ABSTRACT
I am not, now, a Christian: my religious desire faded away, in a process that was, one might say, a little like falling out of love, in the years immediately after I left home and moved to England. My actual journey away from the distinctive religious and social culture of South Wales seems to have derailed the spiritual pilgrimage to which I had been so intensely committed as an adolescent: my desires did not seem to mean quite the same in England as in Wales. Richard Crowe has spoken of how Welsh literary representations of male homosexuality expel it beyond the boundaries of Wales (Crowe 1997), and I could certainly construct a conventional narrative in which I had to leave Wales in order to become a dyke. But I do not want to use my history with religious desire and sexual desire as a way of telling an escape story, of how I fled the gloom and oppression of a Christian childhood in Wales for the heavenly light of adult life in the lesbian nation of Hackney. Setting aside my in grained suspicion of progress narratives, such a linear tale would not do justice to the false starts, returns, and strayings from the path (what path?), that characterize my hesitant, dubious pilgrimage through several barren lands. This is not, then, a story about how I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now can see. Nor
is it a version of the testimonies of religious experience I used to offer eagerly to my chapel youth group as a teenager, although in terms of narrative structure and collective function those were effectively identical to coming-out stories. The process of giving your testimonial-also known as witnessing-entails the narrating of a selfhood acceptable to the community that constitutes the immediate audience for the narration. Biddy Martin has written about the personal and political usefulness within lesbian feminism of the telling of coming-out stories as just such a form of witnessing: ‘Self-worth, identity, and a sense of community have fundamentally depended on the production of a shared narrative or life history and on the assimilation of individuals’ life histories into the history of the group’ (Martin 1996:143).
