The Church and Homosexuality: Post-Lambeth Reflections

I formally applied for ordination training in 1975, just as l was coming up to my first degree exams. It meant filling in a form to be submitted to ACCM (as it then was). If you were also ordained around that time, you may remember this form, and the astounding list of questions that had to be answered under the heading ‘Personal Health’. They began conventionally enough with various enquiries about one’s general soundness in wind and limb, but then suddenly veered off into startling suggestions of personal peculiarity. louis vuitton wallets

‘Are you afraid of the dark?’

‘Do your hands shake, for example, when pouring a cup of tea’?’ (Obviously important for Vicarage entertainments, that one.) ·

‘Do you have, or have you at any stage had, a bedwetting problem?’

And my favourite of all;

‘Have you lost interest in almost everything?

l suppose a cynic might say this showed a commendable realism on ACCM’s part about the motives of ordination candidates, but it did give me worries about what I was letting myself in for. How many depressed and tremulous bedwetters had already got through the net, l wondered, and did I want to join them’?

However, my sense of psychological superiority was short lived, because a couple of weeks after sending back the form, I was summoned to pay a special visit to the ACCM psychiatrist. This, l later discovered, was because l had given permission for ACCM to see my medical record, and although l was unaware of it, my medical record showed that at the age of fifteen I had asked my GP if there was a cure for being gay. The doctor had written it down, and that was enough to ring the alarm bells at Church House. Cheap True Religion

So l had to go and be checked by the ACCM psychiatrist. This was the first time I realized that in seeking ordination I was entering a danger zone. I was furious that it had happened. but I duly trotted down to London from Oxford one Saturday morning and arrived at a remarkably dingy practice in Battersea. It was the sort of place one might imagine a back street abortionist to operate in, a tiny surgery with peeling wallpaper lit by one fly-blown naked lightbulb. This apparently was the Church of England’s psychiatric HQ. But the truly remarkable thing was the ACCM psychiatrist, whom at first I took to be a patient, since he was dressed in a leather jacket with studs and chains, leather boots, tight jeans, very long dark hair, and a cerise chiffon scarf. When he introduced himself as the ACM psychiatrist, I began to wonder if this was some sort of entrapment procedure - perhaps I was supposed to respond to the uniform and try to get off with him, whereupon an ACCM official would leap out from behind a curtain and say ‘Aha. Got you red-handed’

That did not happen. We had a cup of tea instead, successfully poured by me with a steady hand, and a cosy chat about family and feelings. Nothing at all about sexuality, nor the entry on my medical record, which was the reason I was there. After tea he said, since he realized I was more than a little angry about what had happened, that he would write his report on me right away so that l could see it myself and post it to ACCM on my w ay home. So he did. He wrote, ‘Dear ACCM Secretary, I have examined Mr John and conclude that he is a good deal saner than those who sent him to me. Yours sincerely,…’. I posted it in the box outside.

Such was my introduction to the gay problem in the C of E, and I suppose it was symptomatic. Until 1987 the problem of homosexuality was generally dealt with by ignoring it - even when it was staring you in the face, like the ACCM psychiatrist’s chiffon scarf. The policy of not dealing with it but quietly getting on with it was particularly endemic in old-style Anglo Catholicism, Some people regret it now and look back wistfully to the days of quiet toleration when those who wanted to did, and those who didn’t want to pretended it wasn’t there. No doubt in a way it was easier. But it is important to grasp that it is precisely that culture of double-think and turning the blind eye which has created the mess we are in today. ugg boots sale

From the mid nineteen-sixties at least, when the subject began to be openly discussed in secular society, one could find a certain amount of constructive wisdom about it in the Church, but only ever in private, in pastoral consultation or confession. From the time I was a teenager most Catholic clergy would say privately that if you were not celibate, you should avoid promiscuity, find a partner and live as discreetly as you could. By the time l was at theological college in the mid seventies the staff took a very supportive line. When l began the relationship I am still in, I went along to the Principal to own up, and asked if I should leave. To my astonishment and joy he congratulated me. He told me I had been a miserable, introverted academic, and that this relationship would make me a better human being and a better priest. He was right; it did. They were the wisest words I ever heard him utter. When I informed my diocesan bishop, the response was equally kind and supportive. He thanked me for being honest with him, and certainly saw no bar to my being ordained. But there was no question of this support and pastoral wisdom being expressed in public. Such truths were to be kept within the Catholic clerical club, where gay relationships were entirely normal, and still are. By this time, however, the veil of secrecy is in tatters, and the old kinds of gentlemanly understanding will not work.