UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality

By David Hilliard

DESPITE THE TRADITIONAL teaching of the Christian Church that homosexual behaviour is always sinful, there are grounds for believing that Anglo-Catholic religion within the Church of England has offered emotional and aesthetic satisfactions that have been particularly attractive to members of a stigmatised sexual minority.

This apparent connection between Anglo-Catholicism and the male homosexual subculture in the English-speaking world has often been remarked upon, but it has never been fully explored.

In 1960, for example, in a pioneering study of male homosexuality in Britain, Gordon Westwood stated:Some of the contacts maintained that the highest proportion of homosexuals who are regular churchgoers favoured the Anglo-Catholic churches....

It was not possible to confirm that suggestion in this survey, but it is not difficult to understand that the services with impressive ceremony and large choirs are more likely to appeal to homosexuals.

More recently, in the United States, several former priests of the Episcopal Church have described some of the links between homosexual men and Catholic forms of religion, on the basis of their own knowledge of Anglo-Catholic parishes.

This essay brings together some of the historical evidence of the ways in which a homosexual sensibility has expressed
itself within Anglo-Catholicism. Because of the fragmentary and ambiguous nature of much of this evidence only a tentative outline can be suggested.

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