Pardon 49,000

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I just signed a piece of history.

During the course of the past hundred or so years, 49,000 men in the UK were arrested and punished for being gay. Under an arcane legal system, this swathe of men, World War 2 hero Alan Turing among them, were systematically discriminated against.

It is too late for most of them.

Alan Turing himself, however, was pardoned by Gordon Brown not so long ago. Now is the time to pardon the other 49,000 men who were in a similar position. Sign it, share it and join the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Stephen Fry and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Horrifying Reality: Becoming a Surprised Minority

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A moment of quiet. Taking a seat in my new bedroom, I pick up the book I am currently devouring. It’s the end of August and, in my county, all the ‘schools’ chuck out at sixteen into the clutches of the ‘colleges’ (similar, in that both are there to get you through exams; different, in that schools mollycoddle whereas colleges don’t care) so I’m enjoying one of the longest summer holidays I will ever get.

I’ve thought a lot about my future, this summer. Church is my life and having time to devote to church work and reading all about God has given me a taste for how I could be living my life in future.

First, there’s an ‘outreach week’ in a nearby town. I’ve been doing these intensive, public events in my summer holidays since I was 13: each morning the team of 25 listen to some preaching, sing, pray, then we hit the streets to tell people about Jesus. Sometimes we do questionnaires and knock on people’s doors; other times we do demonstrations in the street. I miss out on one of the days, to go to the taster day for my new college; I can’t wait to get stuck into music again in September, but I’m annoyed this day had to happen during such an important week for me. When I get back, the guy in charge practically makes me a job offer for when I finish college in two years time. I can’t wait to go and live there for a year and work for his church. Who knows, I might even get to be a Pastor when I’m older!

Don’t you find that during hot summer days, when rays of light seem to deposit tiny beads of liquid on your skin, you just can’t fight those erections? Is it the heat that does it to me, or is it the fact that everyone strips off in the sun? Does it matter? The point is, it’s two weeks later and it’s getting out of hand.

Since we arrived in France, I’ve made my excuses and ‘gone for a wander’ during every single trip to the supermarket. I just can’t get these images out of my head and I need more. Resuming a routine from the past few years (look, memorise, masturbate; rinse and repeat), I head straight to the magazines and instantly appreciate how easy it is to reach up for an image of a naked man here, compared to the UK. On the second trip, I manage to tremblingly pick the magazine up off the shelf and leaf through it, ready to drop it the instant anyone walks around the corner. It’s fine, I’m only curious, after all I’m completely straight (I’m going to be a church leader, for heaven’s sake!).

It’s been a good twenty minutes and my Dad comes to find me: they need help choosing the breakfast cereal. Immediately, I become absorbed in a French caravan magazine, in my rehearsed ‘mission abort’ routine. Still shaking, but now flushed too, I begin to talk enthusiastically about how good the range of caravan magazines is and has my Dad had a chance to look at them yet. He points out that they are all in French and we move on, at least one of us deeply embarrassed and wishing never to be in such a situation again.

A fortnight later and I’m camping in a field somewhere in the English countryside with tens of thousands of other Christians, for an enormous Bible camp. I know my friends think me odd for it, but I really don’t mind because this is how I’ve been brought up: it makes sense to me, somehow, to be doing things like this. It’s an intense week: one by the end of which, my plans for the future change completely. God has shown me that I have let my biggest talent, music, become my biggest passion, that it’s more important to me than he is. Moving music off my college timetable means some other choices have to change too, but I know this is what God wants, even if I’m not exactly excited about what I’m studying. After all, I’ve got my year out with the church to look forward to.

It’s a Sunday in late August and, finally, a moment of quiet, reading alone in my room on the last weekend before college starts. I’m reading an autobiography by a leading pastor when, suddenly, I am hit by a wall of blind panic as I realise: I’m gay.

I’ve always known I fancied men and, yes, I’ve known what a gay person was for years. But that means I am one? That surely cannot be right. I’m a Christian and I’ve chosen to be straight; I want to marry a woman and have kids. Granted, I don’t actually fancy women yet, but that time will come, I know it will. It’s just that I started loving men before a love for women could grow. This is what I’m telling myself, even as I’m imagining the church meeting, one of the special members-only meetings, where they declare that such and such a person has been ‘put out’ of the church (even conversations with such people are discouraged; cross the road to avoid them if you must). At the imaginary members’ meeting in my head, everyone I’ve ever known and loved is being told to ignore me, so before I can let my imagination carry on any further, I make a pact with myself. Since I am the only person that knows I’m gay, I will keep it to myself.

To my surprise, I am now part of a minority: one that will shape the rest of my life. No one must know.

Zero to Hero

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Religious organisations, and Christian churches in particular, need to set out their values then plan thoroughly and work tirelessly to communicate with LGBT people.

After posing some important questions to evangelical Christians about how they show love to everyone, today I am thinking about how a church made up of such Christians might actually go about showing the LGBT people in their communities the love they strive to show to all.

I am currently convalescing while I wait to hear about whether I will receive an operation on my back. As such, I have been off work for three weeks and therefore, as you might expect, going more than slightly mad at the sight of the same (albeit very well-decorated) four walls. So yesterday I take my horizontal stature to my best friend’s house and at my best friend’s house I help her prepare for a job interview she is having today. A job that (for selfish reasons only) I do not want her to get, but that I want to help with because… well, she is my best friend and you don’t let best friends down if you can avoid it.

My best friend is a teacher by trade and, here in the UK, teaching in state schools is measured on a four point scale, 1 (Outstanding) to 4 (Requires Improvement). We talk about her presentation on the theme of moving a department of teachers from ‘Good’ to ‘Outstanding’ and by the time I get home, I get to thinking about how we would grade the Church’s ‘welcome’, or communication of love, to gay people. The conclusion I draw is that it needs to move from Zero to Hero pretty darn fast.

The presentation we write together has two parts; in the first, she outlines who she is and what is important to her, whereas in the second she outlines the key policies and procedures she feels will achieve the required goal of moving from Good to Outstanding. Here in the UK and, who knows, around the world, we have a problem whereby we need to move from Zero to Hero without delay. From a Christian perspective, the urgency arises out of the fact that until we start taking more about about our love for LGBT people, we can be confident we are not fulfilling the role we are supposed to be playing in society: showing love to all. With my secular hat on, getting this issue right or wrong means the different between a nasty sect and an acceptable force for good.

Communication is a two-sided entity in which neither side has sole responsibility; yet it’s the one who is trying to do the communicating that is really the one in whose interest it is to make sure there is no misrepresentation. What if the evangelical Church (or parts of it) actually laid out their values to gay people in language understood by all? Having laid these values out, what if churches then undertook whatever policies they deemed necessary in their own setting to actually go some practical distance toward demonstrating the welcome that (I remain hopeful) I’m sure is in their hearts?

It’s my feeling that if each church in the UK was able to assert that they had done this, we would actually have a true picture of which communities of faith actually have a prejudice problem and which, despite former appearances, may actually have had a hidden gem of love underneath the bluster.

Profound Tenderness, Passionate Affection: 6 Questions for Evangelical Christians

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What is love? This is one of the ultimate questions of our race: one explored by Andy Hayes earlier this week. Originating from a similar background to mine (we’ve even worked for similar employers), after reading around it seems geographical miles don’t count for much when it comes to the application of ‘good Christian values’ we have both experienced. You know the sort: claim to be focused on the family yet, on occasion, wrench families apart.

They talk a lot about sin. Here’s my question to evangelical Christians: where are your gay supporters? You will struggle to find them. Not because they don’t exist (they do in infinitesimal numbers) but because, where they are happy with the word gay (and that eliminates most), they are in hiding, too fearful to be honest with their closest friends and family, let alone themselves.

I have a third question. If love is profound tenderness and passionate affection, to what degree have Christians succeeded in loving gay people? Since I class myself as a Christian, I stand as accused as anybody else. My answer would be that I have failed, that is to say I am still learning. Some would insist that the application of their personal prejudices was an act of love (Christians talk of “speaking the truth in love”); to those people I ask, can you be sure of your deep-seated motivations?

Gay people, or LGBT people, are a people group. Whatever your opinions (and they are only opinions, whatever it is that you may think) about where sexuality comes from, the observed fact over generations has been that it rarely changes substantially in the course of a lifetime and never overnight and never by choice. Think of another people group (Afro-Caribbean, Romany Gypsies, Eastern Europeans); consider whether it would be acceptable to speak to a member of that people group in the way you have spoken of gay people in the past, even when you think none of them can hear you. Forgetting anybody else, would you personally feel it was justified to treat a gypsy that way, simply because they were a gypsy?

When an entire people group is at odds with a religion, there is an acceptance issue on the part of that religion. It is no more a sin to be a gay person any more than it is to be a black person, a gardener, a Jew or a male human. Insofar as sexuality is a part of human identity, loving others means seeing beyond others’ people group to exhibit tenderness and affection to an extent that it could be described as profound and passionate. Fancy giving that a try?

Fireside Solitude

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Sitting, again. Sitting still feels like a treat, so I relish it for the brief time it will last before pain returns. Pain that sears through my legs, requiring my body to form a total, untouched horizon on my parents’ brown leather sofa. Occasionally, my knees rise to form the snowy tip of a tall, tall mountain (the Semi-Supine) rising out of the still silent Torso Plain. Then, more pain. At a stroke, the mountain dissolves. I may fall asleep.

Gonzalo skimmed us last night and now we have balding trees and a carpeted lawn. Still occasionally blustery, the fire is lit and I’m grateful to simply sit. Sit, before more pain. Is pain the new punctuation of my life? Perhaps.

A relationship ended last night. Ten months. Forty one weeks. Two hundred and eighty nine days. More pointless to count the days than to sit atop our new outdoor carpet and count its leaves, though. Sooner or later they’ll be raked and vacuumed. Not yet, though. There is green among the reds and the browns of the ended relationship: greens of friendship. These, I hope, will endure beyond our 289. The trees here may be balder, but bald trees give way to more sunlight.

Gonzalo’s Tail

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Grateful to sit for once, I’m sitting (what a treat to be able to say it: sitting) in my parents’ comfortable home in suburban England. On the ten o’clock news: Hurricane Gonzalo hitting the UK and Lynda Bellingham, a popular actress and TV personality, dies of cancer after stopping treatment of terminal cancer.

Gonzalo has raged across the Atlantic. We expect the tail end of it overnight. The tail end; oh, the tail end. I long for the tail end. If this moment, right now, was the tail end of the past five years, I would climb the stairs tonight, in pain, yes, but a happy man. The final five of my twenties have been an inglorious and almost deadly affair.

Lynda Bellingham, though. What an inspiration the woman is. Sweeping the irritating fact that everyone who dies is a saint in the eyes of 21st Century Britons, her honesty about wanting the pain to end was truly inspiring. A positive approach to accepting the defeat of pain and, ultimately, death.

I go back to lying down. I’m not saying I want to die; far from it! Rather, I would like a conclusion to this chapter and a resolution to the mindbending cliffhangers posed by my story of the past five years.

I think of one aspect of the past five years and that aspect is back pain. Back pain is the most recent plague that has been set upon me. Plagues of the past, for me, have been dramatic, life-threatening, funny (yeah, funny), but never as mundane and as fundamentally undermining as back pain (cue the eye-roll) ; boring old back pain. Friends forget it (oh yeah, your back). Colleagues resent it (what, back pain, still?). The dog enjoys it (oh good, a daytime playmate). Family join the daily grind, adding in small number to the hidden, apparently voiceless, community of afflictees and their supporters.

When I get to the end of my yellow brick road and face the prospect of departing Earth for good, I’ll look back on this time, right now, smile and face my tail end confidently, like Lynda Bellingham. I’ll know that this time, right now, wasn’t much of a tail end after all; that back pain (eye-roll) wasn’t such a defining plague after all; that I can face my tail end confidently, feeling I’ve done so successfully many times before. That’s my hope.

In the meantime, it’s time for more painkillers. Let’s hope this autumn is the tail end of the eye-roll inducing back pain. Back pain has given me a need to vent, so here goes…