Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

According to Peter Tatchell in The Guardian last month, the gay community has become feckless, amoral, trivial and without substance. This month, according to other papers, it seems all we want to do is take on the responsibilities that heterosexuals are anxious to be rid of – marrying, settling down and having 2.4 children.

Progress towards these goals in this country is negligible when compared with what is happening in the USA. There a titanic political and moral battle has been set in motion by two modest Hawaiian gay men called Pat Lagon and Joe Melillo.

Pat and Joe have been together for 19 years, and they decided, according to The Independent on Sunday (September 8th), that the time had come to get married – not pretend married, but really married. Needless to say, the Hawaii Department of Health refused their request for a marriage certificate, and the two men took the state to court “to argue for the right to become spliced, not as man and woman, but as man and man”.

According to Republican senator Charles Canady, the case has since become an argument about “nothing less than our collective moral understanding – as expressed in the law – of the essential nature of the family, the fundamental building block of society”.

If the Hawaiian case is won, then it is almost certain that gay marriages conducted in that state will eventually have to be recognised in the other 49 states, despite several of them trying to rush through legislation banning same-sex matrimony.

President Clinton then further betrayed his commitment to gay rights by signing the Defence of Marriage Act which encourages individual states not to recognise gay marriages and ensure that gay couples are denied any federal tax benefits extended to heterosexual couples. The Act defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

If the Lagon and Melillo case is won – and there is optimism that it will be – then each state will have to justify any refusal to recognise marriages that will have been legally performed in Hawaii.

Meanwhile, in this country, consternation was expressed by The Jewish Chronicle (September 27th) that Rabbi Elizabeth Sarah, a director of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, was planning to conduct a “lesbian wedding” in Sussex. When she announced her plan at a synagogue in Bushey “many congregants walked out” and the synagogue chairman was quick to distance himself from the plan, saying: “It is not a policy we wish to be identified with.”

All the same, there is some hope of change in the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain. Its chief executive said that the whole matter had been referred to an “assembly of rabbis” who will “look at the issue in relation to Jewish tradition and report back to us early next year”. He said: “As a movement, we are pledged to find room for all Jews who feel a commitment to Judaism, regardless of their social, political or sexual differences.”

Others remain implacably opposed. For instance, Barbara Amiel wrote in The Daily Telegraph (September 19th) that gay weddings would be the “last nail in the coffin of marriage”. She conceded that “some homosexuals couples have spent years together, paying mortgages, supporting each other emotionally as well as financially in committed relationships that make many of our own heterosexual unions seem rather flimsy” and yet still she thinks that marriage should be denied them. Her reasoning? “The institution of marriage has a specific purpose – to procreate and raise a family. That reason is unaltered by the fact that some people marry for purely economical reasons or that some marriages are without issue because of medical problems or personal choice.”

She says there is nothing stopping gays having deeply committed relationships with each other, “but they cannot create life”. Ms Amiel believes the real reason that some gay people are agitating for marriage is not because they feel strongly about the institution, but because they want “to achieve the legal obliteration of any distinction between the normative sexual behaviour of society and the neuropathology of homosexuality which affects a figure estimated at about five per cent of the population.”

Barbara Amiel, of course, is well qualified to comment on the sanctity of marriage, having been wed four times herself.

Another marriage veteran, Elizabeth Taylor, also had some words of advice to the gay community on the topic. In an interview in The Advocate she was asked to endorse the idea of gay marriage. Her response: “I would say to you all: ‘You’re crazy. If you want to be stupid, go ahead, but I don’t want to hear about any of your tears.” Sour grapes or hard-won words of wisdom?

Indeed, human beings being what they are, divorce is the inevitable shadow that dogs the steps of any marriage. It will be no different for gay people. The ending of legally binding relationships will be as messy and painful for us as it is for them. Especially if children are involved.

A little taste of this was given to us on Dyke TV (and subsequently in The Daily Mail) when a Scottish lesbian couple who were raising a child together decided to split up. A custody battle in court then ensued, and nobody came out of it smelling of roses.

Apropos of this, the Reverend Bill Wallace of the Church of Scotland was quickly on hand to tell The Daily Mail that “I think same-sex relationships do not have a good track record for stability.”

Has Mr Wallace seen the heterosexual divorce statistics recently?

Taking on the responsibility for raising children is a serious decision and I am all in favour of it being made difficult. Nobody, straight or gay, should undertake parenthood without first having to think carefully about it. Straight people often have children by accident, children which they resent and don’t want. Gay people have to go to great lengths to achieve the same end. Artificial insemination, adoption or surrogacy all need careful planning, not just a careless night of passion. But that does not stop the outcry from the tabloids whenever a child is brought into a gay relationship.

The Daily Express tried its damnedest to make the surrogate baby conceived in America on behalf of Bill Zachs and Martin Adam sound like a scandal, but the participants in the drama wouldn’t co-operate. The paper eventually tracked down the mother of the child, Andrea Gibson, but she was adamant that she had carefully thought about what she was doing, didn’t regret it and had the child’s best interests at heart. She thought little Sarah Clare would have a loving and privileged life with the two men.

This did not stop anti-gay propagandist George Gordon – The Daily Mail’s American correspondent – from trying to turn the positive into the negative. “My torment, by mother who sold baby to gays” was the headline over his piece (September 7th). He tried to convince us that the two gay men had somehow exploited the woman and that she now regretted her decision, but there was no evidence to back up his assertions, and despite his wishful claim that the government were about to “set up an urgent review into the case” no such review has been forthcoming, and none is planned.

The Right’s objections to gay parenting are familiar by now. Fiona Webster in The Daily Mirror expressed one of them: “A gay couple who have ordered a baby from America – in the same way you might order a toy from a catalogue – say they don’t want any embarrassing fuss… If these suddenly ‘shy’ parents want to learn anything about fuss and embarrassment, all they have to do is go into the school playground on ‘their’ child’s first day at school.” The other point made is that children brought up in a same-sex relationship will inevitably “become” gay themselves.

Some of these issues were explored in an article in The London Evening Standard, “Living with Gay Parents” (September 6th). Children who had been raised by gay parents were allowed to tell their own stories. One, Derby Davenport who is now 25, told how, at the age of twelve, she had confided in a friend that her mother lived in a lesbian relationship. “[The friend] told everyone in my class and I immediately became an outcast and all the children would whisper to each other as I walked down the hall. I never wanted to go to school again. That’s how it was for most of my teens.” She admits that eventually the experience made her stronger and more understanding, but it was terrible at the time. She is not gay herself, and neither are any of the other people interviewed in The Standard, although one young man said that he had been troubled about it for a while.

When Dan Katch discovered that his father was gay, he became terrified that he, too, would become homosexual even though he felt no attraction for men. He went to a therapist who assured him that his father’s sexuality had no influence on his own and from then on “I felt overwhelmingly relieved. The realisation that I wasn’t necessarily going to be gay just because my father was meant that I could stop being afraid of it.”

And that’s half the problem – people being afraid. If those who oppose gay child-rearing continue to peddle untruths about the nature and functioning of gay families, then progress will be slow indeed, and totally unnecessary fears will be planted in the minds of young people.

It is not gay couples who are harming the children in their care, it is the preachers and pseudo-moralists who do the damage. As a correspondent to The Daily Express’s letters page said: “Today many children in so-called normal families are abused, neglected and deprived without any public outcry. It is the quality of love and care given a child that matters, not who provides it.”

***

QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

Oscar Moore, the Guardian columnist who lost his long battle against Aids in September, wrote a last essay which could stand as his epitaph: “It is perhaps the inevitable, but certainly the fabulous irony, that the threat of death has led to a heightened sense of life, for me personally, and for the gay community in general.” (The Guardian)

“Please, George, do shut up and be sensible. Do refrain from pontificating on a subject, that of homosexuality, of which you, as a happily married man, appear to know pathetically little. I don’t remember Our Lord commenting on it. Are you not being a little presumptuous? In the world to which you look forward, you will not be judged on your sexual proclivities, but rather on the love and compassion you have shown for your fellow men.” The Rev Dr Robert de Massey’s advice to the Archdeacon of York, the Venerable George Austin (The Observer)

“From watching the porno channel in New York, I find that one of the biggest turn-ons for men is to see two women having sex together. I would feel very uncomfortable if, in the name of sexual liberation, I was actually being used for the opposite – sexually oppressing women,” was the reason given by Prime Suspect star Helen Mirren on why she will not be doing a lesbian sex scene in her new TV movie in which she plays a housewife who finds love with another woman.

That Eastenders kiss has got ‘em going. Take self-confessed “middle-aged housewife”, Ann Jones, who wrote to the Radio Times: “It is time television woke up to the fact that a sizeable number of the population are gay. It is far less offensive to watch a gay kiss than a heterosexual couple ripping each other’s clothes off.”

Real men don’t wear support hose. Let Leonardo di Caprio explain, talking to Premiere magazine about his new film he said: “Our Romeo and Juliet is a little more hard-core and a lot cooler. Because I wouldn’t have done it if I’d had to jump around in tights.”

Fran Landesman, the 60-something poet and lyricist, was asked on Desert Island Discs what luxury she would take with her: “Cannabis seeds,” she replied.

Terry Sanderson’s autobiography “The Reluctant Gay Activist” is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Gay-Activist-Terry-Sanderson/dp/B09BYN3DD9/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Actually I think Mrs Anne Atkins is right. She’s the vicar’s wife who made the famous Thought for the Day broadcast which seems to have brought the Anglican Church to the point of schism. In the broadcast, Mrs Atkins used the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement’s 20th anniversary bash at Southwark Cathedral to launch a full-frontal attack on what she regards as the Church of England’s permissive attitude to homosexuality. “Soon we will have an adulterers’ Christian fellowship, a sex before marriage Christian fellowship. I see no reason why the list should ever end.”

That fateful two and a half minutes on Radio Four generated a huge amount of comment and reaction. Stories appeared about the support the fragrant lady had got from her husband’s parishioners and people all around the country. She was photographed being embraced by her husband and surrounded by adoring children. The complete picture of traditional family values within the context of heterosexual marriage.

Apparently her phone never stopped ringing all day — and naturally everyone who rang agreed with her. A hundred vicars wrote to The Church Times roused to action by her clarion call. The woman certainly whipped up a storm, to the extent that The London Evening Standard opined: “Mrs Atkins bids fair to become a heroine of the church-going middle classes.” And there was plenty of evidence to support that opinion in the other papers.

Her outburst was like manna from heaven for those havens of moral correctness The Daily Mail, The Express and The Sun. “The Reverend Richard Kirker says the proposed service for gays and lesbians will be a ‘celebration’ of the ‘gift’ of their homosexuality. Who might I ask, gave them that gift? It certainly didn’t come from the God I love,” wrote D Keefe to The Daily Mail.

“Church must admit gays are sinners” headlined The Sun, while The Daily Telegraph thought that blasphemy had changed its meaning. The “modern blasphemy” apparently is not speaking ill of God, but daring to criticise homosexuals. Every religious fanatic and right-winger in the land raised cheers. At last, it seemed, their time had come.

But even as the newspapers lauded Mrs Atkins for her forthright espousal of true Christian values, they were, in their usual way, preparing to knock their new-found heroine from her pedestal.

Boy George was first in, when he wrote in his Daily Express column: “Just 60 shopping days to go and already the Christians are curdling the milk of human kindness. Anne Atkins, the wife of a vicar, says gays should be chased out of the Church. Her media outburst and profile might boost the sales of crimplene but life still goes on.”

The Sunday Express, however, thought it wasn’t the sales of crimplene Mrs Atkins was trying to boost, but something else entirely. “Thought for the Day: How to market my wonderful new book” was the headline over a comprehensive hatchet job on Mrs Atkins by Jane Warren. “Could it be that her dramatic contribution to the moral debate was related to the publication last week of her novel On Our Own, on sale in all good bookshops for £16.99?” Surely not.

A retired rector is quoted as saying: “It would certainly seem inappropriate for a vicar’s wife to use the scriptures to serve any other ends than God’s, if that’s what indeed she has done.” And yet Mrs Atkins “does not refute the charge that the radio and the book might be connected.” She happily admits: “The novel may have been one of my reasons for doing Thought…”

“Her morality is also distractingly flexible when it comes to her own fiction,” writes Jane Warren. “the unmarried heroine of her novel feels no shame about sleeping with her boyfriend. Bible-bashing fiction doesn’t sell so she simply stumped up the standard fare.”

During her Thought for the Day talk, Mrs Atkins claimed: “I am not homophobic and have gay friends.” It seems she must now speak of those friends in the past tense, because according to Richard Kirker: “We have received a number of letters from gay Christian friends of Anne Atkins. They are horrified that she might have been thinking of them when she spoke of having ‘gay friends’ and they no longer wish to be considered as her friends.”

But despite the fall from grace, Mrs Atkins had given the holy homophobes a new impetus. The Daily Telegraph reported that “every Friday at lunch-time, two dozen or so City workers meet in a room at St Margaret’s Church, tucked behind the Bank of England, for tea, sandwiches, Bible-reading and prayers”. And, it seems, a spot of righteous gay-bashing.

“The Bible says that if people are involved in homosexuality they cannot enter the kingdom of God,” one is quoted as saying. Another says: “Homosexuality is one thing God says you should not do if you want to benefit from My kingdom and My life.” Another insists the Bible considers homosexuality “shameful and a perversion”.

These sad souls, who seem to derive great pleasure from hatred, adore telling each other how good they are and how wicked everyone else is. But they don’t have it all their own way. The Telegraph also visited a pub up the road, where ordinary people were spending their lunch break, to find out what they thought. Ms Rochelle Ormond, 26, who describes herself as a regular churchgoer said: “If gays and lesbians want to do that sort of thing then good luck to them. It’s a free country. If they want to be together they should be allowed. If a heterosexual couple want to be married in church, then I can’t see why a gay couple can’t be. I don’t see why if two people love each other they shouldn’t show the world what their feelings are.”

Dear old bleeding-heart liberal Rachelle. She’d better watch what she says or she’ll be going to church on Sunday and finding herself had up for heresy. Yes, heresy! If you thought that such a medieval idea had gone out of fashion with the Spanish Inquisition, think again. In fact it’s one of the favourite buzz-words of Reform, a group of Anglican authoritarians who are leading the charge against gays in the Church.

One of the leading lights of this bunch of fanatics is the Reverend David Holloway (he’s the one who’s always on Kilroy and The Time and The Place breathing fire and brimstone to order). The Revd Holloway was writing in The Church Times about LGCM’s party: “There is now evil in the Church even where there is ‘chief authority’. There has been overt heresy in the episcopate… Public doubts and denials of the virginal conception and empty tomb of Jesus are heretical, if words mean anything. The bishops’ report Issues in Human Sexuality is also heretical. For all the benign language (and much good material), the acceptance of conscientious gay sex among the laity is heresy.” In fact, anything that Reform doesn’t agree with (and that’s just about everything that’s happened since the 12th century) is “heretical”.

Heresy is a very useful concept for authoritarians because it effectively stifles debate. You want to challenge the orthodoxy? You’re a heretic. You think the church is being cruel and inhuman? You’re a heretic. This is one game the gentle and compassionate Christian can’t win, only McCarthyite bully boys like Reform will use weapons such as ‘heresy’ and ‘blasphemy’ to silence its opponents. Don’t forget, you can still be sent to jail for blasphemy.

An editorial in The Church Times sought to referee the scrap between the LGCM and Reform. “The bishops have become like the police at a demonstration, caught between two rival factions, and hit by missiles thrown by both… Different views necessarily exist in any Christian Church; and a common mistake is to allow the existence of opposing views to harden one’s own. Valuable Anglican habits of debate and toleration are thus replaced by assertion and confrontation. To live in communion with people with whom one disagrees is a sign of strength, not weakness.”

This plea for tolerance regrettably fell on deaf ears. The Revd Ian F R Jarvis of Derbyshire wrote in the following issue: “You pass over the awkward fact that Reform, most evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, and many other Anglicans besides believe that the gay and lesbian sexual behaviour advocated by LGCM is radically unChristian, in fact anti-Christian. Because of that conviction, solidly based in scripture and age-long Christian teaching, they can do no other than protest and oppose such behaviour as rigorously as possible. Truth matters far more than your editorial begins to acknowledge. It exposes a deep, radical disagreement on what is, and is not, Christian sexual behaviour. Your editorial makes sorry reading, a sad capitulation to secular Western cultural values.”

And so I return to the point I made at the beginning. I think Mrs Atkins is right, and so is the Revd Holloway and all the others. Christian teaching leaves no room for doubt that homosexual sex is contrary to the rules and all the “theological nit-picking” (as the Revd Holloway calls it) in which gay Christians engage will not change that fact. Reform and its members, and the Roman Catholic Church say that our love is “intrinsically evil”. We know from our own experience that they are wrong about this. And if they are wrong about this, then they can be wrong about so much else.

It’s from this starting point that those gays hammering on the doors of an institution that despises them might stop and consider the alternatives. They could begin the slow process of disengagement. There are alternatives to religion that value human life and all experience. It’s possible to be good without God.

***

QUOTES OF THE MONTH:

The Guardian was enchanted by a photograph of Defence Secretary Michael Portillo published in The Times during the Tory Party Conference. It showed our Mick “relaxing in his Bournemouth Hotel with a bowl of fruit by his side.” Guardian diarist, Smallweed, pondered the significance of the fruit. “I suspect the return of the kind of iconography, once familiar in portraiture, where heroes appear with symbols… designed to convey some allegedly salient truth about them. We are being asked, subliminally, to see Michael Portillo as a bringer of fruit…”

The arrival of TV’s newest and campest cooks, Two Fat Ladies, has prompted much wild speculation. “Are they nodding acquaintances,” asked The Independent on Sunday’s David Aaronovitch, “brought together by the BBC, like the Monkees or Boyzone, to create a camera-friendly chemistry? Is it possible that they are followers of Sappho, living together in Shropshire, with two golden retrievers and a donkey called Prescott? Or are they Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders in their most subversive show to date?”

“He doesn’t say much,” writes Sylvia Patterson in The Face, “has a lot of sex and is full-frontal naked for much of his on-screen time.” Who? Euan McGregor, that’s who. In Peter Greenaway’s new film, The Pillow Book. Oh, and “he has a very handsome penis.” There’s more. “Weren’t you worried about, you know, shrinkage?” Patterson boldly enquires. “No fuckin’ worries there, darlin’.” For once, this is no idle boast…

When politicians talk about morality, it’s usually time to count the spoons. But Labour leader, Tony Blair, has made a better pitch than many: “I’ve no desire to return to the age of Victorian hypocrisy about sex, to women’s place being only in the kitchen, to homophobia or to preaching to people about their private lives… But the absence of prejudice should not mean the absence of rules, of order, of stability… Let the social morality be based on reason — not bigotry.”

Poor Jason Donovan, forever haunted by that libel case. His latest attempt to resurrect his once-glittering career saw him talking to The Guardian: “I was virtually brought up by a gay guy for six years so I was surrounded by the gay community and I loved it… I paid the price for alienating the gay community and my gay audience.” And if he had his time over again, would he still have sued The Face? “No, I wouldn’t. It was horrible. Horrible.”