Growing up with the gay Vicar of Thaxted

After the portraits exercise was successfully concluded (see Interlude 1), I asked Francis Elers if he was happy to introduce his family to the readers of this book and to recall his life growing up with his father, the gay Vicar of Thaxted. He very willingly agreed to do so. At the foot of Francis’ presentation below, I have produced his family history and how it relates to that of us New Zealanders.

Here are Francis's memoirs: Growing up with the gay vicar of Thaxted:

“We were all adopted while still babies, three boys and one girl, from different birth parents. Decades later each of us searched for, and eventually found, our birth mothers. I was close to 40 before the ‘search bug’ bit me.

Anne Lesley Harrison had moved from Yorkshire to France soon after giving Paul Andrew (me) up for adoption. She was married with two children. Suddenly I had a half-brother and half-sister. Anne, Stephan, Vanessa, and Anne’s husband, Jean-Claude, are wonderful people who handled this unexpected intrusion into their lives with welcoming grace. I am very fortunate; searching for birth parents often leads to unexpected and sometimes heartbreakingly sad outcomes.

My three siblings and I were very lucky; we had wonderful childhoods. Our father was an Anglican vicar, which is to say, a priest of the Church of England (founded in the sixteenth century by King Henry VIII for somewhat ignoble reasons) and in the 1960s, Anglican vicarages were usually very large and came with very large gardens. We didn’t own the place, of course, it came with the job, but kids don’t care about such details.

We grew up in a six-bedroom Georgian vicarage in the village of Kelvedon in rural Essex, on three and a half acres of land, with a lake, a meadow, and a small wood. There were various dogs, cats, chickens, goats, and at one point even a couple of donkeys rescued from lives in the ‘seaside entertainment industry’. It was all great fun. As children, we naturally assumed that everybody lived like this, and the dawning realisation that they didn’t, and furthermore that we wouldn’t indefinitely, would one day come as rather a shock.

We moved, on my 12th birthday, from quietly ordinary Kelvedon to the town of Thaxted. This was a promotion of sorts for my father. Thaxted church is huge. It is at least as large and as grand as the diocesan cathedral in Chelmsford, Essex’s famously dull county town (a county town being the ‘capital city’ of a county). It sits on a hill and completely dominates the village, much as Christianity dominates village life in Thaxted.

Thaxted is postcard picturesque, with a windmill near the church and a spectacular medieval guildhall in the high-street. It has existed for at least a thousand years and the settlement of 'Tachesteda' is listed in the 1086 Domesday Book. In 1973, it seemed a quietly refined if perhaps slightly twee place; a place of antique shops and tea-rooms.

Oddly, for somewhere so thoroughly gentrified, it has a storied history of firebrand ‘red’ politics and of outspoken vicars rocking the establishment boat with their controversial socialist, and even communist, sympathies. For those who saw Jesus as, essentially, a communist, the ethos of Thaxted should have felt very welcoming; a thoroughly progressive place, one might assume. Perhaps… but within limits.

For me, Thaxted was simply the place I came back to during school holidays. I went to a mediocre English private boarding school where gayness was a thing to be mocked and disparaged and certainly never admitted to. This was ironic in a sense because, being 'boys only' until the sixth-form, it was undoubtedly, to borrow a phrase from my friend Mark’s disapproving Dutch grandmother, “a hotbed of homosexuality” for some.

However, since no-one at school would ever have owned up to even wondering if they might have such tendencies, the teasing and bullying was randomly targeted, and since English boarding schools in the 70s produced some of the most unworldly people imaginable, we had not the slightest ability to sense genuine latent gayness in our fellow inmates.

In short, gayness was just a childish punch-line and actual gayness was unthinkable and so I didn't think much about it at all.

I clearly remember my brother Nick (a year younger but already more worldly than I) suggesting, when we were fourteen and thirteen, that Dad might be gay, and me being absolutely adamant that Nick was out of his mind, so great was my determined self-delusion.

And yet it was blindingly obvious really. My parents’ affection for each other, though deep, was completely non-physical (we were all adopted from different birth-parents), rooted seemingly in their shared love of Christianity both for its spiritual guidance and for its art, music, and architecture. There were constantly gay people at the vicarage, some of them exceedingly flamboyantly gay; there were books and periodicals about the intersection of gayness and Christianity all over the place; I was well aware that Dad was a leading light in something called ‘The Gay Christian Movement’. But to the extent that I thought about it at all I just assumed that all of it, the unconventional marriage, the visitors, the books, and frankly, some of the mannerisms, were just facets of a life in ministry.

In 1976, Dad came to pick me up from school for the Easter holidays. My priority at such moments was to cram my luggage and myself into the tiny open-top MG Midget as quickly as possible and get him and the car away from the school before any of my friends saw us. He would arrive in this deathtrap wearing a scarlet shirt unbuttoned almost to the naval with a crucifix on a heavy gold chain round his neck (Anglican bling?) and Haydn blaring out of the stereo. To have been spotted would have been mortifying. The fathers of my peers were ‘something in the city’ types who arrived with equestrian looking wives in Jaguars, BMWs and the occasional Rolls. At fifteen, all I wanted to do was fit in, or at least not stand out.

During the journey to Thaxted, Dad announced rather suddenly and with very little preamble: “I have something I need to discuss with you. God made me a homosexual”. I remember two reactions: suppressing the inclination to reply with the tired old line: “If I gave him the wool do you think he’d make me one?” (yes, I really was that juvenile) and thinking “So Nick was right all along”. Dad went on to explain that he’d recently blessed the union of two lesbians in Thaxted church and somehow one of the national newspapers had found out about this disgraceful benediction and had sent a reporter to interview him. Asked the direct question: “Are you a homosexual yourself, Reverend Elers?” my father felt unable to lie.

I think my view has always been sympathetic i.e. that Dad obviously couldn’t lie; he was a vicar, for heaven’s sake! but I’m sure that my sympathy was served with a generous slice of teenage self-absorbed concern along the lines of ‘how is this going to impact me?’ Nick, on the other hand, was furious. He never forgave Dad until the day he (Nick) died, arguing that Dad should have lied to protect the family from what followed.

So what did follow?

I think my parents had a hell of a rough time. Some of the Thaxted Church grandees tried to have my father removed or de-frocked, though others were wonderfully supportive. My mother was treated harshly by some for staying with him or for being with him in the first place. Much of this vitriol came, depressingly, from women and is perhaps somewhat similar to the treatment meted out to Hillary Clinton after her husband’s affair. Here also it was often women who, rather than seeing Hillary as a victim, concluded that she’d been a willing enabler all along, “…and anyway, she’s probably a lesbian”. (I can’t speak for Mrs. Clinton, but my mother was neither).

As for myself, I merely had two rather awkward and unnerving years of school to survive. Unnerving, because one of the school bullies, an irritant called Simon, quickly let me know that he’d heard the scandalous news from Thaxted and wouldn’t hesitate to use it any time he felt short of material. But he wasn’t particularly well liked and I think enough people felt somewhat sorry for me and so I was largely spared. Ironically, years later I heard that Simon ‘came out’ (thank you, ‘Friends Reunited’).

The unsupportive of Thaxted got their wish quickly, though by unexpected means. A few years after this all tumbled on top of us, my father was diagnosed with brain tumors which would prove incurable despite three catastrophic surgeries. He died in Cambridge, aged 55. I have absolutely no doubt that some in Thaxted delighted in this outcome, seeing it as ‘God’s just vengeance on the sodomite’. I despise those people very deeply and to this day I can not be in Thaxted for more than a few hours. Memories of the small-town myopia and hypocrisy we encountered there make my skin crawl. This is probably unfair of me because the hateful were, I think, a small minority, but their utterly un-Christian meanness of spirit made a very deep impression on me. In years to come I would lose my own faith for a variety of reasons but certainly with the words often attributed to Gandhi ringing in my ears: “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians; they are so unlike your Christ”.

I left school and parochial Essex as soon as I could and went to Drama College in London, where nobody knew an Elers from an ocelot and couldn’t have cared less if the entire family including the dogs and cats had been as gay as maypoles. I lost myself in big-city anonymity and found myself in the welcoming and tolerant nature of theater people.

In 2018, I did go back to Thaxted briefly with my brother, Ben (I forget the purpose) and we came across a new housing estate with streets named after some of Thaxted’s notable former inhabitants such as Gustav Holst, and also some of the former vicars. I was doubtful that this honour would have been conferred on the disgraced ‘Gay Vicar of Thaxted’ but my pessimism proved unfounded and we quickly discovered ‘Elers Way’. Ben and I gleefully took pictures standing next to the street-sign, and I think I forgave Thaxted a little”.

The adopted children of Reverend Peter Elers and wife Gillian:

• Francis Elers (23 Aug 1961 – living)

• Nicholas (Nick) Elers (14 Nov 1962 – 12 Jul 2018). Cause of death: indeterminable (per autopsy and inquest)

• Tomie (originally Claire) Elers (3 Nov 1964 – 8 Jun 2011). Cause of death: Autoimmune Limbic Encephalitis following an Ovarian Teretoma.

• Ben (originally Fabian) Elers born 17 Nov 1968 – living) 

In 1977, an interview with Reverend Peter Elers and his wife was recorded (“The Lord Is My Shepherd – He Knows I Am Gay”)

This can be viewed at   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXH3-jhCR4Q

The genealogy chart below shows that Francis’s ancestors Carew Elers and his wife Susanna Farrow are the common links between he and his family in the USA with the Elers family in New Zealand.