Grey and gay: Ken's story
The anguish of being gay and feeling unable to acknowledge it is still vivid in the mind of sixty-something Ken Thomas, who grew up on an isolated Cornish farm as a single child: “I realised at puberty that I was attracted to men but I didn’t want to admit it. I hid my feelings and was incredibly lonely. I certainly didn’t feel I could tell my parents.” He went to Oxford University and although he had friends of both sexes, “I tried to put sexuality out of my mind.” It was when he visited Russia on an academic exchange that he met a student in Moscow and both were passionately drawn to each other.
“I realised I could be happy with a man but we didn’t do anything. We were too afraid of the KGB. I was heartbroken when I had to go back to the UK. I was a mathematics lecturer at Birkbeck and I didn’t know anyone else homosexual.”
By 1974 living alone in a bedsit, he decided he could not go on in this way. “I very much wanted to have someone, more than a friend, to share my life with.
But even though the law had been altered, many of us still felt fear that we would get into trouble. Yet, if I look back, I can see that things were changing and there was quite a drive to help gay people move forward with their lives.”
Eventually he discovered a gay dating agency in the London listings magazine Time Out. “It promised six introductions for £5. The second was Ian McDonald, who I have been with ever since.
We were immediately attracted. When we moved in together I was anxious about how it would be taken, but although there were a few strange remarks at work, most of my colleagues and the students were fine about it.
That was the beginning of my seeing that I could be open about what I was, and Ian and I have spent a lot of our time campaigning on gay issues.”
The recognition that they will not have children is a great sadness for many gay men who do not want, or feel it right, to marry. Certainly Ian remembers Ken “becoming broody” and long discussions about how they might involve children in their lives. At the time they were living in the borough of Haringey which was advertising for people to foster teenagers.
“We applied, went through the training and in 1990 became almost certainly the first gays in London to foster,” Ian says. “The council, realising how the media might react, asked them to keep quiet about it.”
In fact Ian and Ken invited journalists to the happy, caring home they created for the disturbed and needy boys they took in over the years. In 1997 the Daily Express voted them Model Parents.
Far more problematic, says Ian, was the way he was treated by the Church, and this was echoed by other Christian gays I talked to whose faith is central to their lives.
Soon after he had met Ken, and realised it would be a serious relationship, he saw the minister at his church to explain the situation. “He appeared to be sympathetic, but I discovered afterwards that as soon as I left, he rang a female friend, assumed to be my girlfriend, and told her to get me into bed as soon as possible ‘and drum this nonsense out of me’.”
Later, when he was nominated as an Elder of the United Reform Church, several people said they would leave if he was ordained and one, a policeman, said that he couldn’t tolerate Communion being given to a criminal.
Even so, Ian wanted to train for the ministry and went through an assessment. “But at the last minute I was turned down.
“I received a letter from the ministry’s committee saying, ‘We are aware God is calling you but we are not going to allow it’.” In the end Ian went Oxford to do a theology degree and he was given a commendation to the Church.
He remembers: “I set out looking for churches and was turned down by seven who all knew I was gay.” Angry and disillusioned, he decided to withdraw: “I was not prepared to give up my relationship and live a lie for the sake of ordination, but I felt very let down by the Church. However much acceptance there may now be of gays elsewhere, it’s not there on the whole in the Church.”
However, since moving to Devon, where the couple live in a small and, they say, “extremely friendly” village where they are totally accepted, he has been asked to preach at the Minster in Exeter.
Written by Angela Neustatter
This article was created: 13 July 2006.
This article was last edited: 14 December 2006.
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