Category: Uncategorized

Here I am, blowing the dust off my blog. It wasn’t inspiration that brought me here (as will likely now become painfully obvious), it was fear. Email chatter suggested that the host for the site has a partnership with a company that sends out warnings that your site has been “infected” with something unspecific. Athlete’s Foot, perhaps. Either you pony up a subscription to sort it out or they lock the account. So it’s speak now or forever hold my peace.

I’m conscious that I am speaking to an empty room. That’s fine. I’m very noisy on Twitter (using my real name) and I get more attention than I can handle there. Talking to you, Mr Overturned Chair and you, Mr Threadbare Curtain, is sort of comforting. Or is it? Perhaps there is no comfort in absence; specifically the absence of those of you who were once kind enough to pass by and who shared a little life with me here. There were many times when something you said in your blogs or in a comment made me see the world differently. Sometimes they made me see myself differently. I could pretend that the blog was about scratching some itch to write or that it served a particular therapeutic purpose but, in truth, it was about … well .. companionship and camaraderie. Or, to put it another way, it was about love. I’m not sure I could have said then that I loved you all, but I did. I do. So if this sentiment finds its way to you – tumbling in the electron torrent of the network – I would like to say thank you. If it never finds its way to you, then I am sorry that I did not speak up sooner.

I grew up in a seaside town. Every summer, as others squeezed families into cars and headed for the ferries, we stayed put. Towards the end of the school holiday, students would arrive and pitch a tent on the greensward. They were there on behalf of the Scripture Union to run a beach mission. To a serious and religiose child like me, their arrival was a cause of great excitement. The first time I went to the mission, I was seven years old. Weekday mornings began with a 7 am Bible study. It was at one of those study sessions in the early Eighties that I had my one and only experience of someone discussing biblical attitudes to homosexuality. The leader of the study was called Ann, a student teacher from Sunderland. “I work” she said “with some people who are gay. They are very nice. They invited me to dinner. You could tell they really loved each other. They almost persuaded me that being gay was alright. But I prayed and was able to place my trust in scripture.” She looked, momentarily, sad. She had looked into the abyss and backed away. It was the first time I saw a faithful Christian struggling with how to reconcile the Gospel injunction to commit ourselves to the love of others with what seemed to her to be a scriptural requirement to hate.

What she feared was the slippery slope that we were constantly being warned against. We should not, under any circumstances, pick and choose the parts of scripture we were prepared to adhere to. We were fundamentalists. Of course, as many point out, there were all sorts of Biblical proscriptions and prescriptions that we seemed, in practice, perfectly prepared to overlook. For some, no doubt, the desire to emphasise the verses forbidding homosexual intercourse whilst ignoring the sometimes bewilderingly archaic Old Testament strictures that surround them was motivated by a pre-existing prejudice. Ann did not want to hate anyone, but she could not find a way to reconcile her faith with her natural instinct to love.

I, on the other hand, was a bigot. I avoided cognitive dissonance with a glib evasion: I hated the sin but loved the sinner. A Christian Union man, I could be found at university asking Stephen Twigg to accept that whilst Christians could not condone his sexuality, they could not be convicted of bigotry. It was what their faith required. I asked, in effect, for his sympathy for our predicament. I am ashamed.

I knew my glib distinction between sin and sinner made little sense. I understood, in truth, that being gay was a matter of identity. I just made sure I kept those discomforting thoughts at the periphery of my mental vision. I was guilty of a repellent cowardice. I chose to stand aside as others suffered.

Eventually the tatty superstructure of my arguments against love collapsed, as I suppose it was always bound to. I wish I could say that I tore it down. I didn’t. It decayed, sagged and disintegrated as the part of my mind dedicated to defending the indefensible grew weary and withdrawn.

I am not ashamed of my faith. I am ashamed of myself.

I want to say two things. To those with whom I share my faith I want to ask you to question whether you really believe God calls you to hate. Does the fear and isolation our attitudes have visited upon gay people strike you as something Jesus would want us to be inflicting?

To my gay friends I want to say sorry. I have done nothing to deserve your friendship but it is precious.