This Lent, our inclusive church in Liverpool city centre offered a six-week course to explore the ‘queerness’ of the Christian tradition. Participants read and discussed Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity (Beacon Press, 2016), written by the American Episcopal priest Elizabeth Edman. At the launch of the study guide to accompany… Read more »
TEN YEARS AGO this month, the UK’s longest running LGBT youth group* produced a short film about their experience of being lesbian, gay or bisexual in Liverpool. The 18 minute film aimed at 13-19 year olds uses drama, animation, original music and research to present issues around coming out, bullying at school, harassment at work, love and relationships. The message… Read more »
TODAY, 11th October, is celebrated in many countries as ‘National Coming Out Day’, a campaign to promote a safe world for LGBT+ individuals to live truthfully and openly. This morning I marked the occasion by giving a lecture to around 300 trainee teachers, to raise awareness of issues around gender and sexuality, and to explore these in age-appropriate ways in… Read more »
THESE were the courageous words of the keynote speaker at this year’s annual conference of Quest, which offers pastoral support for LGBT Catholics in the UK. Sister Jeannine Gramick has cared and campaigned for the LGBT community in the USA since 1971, two years before Quest was founded. I first heard about Sister Jeannine in 1999 when, together with her colleague… Read more »
IT’S BEEN almost five years since I started this blog – but in the last five months I have been unusually quiet. It has been an exceptionally busy time with the unprecedented growth of my voluntary work with the Open Table ecumenical Christian community, alongside other commitments. Not only that, but the company which was hosting the website became increasingly unreliable… Read more »
Yesterday afternoon I visited a secondary school to discuss what more they could do to support their LGBT+ students. Last night I dreamed I travelled back in time and saw myself as a teenager. My younger self recognised me, approached and gave me a hug. I may have been watching too much science fiction lately, but I suspect these two… Read more »
THIS is a guest post by Amy, Gary and Katherine, members of Open Table at St Bride’s Liverpool, about being asexual and raising awareness this month: Today (Saturday 29th October) is the final day of Asexual Awareness Week (AAW). Now in its seventh year, AAW was created to celebrate asexual, aromantic, demisexual and grey-sexual pride and also to promote awareness. AAW… Read more »
THIS is a guest post by Jen Williams, a member of Open Table at St Bride’s Liverpool, who writes about walking with a Christian group in a Pride march for the first time: Basking in the sun, under a brightly coloured rainbow umbrella, donning a rainbow cape, and wearing a beautiful white t-shirt with the brand new Open Table logo,… Read more »
In Interfaith Week, November 2015, the LGBT Foundation in Manchester held an event called ‘Believing In LGBT Young People‘, which was the inspiration for the Divine Love event I facilitated in Liverpool in LGBT History Month this February. At this event I met a young playwright and director who was promoting her new play, One Flesh, about an evangelical Christian woman… Read more »
IN OCTOBER 2014, the UK Government announced £2 million funding for charities offering creative ideas to stamp out homophobic, biphobic and transphobic (HBT) bullying in schools. In March 2015, eight organisations received a share of the fund, including the children’s charity Barnardo’s, for its plan ‘to provide face-to-face support for victims of HBT bullying and training for staff with a focus on… Read more »