access-contro...

Since I maintain my own sites anyway, keeping as many private repositories as I want is basically free once this is set up.