LGBT Pride... And Humility

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LGBT Pride… And Humility

June 30, 2026

My husband and I went to my fraternity reunion in Dothan, Alabama last year. It reinforced a 40-year-old lesson for me about gay pride and gay humility.

I graduated from Troy State University in rural southeastern Alabama in 1980. It was a wonderful weekend among the people I got to know back then, who mostly consider themselves conservative Republicans and often evangelical Christians. We were pretty much what you'd imagine a fraternity would have been in the Deep South in the 1970s - not Animal House but I'm proud to say that we had repeated run-ins with the college dean.

This is the third time I've been back to a fraternity event with my same-sex partner. We have always been treated with genuine affection and great kindness. I was amazed at how easy it was to pick up close friendships after half a lifetime.

On the Sunday after the reunion, my husband and I went to a tiny church in a glorified trailer in a town of 3,000 midway between Dothan and Troy. The church was listed on a website of LGBT welcoming and affirming churches. We discussed it with the people who greeted us in the roundabout way that Southerners have perfected, never once mentioning the words "gay", "husband" or "marriage equality"; they seemed quite surprised that they had made it to the website. If there were any other lesbian or gay people among the 20 or so there, it wasn't obvious. Whatever the confusion, they welcomed us warmly and delayed their parish meeting by 30 minutes to spend more time talking to us after the service.

It all highlighted the value of a lesson I learned in 1988. I was newly back in the UK after a decade in the USA. I turned up at London's central baptist church and asked the minister how he would feel about having an openly gay man in the congregation. "Very positive," he replied. "Let me ask a favour, though. Be yourself and tell the truth. But don't provoke a fight. If we need to have the fight, we will and we'll win, but don't you be the one who starts it." Maybe he had made a quick character assessment; maybe he realized that I would be unlikely to do 'don't ask don't tell' well - I told him that I had worked full time for the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York for three years and attended the, almost all-lesbian-and-gay, Metropolitan Community Church.

We never needed to have the fight. The congregation's issue with me, if they had one, was that I wasn't a big enough opponent of Thatcherite economics (don't worry: I'm now older and wiser). In the years since, I've spent a lot of time working with African and global Christian groups on development issues and I've only once had an issue around being gay, which I resolved by wishing the group well and having nothing further to do with them. If I'm in Uganda, I don't talk much about my husband until I know who I'm talking to, but I don't lie about the wife and kids either.

I've met quite a lot of lesbians, gay men and even transgender people working in development. Most of them have experiences like mine. This is not, though, to minimize the real discrimination and persecution experienced by women and men in sexual minorities in much of Africa and South Asia. They are mostly the victims of populism and opportunism among politicians who stir up hatred to deflect attention from their own corruption and incompetence. A trait not confined to politicians in the developing world…

A colleague and I do a lot of pro bono work with Amplify Change, a funding organization working in sexual and reproductive health and rights in Africa and Asia and I try to visit its grantees when I get a chance. I often talk about my experiences with these community groups as part of my other work.

I haven't kept quiet when I've seen serious problems in mainstream organizations: last year I was at a Christian health meeting and ended up part of a breakout group with a number of impressive African and American women. One of the Africans said that since I was the only man in the group, I should lead the prayers. I refused firmly and repeatedly until she did it better than I would have done it.

It's not just over there that we have to fight stereotypes. I lived for 20 years in the South Wales Valleys, one of Europe's most beautiful but most deprived areas. I remember being at a meeting in Cardiff, the Welsh capital, where a highly-educated young woman was talking about the horrors of homophobia in the Valleys. I put my hand up and told her where I lived with my husband and that we had never experienced anti-gay hate.

As all of us do in Britain, she made a quick assessment based on my accent and said I might live there but I wasn't part of the "problem communities". I told her that I belonged to the local Congregationalist chapel, volunteered at the Welsh-language school and went to the body-building gym in our nearest town with the rugby players, the drug dealers and the drawer, which I asked not to have to see opened, where the owner kept the steroids. The rugby boys mostly idolized Nigel Owens, Wales's only international rugby referee who is openly gay and a mental health advocate. The lesbian couple in the village were a fixture at protests against planning decisions.

"Well, you must be blind if you can't see the homophobia," she replied. I suggested that I was a neighbor, not a judgemental do-gooder on a flying visit designed to spend her grant money. It became clear that we weren't destined to be soul mates.

We have a lot to be proud of in the LGBT community. The progress we have made over the 43 years since I started working at GMHC would have seemed completely impossible to my 23 year-old self. Much of that progress came because of the quiet and persistent caring in response to the AIDS epidemic and despite the outlandish protesters screaming obscenities and outraging their communities.

We need now to resist the temptation of enforcing our own orthodoxy and trying to silence those who disagree with us. There are people who have genuine theological and cultural reservations about the legitimacy of same sex relationships and the spectrum of sexual identities. If they want to talk about them, we should engage and treat them with the respect we dared to hope for in 1980 when ours was the outlier position. If they don't, we should enjoy the silence and their company. I think that their theology is based on a fundamentally disordered relationship with the Eternal and that their understanding of culture is wrong-headed, but I'm old enough to realize that I'm only almost omniscient.

If people we disagree with want to be our friends despite their convictions, we should accept that friendship with gratitude and without an ideological litmus test. Alongside our earned pride, we need a little learned humility.

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POSTED BY: Mark Chataway