Ignorance

Sir, Speaking as a52-year-old gay man who came to terms with his sexuality over 30 years ago, your leader ‘The inconvenient truth of sexual fluidity’ is astonishing in its ignorance and its hostility. The author has clearly little idea about the reality of the lives of LGBT people and there’s a point at which publishing such opinions over and over again just becomes insulting and rude.

I would like to point out that the ‘B’ in LGBT is not by any means a new addition - so the fact of the fluidity of human sexuality is certainly not a newly discovered ‘inconvenient truth’ as the author so ridiculously asserts.

The Church of England’s widespread attitude to people who do not conform to your ideals of identity is transparently prejudiced. It makes me SO angr y that you just refuse to begin to understand what is so plainly under your noses. The notion that we gay people ‘choose’ our identity is in the vast majority of cases utterly absurd. It is your ‘choice’ to ignore the weight of human experience in your desire to see things as you wish them to be, not as they are.

The author’s habit of putting words representing the way that people identify themselves in quotation marks (“A Guardian writer reported an angr y reaction from ‘lesbians’...”, “‘Bisexual’ Katie Welsh in the Telegraph says...”) is also really insulting. How would you feel if we went around calling you ‘Christians’ - in quotation marks? ‘Christian’ publication The Church of England Newspaper... ‘Straight’ ‘Christian’ Archbishop Justin Welby... Those quotation marks are deliberately positioned to undermine our self-identity as if the personal experience of countless tens of thousands of people counts for absolutely nothing.

I am a gay Christian, not a ‘gay’ ‘Christian’. Using quotation marks in this way simply demonstrates the author’s lack of love, respect and grace.

Peter Chater, Gay Christian