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Today's date is Wednesday the 13th of January 2016. The interviewer is Carol Shepard. Can you tell me your name please? Christopher Wardell. And could you spell your name please? W-A-R-D-A-L-E. Thank you. Can I ask for your date and place of birth? 11-7-46 Stokesley in North Yorkshire. Today's interview is being recorded at 24 Beechcroft, Kenton Road, Newcastle

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upon Tyne. For the Christian Voices Coming Out project. Okay Chris, I wonder if you could begin by telling me about where you grew up, any siblings, what your parents did, that kind of thing. Single child, brought up on the North Yorkshire coast in a tiny little Victorian seaside resort called Sodburn-by-the-Sea. Father ran a bus company, mother was a teacher.

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I did a sort of fairly ordinary schooling in my young years, much to everybody's surprise, I passed the 11 plus and went to the grammar school which for the next seven years I absolutely loathed. Then went off to university, got a degree in fine art, went and restored medieval stained glass in York Minster. Finally realised a vocation that had been lurking around for

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a lot of years. When I got to the age of 30 thinking if I wasn't going to do it, it was going to be too late. Went off and tested it and much to my surprise and I think gods ended up with the dog collar on. Is that the Anglican Church? Yes. Okay. Talk to me, did your brothers or sisters? No. So you're an only child? Yes. Okay. Would you say you had

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a living faith when you were a child? I had a church faith. Church became the sort of the place I went to. I was never very good at sort of things like youth clubs and cubs, scouts, things like that. They weren't really for me at all. But church was great because there were things to do and I started serving at a remarkably early age and got involved

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with all the myriad bits of things that there are to do in and around a church and a church fest. And that became, as it were, my little club. That was the place I went to and nobody seemed to mind very much. Nobody complained. So it was alright. And I spent quite a lot of time there and got to know people very well. And I was always better with adults

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really than I ever was with other children. I seemed to relate much better to them. Yeah. Do you think this was because you were an only child? I can't really answer that question because I never knew what it was like to have brothers or sisters. I may have been a very different person or there again I may not have been. So I don't know really. Okay. When

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did you first become aware of your sexuality and your sexual identity? It was somewhere during school, secondary school, as everybody else got terribly, terribly interested in girls. I got terribly interested in drama. Drama the subject? Drama the subject. Not being a diva. Yeah, it's not being a diva. Oh, I could be a diva. I could be a diva.

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And then it began to dawn on me and I think as it always happens with adolescence, you think you're the only one in the world. Yeah. And nobody else would know and they'd all have a fit and faint and all the rest of it. So I don't think I ever did anything about my sexuality apart from having discovered what a hand could do and what pleasure it could give.

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I never really did anything about sexuality until I went to university and came here to Newcastle, which was only 60 miles away but was an entirely different place. It was a foreign land. You'd cross three major rivers and you came to a place where they spoke a foreign language and they did things differently and suddenly you could be almost who you wanted to be.

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Did it have that big city feel then? Yes, for me it was a big city, although it was actually a very small city, but it had the feeling of a big city. There were three theatres and umpteen cinemas and there was music and there was things to do and there were pubs galore and there was a gay pub. In fact there were two in those days, which were all a bit secretive and in some ways

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that made it even more interesting, whereas now it's dead boring because there are so many gay pubs and nobody gives a toss really. And it's mostly full of straight people because certainly straight women feel much safer in a gay pub than they do anywhere else, especially in Newcastle on a Friday night. What did you do at university? Fine art. Oh yes, with stained glass. Stained

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glass? Yes, that's right. And did you get involved in gay soc and things like that? Oh there wasn't gay soc, nothing like a gay soc. The one place you couldn't be gay was the university, because either the medics or the agricultural students beat you up. You could be gay in town, that was all right within that particular group, but it wasn't. I mean this was the middle 60s and though

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we were all wearing flowers in our hair in the day when we had hair and all the rest of it. Being gay was still thought of something as very suspicious and all the rest of it. And it was still illegal. And still very illegal. So what were you involved in at university as well as your fine art degree? Very little. Very little. In fact I didn't do politics.

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I took one look at the Christian Union and realised that they thought the Bible was literally true and there really had been two people called Adam and Eve and realised that really wasn't for me. I began to discover that there were lots of other ways of doing Christianity than just the one I'd been brought up with at home, which had been very middle of the church.

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But you could kind of within, in the city centre itself, you could go from extreme Protestant Church of England to extreme high church, Church of England, and this became fascinating. This became absolutely fascinating as I began to find and made friends in the churches. I have made friends at university, but they were people I

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worked with, rather than people I ever went out drinking with. I did a lot of work in the Theatre Royal Moving Scenery, which fills in a couple of years, and then went at the old repertory company. I purely by chance met the guy who was the then designer and he was looking for somebody to paint scenery, so I went and painted scenery. So weekends were taken on kind of working

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really. So it wasn't a terribly social university life, it was a very busy university life, but not a particularly social one. So relationships, were they happening? There were friendships and there were

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anonymous sexual connections, until my final year when I did meet someone, purely by chance. I spilled a pot of paint over him when we were painting the set for Murder in the Cathedral, which seemed ironic in a way. And he was very cross about that, he was very apologetic. We went and had a drink afterwards and I turned into a, though it was only as it were a one-to-one

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for the last six months before I moved and went off to work in York, we were always friends. And indeed I did his funeral a couple of years ago, but we never stopped being friends. So you discovered your calling and you went off and got a dog collar, as you put it. Went off and got a dog collar.

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How have you, during that time, did you reconcile your faith in your sexuality publicly or privately? By the late 60s things had relaxed amazingly. There was a very large gay community in York where I was living. And it wasn't just all squeezed into one particular pub. I got involved

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in a lot of theatre companies and there again I was doing scenery for them and I was doing acting for them. So life became much more social and made a lot of long-lasting friends, sexual and otherwise, in those eight years. And there was much more of a feeling, yes, you have to watch your back. You didn't exactly walk down the street burning your Calvin Kleins,

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not that they'd been invented in those days. But there was much more a feeling of coming out and frankly nobody cared any more. And at college, and of course it didn't bother me all the business about getting ordained and, oh God, the church roof would, you know. And when would the question come, was I gay? Because I was, I was 30. I wasn't married. It was quite clear I wasn't married.

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And I'd never had particularly close women friends. I had a lot of women friends. And nobody ever asked the question. Ever. Every time I went for an interview with anyone I thought this is going to be the one. This is going to be it. Am I going to be honest or am I not going to be honest? I'd come out at work and most people I got friendly with sort of, they didn't care

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whether I didn't have to formally come out. It didn't bother anyone. But I went through the whole process of selection. Even the formal interview, the two or three days you go away on, and those days called an album, and nobody asked the question. There was a lady from the Mother's Union who sort of said, I realise you're single Mr Wardell,

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you'll wonder why there's an ironing board here. Show me how you iron a shirt. So I did. And she said, that's a very interesting way of ironing a shirt. Who taught you how to mother? And she said, how did you do the collar? So I showed her how to do the collar. She said, that's much better the way that I do it. Show me how to do it. So I taught her how to re-iron.

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And we talked about drama. She wanted to play for the Mother's Union for Christmas and I told her to do one. And then there was an interview, we talked all about cricket, about which I knew absolutely nothing. And the evangelical asked me, you're walking along the street and someone has a car accident, what would you tell the person who's been run over, what would you tell them

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about the cross? To which I said, I wouldn't actually tell them anything, I would do it. I'd ask them if they were serious, it was quite clear they were dying, did they want to make their confession and would they like a blessing? I wouldn't tell them about the cross, I'd make the sign of the cross. This has never dawned on them apparently. This is fascinating. So I went away

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thinking, well I've ballsed that up, I really have ballsed that up because nobody asked about it and nobody really talked about God, apart from the crop. And much to my surprise the thing was I'd been accepted. Do you, I mean, you think they know but they just deliberately didn't ask you? Well yes, yes they knew, but those were the days, it was rather like Bill Clinton's thing about the

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army. Everybody knows but nobody says anything. And it was very much the gentlemanly way that the Church of England decided on the people they felt they wanted. So do you think they would have treated another gay ordinand that they maybe thought weren't as gifted as you are differently? Yes, that would be the excuse, as indeed it was the excuse. Because there were other people who

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were gay and we'd swapped and I rang round and they'd been rejected because there were questions about their sexuality. So they deliberately didn't ask you because they wanted you? Yes, I now know that in retrospect. Yes, but at the time?

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But at the time it all seemed very strange. So you were accepted and you did your initial training, where did you train? Went off to Merfield, to the monastery at Merfield. Where's that exactly?

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Outside Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. High Church, very much the Catholic end of the Benedictine monastery. So there was all that sort of discipline of living really as a monk, though the college was in the grounds. You lived and worshipped with the brothers. And of course I was much older than everybody else because everyone else was going

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still in those days after university at 21, 22. So I was getting on for 10 years older than anybody else and it was the first year that they'd had more than one or two mature students, as we were called. So you did the course in two years by essay rather than three years by exams. You did exactly as much work, but you did it in two years instead of three.

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But there were half a dozen of us and we'd run businesses. We'd run, you know, we'd seen life and all the rest of it and in many ways we had quite an influence on the place because we asked questions. We kind of laughed at the ethics teacher and said, have you ever been in a gay pub? Have you actually been in a prison?

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Because there was someone who had been a prison warder. So we took him here and we took him to the gay club in Huddersfield where he seemed to enjoy himself rather more than I thought he was going to. But never mind. And there again we stayed friends for lots and lots of years and finally became a bishop and was happily married with children, all the rest of it.

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So those two years, yes, but there was never the great worry of having to sort of sort myself out and come to terms with all this thing. I'd done the biblical thing. I'd thought through all of that, but every time I kind of asked God the question, so what about this? The answer had never come down no. But there again the answer never came down yes either.

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But there was never a sort of a turning away. Was the whole business of the vocation I felt simply part of my own delusions? And all the way through it seemed to work. And indeed when it came to ordination, apart from one little hiccup where I thought I was going to be ordained into the diocese of York but ended up in the diocese of Durham, it all went alright.

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The earth didn't move and the cathedral didn't fall down when hands were placed upon me. No darkness, no black curtains. No, not at all. And in that sense it was kind of worryingly ordinary. Yes, there were the crises, there always are in those things. But it wasn't necessarily about the

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sexuality. So you then started a curacy? Curacy before? It was still the days when you had to do six years as a curate. A three years and a three years. But because I was that bit older, I did four years in one place and then went off and got a place of my own. Which was just south of the river from here in a place called Burden Connery. A pit village. The pit had closed and I got

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instituted on the second day of the miners' strike. So you were kind of in the middle of it. They'd had thirteen years of my predecessor who they loathed. And in many ways I could have been a gorilla with two hands behind my back and they would have welcomed me. And it was wonderful to suddenly find yourselves in the middle of a community, in a real

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community crisis. And there was no money and there was no food. And it kind of makes today's austerity look positively generous. I mean it really was awful. Just watch the film Billy Elliot. And it's when people are having Christmas dinner on beans on toast. I knew those people and they burned the piano. But the generosity. Because if you had a tin of beans, you shared it with somebody.

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I grew up in South Wales so when I was a teenager it was on the news in Wales the whole time. So I'm quite, you know, aware of it. I bet you wished you could have dragged your ethics teacher there and said, look. Absolutely. I did drag my Glen Bishop who had been Professor of Theology at Leeds, a man called David Jenkins, who turned out to be absolutely wonderful. He turned out to be

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the liberal that Margaret Thatcher agreed to and regetted because he stood with the miners at the Pit Gates. He came and talked to people. He read something in the paper about I'd released. There was a family, there were three children and one pair of shoes. So the children only went to school one day every third day. They took turns. I said, do you want to come and meet

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them? He said, I'm in the car. Go around and have lunch. I took some sandwiches out. And he'd never been on a council estate in his life. And it just opened his eyes. And by that time I'd met Malcolm. And we were relatively discreet. There were other gay men in Bolden Colliery and it was all right because he was sometimes loud. He was a nice lad. And he played rugby and he had his whippets and he

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grew his leeks and all the rest of it. So it was fine. And the only time it really hit me, where it hit both of us, was having spent eight years there. And it was just after the... There'd been one or two peculiarities in the General Synod in 88, where it was kind of a serious suggestion that anyone who knew themselves to be gay

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should resign their orders. And it didn't pass. It was a strongly felt thing. And that was the moment where it kind of really hit me. And having gone through this sort of fairly easy stage of minor crises, this was a real major crisis. And I spent all night in church. And I really didn't know what to do. And I rang

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David Jenkins up and I said, do you want my resignation? So he laughed and he said, don't be so bloody stupid. For goodness sake, I sat through all that. Don't be so bloody stupid. Grow up. So I duly did. Then moved to another parish, which was next door to where I'd served as Curacy in Darlington. Huge great church, small cathedral of a church, very middle class,

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very suburban, tree-lined suburbia, which is not really my cup of tea at all. And it was quite clear, a lot of people remembered me, but the people then largely in charge hadn't known me. And it was quite clear when I went to make the PCC that I was not the easy pushover that they'd been used to. So they dug round to see if they could find any objections. Of course,

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gay. Straight in. So we were outed in the press. And the world went crazy for about a week. And we invented the little tag that we've always kept to, we're middle class, we're middle aged and we're as boring as hell. So within days the tabloids gave up. And then other bits of the press started taking us seriously. Because we talked about the gay

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issue. He was still heavily involved with the LGCM. I'd become attached to LGCM through him. We'd been mentoring other people who were having trouble about their sexuality and their vacations and things like that. We'd started a group for the younger gay clergy who by the late 90s were feeling particularly

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threatened after all the business of the Lambeth Conference in 1998. See big pictures of Richard Kirk on LGCM and the Bishop of Nigeria and all the rest of it. And that really kind of flawed both of us. Because yes, we'd helped other people through with it, but it had never happened to us before. And that really was quite a surprise. But the net result was that I could walk down

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the street not having to be schizophrenic anymore. Because everybody knew. And Darlington didn't mind. And if Darlington didn't care, you were pretty safe elsewhere. And I could actually walk down the street with my head up high and I no longer had to have half a glass behind me as to who was listening to whatever I was saying. And in the end it was awful when it happened,

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but that kind of outing thing was an amazingly releasing thing. And I think in many ways made my ministry, not more honest in a way, but much more outward looking. Did you end up in that church? Yeah. The people who had organised the coup all left, but it was only six of them

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out of a congregation of 150. I was told afterwards that they were very grateful to me because there'd been pains in the bum. I thought it was a very apt phrase really. So I then spent 14 years there and became, I mean I was always very fond of Richard Kirker though he was really our concern, but became my friend as well. Richard had this wonderful

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way of networking. He knew everybody. He knew absolutely everybody. And whenever he had need of you, he would ring you up. And after 98, the number of Anglican clergy who were prepared to put their head over the parapet got less and less and less. Everybody got very frightened again. I mean the banging of the closet door and the rattling of the chains on the inside became

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extraordinary again. Just when you thought everything was moving on and coming out. And there were two of us who were prepared to talk to the press. One in East London and me in Darlington. So whenever anybody wanted a gay comment, it was me or Michael in East London. Michael then got frightened off by Richard Chartres because he was a priest in charge and

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Richard Chartres told him quite firmly that if he ever spoke to the press again on the gay issue, he would have no job. So it ended up being me. So there were endless articles about this and that and comments and all the rest of it. Then I got a bishop when David Jenkins had retired. A new bishop arrived who we discovered had been in court for having sex in a public toilet with a man.

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Okay. He was evangelical, happily married with several children, but he was outed by the news of the world. Yes. And I stood up and he had a big clergy meeting in Auckland Castle sort of saying, do you want me as your bishop or not? And I stood up and said, on behalf of the gay clergy of this diocese of which there are now 44 members of us,

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we welcome you. We all know what you've been going through. Yeah. And the man was so embarrassed. He was so embarrassed because he'd never had anybody actually, he'd never, I don't think he'd ever spoken to a gay person. He wasn't gay. He really wasn't gay. He'd come up for bad sex. And he was horrified by anyone who was out and sort of wasn't guilty.

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And hadn't sort of publicly repented and all the rest of it. So that, and by that time I had for several years been on the Bishop's Council, the central grouping of the diocese between laity and clergy and the senior staff. And everyone respected what I had to say and Michael Turnbull just didn't understand any of

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this because I was this strange person who seemed to be like a perfectly ordinary human being. And it got worse. George Kerry was still archbishop who was homophobic. Yeah. He was homophobic. And I got dragged to one side after Bishop's Council. He said, I need a pastoral conversation, which normally meant he had a problem with somebody else and would I sort it

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out. Okay. But this one was, I'm giving you a sabbatical. Sabbaticals were very common in those days. In public, it will be, it's a pat on the head. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. And you're ready for one at your right age. All the rest of it. Between you and me, I'm giving you three months salary to go and find another job, which will have nothing whatsoever to do

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with the Church of England. Okay. Because you are an embarrassment to us all. I have tried to do everything I can to get you out of your, your living. And legally I can't. But I really don't want to work with you anymore. So you will come back after three months and send me a letter of resignation. Gee, thanks, I thought. So I went and had a ball. I went and everybody else did serious

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things for sabbaticals and they went and studied and I went and had a ball. I had three months. I really enjoyed myself. Came back and wrote him a letter that in my sabbatical, in my trekking around Cappadocia, God and I had reconnected in a very new and real and positive way and I was not resigning. I couldn't do anything about it because it was, this was only a conversation between him

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and me. Everybody else knew about it. And he tried very hard. He tried everything that he could. Wouldn't give me a new job. I wasn't allowed a license in a new place. And the thing was that if I decided to stay, there would be, I couldn't move. I was on a blacklist. And I wasn't. That was a lie. An absolute lie. I was stuck where I was and I thought, hmm. But curates kept coming. And I kept

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thinking how strange it is. I am this person who is not fit to stand in front of people. Talk to people, take their wedding screen, baptise their children and all that. But I can train curates. They were actually putting the lives of these very vulnerable people. And you are trusting me. And I was very good at training curates. I must admit. I enjoyed training curates.

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Michael Turnbull retired and then Mr Wright came. Tom Wright. He was a Bishop. He was a Bishop who should never have been a Bishop. He was, as somebody rather cruelly said, he's not so much Bishop of Durham as the author in residence who's mostly in absentia. Which was true. He had no interest in the dances at all. And indeed was homophobic.

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And his wife certainly was. And by that time I didn't care anymore. And I just told him what I thought. What year was this? It came in 2003. And he really, he really was just awful. And when civil partnerships came up and we decided we would have ours on the first day, December 21st 2005, to celebrate our 10th anniversary. Not in the Diocese of Durham

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but here in Newcastle where the then Bishop had done the I wish them well but I don't know anything about it line. We had it done not in a parish church but in a chapel of ease, a peculiar which is called St Thomas' in the town centre. Which though it doesn't have the same sort of connections or responsibilities as a parish

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church. It's a chapel in it, an Anglican chapel in it that had belonged to a hospital. And Tom couldn't do anything. We were dragged before him and sort of said how embarrassed he had been by it and he had been publicly embarrassed about what had been in the press and all the rest of it and threatened to sack me and all the rest of it. And I

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smiled sweetly and sort of said, it was the line of do you not realise the harm you too will do to my national and international reputation. To which both of us without looking at each other closed our books, closed our notebooks and sort of said this isn't about us at all is it? It's all about you. And he never spoke to me again. The next year I was going to be 60.

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I was coming to the end of training one particular curate and we'd had a very good time and I thought I'm never going to get another one and I shall just hang around for the next five years. I might as well retire now. So I did. I retired at 60. We bought this flat in the late 80s so this was home because he was working in Newcastle and

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commuted up and down. I commuted to Newcastle and he commuted to Darlington. So we had somewhere to go to, the home was set up. Moved north into the diocese of Newcastle which a lot of people from Durham had already started doing. The tidal drift became like a tidal wave of people moving north and they were the gay clergy and the ones who were rather more liberal and all the rest of

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it. So I knew lots of people. And crossing the bridge, so I commuted to a place that smelt of fresh air with a bishop who remembered your name and your partner's name even when you were totally out of context. You'd find him in the market, how's Malcolm, give him my regards. This was a new world which I'd not had since 94 when they'd taken to Victoria.

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And I have spent the last 10 years, how did I find time to run a parish? I mean it's just been great because I've rediscovered all the things that I thought, I always believed I had been ordained to do instead of having to sit at a desk managing other people's ministry. I did have, after all, a ministry of my own and was made very

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welcome in so doing. What sort of things are you doing now? Oh, I brush around taking services where there's vacancies, people are sick on holiday, they want a guest preacher, it's like a locum. I've attached myself to a big church in Jesmond where the vicar has just gone off to be with the new Bishop of Grantham. To the ones of us who were left out, our diaries have filled up

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remarkably to be a very busy church. So life is very busy. So you're doing all the fun bits of it? I'm doing all the fun bits and I don't have to sit on committees anymore and I don't have to do, I don't have to organise anything anymore. I go in, drop my stuff and be very nice to people as you drink the Anglican coffee and come home and it's great and you get paid for it.

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That sounds wonderful. You get paid for it. So yes, it was quite a shock retiring at 60 but I couldn't have worked with Tom Rice any longer. It wouldn't have been, because I knew what would have happened. I would have simply slid into a depression quite frankly and it was having Linda that particular character around because she was

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very bouncy and I thought life is just going to be awful without her. It's all going to be very lonely again so I might as well go and enjoy myself. So I did and that's a very long and roundabout story. How would you describe yourself? Astrologically I'm Cancer so I'm supposed to be sort of solid, dull, unmoving.

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I suppose in many ways I am. I'm the orcher. I like my feet in the ground. I'm much more adaptable in my latter age than I think I was for the rest of my life. But I'm an outgoing sort of guy. I get on with people. I like people. I like talking to people. I like listening to people.

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What terminology are you happy with to be described as? Do you like being called a gay man, a queer? All those times, certainly. I think the one and only time I had a standing ovation at the end of a sermon was at LGCM in Newcastle, not long after. And it was when Stonewall put out that

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thing about lots of people are homosexuals, get over it, thing on the bosses. And it was the anniversary of my ordination and I preached on, I was ordained as a gay man because I was called as a gay man. So I ended up with, I'm a priest, I'm a puff, get over it, get over it. And they all stood up and clapped. It's never happened before and I have to say it's never happened since.

00:39:47.720 - 00:40:09.220

You've got the red t-shirt with... Well, sort of, yes. I'm a puff priest. But it doesn't bother me anymore whether anybody is, I am who I am. And I happily talk about him. I've also got to go home, the other half is waiting. Oh, how is she? It's a he.

00:40:10.360 - 00:40:28.800

And nobody faints anymore. Mr Holloway and all the rest of it at Jesterman Parish Church and all those things that they get involved in and they're deeply, deeply anti-gay because the Bible tells them to be. Yeah.

00:40:32.220 - 00:40:55.980

But that's a church that's kind of removed itself from all the systems. It simply runs its own show and we have nothing to do with it. We always used to get into arguments on the radio and in the end we said there was no point in, because they either got David Holloway, who was another guy down by the river who was the other evangelical who was anti-everything,

00:40:57.300 - 00:41:19.640

to do radio interviews. And I said there was no point because they simply trotted out the same stuff over and over again, whereas we were moving on, we were relating to the world, it was just the Bible says therefore it is wrong. And they were pointless interviews. I mean, I think one of the frustrations, certainly for me, is that they're willing to be

00:41:19.640 - 00:41:49.040

challenging and questioning and theologically rigorous about other issues, but when it comes to sexuality, it's almost a kind of infantile unwillingness to apply the same rigour to that as they would to other areas. And they will ask you all the questions, but will not answer any of the questions, except quote the Bible. Yeah. And, you know, I'm sure they have mixed fabric

00:41:49.040 - 00:42:25.120

clothing on. Precisely. I did point that out to one of the ones that he was obviously wearing a cotton polyester shirt. Yeah. And it was on his third marriage. What would be your proudest achievement in your life so far? Professionally. Anything you like. Professionally training seven curators. Six and a half,

00:42:25.320 - 00:42:54.360

really, if you want to be technical, we'll call it seven. And I'm setting people off on the ministry of giving them a base and helping them to find themselves. Personally, finding him and living 31 years with him. It's a long time. We look at each other and think, did we ever see each other? But we're still together. And of that I am deeply, deeply proud.

00:42:54.480 - 00:43:28.980

It's a big achievement. As I watch, as we watch, friends and family, they marry, they divorce, they marry, they divorce. All my first cousins are on at least their third marriage. What makes your relationship work so well? I think because we remain independent people who are in a relationship. And we know the boundaries

00:43:28.980 - 00:43:53.960

where if he's off busy with his committees and things like that, well those were important, his diary and I don't argue about it and he does the same with me. And in that sense, we respect each other's diaries. And we always have done. We are two individuals, but in fact, we are together professionally, we are two individuals. But personally, we are a couple.

00:43:53.960 - 00:44:16.660

Yeah. And I think that was why the civil partnership was so important, much more than the marriage business. Have you done the marriage business? Because if I marry, I will have my licence to officiate him. And they haven't sorted the pensions out yet. And we've all gone very quiet.

00:44:18.440 - 00:44:47.280

So it was the civil partnership and it was all the business to do with kinship and all that. Those for us were the important bits. That we were recognised as a couple and we were next of kin. Now, we're both, as you will discover from him, he's a single child as well. We were well into our sixties before the last parents died. So we did remarkably well.

00:44:48.300 - 00:45:05.940

And you've got a cruise coming up. We've got a cruise coming up on Monday. Yes, this is coming. We have no one to leave it to, so we're spending the inheritance. He can leave it to Battersea Dogs Home or something. I think I'd rather go on a cruise.

00:45:06.120 - 00:45:29.400

I think LGCM, if it still exists when we die, will benefit quite well from it. Okay. I won't bump you off as a trustee. There you are, sorry. Yes, various churches and charities will do very nicely indeed. Yeah, LGCM's really picked up again, so I hope we'll still be around.

00:45:31.360 - 00:46:05.600

Yeah, how are we doing? Okay. Have I, if you could think of any things that we haven't touched on that for you have been significant, either in your walk with God or LGBT rights? The great disappointment, I think, was having watched him when we met in 1984. Now, LGCM was eight years old already. It was forming, it was emerging, it was struggling.

00:46:06.920 - 00:46:35.340

And to watch it grow, to watch it become a real force in the nature of not just making all things gay respectable, but making them possible. And other people linking into LGCM and seeing LGCM as really one of the things. And how that kind of moved on and was accelerating all the way through the 90s until 98, where kind of everything collapsed again. And everybody, and all the

00:46:35.340 - 00:47:01.820

evangelicals were being said, oh, well, we must have meaningful conversation, but we must go back to the beginning. And instead of moving forward, we were going backwards. And the last 10 or so years has been, has a real feel of that. We've been, certainly in the church, we've been going backwards rather than forwards. And... 1998 Lambeth was clearly... It was the 1998 Lambeth.

00:47:02.540 - 00:47:35.820

Entirely pivotal in all that. Yes, I think it was. Because the gay issue took over, which wasn't really on the agenda. And it caused the schism about which they, as we talk, they are sitting down arguing about in Lambeth at the same moment. Yeah. I find it quite ironically amusing that David Bowie, dying, part of his life a professed bisexual man, stole the headlines away.

00:47:36.960 - 00:48:03.560

It was kind of like when Diana died the day that Mother Teresa died. It was that feeling of, I don't know, to me it felt ironic and vaguely amusing. Yeah. Yes. But I think the one disappointment is that the whole gay thing has moved on. But there have been those bits of society which have very carefully

00:48:04.940 - 00:48:27.880

decided not to move it on particularly. And the church, of all denominations, apart from the URCs, and some of the sort of the fringer ones, even the Methodists have moved on amazingly. But the Anglican Church and the Roman Church seems to have just got stuck with this. And it's become a problem. Rather than recognising that gay people are a huge asset,

00:48:28.980 - 00:48:48.740

we've become a problem. And somehow they've kind of got to put up with this. And just, damn it, refuses to go away. And damn it, it refuses to go. And why can't these people go and live on an island? Yeah. What do you see as the future of the Church of England? And to me it just feels like there can't be a middle ground anymore.

00:48:50.260 - 00:49:12.600

You have to be LGBT affirming or you have to be... Or you're not. Or you're not. You can't ignore it anymore. You can't fight it anymore. I think the thing that surprised the Roman Church and the Anglican Church was that the vast majority of people who call themselves members of those churches approved of same-sex marriage.

00:49:16.400 - 00:49:48.360

And in the latter year, there was an interview about the referendum on same-sex marriage in Ireland. And someone deeply academic sort of said, whoever would have thought it would have been homosexuality, which united the Republic of Ireland in such a strongly Catholic country. And I think that's why both the Roman Church and the Anglican Church begin to realise that

00:49:48.360 - 00:50:07.600

they have moved as institutions onto the edge of society and they're not in the middle of them anymore. And they have to rediscover them. Because it's not just that, it's suddenly they realise that it's other things as well that they haven't taken on or they've seen as a problem. Now the Anglican Church always had the thing was, whatever the world did, the Anglican

00:50:07.600 - 00:50:29.100

Church would take 30 years to take it on, like abortion, divorce. It's a bit like hairstyles in 2003 when I grew up. And like I said in 92, I did a seminar at the University of Newcastle, which there was David Holloway and then there was another guy from round by the river who's never instantly forgotten. And I was talking about marriage and saying marriage will change.

00:50:31.220 - 00:50:52.340

Marriage is not necessarily going to be one-to-one for life. It may be an ongoing contract. It may still be one-to-one, but it may not always be man and woman. To which they jumped and said, but the Bible says and all the rest of it. I said, well, no, we have divorce. What does the Bible say about divorce? Oh, well, it's wrong because the Bible says,

00:50:52.740 - 00:51:15.280

you know, this is the ultimate, you can't argue against the Bible. They said, will you see same-sex marriage? When will it happen? I said, it will happen in my lifetime. I won't go any further than that. Ten years earlier than I thought it was going to be. And why the hell was it David Cameron who pushed it? Why did the Tories push it through? Of all the things for the

00:51:15.280 - 00:51:50.800

Tories to push through so quickly and so unpreparedly, what on earth motivated them to do it? I can't imagine. Anyway, that's another lie. But I think it's the way that the two major churches have quite deliberately, from the inside, manoeuvred themselves onto the edges rather than being in the middle. And I think that's my real professional and indeed gay

00:51:50.800 - 00:52:24.720

disappointment, was the fact that we've gone, in the last almost 20 years, we've gone backwards rather than forwards. Yeah. Would you say the Church of England is bordering on being seen as almost disreputable by swathes of society? I think it's not so much. If it was disreputable, it would be noticed. I think it's just unnecessary. It sees itself as unnecessary. You don't have to

00:52:24.720 - 00:52:51.100

get married in a church anymore. You don't have to do all those social things like having your child baptised. You don't have to have a clergyman for a female anymore, a clergyperson for a female anymore. And there are all these famous buildings and it's nice to go to a carol service and things like that, but what's it for? And the Romans are finding much the same thing. Yeah.

00:52:53.580 - 00:53:24.940

Okay. I've got a few more minutes left. What do you, thinking about all the prominent people who have now changed their tack and come out in favour of same-sex relationships, thinking of Steve Chalk, Rob Bell in America, Vicky Beecham, etc. Do you feel that there's almost a move of the spirit

00:53:26.560 - 00:53:52.120

happening in society, in the church? I've never been terribly comfortable with phrases like a move of the spirit. It's just not my language. And it's never been particularly part of my tradition as such. I'm too old-fashioned Anglican.

00:53:57.240 - 00:54:25.460

On the one hand, I hope it is something like that. Now, I'm being Anglican, you see, on the one hand. If that's what it is, I am delighted, even if I don't quite understand what it is. On the other hand, my cynical grumpy old man-hand says that it's amazing how convenient the churches can be when they can spot an audience. And rather like politicians suddenly

00:54:25.460 - 00:54:50.500

found the influence and the power of the pink vote and the pink pound. And it's these institutions realising that there is a huge amount of their congregations always have been gay. And they really ought to do something about either keeping them or winning some more of them. And then put all these things about, but of course, you can't get ordained and you can't

00:54:50.500 - 00:55:12.100

do this and you can't do that and you can't. Which is why, of course, I think in all these managed conversations we've had about sexuality, all the papers had nothing to do with any conversations with gay people. I got invited to go on behalf of this diocese and we were away. We'd already booked in for a

00:55:12.100 - 00:55:39.520

conference so I couldn't go. But the people who did it, and lots of people, Colin Cowden and all the rest of it, has argued that gay people wouldn't go to it because if you outed yourself, the evangelicals would report you to your bishop. So there was still that level of fear on the one hand, you want them in the pews, but we're still not really good enough to have hands laid on us.

00:55:40.820 - 00:56:12.920

Though I think that is changing and I am surprised by just in that sense how liberal and non-contentious Justin Welby has been on the gay issue and indeed is muttering things about our history with the gay issue as a disgrace and things like that. So maybe things are turning. For America, the church is a business as much as any other business, I fear, and I think that's

00:56:12.920 - 00:56:40.140

the great strength of having two, as it were, established churches, though certainly the Anglican one really is established, but having two churches which are, as it were, very much at the heart of a nation, which is where they should be in dealing with absolutely everybody, but in fact both for internal rounds, have become apparent to the centre that they don't belong anymore.

00:56:41.720 - 00:57:08.340

And it will be very hard to win them back. And it won't just be gay people to win back, but to win anybody back because people have realised you can actually live without them. Yeah, I have three children, two of them are teenagers and that's complete anathema to them, you know, as teenagers identify as straight but fully supportive of friends who are LGBT and

00:57:09.300 - 00:57:26.880

just have no idea why anyone would want to be involved. Yes, we still have friends, the one thing, both straight friends and gay friends, and the greater objection is not that we're gay, but that we're Christian. That's the thing they find really repellent.

00:57:26.980 - 00:57:42.760

Yeah, that's far more disreputable these days. Much, much more disreputable, and to be a priest. Good God, you know, kind of, sort of, when, you know, you find yourself introduced, oh, have you met Christopher? He's a vicar, you know, but he's quite nice.

00:57:43.400 - 00:58:01.320

It's almost that I'm a Christian with a proviso that, I've talked about this with a few people, that because of the connotations of saying you're a Christian in society these days, you find yourself prefacing it in some way. And, I mean, I'm someone that will say I'm a left-wing Guardian reading Christian

00:58:01.320 - 00:58:20.280

because I so don't want anyone to think I'm fundamentalist. And that's sad, really. Yes, yes, if we have a prophetic voice, it's Charles Fraser. Don't always agree with him, but he's, perhaps John the Baptist, and he says things which

00:58:20.280 - 00:58:39.900

I don't think you're supposed to agree or disagree, but he just sort of wakes you up. It's a pity he's moved to Friday rather than Saturday, but never mind. Just to close, if you were having a headstone made up for yourself, what three adjectives would you have on it to describe yourself?

00:58:40.000 - 00:58:57.740

Oh, heavens. Oh, good gracious. Well, that. Oh, good gracious. I told you I was ill. I really don't know because that's the one thing I won't do, I won't write my headstone,

00:58:57.880 - 00:59:11.900

but I think if I was to leave instructions, I wouldn't know. I've never even thought of that. I wouldn't know. I think, I hope it would be, somebody at my funeral said, despite everything, he was really quite a nice guy.

00:59:13.200 - 00:59:18.540

Despite everything. Thank you very much for your time, Chris. My pleasure. I really appreciate it.

00:59:18.660 - 00:59:30.480

My pleasure. Look, I didn't ask you what the project you were talking about, what is the project, what's it for, and what are you going to do with all this information you're gathering? Um, I'm going to,