A question of faith
The day my husband, a vicar, told me he was gay
Ruth McElroy’s life turned upside down on January 13 2000, a bleak weekday afternoon, when her husband of 16 years came home from work to deliver the news that their relationship was not what she had thought.
“He had been miserable for a while,” says McElroy, clasping a coffee and trying without success not to cry. “I’d ask what was going on and he’d say, ‘Oh, it’s not you, it’s me,’ but then never say anything else.” With hindsight, she admits, cracks had been forming for months, if not years.
At the time, her husband, Clive Larsen, now 60, worked as an Anglican priest near the couple’s home in Marple, Greater Manchester, and both had been bought up in conservative evangelical Christian households as diligent churchgoers and active members of the religious community.
McElroy had been at home on a rare day off from her job as a veterinary ophthalmologist when, in the midst of making holiday plans, she realised that she would rather go away with her sister and mother.
“Your marriage is in trouble if you don’t want to go on holiday with your husband,” she says, half-smiling.
Larsen returned home from church to find her crying, surrounded by information on marriage counselling and asked her what the matter was.
“I said: ‘I realised I didn’t want to go on holiday with you, and I am just wondering how long it is before I just don’t want to be with you any more.’”
As well as being distant, Larsen had become wedded to his work and was often away from McElroy and their two daughters Rosie and Katy, then nine and five.
“He just said: ‘Are you ready for this? I am gay.’”
Unbeknown to his wife, Larsen had known he was homosexual since the age of 10, but a rigidly conventional and religious upbringing in Merseyside during the Fifties and Sixties had taught him to suppress it. Years later, he would tell McElroy that meeting her had made him believe he was “healed” and he’d hoped she would be able to switch off all his other feelings.
Larsen pleaded for them to stay together. “The first thing I thought was, the marriage is over,” McElroy says. “Then incredulity. Anger. And in a very small way I felt a bit of relief that I could stop trying.”
Nearly two decades on, both have found new partners. Last year, Larsen resigned from his post as the resident Church of England vicar at St Agnes Church in North Reddish, Stockport, so that he could hold a commitment ceremony to his long-term partner, John. His ex-wife was in the congregation, and his two daughters walked him down the aisle.
But he said he had felt “squeezed out” by the Church of England, which produced a key report last month, which will be voted on at the General Synod tomorrow, reaffirming its opposition to same-sex marriage and proposing no practical change to current doctrine that gay clergy must remain celibate, even if in long-term relationships. In an open letter, the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement said the House of Bishops’ report “essentially asks clergy to dissemble and keep the nature of their relationships hidden”. It’s a subject on which Ruth McElroy feels especially strongly, as Larsen’s position within the Church was another reason he felt compelled to lie to his family for so long. “No, it isn’t right to suppress or ignore it,” she says. “It only makes things worse.” The week after Larsen broke the news to her, McElroy spent three hours a day on the phone to the charity Changing Attitude, whose volunteers helped her realise that she didn’t “turn” her husband gay. Her emotions ranged in the early days and months from seething rage and denial to a profound sadness.
“The pain of first finding out feels like a tumour – a massive lump that you can’t process. It’s a death.”
There was, she says, the added irritation that Larsen was not as devastated by it all as she was.
“I was on the floor but he had all the euphoria of coming out. I asked him why he wasn’t upset and he said because he had been upset for years and years.”
Did she ever suspect that he might be gay?
“It might have crossed my mind” – their love life had disintegrated, and he had seemed reticent to have a second child – “but it is not something you ask your husband.”
Surprisingly, after McElroy learnt her husband’s secret, they lived together for a further 18 months.
“There is no blueprint for this. I decided that I should stay put because I had a roof over my head, I was loved and I could work out what I was going to do. Perhaps you don’t break something until you feel you really need to.”
The toughest part for McElroy was feeling isolated from her friends and family, many of whom “hit the roof ” after the news. “I had to spend all evening counselling them about how this happened. You stop telling people,” she recalls.
Larsen began going clubbing on Thursday evenings and, while they had agreed that he wasn’t allowed to see people while they were living together, she reached breaking point. She also recalls some “horrid bits” when the Church found out and when people were “really nasty” to Larsen.
Eventually, she moved out into a house in the same area where the girls could visit their father most days.
They had originally met on a Christian beach mission on the Isle of Man when McElroy was 22. The group was staying in a church hall and it was love at first sight.
“I looked across the room and something went thump.” She hits her chest with a closed fist and giggles at the memory. “I thought he was gorgeous.”
After a whirlwind few months’ dating, they married in Liverpool and settled into a life in Marple, including trips to the pub and holidays in Greece.
Looking back, McElroy doesn’t regret a thing. Over the years she has come to the conclusion that it might have even made her stronger. “If I stayed bitter and angry and cross and twisted, I would be ill, and suffering for the rest of my life. So I had to decide to let go.”
Four years after Larsen’s confession she married Peter, a vet, with whom she lives happily in Cheshire. In her spare time she counsels the wives of gay clergy through the religious group Broken Rites, and hopes her daughters are well “trained enough” not to let history repeat itself.
“There was a time when I felt like it defined me. Now, I don’t.”