A couple enjoy a moment together at Birmingham Pride (Photograph: Adam Yosef)
It became legal to be gay, to an extent anyway, in 1967, when I was 13. At the time it was widely viewed as something nasty, which was best left unmentioned.
I started at secondary school in 1965, and remember a lot of jokes about ‘sexual perverts’, though I wasn’t clear what sort of nastiness was involved, and I don’t think many of the others were either; it was a climate which fostered ignorance.
The games master was a notorious bully who was entirely too fond of physical contact with boys; there have never been any allegations of abuse, but most of us hated him. His name was Mr Holmes, and we called him Homo, for homosexual, with a long ‘O’, and the stress on ‘sexual’. He hated it, and with hindsight, was massively homophobic. I’m still in touch with some of the people from my year; we think he was probably gay himself, and repressed about it.
Inevitably, I knew a couple of boys who eventually came out as gay. One in particular was clearly ‘different’ at the time, though I didn’t know why. We were all fans of ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ which was often full of gay innuendo. Society in general was still very homophobic. There were conversations about ‘them’, and little or no understanding.
Robert Brenchley is a Methodist preacher from Birmingham (Photograph: Adam Yosef)
There was even less about the people we soon started reading about in the press, who had ‘sex changes’. Whether you were straight, gay, trans or whatever, it wasn’t healthy.
Hopefully we’ve moved on somewhat since then, but I sometimes wonder how far, particularly where trans people are concerned. Have we merely repressed prejudice for a while, leaving it lurking, ready to appear again when conditions are right? I look at the way racism has been emerging from the shadows again, and worry.
Much of conservative Christianity is imported from the States, but even over here, otherwise perfectly decent people are led to be unpleasantly free to condemn gay people. I’m not sure how long this would last if they knew any of them well, but of course there aren’t many who are out in those circles. I’m not sure why there’s such a perceived need to emphasise the half dozen very short snippets of the Bible which provide ammunition for this.
Religious people are very good at ignoring inconvenient bits of scripture. I’ve yet to meet a preacher who held that bashing babies’ brains in could ever be a blessed thing (Psalm 137:8-9), but the way they maintain homophobia suggests that there is some, probably unconscious, purpose for it.
Conservative religious groups like the Westboro Baptist Church in the US stand against LGBT+ civil rights (Photograph: David Shankbone)
>> READ MORE: How is LGBT History Month being celebrated in Birmingham? <<
The sectarian mentality needs enemies, but why keep that one going when there are other, more marginalised, groups of people out there, and fundamentalism adapts and changes all the time?
Trans people are particularly vulnerable. I’ve heard horrific tales of people being gay-bashed, but violence towards trans people seems to be more persistent, along with phobia from vocal sections of the population; not only religious conservatives, but some feminists, for instance, who still insist that ‘trans women are men’.
Once again, most of them are perfectly decent people, and some have had appalling experiences with men. But that doesn’t mean that trans women are fakes.
It’s easy to understand the historical importance of LGBT Month, but is its continuing importance any more than a sign that we’re not really as inclusive as we like to pretend?
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Robert Brenchley
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Robert Brenchley, 63, is a local Methodist preacher from Birmingham.
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