You are not logged in. Signup to contribute or login! Not recieved your activation email? Click here to send it again.

Quakers positive about homosexuality in 1960s

1968

Betty: “In recent years there have been points where I have thought that there would be almost no way of going to worship anywhere else because there is almost nowhere else where my lesbianism would be as comfortably accepted. The book ‘’), (published in 1963) was quite positive for the time. It hit me, when I was 18, (1968) that it was towards ‘a’ Quaker view of sex, it didn’t say this was ‘the’ view and for me coming out of a standard Protestant church to suddenly discover a religious body which basically said ‘Several people have got together and this is the view that we have’ without being prescriptive.”
Gill: “In a guarded sort of way, it wasn’t sort of, this is a terrible sin. It still saw homosexuality as being a bit disordered but it was much more accepting. But it dealt with various other issues like sex before marriage and living together and so on and it was pioneering for its time in its non-judgementalist way, and that started to change the atmosphere.”

Contributed by: Gill Coffin, 63, Betty Hagglund, 50

Click here to read the full interview with this contributor