When I moved into a new place a while ago, one job was to display a collection of my photos on one wall. While getting sucked into a Pinterest search for wall art, my mind drifted back to what I have had on my walls in the past and one particular memory stuck out. While at university, I had a poster displayed above my bed with a baby blue background and white writing that read: ‘Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them.’ Having a Christian faith and being LGBTQ+ can make the ‘com

Once upon a time there was a little girl who was a bit different; everyone thought that she was a boy. She was a very kind and caring person but no one would help her just be herself. She was subjected to male behavioural conditioning which culminated in being hypnotised into actually believing that she was a boy. For many years of her life she couldn't figure out why she couldn't do what the other boys did and why she was so much more comfortable in female company. She had

My new beginnings started on bonfire night in 2014 when I wandered back to the smouldering bonfire at the end of the night to pray alone. I told God my regrets of being celibate in the church; for not having the courage to come out earlier and of having given up a girlfriend I had many, many years ago, seemingly for Him, for the Church. Regrets. The next morning I knew God had taken the heavy weight of celibacy from me. And six months later I had come out and new beginnings

I realised my sexual orientation from age seven when I fell for my Year 3 student teacher, and was fixated with other boys at school and Uni, but, growing up in a sheltered environment, had no fitting vocabulary to describe my feelings. Even when I did, my refrain would always be I’ve never ‘felt’ gay: my gender expression is definitely masculine: my man friends outnumber woman, and cis-straight outnumber LGBT+. Growing up in the military, I was often told gay people are “si

Every time it’s like the first time. Every time I drop the words into a space that seems to fit them, stand back, and wait to see what happens. Every time my heart’s beating faster. Every time I’m wondering which bridges I’ve burned. Every time the reaction is unforeseeable. Every time I think I should have foreseen it. Whatever it turns out to be. Every time I’m rewriting the other person’s assumptions about me. Every time it’s a new beginning. People talk about bisexual inv

Imagine, if you will, a gay teenager in a vicarage on a council estate in South Bristol in the early 90s. No internet, virtually no out gay people on TV, and even if there had been an LGBT section in Bishopsworth library, this vicar's son wasn't about to be caught there. Nope, my entire knowledge of what it meant to be gay was picked up from a terrible game show on Channel 4 called 'Sticky Moments with Julian Clary' and a VHS recording of the Rocky Horror Show which I kept i

A new year, a new start. We find one of the biggest obstacles to LGBT people being accepted in UK churches is that Christians aren’t always told true stories about what it’s like to be an LGBT person. You’ll have heard some of these stories: that people choose to be LGBT as an act of rebellion against God; that all gay people live a hedonistic party lifestyle and will die an early death of drug overdoses or STIs; that all bi people are promiscuous. And so on. Or, the existenc