Quest

Benedict Luckhurst

“That night they caught nothing” (John 21:3)

A feature of my nearby county town is the river that runs through its heart. For decades, however, the town has largely ignored the river. As a result it is mostly hidden from view by factories, a large brewery, and retail parks. Someone, however, has now woken up to the possibility of utilising the river as a focal point for leisure and a potential tourist lure by submitting an application for a floating restaurant adjoining a local park; the only open space on the banks of the river nearest to the town centre.

Objections to the scheme were initially raised by the unlikely alliance of the local police force and gay activists, the latter arguing that it will harm the openness, natural character and freedom of the area. In fact, the proposed three-deck floating restaurant is close to an area used by male and female cruisers and cottagers. A gay website describes it as a place where “fun can be found in-car and in the bushes as well” but warns ‘fun lovers’ “don’t leave your sex litter behind though, it gives us a bad name.” The police have since said they have not objected to the planned restaurant, but warned the town council that there could be a clash of interests between locals and cruisers. The local lesbian and gay alliance posed the question: ‘What about the needs of the gay community? How are they being met in terms of bars and clubs and social spaces?’ Read more…

Mark Dowd

From his new home in Madrid, former Quest chair, Mark Dowd, reports on the difficulties that gays still face despite having some of the most liberal sexuality laws in Europe. A case perhaps of the Spanish equivalent of ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’ (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

Summer 2005. I am in Valencia on Spain’s east coast having swapped my London flat in a holiday exchange for a pad just a stone’s throw from the city centre. Tuning in to the evening news, there is a feature on a male couple. They are the first in the country to have taken advantage of the country’s new gay marriage legislation. The crew from TV España film their first full day as a married couple. And it rather resembles a scene from La Cage Aux Folles as the cameras capture them walking the dogs and ambling down to the bakery for pastries. You can tell that the reporter is keen to inject some tension into the piece by trying to find some detractors. She approaches a gaggle of elderly ladies dressed in solemn clothes. Surely they´ll provide a bit of homophobic opposition? Franco turning in his grave at the thought of same-sex marriage blessed by the state; that sort of thing. When I heard the vox pops, I knew that these new legal changes weren’t just superficial.

“Aren’t they lovely? Why shouldn’t they marry?” asked one woman in a severe black mantilla. “They’re very good with dogs…that’s what I like,” said her elderly companion. In the end, the reporter confessed she’d spoken to a lot of people but failed miserably to come up with any ammunition. So all is well in Spain then? It’s the new gay nirvana?

Well not quite. Read more…

Benedict Luckhurst

According to a press report, the actress Keira Knightly deliberately ignores her mobile when it rings, much to the displeasure of her mother. Keira said: “My mobile phone doesn’t really get answered a lot. I don’t like talking on the phone, which is a nightmare because my mother does.” Doubtless Keira’s celebrity status is the principal reason why she ignores phone calls, but I am pleased to be in such good company. Indeed, I will take my aversion a step further and pronounce a curse on the day the telephone was invented and a thousand curses on the day the mobile telephone was conceived.

I am in a deep sleep or enjoying an afternoon nap, the phone rings. I am praying, the phone rings. I am cooking, the phone rings. I am eating, the phone rings. I am washing up, the phone rings. I am reading, the phone rings. I am in the bathroom, the phone rings. I am watching a favourite TV programme, the phone rings. I am listening to music, the phone rings. It can only be the invention of Satan!

Irascible, belligerent, irritable: I admit to them all when it comes to life with the telephone. In my increasing desire for solitude and to taste something of the eremitical life, the culmination of many years of searching, the sound of a telephone ringing is an intrusion and a source of constant irritation. The answer would be to remove the irritant completely, landline and mobile; but, for the time being, this is not a viable option.

Read more…

Kieran Bohan

Barbara Glasson. The Exuberant Church: Listening to the Prophetic People of God. Darton, Longman & Todd. ISBN 978-0-232-528619

One of the speakers at the Quest Conference in 2010 was the Reverend Doctor Barbara Glasson, a Methodist minister currently working in Bradford. Previously she led Somewhere Else, the community which hosts meetings of the Quest Liverpool group. As she prepared to leave Liverpool Barbara began a series of conversations with Kieran, other representatives of Quest and Storm, an ecumenical LGBT Christian group, and other people marginalised by mainstream faith groups. Her newly published book, The Exuberant Church, is the result of these conversations about how LGBT Christians, and other ‘coming-out people’, may be prophetic examples of the potential for new life and growth in the faith communities from which they spring. The text of her Conference talks form the basis of this book, hence they could not be published on the Quest website as usual. Barbara plans to launch her book at the Quest conference [This text was published in Spring 2011 - editor] this summer in recognition of the contribution this ‘prophetic community’ has played in the formation of this work. Here Quest Liverpool Convenor Kieran Bohan reflects on the coming out experience, based on Barbara’s pastoral and theological  insights. 

In writing about the process of ‘coming out’, Barbara Glasson describes how it takes ‘an unusual and specific sort of courage’. As a gay Christian man I can vouch for this from my own experience. And, as the convenor of the Quest group in Liverpool, and the co-ordinator of an LGBT youth group in the city, I think I can say with some authority that courage is indeed a defining characteristic of the process of questioning your identity and becoming something which defies the dominant norms of culture, society and faith. Read more…

Benedict Luckhurst

Glitter and Be Gay is the title of a song from Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Candide, based on a novella by Voltaire. The sexuality of the composer and conductor Bernstein (1918-90) has long been the subject of speculation and debate. Humphrey Burton’s significant biography, published in 1995, several times suggests that his subject may have been gay. Certainly, while still a student at Harvard, Bernstein befriended many of the leading musical figures in New York, a large number of whom were gay; composers such as Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, Samuel Barber, Gian-Carlo Menotti and, later, Stephen Sondheim, who collaborated with Bernstein on West Side Story. In this respect, Bernstein, like many of his contemporaries, guarded his privacy. Arthur Laurents, another of Bernstein’s collaborators on West Side Story, said that he was “a gay man who got married. He wasn’t conflicted about it at all. He was just gay.”

In Candide, Cunegone, the daughter of a baron, escapes a war that destroyed her family. She is forced to maintain her lifestyle by sharing herself with several important Parisians, thus she sings of her need to conceal her unhappiness by laughter and a cheerful demeanour. Read more…