Environment Agency: For homes and habitats

That was what my university friends told me, just before I was due to go home for a weekend, shortly after I’d started seeing my first girlfriend.  I don’t know why I listened to them at first.  They’d never met my parents, didn’t know they were kind and loving, only that they were Methodist Ministers.  So why was that their first reaction, and why did I listen?

That was in the early nineties, and whilst I’d never heard anything negative about homosexuality from my parents, I had heard a few mutterings from the church I had attended.  So I was scared of my parent’s reaction.  I shouldn’t have been.  My parents are awesome, and had for years known I was gay, and decided quite early on that I needed to discover it for myself, and that they wouldn’t tell me. They therefore orchestrated lots of opportunities for me to tell them – but that is a whole different blog!

I grew up in a house full of faith – my parent’s faith, my sister’s faith, and the faith of all the congregation who regularly visited.  I was 14 when I was confirmed, affirming my faith in God, in public, in church.  At the same age, I was starting to have a sense that I was gay.  It is only now, writing this blog, that I am thinking about whether I hid from that part of myself in order to belong in the church, or whether I was simply not ready to recognise that part of me. But deep down, I recognise that I had been hurt by comments made by members of the congregation (not to me) about homosexuality, that did make me wonder whether I could ever properly be part of something that didn’t recognise and accept some human beings for who they are.  My mum once said to me the church is the people, not the building.  Well if the people were like that, I wasn’t sure I wanted anything to do with it.