AS THIS ADVENT SEASON invites us to ponder the mystery of Jesus’s coming at Christmas, I’m sharing a short series of reflections inspired by Listening to the Music of the Soul, the Archbishop of York’s Advent book for 2025 by Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani.
In her exploration of faith, identity, beauty and vulnerability, Bishop Guli invites us to listen for the melodies that shape our inner lives and connect us more deeply with God and one another.
In the first post in this series I shared Bishop Guli’s invitation to compile our own Desert Island Discs – eight pieces of music
‘to help you better understand yourself and the things that are important to you… [and] remind you of seminal moments in your life’.
This challenged me to reflect on the ‘music of my soul’ and the stories it evokes that tell me something about who I am now and how I came to be here. In the days up to Christmas Eve I will share one of those reflections – pieces of music and moments of meaning. Here’s my fourth:
True Colors by Cyndi Lauper
Like my second music choice this song was also released in 1986, a little later that year, when I was 16. I don’t recall how much I was aware of it at the time, though I spent much of my 16th year working after school on Saturdays in a branch of Woolworths which played and sold the latest popular music, so I guess I heard it there, and on the radio.
I didn’t know at the time that the singer Cyndi Lauper recorded it in memory of her friend Gregory, who had died of HIV-related illness the year before. He was kicked out by his parents at the age of 12 when they discovered he was gay, and ended up sleeping on park benches.
Lauper went on in 2008 to set up the True Colors Fund (which became known as True Colors United) to support LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness. The Fund opened the first True Colors Residence for homeless LGBTQ+ youth in New York City in 2011, and the second in 2015, with plans for three more.
By 2008 I had come out as gay, moved to Liverpool, and begun working for the city’s longest running LGBT youth group. Between 2011 and 2013 I was a trustee, then development worker, for a new charity in the city seeking to support LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness. For this role I researched examples of similar support elsewhere in the world, and discovered the work of the True Colors Fund.
I wasn’t aware or accepting of my own sexuality at the time True Colors was released. But when I learned the back story, and how it inspired the True Colors Fund mission statement to end LGBTQ+ youth homelessness by ‘creating a world where all young people can be their true selves’, this song took on a whole new meaning for me.
By then I had also met the man who would become my husband, and we were both part of the first Open Table community for LGBTQIA+ Christians which began in 2008, and is now part of a UK-wide network of which I am the Director.
When we were planning our civil partnership – the first to be registered in a place of worship in the UK – in May 2012, we chose this to be the song to which we would walk down the aisle, together, after our ‘best friends’ had walked in to my third music choice played on the church organ. The song was beautifully performed live by Liverpool Rainbow Chorus, the city’s LGBT+ choir.
The lyrics sounded to us like what we could say to each other and, we believe as LGBTQIA+ Christians who were working to support other LGBTQIA+ Christians through our Open Table community, how God speaks to us, especially the chorus:
But I see your true colors
Shining through
I see your true colors
And that’s why I love you
So don’t be afraid to let them show
Your true colors
True colors are beautiful
Like a rainbow.
It was a highlight of a beautiful day. After the reception my new civil partner and I retreated to a nearby hotel. About nine hours after we’d walked into the church to this song, Cyndi Lauper’s original was playing as we entered the lobby. We didn’t just ask for God’s blessing on that day – we most definitely received it.
Looking back, True Colors has become one of those melodies that I didn’t recognise at first, but which has been quietly shaping my life for decades. It is a song that speaks of being seen, named, and loved into courage – a theme that runs through my own story of faith, identity, and belonging.
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