RENAISSANCE

From the Archive

Dispatches

RENAISSANCE

July 4, 202I

A Reminder of Liverpool Days - freedom, brief and as quickly over as it had started

I

COMPLETING and handing over chairmanship frees me for return to my own work. I’ve very much enjoyed the challenge, and believe me, despite my credentials, producing 64 newsletters that run, in total, to 1,120 pages feels quite an achievement. We pulled together and were able to maintain regular touch despite the pandemic. It did, though, mean that I had to let the website trundle quietly along for the duration.

Talking this through with a good friend - who happens also to be a very wise and innovative counsellor - earlier this week, he used the term ‘renaissance’ which surprised me.

I thought about it.

It was one of those moments when we hear something that instantly resonates so deeply, that, along life’s timeline, we just know we have reached quite an important milestone. And we decide not to say anything. I do not want a hundred definitions and explanations.

II

THE Oxford Dictonary widens the perspective contained in this beautiful noun. It can be any one or more of five aspects:

1 the revival of art and literature under the influence of classical models in the 14th-16th centuries;

2 the period of this;

3 the culture and style of art, architecture, etc., developed during this era;

4 any similar revival; thus in French it suggests ‘birth’ from Latin nascentia,
or the French naitre naiss to ‘be born’, as too the Romanic cf. NASCENT;

5 Renaissance man ~ a person with many talents or pursuits, esp. in the humanities.

I pause. I hesitate. That inner voice. Problem?

Yes, don’t speak of birth or rebirth.

III

I thought back to that earlier conversation.

Was I right to allow a second edition of the third anthology published in 2013 under what was dubbed the double-decker bus title ~ Being Gay Bi Whatever. In 2013?

I’d responded, what on earth are you talking about, ‘double-decker bus?’

‘Think about it Ken. It’s one of those catch-phrases
we see on buses zipping by and it catches our eye.
Don’t change it!
PR and Marketing would take you to the cleaners!’

Alexander M Long ~ Front Cover of BGBBW 2013 by Alexander Petricca of Liverpool

For once, I listened, took note, and did not overrule.

IV

But hang on. Why am I worried?

Well, eight years on (in 2021), depending upon which country in which one lives, all is not universally rosy in the garden for people who find themselves falling within the label GLBTQ or LGBT.

Here, in Britain, it’s pretty liberal. Northern Ireland is getting there, but whenever religion plays a major societal role, then this subject will always be the “one step forward and two back fox-trot”. Not unlike that touchingly hilarious scene at the end of the film The Two Popes, with two rather elderly gentlemen attempting the tango.

It is good to laugh at ourselves.

V

Liverpool is liberal.

The city saw to that when it declared that its city centre was the first official Gay Quarter in Britain and promptly ensured that a host of very famous street names carried, very discreetly, the rainbow flag!

I lived in Liverpool at the time, my home for fourteen years, a five minute walk from the centre. I could not quite believe it. I had, with the stroke of a pen, followed by the midnight hour’s first strike across the city from the Liver Building - ‘my next door neighbour’ - become ‘normal’.

Nothing else happened. The ships continued up and down the Mersey, the air was fresh so high up, and it was pleasant to gaze across the basin to where once lay the SS Lusitania, her berthing in her home city.

As in many things, Liverpool has a way of trail-blazing. I’m very proud of her tendency to do this. So too her two cathedrals, very much listening to the people and changing their ways accordingly. We have a large Irish community here, so I hope that this will point Northern Ireland in the right direction with a little encouragement.

VI

And that is how it is; that is how it shall remain.

And this perfectly dovetails with my work as a minor self-published writer. I’m proud of this.

VII

So, I’ll end this dispatch by showing the forthcoming front cover of Alex Long who featured in the first edition, and is also the cover for the second anthology Meanderings (published in hardback 2011), the artist photographer being Alexander Petricca of Liverpool.

VIII

Now I turn the page. The past is behind. Now this, in my book, is when I can say, yes, something of a Renaissance.

10 October 2026
All Rights Reserved


Liverpool and Gloucestershire

© 2021 Kenneth Thomas Webb

© 2021 Ian Bradley Marshall

Written 4 July 2021

Do you fly the vales and hills?
Seek out the Unkown?
Do you challenge the accepted Norm?
Do you see beyond mere humankind?
Do you…
Do you… …
Do you… … …
No?
Away with you.

‘Do you fly the vales and hills’ AI Digital Art by KTW IBM 2023