Walking home alone, after speaking at my first gay rights rally in 2005. I couldn’t understand why I felt so empty and deflated. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the skills to communicate with a crowd. As a high-profile preacher in Australia’s Pentecostal world, I used to preach to congregations in their 1,000s every weekend. [...]
Gays and Lesbians in the Military - WWll (an extract from The Quest to Cure Queers) When World War II arrived, it definitely created the opportunity for an increase of both male and female same-sex sex. Even though there was a concerted effort to keep homosexual men out of the military, they still got in [...]
This Sunday, something I never imagined in my wildest dreams is going to happen. If you’ve read my autobiography, you’ll know that in 1972, I was in a residential Christian program operating out of a church in Sydney’s south to rid myself of my homosexuality. This was before the founding of Exodus (1976), or the [...]
LinkedIn Top LGBTQIA+ Voices: The 20 creators to follow in Australia Published on March 1, 2022 Photo: Getty Images LinkedIn News Australia 541,442 followers Following The inaugural LinkedIn LGBTQIA+ Voices list highlights 20 thought leaders within the Australian LGBTQIA+ community who are posting insightful content and shaping conversations around inclusion and diversity. The honourees in [...]
I’m not a betting man, but I’d be happy to make a wager that the person who wrote the statement below in the Citipointe Christian College contract was rather aged. It could have been lifted from the writings of Socarides, Bergler or Bieber. In the 1950s and 1960s, these men were the “experts” on homosexuality [...]
Citipointe Christian College, in Brisbane, has done the unthinkable. The college has created a new enrolment contract which states, “We believe that any form of sexual immorality (including but not limited to adultery, fornication, homosexual acts, bisexual acts, bestiality, incest, paedophilia and pornography) is sinful and offensive to God and is destructive to human relationships [...]
2004 A Life of Unlearning – coming out of the church, one man's struggle. Published by New Holland. This was only released in Australia sadly, but it became a bestseller here and sold out. When I wrote the first edition in the early 2000s, I had a limited understanding of writing (I had never considered [...]
Hearing Bishop John Spong speak in Sydney in 2007 was memorable for me. I’m not usually one to avail myself of the opportunity of a question time. Prodded on by others, I felt this was a good chance to draw on the wisdom of the retired Bishop. After all, he’s been an amazing advocate for [...]
LGBTQ Religious Suicide Why we'll never be able to count the cost The higher risk of LGBTQ suicide, which includes ideation and attempts (See stats here), is well documented. But thoughts of suicide and attempts are much higher for LGBTQ people from faith backgrounds. Why? Research is now demonstrating something I have been pointing out [...]