I entered SPS as a student in the First Form.  By the time I was in the Fourth Form, I knew I was gay.  I didn’t have many words or much understanding for what I was discovering about myself.  There wasn’t much in the popular culture — that I knew about anyway — that informed me as to who I was or who I might be.  In those days SPS was an all-boys school; and, while there were the usual sexual innuendos and horseplay amongst us, I knew I was different.  That is, I perceived my peers as just fooling around, but I understood that sex with my own gender was where I was born to be and that this was serious business. At first I wondered if this might be something I would outgrow.  By the time I was in the Fourth Form, I understood that this desire for others of my own gender would be with me for the rest of my life.  There was no one that I dared trust with a conversation about these matters.  I had my suspicions about some students and teachers, but I didn’t dare risk a conversation.  An important part of me became isolated from friends, peers, teachers, family — something that would continue for another twenty years.

My fears went something like this:  If I were candid with my peers, I would be teased and bullied unmercifully — at the least, ostracized.  If I were known to the teachers or administration, I would be expelled.  Worse, I might be sent out to be “corrected.”  If any of that were revealed to my family, they would be mortified — or so I believed, and the embarrassment I would cause them was unacceptable to me.  (My father had been a respected teacher at SPS for 30 years.)  I felt like a failure as a human being, and I was utterly ashamed of myself.  During the latter half of my Fourth Form year I thought about suicide — imagining the place, the time, and the mode.  The crisis came to a head late one afternoon in late winter in the Chapel when I sat alone and prayed.  It wasn’t the first time that I had prayed.  But it was a time I never forgot, and it was a turning point in my life.  I realize now that, if things had not happened as they did, I might never have survived.

Looking back, at SPS I chose to survive — and succeeded.  Because I was quiet about my sexuality in my twenties, I was never seriously confronted by others with the issue in my preparation for ordination.  Some folks cannot understand how/why I ever ended up serving in the Church.  My response has always been:  If my time and effort have made life easier and safer for others, the time was well spent, and I look for the day when the world will be safe for all of us.  That’s the trail I’ve walked on most my life.  And it started at Saint Paul’s, in The Chapel, in my Fourth Form year.

John B. Edmonds  –  Form of 1960  –  SPS

Submitted to Alumni Horae and printed in the Winter/2010 issue.  Posted here by permission.